Anna From Away

by D. R. MacDonald

  Even so, she walked reluctantly to the mailbox, she wanted to show herself, composed. Along the driveway a ruffed grouse startled her when she sent it beating in a feathery commotion through the underbrush. Jittery, she almost turned back but kept on, not expecting mail of any consequence. But there in the box lay a letter, a vanilla envelope, addressed in Chet’s impulsive, forward-slanted hand. She wouldn’t read it now, she didn’t want to be yanked back there, not today, if she could manage it.

  Into the afternoon Anna worked on the drawing, recalling Connie on the road that night, his dark, shambling figure from behind in the blaze of headlights, tormented already by what he had done. What she wanted in those lines and shades and hatchings, a kinetic fusion of shapes, was coming, she knew she would finish it, be done with it now any hour she wished.

  Soon she would see Murdock again, without apprehension hovering over them. Yet hadn’t that tightened their embrace, set part of them listening for sounds other than their own quick breaths, their inarticulate whispers?

  XXVII.

  WHEN HE CAME IN THE BACK DOOR in the afternoon and saw her waiting for him, wearing a full skirt of black cotton and a yellow blouse, he smiled, took her waist in his hands, drew her to him, kissed her.

  “All quiet?” he said. “No travelling salesmen?”

  “A red squirrel climbed the screen. I didn’t ask what he was selling.”

  “Don’t let him inside, he’ll winter in your walls.”

  “Maybe we should pull that rug back and go away for the night. I’ll put a sign on the front door, ‘Check the Cellar.’”

  “Tempting. But let’s not hand it to them, Anna. Not now. I don’t want Livingstone walking away with anything, nothing. I don’t think he will, Willard says the Mounties are looking for him, and that means the rest of them too.”

  “That puts them off us then?”

  “He hasn’t been located. He won’t be easy, Livingstone.”

  “They know where he lives.”

  “You can hide poorly in the city, in the country you can disappear. For a while. Livingstone grew up across the water there.”

  “You mean they won’t find him?”

  “Not right away. RCMP, they’re spread pretty thin.”

  “I thought I knew him a little,” Anna said.“We missed things. All of us.”

  She took his hand and pulled him gently out the back door, into the field flowing with goldenrod beyond its prime, greening faintly like the goldfinches past their mating, they bobbed on flower tops, then dipped away toward the trees. Bull thistles released into the wind their downy seeds, a gust ballooned Anna’s skirt and she let go his hand to press it down.

  “See those, Murdock?” She had set two kitchen chairs a few feet apart in the lawn grass. “I want you to sit in that one and I’m going to do a portrait of you. No arguments.”

  He shook his head but let her sit him down. “Is this what husbands do?” he said.

  “For a little, early on.”

  Watching a gypsum freighter outbound, registered in Panama, he waited while she went for the sketchpad and then sat across from him, propping it on her knees. “Now look off east, toward the sea. And keep still if you can, please.”

  “That’ll be hard, you close by, and the wind in your clothing.”

  The sun was bright and Anna felt its heat in her skirt as she drew first the shape of his face, the high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, the cleft of his chin, then pencilled in details, the creases and lines of his years, the slight smile she knew was for her, his tight, almost kinky hair barely ruffled by the wind. His gaze was aimed up the coast where in the far distance Cape Smokey thrust into the Atlantic. Everything felt broad and wide, the high, balding slope of the mountain behind them, the strait stretching seaward and inward beyond the bridge. Anna felt as if she could soar in any direction, be lifted away. She didn’t care who was watching them here by the field, they couldn’t be harmed by anyone. She worked quickly and deftly, she’d seen this face close, traced it with her fingers.“Murdock?” she said, catching him cast his eyes seaward. The freighter’s wake churned white and faded quickly grey into the water. “Have you ever been to California?”

  “I’ve been hardly anywhere. Just ports. In and out. I don’t like to be a stranger.”

  “Well, you’re not. Anymore. Would you travel for me?”

  He didn’t answer. He made his eyes slits of distant concentration. “I would, in a way. A long way.”

  “But not to California.”

  He smiled. “I’d be hopeless there.”

  “Lots of hopeless there already, Murdock.”

  “I’ll make it one less.”

  When the sketch was finished enough to show him, he stood behind her, his hand on her shoulder.

  “I won’t look that good again ever,” he said.

  They walked down the path, without purpose, unhurried, past the arthritic apple trees and the fruit rotting in the grass under their canopies, wasps digging in the mashed flesh. The stones of the shore, scattered by the last tide, lay in an array of rounded textures, black swirled with white, rust veined with yellow, the rose granites, the smooth, dark greys. Anna picked them up, dropped them back, Murdock just behind her, turning now and then to keep the house in sight.

  “Look, Murdock! How did it get here?” Just below the high-tide line, in the sandy gravel, a short sunflower had germinated and was blooming gaily, its incongruousness almost comical, its brash good cheer, but to Anna delightful, so unexpected, she had seen no sunflowers anywhere around.

  “A bird dropped a seed, probably, or an animal,” Murdock said. “People grow them in gardens.”

  They stopped at the point just shy of the lee where the higher field behind them obscured the house. Along the shore an eddy ran seaward like a rippled stream, but beyond it a strip of water was calm, so laden was it with seaweed, and beyond that the ever-widening channel was ebbing, broken by shoals. They sat on a beach log side by side, their legs touching. Aware of a house on the other side of the water where tiny figures ran along the shore, they didn’t embrace, didn’t kiss, Anna could feel his yearning, like her own, held in check. He stared ahead, squinting at the glare. Anna brushed a bit of sand off his knee.

  “You’re free to leave after tonight,” he said. “I know it’s pulling at you, Anna, like that tide out there. I can see it in your work. In your eyes.”

  “Free? I don’t feel that way. I made a mess of things.”

  “We’re after clearing it up, your corner of it. I’ll take care of the rest. If there’s any spillover, it won’t reach you.”

  “And you?”

  “I live here. The good and the bad. That’s the way it’s always been.”

  “I got a letter from my husband. He’s going to marry the woman he’s with now. So we have some steps to take, Chet and me. The last waltz.”

  “There you are.”

  “I want to come back here, Murdock.”

  “You think so? It’ll be pretty much the same. I’ll be here.”

  “That’s what I like—the same, and you’ll be here. I still have a lot of drawing to do.”

  “You do, but not just in Cape Seal. Don’t hear me wrong. I’d love to see you down the beach on a grey morning.”

  She wanted to resist, tell him no, the best work she’d ever done was infused with here, that was true, she wasn’t finished. But the art was here, the meaning was there. She took his hand firmly in hers and said nothing. A flock of gulls, spooked by something, rose from the pond behind them in a great chattering swirl, then settled again one by one out in the water.

  “I can’t look at you without wanting you,” he said. “I am happy and sad at the same time. How can that be?”

  “We could go back,” Anna said. “We could lie down for a while.”

  He turned to her, solemn for a few moments. “We could,” he said. He smiled. “I need the nap. After all, I’m rowing tonight.”

  IN THE SPARE BEDROOM they lay side by side
, dozy now with the heat of the afternoon. The pillows smelled of old wood. Sun played through the dancing curtains, over their perspiring skin. His hand lay on her belly and he moved it lower, brushed it lightly over the dark hair there. Anna, her eyes shut, smiled and took his hand to her lips and kissed it. He kissed her breast and then sat up.

  “I’d better fetch our boat while we have the day,” he said. “When it’s dark, we go.”

  She watched him dress. He drew his jeans up his lanky body, pulled over his wide shoulders a denim shirt, buttoned it slowly, tucked it in. He ran his hands through his hair. He looked out the window before lowering it. “That bed makes quite a racket,” he said quietly. “I forgot.”

  “I don’t think anyone was listening. I did forget to lock the door.”

  “I’ll lock it behind me.” He squeezed her foot as he passed the bed. At the door he paused, his back to her. “It won’t ever look the same,” he said. “This room.”

  Anna lay as she was and listened until he closed the front door. A sentinel crow spotted him and cried from the high poplar. The van started up and faded away. She took in the room around her, the rocker by the window and the small chest of drawers painted white. Everything about the spare bedroom was as it had been, except for herself lying naked here. Who else had lain in this room on an August afternoon? The ill? Not likely a woman and her lover, her husband, the days would have been taken up with rural tasks, they wouldn’t have climbed the stairs and stripped off their clothing in the middle of the day, though surely passion ran its course elsewhere, on the sand, in the cool moss of the woods. Later, the woman of the house might descend into the cellar with a pail of milk still warm from the cow. Anna remembered the sepia photograph, a woman squatting on a milking stool, her forehead pressed against the cow’s dark flank, her fists sending two clean streams of milk into a bucket, how sombre she’d looked, pensive and awkward in her long white dress, its skirt jammed between her thighs, and something on the back of the picture in Gaelic with an exclamation mark, not written, Anna thought, by her.

  She looked at her clothing heaped on the floor. The wind felt cooler and, aware of her nakedness, she drew over her the thin coverlet. What was she resuming when she wheeled from this bed? Something bittersweet, all the more because she would not have it again, never, in any way, like this, like here, not possible, all these things that touched her. She took a deep breath, drew in the mix of air, and held it until it dizzied her. Every time she put her hand to blank paper, all of this was in there, in what moved her hand—room, house, shore, sea, the fragrant woods, the dark pond, the scattered flotsam, the wandering animals, their skulls and bones. Never would these drawings have come out of her anywhere else, never at home, never on that street, in that house, in that California garden flowering in some way every day of the year. Murdock was right: she had work to do there, where nothing stayed pretty much the same.She would have to dress for tonight, for a boat, for the end of the marijuana, sitting down there where potatoes should be, apples, not that double-edged gift from the sea.

  MURDOCK DROVE to Breagh’s first, up her driveway, and even though he saw no car, hers or anyone’s, he knocked on the door, walked around back, hooded his eyes at the windows. Just a hunch, that Livingstone might have kipped here, the last house on the road. A pair of jeans and a child’s red overalls flapped on a clothesline running from the house to Dougal’s deer fence. He was glad she was clear of this. Livingstone could be hiding anywhere right now, up any of a dozen unused driveways, logging roads, whatever, or holed up somewhere in Sydney waiting for a chance at Anna’s house. Murdock faced the ocean: the land was high here, well above a broad sweep of afternoon blue. Good wind and water could drive the dross from a man’s mind.

  HE SHOVED OFF from his shore and stepped into the skiff, grabbing an oar and poling the boat through the brief shallows. The water dropped off dark suddenly and he trimmed the oars and pulled out a distance before turning toward Anna’s, the splash of the blades breaking only briefly the wind-roughed surface. There was a bit of a lop but he liked the slight thump as the boat punched through waves, the feel of it, the fine spray on the back of his neck. He was thinking of Anna, he was filled with her, the sight of her on that sun-drenched bed, her skin pale where she’d worn a swimsuit, where he’d kissed and tasted her, but his mind slipped back to his visit at Donald John and Molly’s not long ago where he’d told Willard it was time to stop talking about his lost dog, because he had Connie on his mind, how killing the dog became a torture to him, greater almost than Willard’s loss, I like dogs too, he said, but you’ve got to get past it, Willard, mourning like that, months and months. And Molly said, Are you past it yourself? And Murdock, to kill the subject, said yes, there comes a point you have to move on. But that was a lie, he had not, could not close that door Rosaire kept coming through, though not as often with the same crippling power as she had. She had flared to life yesterday and he’d lost himself in that fantasy for a night. He was grateful for it, no denying, it brought a joy he would never know again except in the mirror of memory, it settled his heart in a good place, calmed him. Now the pleasure of lying with Anna, of having her in his hands, seemed to slide away with every stroke of the oars, and he was just rowing, getting from here to there over water the way they used to.

  Clouds white as snow bulged and sailed seaward into new shapes. The wind was southwest but should drop around suppertime as the land began to cool, and they’d have a smooth sea in the evening. Not far astern a cormorant surfaced from a dive, black and sleek, then fled, its rudimentary wings thrashing inches above the water as it bore like a projectile toward Bird Island. The oarlocks clattered hypnotically, he was soon soothed by his motions, the rustle of water along the hull, the rhythm of his own breathing. A small ketch passed south of him outbound, driving hard, its sails filled, and soon he rocked in her wake. He was sweating now, a little thirsty. Somehow he wanted Anna to stay, impossible though it was, selfish, into the mountain’s blazing autumn, into another winter she might now be ready for, he would have the sight of her, the chance of her company, clear of what had washed unbidden onto her shore. Rosaire, his dear Rosaire, she would understand this. She was always generous that way, about the world. What did he owe her now? Love, the love he had given only to her, forever. He pulled hard for Granny’s beach.

  XXVIII.

  ANNA HAD SPREAD A LACE CLOTH, marred with a few coin-sized holes, over the big table in her room. She’d poured two glasses of white wine and placed two lit candles, waxed to tea saucers, in the centre. She’d had three glasses of wine before he arrived, nervous but pleased. Murdock sat across from her. On their plates were servings of swordfish and rice with chives that had bloomed in lavender near the back door. She’d made a salad from her own garden.

  “I couldn’t get hearts,” she said.

  “They’d all be small now, Anna. The big heart swordfish are gone.”

  He raised his wine. “Here’s to you, Anna. In all ways.”

  “Returned, Murdock. Many times over.”

  “Safe home.”

  They ate quietly at first, trying to ignore evidence of her departure. She had moved two shipping boxes to the parlour out of sight, but the walls were bare of her drawings and none of her belongings were slung about. Although neither said so, they were both half-listening for sounds. Anna glanced toward the kitchen: Murdock had set the bale near the back door, but the old brown blanket could not obscure its presence, its demands. She had hoped that their meal would be, as much as they could make it, festive, but around the edges of it they were attuned to the telephone or the purr of an engine in the driveway.

  “This divorce business,” Murdock said. “Is it a hard go? Bitter?”

  “I don’t want it bitter, or prolonged. We’ll do it civilly. There’s no children, after all. Not even a cat to fight over. Stuff to divvy up. Who cares about that? Not me, not Ivan Ilyich.”

  Knowing that Chet would marry Alicia Snow, that he would take up again th
at kind of life with her, all its snares and responsibilities, gave Anna a feeling of peace, as if, storm-tossed, she’d come to a shore all her own.

  “My mother might’ve, I suppose, divorced my dad,” Murdock said. “There wasn’t much of that in those days, not here. You lived through your grievances. Was running away better or worse?”

  “Worse for you, I’d think.”

  “I’ll never know. Like a lot of things.”

  “Did you ever eat by candle growing up, Murdock?”

  “Ate by Aladdin lamp, didn’t have lights until, hell, the sixties, out this end, electrical. My mother might’ve used candles in Boston, entertaining. We didn’t know just what she did, only that she wasn’t doing it with us.” He pinched a bit of tablecloth. “No wine stains in this.”

  “My father liked candlelight. In a certain mood he’d get my mother to leave the lights off for supper. I can’t see my food, she’d say, this is silly. Sometimes I didn’t know why he loved her, but I know he did. I know that now.”

  Out the window Anna could see, in the southwest, the upper half of a moon emerging above St. Aubin’s hills, faint yet in the early dusk.

  “When should we leave, Murdock?” She wanted to get it over with, to return, enjoy this time with him. “We have to see our way without flashlights, don’t we?”

  “We won’t rush away. We’ll have a moon. You’ve made a fine meal here, Anna. Let’s drink to that.”

  They raised their wine and touched glasses. She brought out ice cream covered in maple syrup and walnuts, the very food that had seized her when she was stoned, that unyielding hunger, voracious, almost sexual. At home, a joint would have made the rounds already. Murdock joked that he didn’t use maple syrup like this, too dear.