Anna From Away (12 page)

Livingstone panned the glasses slowly back and forth, fixing them for a few seconds toward the sea before he set them back on the sill.

“There’s fish, and there’s
fish,
“ he said.

R
ED
M
URDOCK HAD FELT GLUM
since the morning she’d called, he couldn’t forget it. So unexpected to hear Anna Starling’s voice on the phone, he got few calls anyway now, and the morning liquor had knocked him into a nap that left him muddled and grumpy when the phone rings rattled him. After he’d hung up, he stood there dumb: God, he must have sounded the wooden man he was.

He wandered down to the forge, avoiding the woodshop, he was not ready to face it, Livingstone’s desk sitting there half-done, a big slab of oak. What the hell did he want with secret drawers? What secrets for a drawer could you have at his age? I’ll need good money for that, Murdock told him, and Livingstone answered, I’ll have good money for you when you’re done, don’t you worry.

But Murdock was mulling not wood but a pair of skates, the old-style stock skate his dad had fashioned. He’d once promised a set to Rosaire, way back, she was keen to skate the pond on them, What fun, she’d said, I’d love it, but then … You love me, don’t you, Murdock? she asked him often in those last days. Yes, yes, he said, in every tone of voice, desperate that his love was not enough to save her, dismayed that his love had changed, just a little, love for the dying was different, for a woman he’d loved as hard as he could imagine, it was not quite the same.Losing his mother as a boy was some like this ache, sure. She went off and left us, his dad said, without rancour by then, years later, like old news he’d just remembered. That was painful to me, Murdock, I hurt for, oh, a long time, don’t ever get like that, so tight to a woman. But Murdock got over his mother, there was so much time out ahead of him then, endless, he grew, he healed up, he moved on, he learned what a woman felt like with his arms around her, and he could always release her and let her go.

Now he felt on certain mornings paralyzed, like his heart had ripped.

But, yes, for being cold and stupid on the phone, he was going to make skates and give them to Anna Starling. You see, it’s like getting back on a horse, he would tell her, strap these on and take to that ice, just once, and the fear will leave you.

Could he make them, could he remember enough? He wanted something that had weight, had consequences. All the ordinary things wanted power, it could still amaze him: the hammer striking red iron, clangs sparking from the anvil—what took shape there wasn’t just anything, you
made
it. He would dig out some of that Swedish steel, must be a piece or two left, get him started. They had to be well-made, the skates, handsome enough she’d like even the looks. His dad had said, If your work is flawed, do it over, you’re wasting good steel, do it right this time or that’s the end of it, I’ll give you something easy instead. But Murdock, if far more slowly than his dad, had made his first blades out of an old rasp, and that winter his little cousin Kay skated on them over the pond, wobbly but happy.

The air dropped suddenly in the afternoon, into that cold zone he’d hoped was past but knew better, and what might have been rain came snow, fluff dancing to the thick crust remaining from the last heavy fall. Flurries tickled his face as he stood at the shed door, looking out, remembering horses. Shaking them loose in a barn late at night, a bit drunk, hot from the kitchen and rum. His father could never get up the enthusiasm for cars that he had for horses, Where’s the life in them? he said. The used Meteor he finally bought, he drove, battered and muddied, with a look of monotony, Give me a horse, he said, farts and all, she’ll love you and she’ll take you home, drunk or sober. His father’s final driver horse,
Sìoda,
Silken, a beautiful black, sleek mare, like a racehorse, she did it all, plow, dump cart, buggy, sleigh. When Murdock came into her stall, he felt her heft and presence, the low rumble in her throat, she was like a great animal engine idling there. The leather stink of harness, and droppings, the nervous clapper of hooves on planks. That night coming home through black woods, half-cut happy in a borrowed horse and sleigh, he and Rosaire, what a ride up through a logging road in moon-bright snow where he stopped so they could work their hands inside each other’s clothing, her lovely warm skin, her delicious mouth, she there in the seat with him under that buffalo robe that belonged to his grandfather, how warmer did a man need to be anyhow, on a night like that? To snap the reins now, glide away over snow, Rosaire beside him, how that would settle his heart, like rising into the air.…

Noticing footprints disappearing into his back field, he cut across it in the stinging cold, his boots crunching softly, through a few wind-beaten spruce and the wiry tuckamore all the way to the far east bank where he could see MacDermid’s Cove below. Soft, hazy snow hung like gauze over the afternoon, everything cast in grey shades, darker, lighter. The sea was no more violent than the silent fields, and just as still, a driftwood grey, ice white and startling along the shore, fixed in a slack tide. Whoever had tracked to the cliff edge had retraced their way out.Squinting in the wind, Red Murdock picked out tire tracks, growing faint. They came out of the woods below almost to the shore, intersected in two dark loops and wove back into the little road there. He didn’t know who that would be this time of year, not an easy spot to get to unless you had a four-wheel drive, the narrow road was runnelled and rock cut, tear the bottom out of a car anyway. He kept an eye on that property, for trespassers, vandals, a favour to Donny MacDermid, a saltwater captain who lived in Boston but intended to fix up his mother and dad’s old house for retirement summers. It had a good roof and Donny didn’t want people from town roaming around there like they owned it, as they would, had. His father, Robbie, had looked the other way when rum-runners ran booze into that cove, he got his cut of it. Nowadays, a few drinks and mischief, then broken windows and anything else they could smash, and, sooner or later, a fire.

Up at the road Murdock had built a stout gate out of heavy poplar poles and padlocked it, of course you could walk around it, but you sure as hell couldn’t drive around it. So he had believed. Whoever it was, they hadn’t stayed. He would go have a look down there.

But when he reached the house, someone was waiting, hunched out of the wind at the back door. Connie, had to be, hatless, in his long coat, his hair shiny with melted snow. There was a clotted cut along his eyebrow and a nasty bruise on his cheekbone. Had he fallen? Murdock had never known him to, not since they were kids and ran together, but he fought plenty. They’d drunk their first, stolen, liquor up in Murdock’s clearing, a bottle of rum he’d found stashed in the forge shed, not full but plenty enough to get them silly and stumbling, they’d danced around the trees and bayed at the sky until they reeled with sickness. When they could vomit no more, they headed home, pale and shaking. Only much later did Murdock know that was a day of divergence, that his pal’s thirst would become far greater than his own, take him into corners Murdock did not want to go.

“Connie, you okay?”

“You spare a d-drink, Murdo?” he said, his voice raspy.

“Come inside.”

At Murdock’s table he drank quickly two fingers of rum. Murdock poured him another, watched the tremor of his hands subside.

“You been tangling with somebody?” he said.

Connie waved his hand dismissively. “Little shits.” The collar of his white shirt, though pressed, was soiled. He preferred to slip back to the old days when they’d coasted on homemade sleds and explored this end of the mountain, when Murdock stood with him and they fought bigger boys who’d teased him.

“You rem-m-member that old b-bootleg mine?”

“The one you and your dad worked? Way up the hill behind Jimmy Robert’s?”

“I’d like to f-find it.”

“Has to be caved in now, Connie.” Murdock smiled. “You low on coal or something? That had a lot of sulphur in it.”

“Good p-place to hide out.”

“Lots drier spots than that, Connie. Who you hiding out from?”

“You n-n-never know.”

“You’re tough, Con, but you’ve got to stop mixing it up with people. We’re slower now, you know, that split second makes a big difference.”

“I got m-mine in.” He displayed his raw knuckles.

“So did they, by the looks of it.”

All his life Connie had wrung words out of himself, you could see the strain in his looks, the taut cords of his throat, his lean cheekbones, the tight line of his lips, as if to say, don’t make me speak unless you have to, and the dark, warning eyes, primed for slights, for mimicry, his hand already in a fist. He fought often, from boyhood to manhood, sometimes winning apology or regret, sometimes not. Asked his name, he’d say only Sinclair because he could hiss it smoothly through his teeth, whereas Connie, trapped deep in the cave of his mouth, choked him, flared up in his face. He discovered that alcohol could, though not always, sweeten the bitterness that troubled his life. But once out of school, he veered off deeper into drinking, became too much of what Murdock did not want to be—a man without mornings, a man sick in the middle of his work, everything a back seat to drink, drink his sole ambition. Murdock met up with him less and less, then he moved to Boston where he ruined lives with two different women, and little of what he’d been before he went there was left when he came back home to the old family house, rundown but habitable, alone under its leaky roof, visited for a while by a few of his drinking pals who gave out along with the last of his money.

But Connie was a boyhood pal, he felt a responsibility toward him, he knew his tempers. Even if liquor had burned away the best in him, there was still a husk of his old self, if you were patient enough to wait for it, to see it. He travelled Cape Seal Road every day, walking off his thirst, looking for familiar spots where houses used to be. If we weren’t lucky, or put together the right way, we might wander like Connie all our lives, fit for nothing special, happy nowhere. Murdock knew this was the only help he could give him now, a little booze, a little money, an ear. He stuttered less with Murdock.

“Willard,” he said. “Should get him a new d-dog.”

“Willard’s still cut up about that, Connie. You know, you’re about the only man his dog liked.”

Connie tossed back the rest of his drink and slammed the glass to the table. “Barked too d-damn much,” he said louder than necessary. “K-kicked up a fuss every t-time Billy B-Buchanan stepped outside, at Sandy’s there.”

“A lot of fellas back and forth there sometimes. You have to wonder if they did the dog in.”

“How the hell w-w-would I know? G-give me a fill-up, eh?”

“Calm down and I might.” Murdock poured him half a glass, then corked the rum. “Doing a little work for Billy, are you? You get along with him?”

“A big k-kid. Some other shits c-come through there. Not worth a n-nickel.”

“From what I’ve heard, you should steer clear of them,” Murdock said, pushing a twenty-dollar bill across the table. “There’s fresh tracks going into the tuckamore. Were you at my cliff this afternoon?”

“No,” Connie said quickly. He stared into his glass. “I t-told him, I said, Willard, for f-fuck sake, let go of that d-dog, I can’t stand l-looking at you. One more, M-Murdock. Then I’m gone.”

M
URDOCK DROVE HIM
to the bottom of his long unplowed driveway on the high side of the road and let him out.

“Take a rest, Con,” Murdock said, knowing the man would nap in any case and resume his walking afterward. Connie stood unsteadily while he stared at tracks marking the way up the hill through the snow, he had lost his driver’s licence way back. “I d-don’t know what the fuck’s going on around here any m-more,” he said, then, with high, careful steps, set off toward his house.

Murdock turned back in the direction of the wharf, he’d have a look at Sandy’s place, see who was there. In the front yard was Billy’s gaudy pickup, surrounded by tire burn down to mud and crazy swerves in the snow as if cars had made a wild, disorganized exit. The cottage, grey and peeling but sporting a new stark white door, was dark and quiet, no heavy music pounding from its windows. Funny, but years ago the Morrisons, childless, had been known for throwing parties and kitchen rackets, if there was a fiddler handy at any time they would pull him in, and sometimes when the waiting line for the ferry was backed up along the road, Sandy and Kate would fling open their door and hail inside waiting drivers and passengers. Good souls, they were, generous, hospitable. Who this current crowd was, Murdock could not say. But there was Livingstone’s pal watching him from a side window. Billy. No one had a bead on him, he was from New Waterford, somewhere over there.

He was not Murdock’s concern right now: for the first time in a good while, he knew exactly what he wanted to do in the morning, and that’s where he put his mind. Skates for Anna Starling. He looked up at the mountain ridge, a single, smoke-blue cloud took hold of the hot red sun and, like a fist, closed it away.

H
E SPENT
some time rehearsing, recalling the steps, jotting them down, sketching a little with a rough pencil on a piece of paper bag. Had to be sure he didn’t leave one out or have to backtrack. Chaff and dust filmed the tools, all the tongs his dad had made, for different uses, they hung on a rack on the wooden bin beside the forge, the cutters hot and cold, the chisels, punches, he made them himself out of bars of tool steel. Years of use still latent in wood and steel. There were the tin cans of rusty bolts, nuts, screws, nails, hinges, brackets, scavenged, saved. He could still hear his dad rummaging in one of these tins or a salt cod box, the dull rattle of iron bits as his fingers dug for just the fastening he needed. Murdock too would leave his own woodworking hoard behind, a legacy of thrift and necessity that he had nobody of his own to care about.

He’d need coal for the fire, it wouldn’t heat the air but just be good to see going. Even when his dad had the forge roaring and was banging iron on the anvil, the room in winter never warmed, the tight little fire fiercely hot from the blowered draft, focused, and the heat went up the chimney fast, the gases and smoke, though in summer yes it could be suffering hot. The old blower switch was dead. His father had gladly given up the hand-crank blower late in his life when power came to the road. That and the grindstone were the only things electrical, and there was a blown fuse in the little wall box. He rummaged through ruined fuses in a dirty wooden drawer until he located one good fifteen amper.