Willard paused at the front door as he was leaving. Just a few of us left in the winter, old-timers, Scotch people like myself, the MacCuishes, Donald John and Molly MacKay toward the cape, Red Murdock MacLennan down from you there, don’t see much of him these days, old Rory Gunn pushing a hundred, he don’t walk anymore, but Connie Sinclair yes, on the road, coming and going, to a drink, from a drink. Yes, pretty thinned out, this end. We’re dead or gone. Oh, and Breagh Carmichael, young woman and her little girl, rents Kenzie MacKillop’s old place. Summer, things get a little busier, cottage people show up.
He gripped his black tool box that he carried around like a doctor’s bag and went off into a light snowfall, fresh as it had been the day Anna arrived, so light on the ground puffs of it rose at her footsteps.
Before she’d put the key in the lock that day, she looked back at her dark tracks leading from the leased car: here she was, on this back road in winter, tired, a little terrified, but excited too by her very isolation—she had taken herself out of a life with her husband, out of his force field, because he had fallen in love with another woman, one much younger than she. That had wounded her, and she did not want to bleed where others could watch, and where her artwork had gone stale, trapped in distraction.
I’m going to Nova Scotia and I’m going soon, she had told Chet—a sudden decision that set him back on his heels, the dust of their relationship swirling around them, just beginning to settle. Impulsive, yes, but she’d taken solace in the shock of it, to him, and to herself. To both her women and men friends it seemed rash, if not for the same reasons. But his affair with a woman barely thirty seemed to call for a dramatic turn, beyond marriage, well beyond the college town it had soured in. She would do the new Anna alone, she and her art.
In the first days here, she couldn’t bear idleness, such space and solitude let thoughts of home flood in, grievances, missed pleasures, the comforts of routine. She explored indoors, then out, as much as weather would allow, eager for material to draw. She took notes, photos, filled sketchpads.
Dear Melissa,
she wrote,
Look, new things every day, a fresh setting, I just respond to it. And if I want to lie in bed on a foggy morning and listen to the mournful Black Rock lighthouse, that’s okay too. If I want to sketch a tall windfallen spruce sprawled across the pond ice, and the grey blemishes there that the wind has scoured (bad spots to walk on?), I can sit on a folded blanket until my butt is numb if I want to. I went up into the foothill woods across the road, until it got too steep, and the afternoon sun was so strong the shadows of the bare trees striped the snow, and I remembered it in pen and ink when I reached home and warmed myself. How different the woods will be in summer. Weekend merges into weekday here, Monday holds none of its inflated significance. I did a terrific pencil sketch of the old guy who looks after my house (sort of), mournful but strong features, big strong nose, chin, long, hollow cheekbones. Loneliness is always hovering after dark, but I keep busy, I keep it at bay.
She had called Chet one evening after she was well settled in, he was still her husband, he had cared about her, listened to her, shared things with her she liked to think he had shared with no one else, he was not evil, not bad, just weak, and because she was lonely that night and fighting it, she told him about the big pond below her back field, separated from the sea by a snow-concealed barrier of sand and shingle and roiled stones, where she’d come upon a dead beaver on her first cold walk down there, strangled in a snare, thrashed to death, its comical teeth bared. The witless cruelty of that wire, more so when she later found where the beaver had lived, how easily the trapper had determined its trail up the bank to a comfortable den in the rooty, muddy cave of a fallen tree, its half-finished lodge of woven sticks and branches, a brown island near the bank, abandoned. She’d felt tears coming as she told him, but she didn’t mention that. The beaver had been too intent, as wild animals often are, upon its innocent and driven enterprise, unaware that another world, another logic, overshadowed its own. She’d never seen anyone set a trap, not even footprints until today, and that bothered her.
“I have a new cat, a kitten really,” Chet said on the phone, searching for a topic without flammable allusions.
“Don’t you mean we?” Anna said, regretting immediately that she had acknowledged his girlfriend, adding gamely, “What’s his name?”
“It’s a her,” Chet said. “I’ll see what she’s like and then name her. I wish I could do that with women.”
“You have. And so have I.”
“You like cats, we always had one until Luna died.”
“Does your girlfriend like them?”
“Call her by her name, at least, Anna, call her Alicia. Please? Are you doing okay where you are?”
“You might have asked me that at home, oh, maybe a year ago, even earlier. But yes, my own kind of okay. Fine, in fact. It’s not for everybody. But that’s the idea, isn’t it, that’s the appeal.”
The phone line was tinny and thin, she didn’t want to offer details: details were the golden currency of a relationship, and she had no more to spare. A dog spinning slowly through moonlit air? Too strange, too exotic, for his ears, or Alicia Snow’s.
Remember when Rory Angus stepped on the cat? Willard said, helping Donald John clear a path to his front door. He leaned on his snow shovel, resting.
Kitten it was.
His cat’s kitten.
Small, yes, poor thing. His big boot came down.
Drunken boot. His young fella was well put out. Yes.
There was no saving it. Stomping through the dark, no wonder, half-snapped as he was.
Bad place for kittens, in the kitchen like.
It’s where they have them.
Stove I guess, warm. Makes sense.
They’re not dumb animals, cats.
I had one, she’d sleep right up at my head, loved it there.
That’s affection. She wouldn’t have to be smart.
She was anyway. Only had to tell her once and she wouldn’t do it, stay off the table, like that.
Same with a dog.
Some dogs. I’ve seen a lot of them pretty dumb.
They’re not much for tables. They can sniff out disease, I read. Had them sniff a person up and down and pick up cancer there where a doctor even wouldn’t see it.
Cancer hound, eh?
No particular breed. Maybe your dog even, if you could read her right.
I can’t read her any way. She’s gone. Taken.
Who’ d do that to you?
Same as’ll do anything awful. Peg stones at her, they’ll damn sure do worse.
Isn’t that so.
Creatures at the wharf there, wouldn’t put anything past them.
Gone indoors for the winter, down at Sandy Morrison’s.
They’ll be out again, like the blackflies.
They have a taste of the devil in them. I know that much.
Am I too old for this, Willard, this shovelling of snow?
“T
HANK GOD TO BE HERE,”
Red Murdock said at the door.
“Thank God for yourself,” Donald John said, “come in, come in.”
Molly, his wife, looking up from her knitting, said weeks had gone by since they set eyes on him, anywhere. Murdock took in the lovely smell of baking and the warm kitchen, too often he warmed himself only with whisky and didn’t care to eat.
Willard Munro, seated at the table with a cup poised at his lips, had stopped in, wearing his big plaid coat, his tool box at his feet. Murdock joined them all at the table. Tea was simmering on the stove, dark leaves dancing in a clear glass pot.
“We didn’t see you at the meeting, Murdock,” Willard said, “last night in the church.”
“For what? I don’t go to church.”
“The Mounties, they need our help,” Donald John said. “The constable told us, You fishermen, beachcombers, anybody who’s on the water, keep your eyes out for suspicious boats and the like.”
Willard reached for a scone. “A lot of drugs pouring into Nova Scotia, by water, he says. I believe it.”
“Right here?” Red Murdock said, looking out at the grey sea, the wind plucking up bits of white. Apart from a buoy tender, he hadn’t seen a boat in a good while. “Not since rum-running.”
“There’s a new running going on,” Donald John said, “and there’s not much fun to it from what the constable says. Guns and thugs. Dope is what they’re bringing in.”
“Not for us they aren’t.”
“It doesn’t matter about us, Murdock. They truck it away up the province. We got all these coves and bays for to bring it in, see. Down the States, they’ve tightened up the border in the south, so they’re coming up here to smuggle it in, the constable says.”
“Well, I haven’t seen any,” Red Murdock said. “Have you, Molly?”
Molly smiled, smoothing her apron over her plump lap. “No, dear. Wouldn’t know dope if I tripped on it.”
“You’d know it if they dropped it in your teapot, girl,” Willard said. “Make you weird.”
Molly laughed. “Okay,” she said. She held up toward the window a half-knit sweater of tweedy brown wool. “I might walk around in this.”
Red Murdock took a long sip from his cup. “If it’s weirdness around this end of the road, it’d be the youngsters anyway, and summer folks. Who’s left of us in the winter now? Handful.”
“You haven’t seen that little gang at Sandy Morrison’s place?” Willard said. “They hung around the wharf last summer and I had to fetch my dog home more than once, raising such a fuss he was. Up to no good there and he knew it, they cursed at him. I didn’t see a local face in the whole damn bunch.”
“Oh, I think young fellas of our own were in there too,” Molly said. “Most likely. Poor Willard, he has lost his little dog.”
“Someone made off with him, I’m sure of that.”
“Who’d want that noisy little runt?”
“Oh, Murdock, shame on you,” Molly said. “Willard loves that dog.”
“I was kidding. Not everybody loves it.”
“Them fellas on the wharf,” Willard said, “stoned him any chance they got.”
“This took time coming on, you know, and worse it’s getting,” Donald John said.
“See, there’s so much excitement going on in the world that it’s not fit. The young people got an awful hard job to grow up,” Molly said.
“Well, we’ll keep the watch then, eh?” Murdock said. “I’ll send up a flare if I see a drug boat. Fire a shot across her bow. Nobody on the old wharf in this weather anyway.”
“But Sandy Morrison’s old place, hellraising there some Saturday nights,” Willard said. “Play harder than they work.”
“Young men anymore, they don’t know what hard means unless it’s in their trousers,” Donald John said. “That woman from away keeps to herself. Murdock Ruagh, do you know her now?”
“Met her once. I can’t say I know her.” He wouldn’t tell them he had seen her seated in snow, calmly drawing, or that, for a few head-spinning moments, he thought she was Rosaire.
“Nice-looking woman,” Molly said. “What would bring her here, though?”
“God knows, I don’t,” Red Murdock said. “Not drugs anyway.”
“The woman’s an artist,” Willard said. “I seen her pictures on the walls.”
“Those walls could use some pictures.”
Murdock’s cousin Jenny had written from Cleveland,
the renter’s a woman by herself from California, so if you could kind of keep an eye out for her Murdo, seeing as you’re so close by.
… He never had a word from Jenny unless she wanted something and none from her brothers, they owned Granny’s house and he was on cool terms with them—many years since they’d cut themselves away from this place. He’d never answered Jenny, had enough on his mind without acting the handyman for them who never set eyes on the house anymore. Let them pay Willard for that. Murdock had painted it red one summer years ago, and framed the windows with white shutters, but that was for Granny, before she died, Something bright, she said, I’m tired of the grey shingles. His cousins would sell anyway when the time was ripe, to Germans or Americans maybe, shorefront was getting high money now. In the meantime he wasn’t attending to Granny’s house or anyone in it. He was the last of his family here, still holding family ground, but for how long? More distant cousins still lived on the Island, but as dispersed as stars as far as he was concerned. True, he hadn’t done much to stay in touch these last years, but now just himself seemed more than he could deal with.
“Your colour’s not so wonderful, Murdock,” Molly said. She was quick to detect illness or possible decline. “You feeling all right?”
“I was under the weather awhile, I’m good enough.” He could see in the parlour the edge of a china cupboard he’d made for Molly, for the cups and saucers she collected, rock maple, dovetailed joints, glassed doors that shut solid as a safe. His closed-up workshop was strewn with unfinished furniture, some of it already cancelled, customers had given up on him. When would he get back to it? “How about I take a couple slices of that rum cake I’m smelling? That’ll colour me up.”
“This’ll colour you faster,” Donald John said, taking a bottle of rum from the cupboard.
“No thanks, too early.” He had already had whisky when the sun was barely up.
“Is it the hour that matters, Murdock?” Willard said, pouring a good measure into his tea.
“Not to you, it looks like. Are you out fixing things today?”
Willard sipped the last of his tea. “That old house of yours …”
“Not mine. Jenny’s and her brothers’.”
“Family, even so. Something amiss in the wiring or plumbing or something.”
“Best you figure out which is which, Willard.”
“It’s the woman living there. Anna something or other …”
“Going to fix
her,
are you?” Donald John said.
“Nothing broke in that girl,” Willard said, “what I’ve seen of her. Like to see more.”
Molly slapped his arm. “Willard! At your age!”
“Age damps the fire, it don’t kill it. I saw a pretty woman go by on the road a while ago. Breagh, and her little girl on a lopsided sled.”