On the bench, Murdock eased into that August afternoon some years ago he had built it out of driftwood, greyed in ocean salt, he’d toted here piece by board. Plain with a couple flourishes, suitable for two, maybe three if you weren’t too broad. A simple structure, but most of the afternoon he’d crafted it slowly—a backrest of lobster trap lattice, a wharf timber, smelling of creosote, sectioned for legs, wide bleached boards from a beach shack somewhere made a good seat, two-by-fours washed from a dock, a piece of a lifeboat gunnel he hoped to God had been scrapped. A saw, a hammer, a square, an assortment of nails, that’s all he had. Something about that day, working alone so high, all that world of his own out there and below him, a west wind weaving through the trees, white scars of current with the tide, two sailboats an hour apart gliding briskly past the point where the ebbing water curved darkly, into the sweep of the sea widening out toward Bird Island that a lone coyote had reached once across the winter ice but who, well-fed on its birds, had to be shot in nesting season, how contented that solitary animal must have been for a while. Murdock would stop his work and gaze out, isolated, timeless, the sun warm as it moved up the mountain. Every act felt good that afternoon. How often could you say that? Sawing a clean yellow line, joining two pieces, feeling the seat grow level and solid, planning the armrests, the seatback with a relaxing lean so it wouldn’t feel like a pew, that’s what Rosaire would like. How he felt that day he could not explain. Impossibly rich? He’d closed his eyes, under the sway of the trees, he didn’t need to be anywhere else just then or be any more than he was, no one on earth knew his location, no one was expecting him anywhere. It was like being carried up in the first long swoop of a tree swing, and stopped still at the moment you peak, just there, squeezing the rope. Peace beyond words. He knew he’d never have that joy here again, so tight in his heart, when he’d been alone in a certain, unrepeatable way. And so it troubled him, uselessly, that even with Rosaire he had never found that same afternoon, though with her he had found others just as good.
He had liked his privacy, yes. How odd was that? To be on his own time, that’s all, without others’ opinions. But he’d had to take Rosaire into all that, hadn’t he? What she thought of him, what she saw in him began to matter, and so he was not really alone anymore, he’d just lived alone. On his own, still, but not entirely, not as he’d been. Some of himself he’d had to give up, offer it to her. A risky gift, Here I am. She didn’t ask him to, at some point he just knew he must, was ready to, maybe. The feeling was new, a little troubling. But hell, he’d been waking up in the wee hours, thinking of her already, she was in his head so much he’d taken up cigarettes again, and it had little to do with privacy.
Murdock stood up. The roofpeak of Anna’s house lay far below, mossed and maybe leaking now, marked with a few dark squares of flown shingles. Anna Starling. Shouldn’t he have checked back on her that morning, after her and the dog and the ice? He felt shamed by that ever since. He’d gone home and shut the door, shut himself away like he’d done for months. You don’t want to nose in, he’d told himself, she’s got her own life going there, a woman life, you can’t. He did send Breagh, he did, and she’d assured him Anna was doing all right that morning and she’d stop in again, in case Anna sickened or slid back. Still, he should have himself gone, she was his neighbour, she was on her own.
How had she fared off in this crazy weather? He would stop and ask, see what she’d done with the iron things he’d given her. He was shy to show up at her door without a mission, but maybe that was mission enough.
W
HEN
R
ED
M
URDOCK APPEARED
around the spit that hid his shore from hers, Anna rose from the tangle of flotsam she’d been poking through and hailed him with a hearty wave. He picked his way toward her over the stones. The long rains surely had not depressed him as they had her, used as he was to this weather, but her work was going well, she’d mailed Melissa a series of pen and ink drawings of what now seemed a distant winter.
“What are you finding then?” he called as he drew near.
She held up a long tin box, the lid flapping, its label dented and scratched. “Malt whisky,” she said, tapping wet sand from it. “High-end.”
“Where would this be arriving from?” Murdock said, peering into the brassed insides. “Can’t think of anyone here who’d stow that on his boat.”
“I’ll keep it for pencils,” Anna said. “The bottle is long gone, unfortunately.”
They discussed the unusual rains, she told him about her leaky window waiting for Willard.
“He’s that way,” Murdock said, “since he lost his dog. I’ll have a look at the window, if you like.”
Anna was pleased to lead them up the path along the eastern leg of the pond, the water turbid from the rains, toward the house he hadn’t been inside since the night he half-carried her home. She felt strong, proprietary now from just the turn in weather, a warm breeze in her curtains, sun hot in her hair, it gave you confidence somehow, illuminated possibilities. They passed her seedling pots of fresh green sprouts, “Things grow fast here once they’re under way,” Murdock said, “if we don’t see a killing frost.” He suggested Anna trim back the bushes near the back door, they were shading iris bulbs, all blades and no blooms now, he said. When his granny lived here, out the kitchen window in the morning sun they flowered yellow and red. He touched his nose to the first blossoms on the high lilac bush and smiled. Anna mentioned the high-pitched birdsong she heard even after dark, “They sing like lights blinking randomly.”
“Peepers,” Murdock said, “little frogs calling for mates, you won’t hear them in July.”
They paused at her new sculpture on the back porch and Murdock knelt to look at it. She’d rooted around under the collapsed carriage shed and in the barn ruins and pulled out bits and pieces of hardware. Even the old ash pile she’d discovered down the brook bank offered doorknobs and stove parts and holed pots, a lid from a kitchen stove and an old crank handle and a small blade from a plow, piled there in the yard awaiting artistic attention.
“Funny, we’d never give a look to it, chucked-away junk like that. But you bound it together, all of a piece like.”
Anna wanted to serve him tea, as the custom was, and the oatcakes she had baked from a found recipe in faded pencil, so she put the kettle on the stove while he examined the window in her workroom. Now she could use the pale green teapot trimmed in gold and the matching cups and saucers from the downstairs bureau.
When she joined him there, his attention had stopped on the nude study of herself, forgotten on a clipboard. Back home, she wouldn’t care, she was an artist, everyone knew that, but when he turned away, his face reddening, she didn’t know what to say, so she made light of it. “I was the only model on call that day,” she said. “And was it chilly.”
“I bet it was,” Murdock said, moving back to the window. “This needs new flashing. Wind drives the rain under the shingles there.”
Anna had also forgotten the shaggy black bundle on a chair, Livingstone’s sweater he was so proud of, knit in the Hebrides, he’d told her. She had tossed it in a closet corner the day after, but later, on a damp, cold night, she’d yanked it out and pulled it and its woolly smells over her. A faint odour of pot, of harsh tobacco, the funky alcohol smoke of a bar. Almost undetectable, but there too, a tint of that sweat they’d shared? Anna wore it sometimes while working, over a baggy denim shirt, but one evening she slipped it on after a bath, like a floppy wool dress barely touching her thighs. She’d walked through the house that way, through the rooms, the air cool on her legs, before she put on underpants and jeans, and dressed herself for weather unkind to fantasies. Murdock would make nothing of a sweater limp in a chair, never link it to Livingstone, but she wished it hadn’t been there.
“Should I tell Willard then?” she said.
“It seems somebody might’ve done his dog in, back in the winter there. Connie Sinclair hinted as much, but he was steering a little wide when he told me. He seemed awful bothered about it, not even his animal.”
“Who would do that? Why?”
“Connie had naught to say on that. He picks up things he hears, some true, some not. I’ll fix your window, before the next storm, if we’re lucky.”
“I’m sorry about Willard. His poor dog.” Should she tell him what she’d seen? She didn’t want to revisit that cold recollection, not on a day like this.“Bad year for dogs, Anna,” Red Murdock said, smiling.
She was glad he glanced at her drawings and sketches but didn’t ask about them. They soon relaxed at the kitchen table with strong black tea and the oatcakes. She recalled the night on the ice and how ungodly cold the water had been, and the luck of his coming.
“Did you ever see that dog again?” she said.
“Hightailed it, if the coyotes didn’t get him.” They sipped quietly. Voices from the point drifted in on the wind, summer people, she had seen a few on weekends, rarely during the week.
“What brought
you
here, Anna?”
“Cape Seal? Well … do you have an hour or two? Oh, I needed to get away on my own for a while. I won’t bore you with reasons. Let’s say I had to put myself in a new place, and draw what I saw and felt there.”
The battered whisky box sat on the table, open.
“You’re finding what you wanted then?” Murdock said.
“I’m working on it.” Anna smiled. “I was hoping to swim at that nice beach around the point. Before too long?”
“You know what cold water’s like, Anna, you could swim there now,” Murdock said.
“Thanks a lot, Murdock, I’ll wait a while. One rescue is enough. You can’t rush things here. But I like that. Excuse me a minute.”
Anna slipped into her workroom and quietly moved the nude behind a chair. She rummaged through rolled-up drawings, among them the one of Breagh, she’d almost forgotten it. She turned it toward the light: she had tried not to dwell on the contrasts with herself when she’d put the last touches to it, the downcast eyes, the light on her breasts. The fussing had more to do with Breagh than with the drawing, as if the more perfect the portrait, the better Anna herself might appear. She set it aside underneath the table and then found what she was after.“This is for you, Murdock,” she said, unscrolling it on the table in front of him.
“Well, then,” he said, “what’s this?”
There was his forge in oil pastels, as she’d approached it from the snowfield, but the shed dominant, the mountain dark and high as a rogue wave behind it, chimney smoke torn in the wind, somewhere deep inside the glow of fire, and against a wall the shadow of an arm, a hammer raised powerfully. She knew its distortions were dramatic, exaggerated, but suddenly she so wanted him to like it, knowing at the same moment that sometimes art was not enough, no matter how serious its beauty, its vision, or what it told us about ourselves, about our worlds. Murdock held it at arm’s length.
“Yes,” he said. “The forge, right enough. That’s what goes on in there, something like this. I see it myself … a little different, but that’s good, isn’t it? We don’t have the same eyes for everything.”
He wondered why she hadn’t put him in it.
“But you
are.
Very much so.”
“No,” he said, “it’s finished and it’s fine, I’m pulling your leg.” He nodded at the drawing. “I’ll make it a nice frame. Thank you very much, Anna.”
Outside they strolled the soggy fields while he told her where pasture had been, now wooded with scrub spruce and poplar, open spaces of rose brambles, early goldenrod and bull thistle, and some of the things he’d done here as a boy, happy to be with his granny, helping her tend two cows that sometimes fought, one butted the other over the bank and she broke her neck on the rocks. His granddad had died early on, he barely remembered him. He regretted the old saltbox barn had been so neglected, they let the roof go, his cousins, he had no say in its fate, and the carriage shed collapsed after they were good and away and not likely to come back. But if it was iron and broken things she wanted, there’d be plenty under those heaps of grey boards.
“Just be careful there, a snake might surprise you. They’re harmless.”
“Oh, they’re small,” she said, “I picked one up. I’d like to plant a little garden, herbs and green onions, ordinary things.”
Murdock showed her a fertile spot where they’d piled manure, he’d break the sod there for her, wouldn’t take long, if Willard didn’t show, he would fix the leaky window too, she couldn’t have rain in the room where she worked. Nights were still cold, eight Celsius yesterday, did she have enough wood? The apple trees, scarred and bent, shook down flurries of white petals in the wind.
“They’ve done that over a hundred years,” he said, “the apples will come and the deer will come for them, green or ripe, hunters will be around, you’ll hear their guns.”
The same question seemed to hang between them: would she?
They stood looking out on the strait, the pond below a blue not like the sea but tinged dark with iron. From behind bulrushes, a heron rose in great lazy wingbeats and headed downwind toward another marsh. Two lobster boats, done for the day, were passing inward not yards apart, their hulls a vivid red, a vivid blue, the throaty rumble of their engines muted seemingly by the misty air. With Murdock beside her, talking in that slow brogue, saying he would be back, and her saying, I hope you will be, and not just to fix something, Anna felt for the first time like a genuine neighbour, sharing a place, she had woven a few threads of herself into the pattern of its life, and that itself was a kind of shield, she would not be easily shaken. The worst of winter seemed to fall away that afternoon, its cold, lingering threat, and the gloom of rains.
Willard on his third glass of rum said, You know that rocky bank north of here? Juts out a ways? On a calm night like this, but winter, my dad’s young brother Duncan starts across the water, rowing. Dead low tide, the moon in full. Out of nowhere come swells, three of them, one after the other, silent as ghosts, no breeze of wind at all. Turns his boat over, swift and clean, whoosh. My dad couldn’t find him, too dark, he had to give up. Next morning, first light, there Dad was, standing on that bank of rock, me next to him, looking down, the two of us—the water is clear in winter—and there’s Duncan on the bottom, face down, arms spread out like wings. He’s kind of rocking in that easy motion of the sea, shirt ballooning, jacket gone. He could’ve been just playing, resting, floating. That’s what I wanted to think at the time, me only ten, Look, Daddy, he’s holding his breath there, underwater. Dad got him out with a grappling hook. Hooked his clothing, hauled him up. God, he’s some heavy, Daddy said, I never pulled a weight like this. He was crying. Not a sound out of him, just the tears.