Anna From Away (30 page)

He was hesitant to enter Anna’s room, to touch her flung clothing, here where he himself had tossed in the heat, and slept under quilts when the window was frosted. Somehow she’d know, he would leave a trace.

She might turn against him anyway for what he was about to do.
It wasn’t your business, Murdock, you didn’t ask me.
There wasn’t time for asking, and he didn’t want Livingstone or Billy or any of their kind to get a hold of that dope.

He opened the spare room closet. The trunk was underneath clothes she’d recently hung there. Whose initials on the trunk? Anna had asked him. My mother’s, she left us in a hurry for a man in Boston, didn’t have time to pack a trunk. What she left behind, most of it, my dad flung on a burn pile, poked the flames until there was nothing but metal bits, zippers and buttons.

At first the voices seemed to come from the shore but when he rushed to the window, there was a young man, and a girl, in the yard already, she laughing at Anna’s drenched, limp scarecrow, and before Red Murdock could duck, the man saw him and turned by instinct to run. Catching himself, he gave a false and hearty wave.

Red Murdock stepped out back into the soft rain just as he would have at his own door. He didn’t want to fuss about private property, act suspicious, there was too much of that now, trespassing signs nailed on trees.

“You’re her husband, I guess?” he said to Red Murdock, “the woman who lives here?” The friendliness of his voice had an urgent strain to it. His sunglasses were huge pupils of purple. “I met her on the beach one day.”

“She’s gone for a while. Just having a walk, are you?”

“Me and Rita there, yeah.”

The girl wore a pink jacket, its hood down, her blonde hair streaming over her eyes. A smile touched her lips for a second. “We’re taking a break from fishing.”

“What’re you getting?” Red Murdock said. He was aware of the Black Rock lighthouse, a deep wail every thirty seconds, a stab of light in mist.

“Pollock,” the man said, too quickly. “Off the old wharf back there.”

“Pollock have a lot of blood in them. But you get that blood out quick, and they’re a good meal.”

“She said it was all right to cut through your property. Your wife.”

“No harm there. You’re not dressed for the rain much.”

“Doesn’t matter.” The man tilted his head up, taking in the house. “You got a nice spot here. What a view, eh, Rita?”

“Terrific. You must see a lot out there.” She leaned her head gracefully to the side, squeezing her hair into a dripping braid. “Stuff washes up here, I bet.”

“Like any shore. Well, you walk as you wish,” Red Murdock said. “I’m busy in the house.”

They backed away before they turned onto the path to the shore. Had no intention of cutting through, neither of them. From the kitchen, obscured by the door curtain, Murdock watched the man scoop up an apple and pitch it like a baseball into the orchard.The girl was older than Red Murdock had thought, her walk was a woman’s, sure of how she looked. Now he’d have to be certain they were well gone.

He fetched his tool box and was unscrewing the door latch when he heard Anna’s car.

“What’s wrong?” she said, coming breathless up the back steps.

“A friend from the beach was here. A fella with a shaved head.”

“He broke in?”

“Me. As you said, this lock’s no good.”

Anna looked down at the empty shore. “What did he say?”

“He said he could cut through here, that you told him.”

Anna touched the broken latch. “He’s lying. I don’t know anyone like that.”

“He had a young woman with him. Girlfriend, I suppose.”

“Charming. A couple.”

“He thinks I belong to the place, that we’re married, and maybe that suits us, you know. It won’t hurt.”

“He was blowing smoke. If he’s in with Livingstone, he knows who I am.”

“I wouldn’t make much of a husband anyway.”

“Oh, I think you’d more than do, Murdock. I’m sure your late friend thought so.”

“She didn’t,” he said, smiling. “She knew better. But I did for her.” He slowly drove a screw into the latch plate. “That dope, Anna, we have to get rid of it. Today.”

“In daylight? With those people around?”

“After dark.”

Get rid of it.
That sounded so easy, but the bale’s power was undeniable. Even between her and Murdock it was a force, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to give it up entirely, just toss it away, now that Livingstone was after it. With her foot she drew a slow circle over the rug like the beginning of a dance. “We could hide it better,” she said.

“Look, Anna, they know that stuff washed ashore, our shore. They might just be guessing about you, but that doesn’t make things any better.”

After her talk with Breagh, Anna felt pushed, cornered, the outsider. “The guy with the shaved head, he did have a girl with him. Why would he be dangerous? He wasn’t sneaking around at night.”

“Night isn’t here yet.”

Anna took off her rain jacket and flung it on a chair. She ran water into a pot and set it on the stove. Murdock watched her, a crank drill poised in his hand.

“Anna …?”

“Husbands usually stay for supper,” she said.

“There’s nothing usual about any of this. That’s not a bale of hay upstairs.”

“Just not tonight?” she said. “Please? I’m tired out. I feel like I’ve been pulled around by my hair.”

“I’ll finish your door then,” he said, his face hardening. “You need a stronger lock. I don’t think they even make them that strong.”

T
HE PASTA
Anna boiled, now a cold nest in a colander, had not raised her appetite. Murdock had left without a word after he finished the door. He was angry and that made her feel worse, she’d driven him away. She opened the expensive bottle of California wine she’d been saving, for something, someone. From the kitchen table she could keep an eye on the back field, the shore, the path. The rain grew fainter and fainter until it was just still, moist air, and then a wind came up out of the east, cool, full of sound, waggling the sticks of her sluggish scarecrow, its denim shirt soaked. She’d put out in the grass a bowl of leftover dessert and the ravens were at it immediately, their beaks tipped with whipped cream like kids at a party. Who would come here now, in this weather, seeing her at home? That stranger and his girlfriend? Did they even know she had a root cellar? Did Billy? Why should she give in to someone after her weed? She wasn’t going to cower, to hell with them. Let Livingstone stew for a while. Murdock, of course, would not understand.

She was back and forth at the rear windows, staring out. She had let the house slide a bit, and her work. All she had left were two blank sketchpads and the dog drawing, but she could not pick up a pencil or a charcoal stick without Livingstone rising in her throat, his cruel, unnecessary betrayal. Well, she had something he desperately wanted, though no part of herself.

Curled up in a chair, she tried to concentrate on a novel, but the words streamed by like water. She couldn’t even escape into someone else’s language, but she picked up a letter from Melissa, the handwriting, bold and elegant, soothed her.
I love the pen drawings on the grey paper, with just touches of white shading. The crows at the dead rabbit, the blood and the white fur, terrific. You’ve done good animals here but nothing like these. The lines are strong, powerful. I know you have Dürer in mind, they have that kind of sharp stillness, empathy, awe, such careful observation. I sold the red fox, beautiful. I imagine him lying there in the sunlit snow like a dog, full of your leftovers. You must’ve had time to sketch him well, you finished it so fine, the detail. Your best work ever, I hope you feel that way about it. The woman wants it framed so I’ll do that for her. I’m keeping your money like you asked, any time you want a check for it just say so and it’s in the mail.

Anna wanted to reply, but the bale seemed to dull her wit, her invention—she hardly spoke about it except for Murdock, yet it altered everything she did, like sudden, spectacular wealth. It had seemed at first such a luxury to have that sweet smoke at her disposal, all hers, so valuable, a universal currency, and now there were people, not very far away, determined to get it back. But who had guessed it was
here
in her house? Then again, she was the woman from away, from California, a likely suspect. And she had toked up with Livingstone Campbell.…

At least the lock was new.

She smoked half a joint in plain view at her table, killing it in a yellow rose teacup she’d filled with sand. Then she pored through a jumble of old photographs she had found mouldering in a shoebox, all from times when cameras were not common possessions. She’d worked her way through them slowly as if she were squinting through a microscope, imagining histories, however vague or inauthentic, for the faces there. A few were tiny prints probably from the nineteen teens, in sharp sepias: a woman, maybe Anna’s age, in a long wool coat and tight-fitting hat, the ubiquitous spruce behind her draped with snow, she bent awkwardly forward in a white clearing, maybe pond ice, where a man held her arms to steady her, maybe her first time on skates. In another, a dark collie leaned with affection into a woman’s skirt, a mown field behind them (dogs seemed beloved wherever they appeared). She wore a nautical dress—a white jumper with a dark neckerchief and a long dark skirt, likely navy, and on the back of the photograph she’d written:
Myself taken away from the house last fall. I am fatter in the other pictures I think.
Who was she addressing? What hopes did she have in their reaction? What did she mean, “away from the house"? Two middle-aged smiling women at either handle of a long crosscut saw resting on a sawhorsed log, a loose pile of cut wood beside them: they weren’t posing so much as pausing at a task they were well familiar with. No men to do it? Or did they take it on themselves, just another domestic necessity? A boy, maybe seven or eight, putting up his dukes for the camera but looking aside (Connie? He had the thick dark hair). Anna dwelled on three dark, surreal figures in heavy snow, too indistinct to single out the faces, they were framed by a black sky and a black foreground—a murky dream from a Bergman film: on the back,
Snowshovelling 1930.
A ship, its three sails filled but ghostly faint, was passing down what might be the strait behind the house,
August 1917
in pencil, a world war not yet over. She examined closely a photo of a soldier who’d served in it, in his kilted uniform, at relaxed attention for this posed postcard, his bonnet jaunty, his large farmer’s hands at his sides, a slight self-conscious smile on his lips as if he were both proud and a little doubtful. On the back he’d written:
Mama I never thought I’d miss the haymaking. Knit me socks please. Love Rod.
Under it, in another hand,
Cpl. R. MacAskill, killed at Ypres.

Anna’s mother had taken but a handful of snapshots that she could remember, and preserved even fewer. Anna had one of herself, still in pigtails, with her dad on a Pacific beach, huge rocks behind them, mist from a hard surf swirling in the air, and another in their surrounding woods, resting her head against the soft, warm bark of an enormous redwood.

She looked hard for Red Murdock and thought he was there in a few dim black-and-whites, a young man on a boat, maybe the old ferry, shirtless, arms crossed firmly over his bare chest, not out of arrogance (his smile cancelled that) but because he was entirely at ease with himself: there was nothing about him that said I need your help to know who I am. Anna turned the photos slowly, absorbed: was that his philandering mother, pulling her hem up to reveal her shapely legs? Who was the handsome guy, dark as an Italian, holding a baby girl? The four elderly men in black suits, soberly greying, seated on a row of chairs placed in a field, deciduous trees in full leaf behind them and, further on, the sea? Everything about them said a Presbyterian Sunday afternoon, said Gaelic was in their mouths.

She had persuaded herself she wanted to get by on this shore, in this place, alone, and she had. Not because of its simplicity or purity, since it was not simple or pure, but rather its old complexities which she sometimes sensed acutely, in this house and elsewhere, she had preferred them to her own, they had informed everything she drew.

Did she hear a car? She willed the sound away, if there was one. Dusk:
entre chien et loup.
Between the dog and the wolf.

She got up and went from window to window. The bale in the cellar was like a radioactive core: anywhere in the house she could sense its soft vibration. Why had she let Murdock leave that way, in that mood? She wouldn’t run to him, she couldn’t. The rattling call of a kingfisher came up from the pond. She felt watched. The field would be dark before long. Trees were swaying shapes in the wind, she felt terribly alone.

T
HE MORNING OF
Connie Sinclair’s memorial, Murdock carried a piece of water-carved limestone up to his clearing in the mountain woods, a handsome stone he’d dug out of a brook where water, over many years, had worked it into graceful curves and hollows. He knew Rosaire would like it. This was what the settlers had done in their early graveyards, sited near water where they could be reached in all seasons: marked graves with undressed stones picked from the shore or wherever a pleasing rock revealed itself. Murdock set the brass canister holding half her ashes into the small hole and filled it in, tamping the earth down gently with his foot. The rest would stay with him at home, in the beautiful box. Two places at once, my dear woman, how about that? Can’t do that while we’re living. Be damned handy if we could.

This was the day of ashes.

Tired from his climb, he sat on the bench, pleased with the look of the stone. Like a sculpture. Did Anna ever carve in stone?

Last night he had lain awake for a long time. He had the feeling she would leave before long, somehow, in some fashion. If she did, she wouldn’t know October when night frost stiffened the grasses, and the sun, as it rose into the morning, melted away the winter there, you could forget a while longer that it was coming. She wouldn’t see a blizzard rage for three days and drift high as the telephone wires where birds had roosted, dishevelled by the wind. She wouldn’t be dancing by her stove, or his either. But she still had moves to make whether she reached for his hand or not.