Anna From Away (27 page)

“What was she like, your …?”

“That’s hard to talk about.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I mean it’s hard to call a woman up … for someone else. The way I knew her.”

“I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“Needn’t be sorry.” He closed his eyes and touched his fingers to them. “She’s in my head. I don’t know where she comes from, or where she is now, but that’s where I have her.”

They both went quiet, their eyes toward the sea window.

“Oh, she’d wear Breagh’s dresses right enough,” Murdock said, his voice low, “she loved clothes, you know? That hurts, she told me, I have nothing to wear but this silly gown with the arse out of it, day after day. Some getup for the dying, eh? You wouldn’t catch anyone capering around in this. Get Breagh over here, she said, sew me something bright.”

The long ray of the Black Rock lighthouse was swirling slowly over the sea, and the dark land behind it. The whirligig on the back porch chattered to life in a sudden breeze.

“Have you seen anything of Livingstone Campbell?” Anna said.

“No more than I’d care to. His buddy went flying by this morning, in that gypsy pickup of his,” Murdock said.

“Billy?”

“That’s him. Livingstone’s making more than music, I’m thinking.”

“Like what?”

“A lot of activity the other night down at Sandy’s, cars, late. They woke Willard up. He saw Livingstone driving off, then they all left but Billy. Breagh, she might’ve had enough of his tunes anyway.”

“Oh?” Anna felt elated for a few moments—a feeling that could go nowhere, she knew, except to lighten her guilt.

“She’s seeing a teacher, now and then, she told me over the phone. I like him a lot, she says, I like talking with him. Teaches English, I think she said. Over at that university college, in Sydney.”

“Good luck to her. She’ll need it.”

Murdock lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the ceiling.

“Livingstone must never, Anna, get wind of what you’ve got.”

Anna smiled slightly. “Too late for that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t mean I told him. Did you know he and Billy have a boat? It’s pretty big, a dingy white.”

“That’s theirs, is it? Saw it, a while ago. I don’t think they’ve got a clue about boats.”

“Maybe other things?”

“Maybe.”

Anna stood up from the table. She tapped out one cigarette from Murdock’s pack, showed it to him before slipping it in her pocket. “For later,” she said. “I’d like to draw your portrait, Murdock. Could I? I don’t mean right now, but sometime soon.”

“What would you do with a thing like that?”

“I have a collection of faces from here. Yours is special.”

“That’s kind. Well, after we’ve settled with your house guest. Let’s hope his pals aren’t looking for him.”

“Can I call you if they are?”

“Right away. I’ll be there fast. You walked? I’ll drive you home.”

“I don’t mind the dark, Murdock. I know the way.”

“Do you? I’m not so sure.”

He could tell by the way she took hold of the door that he would have to let her. He lifted a flashlight off a wall hook. “Take it. Even you can fall.”

Murdock waited until she should have reached her house, then he got into his van and started down the road. At the first curve his headlights picked up someone approaching on the shoulder, and the instant he knew it was Connie, the man leapt away and stumbled into the trees. Murdock braked and rolled down the window, calling his name out. Never known him to run from anybody, Connie, but God knew what alcohol was doing to him by now, what ravages it was exacting. He waited, idling, but heard nothing from the woods but two barred owls tossing hoos back and forth, staking their territory.

At Anna’s, he crept down the driveway, his headlights killed, keeping back in the trees. The moon was high and white over the water, a wide shadow as defined as daytime beneath the high crown of the silver poplar, it had popped up wild when his grandmother was already old and she let the seedling flourish because, she said, It’s a fast tree and that’s all I have time for. There was a light in Anna’s workroom and when he saw another come on in the bathroom, he relaxed at the wheel. A few minutes later it went off. Behind the house, moonlight washed cleanly through goldenrod and daisies. His attention fixed hard on that field, as if he were seeing it for the first time.

R
ED
M
URDOCK
walked the beach late the next morning, looking for whatever he could find that might have something to say.He hadn’t slept well, so much had reeled through his head, Connie ducking away like a convict, he needed the sharp, cool air. Anna was nowhere in sight, and that was okay, he didn’t want to meet her, not this morning: he had to persuade her somehow to give up that bale and he didn’t know what tack to take now without offending her, without pushing too hard. At his feet lay a lobster trap the storm had crushed, clogged with stony seaweed: could be the man lost a lot of gear in that blow last week, but this wasn’t what Murdock was looking for.

The Dutchman’s tour boat was heading out from the St. Aubin shore to Bird Island, a sign the seas were down. Be seasick passengers anyway before they got to the birds. Binoculars flashed at the rocks where Red Murdock was standing. All he could see was a string of sunglasses and caps along the bulwarks, sometimes the mirror flare of a panning lens. Lookers, not watchers. They didn’t see much really, nothing they could keep, just snapshots. And ordinarily he wouldn’t give them a thought, but now any eyes felt suspect, any person aiming themselves at this shore.

Lord Jesus, he’d been here so long, and the MacLennan houses far longer. His dad had seen sail here, schooners, and local rigs of their own. A boat could come in right off the point there, riding the tide, and you wouldn’t hear a thing but maybe a voice, the soft shaking of canvas.

When he’d last come upon Anna, suddenly around the turn of shore, he felt strongly the simple pleasure of her looks, complicated by an old desire, the thought of touching her. It had sneaked into him. Here, on this familiar beach, where everything had said Rosaire. He had let the feeling pass—it was not one he could keep, should keep. She was from away and would always be from away. She had an armload of dope in her house and would not let go of it. Yet. Yet.Was it his duty to keep the family flame clean, clear of smoke, of soot? He had borne it without question, he’d become after all the last man home, and if you didn’t get away somewhere, you found yourself standing alone some Sunday afternoon in the middle of an empty kitchen, everyone gone for good, dead or living, and memories of them at every turn. How would his own MacLennans be remembered, how would he cap that off? He couldn’t take it lightly, the respect his father had, his grandparents, his uncles and aunts, their names had nothing awful attached to them. Red Murdock MacLennan was known as a certain kind of man, and how he saw himself had a lot to do with how others saw him. He couldn’t change that, it was banked, he could only trade on it, and keep the risks small. Having Rosaire stay over for nights had been gossiped but easily forgiven, lapses of the flesh fit into everyone’s kind of forgiveness, and weren’t they delicious to discuss? But dope was outside of things, not a community sin known and understood but one of garish headlines, handcuffs, sinister figures in poor lighting. People saw you, and they saw
you.
No need to rattle that. If he could help it. Some lines he would have liked to cross, but had not, wasn’t sure he ever could.…

A
FTER HE GRABBED
his mail that afternoon, and jammed the bills into his hip pocket and shut the mailbox, Murdock gazed down the road in both directions out of long habit, not that you’d hail a person or a vehicle much anymore. Things being what they were, better to see it empty. That a dead crow near the shoulder? He would toss it into the brush, he didn’t like to see them flattened, but he drew nearer and it wasn’t a bird but a man’s black shoe, its laces busted, the tongue gagging out. He picked it up: pretty worn, heel rubber nearly gone, the leather cracked from soakings. Whose trash did this fall out of?

He heard the flies then, twirling up out of the ditch, and he stepped nearer, looked over the evening primroses shut to the sun. Jesus. A man face down at the bottom, why the hell the highway department had ditched so deeply he did not know, had to be four feet or more. Was that Connie, for God’s sake? He didn’t want to believe it. But there was the black coat. Stained khaki trousers hiked up his calves. A torn white sock half-peeled off a foot shockingly pale, the limbs twisted, the disturbing angle of the neck that said it was broken.

He slid carefully into the ditch, into its wet clay smell, and stooped in the shallow water, rain runoff, and lifted a shoulder: a muddied, muddled face, the back of his head a sticky mat of blood. Connie, what have you come to, boy?

Murdock stood up, a bit dizzy, and gazed around him: nothing but summer sounds, what you’d expect on a dead-end road: nosy crows overhead hopping and gabbing in the high branches, insect buzz from the roadside brush, wind tugging a thin eddy of road dust. Connie couldn’t just have fallen, you didn’t damage yourself like this tumbling into a deep ditch, a car must have hit him. And then just
left
him? Nobody on this stretch would do that, not even to a deer. If the Mounties weren’t here before, they’d have to be now. He reached down and laid his hand on Connie’s matted hair: a poor end, boy. Lord. Who would run you down and leave you? Why did you flee last night? Didn’t know it was my truck, me? I never knew you afraid.

Murdock didn’t want to leave him there, his face in ditch water, but the police might prefer it that way. He climbed out and hurried toward the phone.

I
T WAS THE WAY THE MAN
was stepping, as if he had never walked on a stony beach, that caught Anna’s eye while her mind was somewhere else. He’d appeared around the lower point, his arms winged out like a kid’s on skates. A fine rain glistened over everything and that made it strange to see him here, mid-week, an afternoon of grey damp. He crept near the water to yank at a piece of dark plastic in the sand. She wanted to run, to be out of sight, but held herself erect, an air of proprietorship about her. She regretted she could not drive him off with a shout, a threat. She endured his approach when he spotted her, his hands coming down to his sides. By the time he reached her, she saw who he was and he had a cigarette lit in his mouth.

“This your place, Anna Starling?” he said, through smoke. She glanced behind her where he was looking: just her house up high, the wide path, the vegetables blooming in her garden.

“You know it is, Billy.” She might have said no, just to confuse him.

“Never seen it from this way.” He poked his aviator sunglasses higher on his nose.

“Not from your boat?”

He stared at her, shook his head slowly. “Uh-uh.”

She measured him, rain inching down her face. His head was thick with curls from the drizzle, and his sunglasses did not convey the menace he might have intended. He seemed to be inflating his pot-belly for her benefit. She could never understand the pride men took in that, lugging it around like a prized rock, oof, check
this
out. He rearranged his foothold so he could stand relaxed. Binoculars hung like a pendant against his chest.

“Are you watching birds?” she said. “The island out there is full of them.”

“No, I’m not after birds.”

She knelt down and resumed unwinding fishing line from a driftwood piece she’d fancied. She hated his standing there stupidly.

“What brings you here then, Billy?” After yesterday’s disturbing accident up near Murdock’s, he was a troubling presence.

“You spend a lot of time on the beach here? Nice view. Shit, I wouldn’t want to
swim
here.”

“You wouldn’t, no. It’s deep. A swift current out there.”

She uncircled the string from the wood more slowly.

“You’re not much for the gab, are you?” he said.

“Gab away, Billy. I don’t mind.”

But he clattered carefully off, stopping now and then to squat over something. She could tell his attention remained on her, so she was not surprised when he looped back. She stood up with the driftwood under her arm, fingering its satiny grain. She wouldn’t mind seeing the red boat out there. Canadian law and order. A Mountie in a scarlet coat. Or Murdock.

“We lost something off our boat,” he said. He waved vaguely toward the ocean, Bird Island.

“A lobster trap? I saw one up …”

“No.” He unsnapped a button of his denim jacket. “No, it’s … a bundle, like, wrapped in green plastic. You know. Gear.”

She took a long slow breath, wary of details or lies. She smiled, tilted her head at him. “Art is all I’m interested in. Natural objects.”

“Art?”

“Pieces of old metal. Sometimes wood. Natural sculptures. Stones. I hope you find what you’re looking for. Lots of people use this beach.”

He looked slowly up and down the shore. “All I’ve seen is you.” “Sorry.”

“See, it’s that Liv and me, we got to find this gear, you know? It belonged to some other guys and they really want it. Need it.” He shaded his eyes unnecessarily and looked across the water. “You’d let us know, wouldn’t you? If you was to find it?”

“Of course,” she said. “It’s yours after all, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. It sure is.”

She listened to the stones shifting under his steps as he set off toward Murdock’s shore.

All the way up her path, lingering casually to pinch leaves off a tomato plant, her knees were a little weak. She was already unnerved by yesterday’s events, the sirens that froze her, their wails rising beyond the trees, so near on this dead-end road, then diminishing toward Murdock’s. Coming for
who?
Then she thought fire, then someone stricken, maybe Murdock, he was not young. She called him, the phone rang and rang before he picked it up, sounding tense and weary. I can’t talk now, Anna, a Mountie is here, an ambulance. Connie was killed up on the road. Car hit him, it looks like. I would hate to think, Anna said, this has anything to do with me, with, you know.… I don’t know, he said, just what it has to do with. The constable’s having a look up there. Nobody saw it or heard anything. Anna said, I wanted to be sure you were all right, that was the main thing. There was a pause and she could hear him breathing, he must have rushed to the phone.I’m okay, he’d said, but an old friend is dead, and I don’t know but I might have saved him.