“Don’t forget your goblet,” he said.
“You keep it, Murdock. You like wood.”
“I don’t drink wine.”
“You never know, there might be an occasion.”
“There used to be lots of them.”
Tracing absently the smooth teak contours of the goblet, Red Murdock watched her from the workshop doorway. She leaned forward against the weight of her pack, into the swirling fog that closed around her before she reached the shore.
She would never know that he’d stood in snow to his ankles, outside her window, his bare hands deep in his peacoat pockets, fingering a tear he’d meant to sew. The skates, wrapped in a paper bag, were tucked under his arm. The wind was sharp in his hair, he’d come without a hat because he thought he’d be inside her kitchen by then. But how could he knock on her door? He had heard the music—not his kind of music but a sort that might get you dancing anyway, he could understand that—and there she was, a shadow swaying, and he took a step toward the window to watch her, just for a minute, the pane dewed with the inside heat, Anna moving in candlelight, twirling in a yellow shawl that had belonged to his grandmother, she’d been into a drawer upstairs, but he didn’t care about that either. The wind had played across the field behind him, a zephyr of snow dusted his face and he tasted it on his tongue. She was dancing with herself, in a place of her own, he didn’t belong there. He wasn’t the man to disturb a spell like that, the skates could wait. He’d pulled the seaman’s collar up near his ears and was about to turn for home when he saw someone moving slowly toward her and back, a man dancing too. Who the hell was that? Not enough light to tell. A confusion of anger and envy rose in Murdock, but he’d turned away, that wasn’t his business, he had no right to feel as he did. But Jesus, he hoped now it wasn’t Livingstone. He slumped a bit, wondering.
Back home, he had thought it would have to be some long, cold, hungry spell before he’d ever mention it to anyone. He had his own little boat to keep clear of the rocks, and he was rowing her hard.
Yes, I talk to myself, and who cares? No one hears me up here. I can crisscross this place in my sleep, and I have, everywhere our people lived, steep or level, tame or wild. Gone now, all Sinclairs but me. What do they know, young bucks from town? They’ d get lost here fast, the way the woods came up since I was a boy chasing cows. I had to bully them out of the trees sometimes and scold them home. Those pals of Billy’s, down by the wharf, they think I’m some kind of hick, see, but I lived in Boston years, years, I know which track the train is on. I had to set them straight, Listen, that’s Sandy and Katie Morrison’s house you’re in, I don’t want to see it trashed, they were good people and friends of my own. What goddamn business is it of yours? says this saucy little son of a bitch, we’re paying you to keep your eyes open, if we need your advice, we’ll f-f-f-fucking ask for it, mocking me. Braying bastards. Well, here’s some advice, I says, and it’s free, and I popped him a good one right in the snout, Jesus, blood spattered out, then they were all over me, I might be a drunk but I can still give more than I get, and there’s Livingstone yelling and breaking us up, I knew his family over on the other side, good family, old family, I wouldn’t have got mixed up in this but for him. Come on, Connie, it’s easy money, he said, you just let us know when things are clear, who’s around, we’ll get it done in one night and be gone out of here. Sure, I took some lumps, things calmed down. But they got the message, Connie Sinclair won’t take shit from you, I never did and I never will. Not in my old home, buddy, not here, I don’t get pushed around here.
B
Y THE TIME THE ODD RAINS BEGAN
, Anna had made it through a sort of spring. After she’d called on Murdock and lugged home, like booty, the iron gifts, she had joined a few—the tongs, closed into a heart shape, and hooks and rings and chains—into a sculpture, and set it on her back porch announcing, she liked to think, a connection, a shared totem, a mysterious effigy no one could ignore: Anna Starling lives here.
The last of the shaded snow, granular and sallow beneath trees and brush, shrank away into the black duff and the soaked, purplish carpet of last year’s leaves, nothing left of their autumn blaze. Shoots of hay, fine and wind-fanned like flames, began to green the dun fields, and although it seemed late and slow, the hardwoods lost their grey filigree of winter and joined the conifers in darkening the woods of the mountain and the hills of St. Aubin across the water, emboldening deer to come down from higher ground. A doe had peered at her out of the trees one morning, still as a tree herself, and they exchanged appraisals through the curling mist until Anna reached for her camera: a buck she could not see snorted and the doe bolted away with him, crashing out of sight. She found violets both purple and white, so pleased to see their fragile blossoms she took a bouquet to her room but they quickly wilted in a fruit jar vase.Red Murdock she did not see after he dropped off the hardware from his forge—I’m terrible busy just now, he said, I’m catching up—just his van on the highway one day. The muddy road out was pocked with teeth-jarring potholes that kept her off it as much as possible. She saw chimney smoke from his workshop when she walked the shore where she sometimes fled to evade, in its breezes, the vicious little blackflies hatching from the full brooks and streams, digging into her clothing, her hat, her hair, raising welts. In the forest of her youth, there’d been few insects, the bug-resistant redwoods were dominant and decomposed slowly, the huge old stumps sprouted ferns, their root stock sending up rings of saplings around them, the heart of new groves whose trees would never, like their unlogged forebears, reach one or two or even three millenniums.
She was absorbed one afternoon in a soft windless forest rain that reminded her of her early home, the feel of it. There was a moist evanescence in the mosses, the rotted red marrow of a stump, a patch of black bog leaves. To add to her still lifes, she sketched the texture of aged bark and dead wood, the gnarly encrustations on windfalls.
The skates she hung from a hall tree in her workroom as if she might, summoned by another skater, sling them over her shoulder and fly out the door. The night with Livingstone had faded, whatever risks it ignited seemed to have guttered out: it was like one of the old photo negatives she’d found in a drawer—the faces dark and unrecognizable in a livid but indefinite landscape. At certain times, especially during the moody rains, she’d wonder about him—there was nothing vague, in the chilly damp of her house, about his body pressed to hers, the heat of his mouth, his hands. She did one self-portrait after another in charcoals, in graphite, lacerating in their frankness, refractions of herself day by day. Some she lit morning fires with in the wood stove, holding the door open while the crushed paper blackened and curled. Others she kept like entries in a daybook.
It was afternoon, she wanted a walk.
The dark pond was bordered with green spears of cattail shooting up through the rough tan mat of last year’s reeds, an animal skeleton woven into them, skull and spine and bits of hide, some winter victim. She was surprised to hear the thrumming engines of what turned out to be a big black-and-white freighter passing down the strait, inbound, Willard had told her, for a gypsum mine in the Island’s interior. She watched the ship, its deck full of machinery, until its wake sent a succession of swells hissing up the shore. A wooden fisherman’s buoy bobbed toward her, painted green and yellow. She picked it up by its frayed rope. So much to sketch, to collect, to gather into something new, she felt as if she were striding again, not crawling, not standing still. She wanted to work, and she was—when she pushed clutter from her mind.
Was Alicia Snow mainly a matter of
degree?
Dalliances, affairs, flings that always flamed out had been
okay?
She was the woman you feared all along but didn’t know it, the one who would show up at the wrong time and against whom, at your age, you had little defence. Anna’s mother had delivered warnings—Don’t let men have their way with you, or Don’t make yourself more attractive than you need to be—as if they were ancient wisdom, not clichés. No man in her life now. Livingstone, the one-night flame, was not there at all. Good. She could not even contemplate a relationship of any duration or depth, it made her listless, irritable, impatient—the effort that went into learning about another man, his idiosyncrasies, and making room for him.
Living
with him? Tiresome to think of.
The sky went heavy and dark and she turned back to her path. Sometimes the weather arrived high along the mountain ridge behind the house, as if the roiling convolutions of cloud, swelling and black and veined with light, would play out their drama there, but soon rain charged down the mountainside or in from the sea, lashing her as she staggered home.
But this was a different rain and Anna watched it from her room, she couldn’t turn her back to it, the sudden gusts, the trees seething, rocking madly, and after dark, heat lightning started up in the west, great white flares, and the wind soon drove pelting rain and thunder. It beat mayflowers to the ground, muddying their petals flat, and cut sharp little gullies down the driveway, so intense at times it felt apocalyptic, as if something as common as rain had gone suddenly wrong, become thick and vengeful. Any patch of blue was quickly chased and overtaken, the slow, rolling, rain-laden clouds releasing a dense and steady downpour. When that ceased, a mist took over, or a relentless drizzle filled the windless air, the woods trembling with wet, mosses luminescent in the gloom, light seemed to rush from them. In the black pools, raindrop rings shimmered outward, intersecting, disturbing the light there, then moved on to the mad brooks that before had seemed tame, now one little vigorous falls after another, foaming in the darkness.
The next day the sky was a blank foggy white out of which rain drummed. Anna walked out in it anyway, half-blinded, squinting through the streams, rain crackling on her rubber hood. She wandered the glistening, soggy landscape, stooping to slip some object into her pocket—a long eagle feather pasted to the earth, black fading into white, a small burl of wood hard as a rock—every day, she’d not let this diabolical weather shut her inside the house, waiting for it to break. She could see the shadowy form of a fishing boat pitching in the slow swells, tending a lobster trap before it blanked out in mist. She swiped rain from her eyes and moved on down the shore, bent over, searching, evading the waves reaching for her feet.When she glanced up, she had gone as far as Red Murdock’s beach, his house lay up the field, two rectangles of light in the rain. Kitchen. She ached for company. She was tempted to knock, sit with him in that hospitable room, listening to his calm voice, she would show him what she’d found, a small, unspectacular stone that had cracked open to reveal its cluster of crystals. What a bedraggled sight she would be, he’d think her crazy for scouring the beach in a punishing rain like this.
He had pulled her from the winter pond, she had not forgotten the gentle feel of his hands. But she hoped never to need rescuing again.
T
HAT NIGHT
the storms rose, pounding into her sleep, and she kept to her bed, clear of windows. When everything else went quiet, none of her activities could fill the dangerous spaces or distract her from them, and she was left to listen against the incessant dripping of the eaves. Through her slightly raised window the brooks were like heavy rain behind rain, unleashed, scoring the mud of the mountainside.
The rooms were damp, the wall plaster, her sheets cool with it. The power clapped out into a sudden, aggressive darkness as blinding, as she stood there flicking a switch, as a dream. There seemed a rush of fragrance from the mayflowers she’d found off a woods path, pink, delicate blossoms hidden beneath heart-shaped leaves.… She hadn’t heard from Breagh, and that wormed around inside her, that she might know about her madness with Livingstone. How senseless and unnecessary that would be. Anna admired her, and she had not intended to interfere in her life, not
intended
… anything.
Downstairs, the window in her workroom leaked. It wasn’t as if a dam would burst or her ceiling cave in, but this nagged at her, this responsibility for the house. The outdoors was creeping indoors. Willard had not showed up lately, he seemed to get into funks and disappear, then return suddenly to the back door full of talk and a thirst for tea. Of course Red Murdock would help, if she asked. She wanted to depend for a little while on someone
else,
a man, for repairs at least. But no, she wouldn’t call on Murdock for a nettle-some leak, for puddles along the wall, though once she would have turned, without a thought, to her husband. Chet, could you see to that, please? Anna, I will, give me a little time. Oh, how much time she had given him.
W
HEN SHE MET
C
HET
, he was a jazz-loving writer, editor of the campus literary magazine, his dark brown hair long and shaggy, wearing tight jeans and rumpled corduroy jackets, declaiming about literature and politics late into the night, in bars, at parties. They were both undergraduates then, and they soon moved in with each other, enjoying the fresh, guiltless passion of that life, free of responsibilities, the pleasures of throwing their own parties and drinking and smoking and sleeping late and, on the heels of the night before, making love again as soon as they opened their eyes and sometimes before. They had an unabashed physical fascination with each other, in lying open and naked any time of day. They were Chet and Anna, or Anna and Chet, depending on which friends or acquaintances were referring to them, which end of the scale a man or woman might place their weight. They both went on to the same university for graduate degrees, she an MFA, he a PhD, but the closer they got to marriage, the more Anna felt his career overwhelming hers, not in any overt way—he did not demand that his take primacy or even that she adopt his name—but the assumption was there, and she failed to challenge it until years later, she’d felt perhaps that they could work it out once Chet got his doctorate and was hired at a decent university, she might be able to resume her own studies, finish her art degree, at least, be her own person, an artist. Then an unplanned pregnancy, a miscarriage. Chet was honest about his relief, she realized he had no wish for fatherhood (neither had her own dad, but he loved her deeply, and showed her in every way he could), and her desire for a child faded away. Her art filled that vacuum, or so she believed.