Anna From Away (18 page)

But Chet did not finish his doctorate, he saw himself as a writer, not a scholar, he hoped to be another Chekhov (she might have asked him whether another Chekhov was called for, but she didn’t say things like that to him, not then), and he said one day, Let’s go to California, things are happening there. He took a job at a small college in central California where the pay was not good, but Anna was glad to return, she felt it some consolation for her interrupted career. She got work as a secretary in the art department of his school, continued her artwork on her own, at home, at night courses. Since Chet’s career as a short story writer seemed, to him at least, always on the verge of rising into some kind of literary notice without actually taking off, his faculty advancement, in the absence of a PhD and notable publications, was on hold. He resented this quietly and his belief in his creative abilities seemed to grow in proportion to the lack of stories in print: you had to know the right people, he said, you had to get into an influential clique and get blessed by the right critics and stroked by the right editors or you didn’t have a chance, and he wouldn’t take that route, his work spoke for itself, he wasn’t going to go down on his knees to anyone.

Anna continued her employment so she’d have money for herself, for travel, a second car, they were stuck in this college town for whatever future they cared to imagine. We could be in worse places, Chet said, who wouldn’t want to live here? Who indeed? she said. I ought to know.

He published in small literary quarterlies, the ones that came in a flush of enthusiasm, manifestos and obscure titles and were gone as soon as their grants ran out. She began to feel sorry for him, and tried her best to hide it. He was not a bad writer, and now and then he turned out a story she genuinely liked, it had power and something fresh, and she felt it
should
appear in a good magazine or compete for a prize. But Chet could not break free of the academic pack, not set himself significantly apart from other competent, mediocre, able fiction writers. The ground was laid for his discontents, his boredom, the diversions of sexual pursuits. I like pretty women, he said. What can I say? Hang me.

Anna pulled away on her own, nurtured a reputation for skillful and original drawings and she demanded eventually the time and means to explore them full-time. Chet complied, thinking it, she did not doubt now, a fair trade-off: so long as he saw to their livelihood, and gave her room, there would remain a part of his life he need not answer for. He said to her, You know, it’s not bad to be a nobody? I’ve come to like being ignored. It frees a man up.

A
NNA COILED BATH TOWELS
on the floor beneath the windows and in the morning tried to work at her table, but water streaking down the wall distracted her almost to tears. Like a leaking boat, and how could she ignore that, in the one room she
worked
in? It had the southern light, and a good feeling about it—women had sewn here, by this light, they had spun wool, the spokes of their spinning wheels flickering through the rays of a winter sun—except when the walls wept and cried for her attention. She changed the towels, she wrung them out in the sink. Okay, was she bailing or was she not? She couldn’t finish a letter, even to Melissa:
I spotted tiny flowers close to the ground yesterday, blossoms are scarce here yet—I think they’re wild strawberries and it gave me joy on an overcast day. One day Willard brought me two early lobsters, his cousin has a boat, they were cooked, glad for that, I could never drop them in boiling water. I watched crows carry away the heads full of that green and red stuff (roe?), I wouldn’t eat it but Willard said it is “some good” mashed on bread, tomalley he calls it. Saw a snake when we had a snatch of sun, bathing in the field. It didn’t want to move, but did. I knew how it felt.
She didn’t care to talk to anyone else right now, and letters were talking, that’s what she always liked about them, their special conversation, deliberate, thought-through, not like gabbing on a telephone. How important had become her walks to the beat-up and rust-stained mailbox, she could feel, defensively, its empty, chilled interior before she lowered the lid, but when an actual letter lay inside, one with cancelled stamps on a clearly personal envelope, she would save it until after supper and her room was good and warm, it was like receiving a guest.

The grumblings of thunder passed away and the last squall blew through, followed by a washed, leaden silence. Everything was waterlogged, smothered, even birdsong. It took all her will to rouse herself, to lift the night off her chest. Dangerous days, she might have packed her things in a frenzied, unexamined joy and driven away, stayed at the wheel until nightfall and gotten deep into New Brunswick, closeted herself in a motel like a fugitive, closed the drapes, watched TV numbly, drunk wine, eaten takeout food to country-and-western music.

But here she was, the house draped with damp clothes and strewn with belongings like a ship battered by a long storm. Sheets of drawings lay about, curled into loose tubes. And there on the big clipboard was the dog drawing in which two animals had merged into one, into some entity she was trying to understand. The dog in the trap was a dark, howling figure here, but what the work needed she had not yet fully realized: into the energy of her lines, her strokes, there had to be the shock of her own falling, the burning surprise of the water, the dog tortured in different shadings of that frosted pond, its agony in the icy light.

The dog in the air was another matter, clawing at her consciousness, and the instrument of his suffering was not a thoughtless trapper but someone worse. What she wanted was that one moment when the dog grasped its own helplessness, its yelp of recognition and despair. The trust of an animal in a human being, that was heartbreaking, wasn’t it, to see it so awfully trashed? The beaver who’d diligently built its house in the pond, oblivious that its life was not ordered only by itself and its perceivable world, was not betrayed, only hunted. It had no master to defer to, its loyalty to be shattered by.

She put the drawing aside, not in the mood for its difficulties, the complexities of its composition, it would come together, sometime. She would concentrate instead on the yellowed skull she’d found in woods moss, possibly a feral cat’s, with its long incisors, rendering it in meticulous detail, the fine lines of bone, of teeth, stained like an old teacup. How had it died?

A breeze trembled through the crow quill jammed into her pencil jar. She rushed to the open window: just the field and its new grasses, sweeping to the shorebank, the stones, the blue currents. The long hill of St. Aubin like thick, uneven hedgerow, a house tucked into it here and there like a nest. The sea was empty. No one. The pond below meandered into the woods, its dark surface barely riffled, new cattails bristling at its margins. No one, just three gulls dozing, nudged in lazy circles by the wind, out where the ice had opened underfoot.High above the sea a bald eagle soared in slow circles, until it dropped suddenly, gliding low over the water, legs down, claws yawning before, with a sharp splash, they clamped a fish, the bird’s broad wings labouring for a few strokes as it climbed toward the tall pine near the shore, a long-used nest of sticks secured on the treetop’s half-dead branches. Anna watched it through her binoculars as it landed, storing the images in her mind. She had begun a collage of eagle sketches, in flight, at rest, and, like now, tearing scales and flesh.

She would phone Willard about the leaky window. In the kitchen mirror: sleeplessness darkened her eyes, a swipe of charcoal on her cheek.

After a supper of cold salmon and cold potatoes, Anna took the party dress from the clothes tree in her room, as if it were evidence, and carefully hung it back in the garment bag, zipping it shut. She closed the closet door. It wasn’t fair her sweat was in it, whoever it belonged to, but hadn’t it hung there all these years, waiting for someone? The woman from here who’d owned it, worn it, would surely not approve of Anna, how she wore it, how she took it off, but the dress still looked fine. Another woman might dance in it yet.

Red Murdock was not far, she would talk to him, if he was at home, after she pulled the frayed ends of herself together. She would go with an errand, bring him biscuits still warm from the oven. That was what she wanted to do.

On the back porch she sipped coffee. Clouds like train smoke were moving away over the sea. The apple trees in the old orchard, in fits of wind, shook loose little showers from their leaves. At the pond, above the new stalks of bulrushes, red-winged blackbirds harried a crow, like tiny planes in a dogfight. The brooks were running loud.

I was on a schooner clear of two years. You wouldn’t get me near one tonight.

Take a fog and you’re on your own, boy. Eh? Donald John tipped more rum into Willard’s glass and they leaned back in the chairs pulled up at the big window.

I used to fish off the schooners, fill them dories up with cod. But you get a good dark fog, waiting aboard for the dory to come home and, boy, no dory. Wouldn’t see her no more.

Dory won’t sink.

Might as well sink, if she goes over. They’ll float, but, see, you can’t hang on to her—a breeze of wind when it’s rough, wash you right off—and you might as well be gone.

Pass me them glasses, Willard. Thought I saw someone rowing out there.

Dory you say?

Pulling boat. Some kind. Seen a flash of oars, I’d swear it. Who rows now?

Nobody we know. Not in this weather anyhow. Rory Dan from Red Brook now, an awful man for rowing. Teeth of a gale, didn’t matter to him at all. You’ d think he was a Newfoundlander.

Best dancer that ever stood on a floor, Rory Dan.

Oh, Jesus, he could step out.

If there was one better, there was three worse.

Wait! I seen a light there, off the cove. Sure of it.… Don’t see it now for the trees.

Not in trouble, are they? SOS?

Gone now anyway. Damn long walk to get down there.

What could you do for a skiff? Upside down by now.

They’re not in trouble. Pass that, if you wouldn’t mind, Donald John.

A
NNA TUGGED OFF HER BOOTS
inside the door and stood in her stocking feet. Breagh sat in a turmoil of sewing, scraps of material scattered on every surface and the floor, bits of black velvet, strips of a glistening chocolate satin, crimson cotton bands, and torn tissue, a spool of red thread Lorna was twirling like a top, strands entwining her hair, the sewing machine humming in bursts, pausing while Breagh manipulated a hem under its needle, telling her daughter through teeth gritted against two common pins, “Lorna, honey, play with the
empty
spools, okay?” She told Anna to clear off a chair and sit down, she’d be done in a sec, just had to finish this waist.

Anna picked up a whimsical tam, a rainbow of dark pinks and lavenders spiralling out from a black pom, it flopped alluringly to one side when she put it on.

“Looks terrific,” Breagh said, glancing at her. “I’ve been at this most of the night, have to get more stock finished before next Monday, and Molly’s dropping by a few sweaters. Isobel hates a lot of forlorn space on the racks, empty hangers and the like. So I’m stitching fast as a witch. Eh, Lorna? Oh, Anna, would you take that red thread off her? Hard enough keeping her away from pins.”

Anna talked to Lorna as she unwound the thread from her hair, Lorna shut her eyes and hummed, and Anna hummed with her, listening for her song. She could see no trace of Livingstone, a full ashtray, a tossed hat, a toy for Lorna. She had almost hoped he might be here, together with her and Breagh, to know what he’d say, what he would do with himself among all three of them, and what
she
herself would do, say.

“What do you hear from Mr. Campbell?” she said lightly.

“Not much.
About
him.”

“Gossip?”

“Not exactly. Molly saw him over at MacDermid’s old place, on foot, disappearing down the driveway, what’s left of it. I was down north then anyway.”

So he’d been on the road, he’d driven past Anna’s house in the rain. “Awful rain, wasn’t it, tearing through everything? Potholes and mud now.”

Breagh stopped her machine, raised the needle. “Lorna wants to get outside, and so do I.”

Anna had Lorna colouring a figure she’d pencilled for her on a big sheet of paper, a galloping horse, its rider in a flowing baroque cape, a hat with a swooping feather Lorna was intensely turning green.

“What was Livingstone doing over there?” Anna said.

“That house? It’s completely shut up. Who knows? It drops down to a nice beach, a cove, people used to come out from town and treat it like a public park. Nothing new there. Tea with rum?”

Breagh clapped the kettle on the stove. Lorna wandered after her asking for juice.

The view out the windows was simple and exhilarating—just the back field sloping toward the cliff, beyond it a wide and breathless sea, as if you were airborne.

“Do you know about this Coastal Watch Program?” Anna called to her. “I heard it on the radio.”

“Liv had his own watch program, I think. He used to go down to the cliff there, have a cigarette and look out for a while.”

“Likes the sea, does he …?”

“Oh, he was curious about old Dougal’s shore down below, that broken-down boat skid there. I told him, you wouldn’t haul a boat up that thing, not anymore, you’d be far better off at MacDermid’s Cove further up. I said ask Red Murdock, but I don’t think he ever did. They’ve got a good-sized fishing boat, him and his buddies, you’d need a wharf for that anyway. Whatever he and Billy are up to, I don’t care to know. Schemes, big plans. Talk. That’s Livingstone.”

Breagh served tea at the kitchen table and two cups seemed to put Livingstone on the periphery. Anna relaxed. Had Breagh cooled toward him?

“You’re busy, I know,” Anna said. “But if you could take a break, would you pose for me? A figure study? Just for a while.”