Murdock withdrew a brick-shaped packet, sniffed it. He took from his back pocket his own knife, then carefully sliced the translucent wrap as he might have gutted a fish. He extracted two weedy strands, immediately fragrant. Tops, all flowers.
Sinsemilla,
Anna shaped with her lips. Expensive as gold now, but someone at parties might have had a little in the old days, days for which she felt a sentimental rush, so superior to the “nickel bags,” cleaning twenty bucks’ worth of pot in the lid of a shoebox, seeds dense as BBs sliding back and forth (I could start a plantation with these, Chet would say, disgusted), gathering with a few grad student friends on the floor of someone’s flat, a candle guttering in sandalwood, passing a joint around and talking talking talking about their peeves and joys, going quiet by turns, distracted by music in the room and in their heads, by the constantly shifting sexual tension, who you were with, who you would like to be with if circumstances allowed.
“That what I think it is?” Red Murdock said, placing the brick on the table.
“It’s what the Mounties asked us to watch for, Murdock. It’s worth some money all right.” She untangled a long cola, sticky with resin, and put it to his nose like a flower. “Marijuana. Pot, grass, weed, boo, tea. Wacky tobacky.”
“You know about this stuff then?”
“Part of my era, Murdock. College days, and after. It’s what we had fun on. Like liquor for you, I suppose.”
He sniffed it. “What’s it do?”
“I guess it depends. It can make you feel better than you might otherwise. High, euphoric. Some people overdo it, like they do with booze, with anything. But that’s always the way, isn’t it? It’s much kinder to your mind than liquor, I can tell you that. It takes me out of déjà vu.”
“It won’t be kind if they catch you.”
“Who would catch me in my house? The Royal Canadian Mounted Police?”
“I couldn’t say anyone would. But you might’ve been seen, hauling her home.”
“Unlikely, don’t you think? Late in the day, after a big storm? The shore was deserted, like it usually is. I didn’t notice anyone up or down the beach.”
Murdock closed his pocket knife and sat down slowly. “Anyone can be seen there from a long way off.”
“Are you trying to frighten me?”
“No need to be frightened, I think. Just something you should know.”
Anna poked the colas into the packet, folded it shut, pushed it into the bale, as if that would take them both two steps back.
“Well, there was a man on my beach this morning,” she said, casually. “Looking toward the house, at me. I thought, what would he want, staring so long?”
“How can you be sure his eyes were on you?”
“I guess I’m not sure. But I wondered what brought him here, today.”
“Hard to tell, Anna. Sometimes people come from a long way to walk the shore. Could be anybody. Maybe the Mounties’ll give you a medal when you turn this in.”
“You think so?”
“Would get it out of your life anyway. Mine too.” He smiled.
“It’s not really
in
yours, is it, Murdock? It needn’t be. I won’t tell anyone you sniffed some marijuana.”
“But I know about it. I know you. So I’d be concerned, wouldn’t I?”
Out Anna’s window green onions hung in a bunch from the porch post, beating in the wind. He’d brought her a small basket of beach peas he’d picked from the shore. Her pickling cucumbers were starting. There was an outdated
Globe and Mail
on the daybed, a Saturday edition she’d been nursing.
“Suppose I didn’t,” she said. “Suppose I held on to it, hid it away.”
“My Lord, that’s a whack of drugs you’re looking at, girl. What do you mean to do with it?”
“I don’t know, Murdock, exactly. To be honest with you.” After the day Livingstone had come by, perhaps into her morning walks, into the routine of cooking and tending to herself, studying moods of sky and sea and self, even into the reading and drawing, there had crept a taste of boredom she was afraid of because it seemed wrong, so against what she valued here, the work she had done. The old house and its wild sea fields, the small discoveries, the lovely yellow-red irises that suddenly bloomed below the kitchen window where their bladed leaves had been lost in grass, the twisted apple trees leafing out, the black fox that strolled past her back steps as casually as a neighbourhood dog, a dead rabbit in its muzzle. But there it was, sometimes, a hint of ennui, her staring off at a blank rainy ocean, a book as limp in her hands as the rabbit in the fox’s mouth. Did she really miss flea markets, art films, concerts on campus, small parties with old friends with whom she could get pleasantly loose and gabby and high, openings at Melissa’s gallery?
“You don’t want them to think you were after selling it,” Red Murdock said solemnly. “They’d hang you for that.”
“Oh, no, not sell it, never. But surely they wouldn’t hang me, Murdock, just for finding it? Livingstone says sentences are ridiculously light here.”
“You wouldn’t look good in jail, Anna, I don’t care what Livingstone says. You didn’t tell him, did you?”
“About this? I barely know him, I’ve only seen him once since …”
She took a swallow from the wine she’d poured before Murdock arrived. His attitude made her stubborn, and she could not explain herself to him. “Look, Murdock, it just … washed up. I didn’t order it, I happened upon it.”
“But here it is. In your kitchen.”
“Like a fugitive, isn’t it? I wonder where it came from. Did the boat sink? Did they have to toss it overboard? It’s had a long journey, maybe from South America, the West Coast, California. How did it end up here? Don’t you want to know the story?”
“I think I’ve heard it before. It was liquor then.” Red Murdock opened the back door, stared out at ocean light the colour of slate.
“The storm brought you a bale of dope, me a boat,” he said.
“A boat? You’re safer with that gift, I guess. Not a police matter, is it.”
“She got blown to my shore and I salvaged her out,” he said.
“Well, there you are, Murdock. Salvage. If not our beaches, someone else’s.”
“Suppose them who owns that come looking for it?” he said.
“How would they know?”
“People like that know more than you think.” He closed the door.
“I guess I’d have to call on you, then. Murdock to the rescue. Or Dudley Do-Right. Sorry. I’m joking.”
He turned to her. “Listen, put it away somewhere for the night, eh? God, you can’t leave it out like this.”
She had an authority now, of some kind: she could act or not act, say no or yes and there would be definite consequences. She knew things about what was in that bale that Murdock did not. And now it was hers. “Okay. Give me a hand.”
He followed her upstairs to the spare bedroom, bearing the bale in his arms. Anna knelt inside the closet, yanking clothes from the deep, camphorous trunk, heaping behind her a dark wool suit, trousers, shirts, a blanket. She beckoned to him. “Here,” she said. “This is perfect.”
“No such thing.” He dropped the bale inside with a disapproving grunt and stepped away. Anna covered it with clothing, shut the lid, the closet door. They stood awkwardly in the waning light.
“The bedrooms are small,” she said.
“We only slept in them. Mostly.”
“Me too. It’s warm up here. Mostly.”
“You sit in that chair?” Red Murdock said. The old varnish of the rocker was nearly black in the evening light. Anna raised the window slightly, a breeze quickly cool on her skin. Her eyes went to that spot on the shore where she’d seen the man: no one.
“I like to look out from it,” she said.
He tugged at the bed’s thin coverlet. Under it, Anna knew, was a hard, bare mattress. She’d lain on it occasionally, arms at her sides, staring up at the stained ceiling like a penitent. This was her thinking room sometimes, spare and unforgiving.
“What do you look at?” he said.
“Whatever’s out there,” she said. “You know what’s out there. I don’t.”
“I used to. I’m not so sure anymore.”
“Has the view changed that much?”
“Oh, Lord.” He touched the rocker, set it creaking softly, then stopped it. “Before the bridge went up, people’d row across sometimes, if it wasn’t too rough, they didn’t always take the ferry. There was this young fella here liked to do it, he’d skip the ferry if he could. Kept a small boat at the shore there. He took her back and forth, he had work in the summer on the other side, a farm. His uncle was old, you see, confined to this house, and anxious about him, and so he’d watch for him late every afternoon, from that chair, until the nephew was in sight, rowing home. One day the young fella, a few drinks in him and fed up with his uncle always at the window like an old woman, he laid down in his boat when it got near where the uncle could see it. Hid himself in the bottom and let the boat drift like, so his uncle’d think he’d drowned. But the man was so struck by the empty boat his heart just quit, gave out, right here. Died in that rocker, right there by the window.”
“That was cruel,” Anna said.
“He didn’t mean it. You don’t think when you’re young.”
“Yes, I know.”
She followed him out, embarrassed when he glanced into her bedroom with its unruly bed and tossed clothing. She hadn’t slept well and left it turned out on this particular morning.
“You can call me up if you like,” he said at the door. “If you need any more advice you don’t want to hear.”
“I don’t want to make trouble for you, Murdock.”
“It’s your own trouble I’m thinking of.”
“It’s just you and me,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
“For now, girl. For now.”
Your dad ran rum, didn’t he, Red Murdock? Willard said, slicing a scone.
You know he did.
He was a fine man, we everybody liked him, Donald John said, a terrible good neighbour. Shoed many a horse for my dad.
He had a boat in the rum for a while, yes, Murdock said. Lots of men did in the hard times. But no one ever drew a gun, not the runners or the Mounties. That’s what he told me. Oh, it was quite a game, boy, a lot of fun in it, he said.
I don’t see the fun, the way the world is today, with dope and heroin and all the killing, Willard said.
Rum-running was not like that, not here, Red Murdock said. Respectable men, trying to get by. Nobody got shot up. There wasn’t any hatred between them, the government men and the runners.
Seems all hatred now, what I hear of it, Molly said.
Wendell Northcutt was a Mountie then. He hated searching homes, the worst part of it, turning things inside out, looking for floor hides. I had no stomach for it, Donald John, he said to me, I knew those people.
They never found one jug of my dad’s. It wasn’t any popskull either.
That don’t make it legal, Willard said, dipping jam.
You and your legal. Everything comes down to that, is it?
I’m just saying.
Brought a little cash in damned hard times. An awful lot of worry to it, and hard work. Nobody here got rich.
Who’s getting rich now? Nobody we care about, Donald John said.
People from away, Molly said.
I wouldn’t bet on it, not all of them are from away, Murdock said.
I
N THE REAR OF HIS WORK SHED
Red Murdock planed a board he’d cut for the thwart. The skiff, keel down on sawhorses, took up too much space, he ought to finish it or move it outside. Shavings, releasing a scent of spruce, curled out of the plane and dropped like hair to the floor. He’d lost heart to work on it. As soon as he’d seen the skiff the day after that hard squall, laden with water, near to drowning in the swells, he’d felt his uncle’s panic, what the sight of an empty, drifting boat must have done to him all that long time ago, trapped in a rocking chair. The clarity had stunned Murdock for a step or two, as it often did now, and then he’d calmed himself and thought, I will get this boat, I will fix it and row it.
He’d waded into the surf still washing high and whirled a small grappling hook over its gunnel, hauling it near enough to grab and drag clear. He’d tipped the water out, turned it keel up on the rocks: she’d taken a knocking, but not a bad boat. No oars or nothing. A busted thwart, a spread plank. Sound, on the whole. Some refastening, caulking, a coat of good paint. Must’ve got away from somebody in the storm. He hadn’t seen a boat like it around here since he’d given up his own. Trim it up, see how she’d go, why not. Rosaire’s name on the gunnels, the stern. He’d promised her one, that he’d teach her to row. You could row here safe enough, if you watched the weather, if you knew the tricks of it, the water itself, he told her.
Someone hadn’t known, though. And maybe it had carried a bit of cargo. For MacDermid’s Cove.
But he was not in the mood to work wood this morning, his or anyone else’s. Five cigarettes a day he’d been keeping himself to since he’d put aside his pipe, for the cost and because he was tired of the packets’ bold warnings about strokes and heart disease and death, thank God he had his granny’s arteries. Now he was smoking one after the other, as he had after Rosaire died. He was trying to hold on to the Anna he knew before yesterday, and while he worked at his tool bench, he almost could. But what had he known of her anyway? Some days she seemed settled in, like she had no future but here, just the way she was living now. Then that damned bale tumbled out of the sea.
Murdock lit another Export, grinding the match out carefully into the earthen floor. He was not in a hurry, nothing in his life could rush him now. But any pause today seemed to bring Anna’s kitchen to mind, the dull knife sawing the tape, the stuff inside packed like rough tobacco. Jesus, it was over there in the old house right now. He knew how polite a Mountie could be just before he collared you. Predicted rain had not come but the air was sticky, windless. Out the double doors of the shed, flung wide, the sea was pressed flat by the grey weight of the sky.
He unvised the board and sighted along its edge toward the open door. He’d seen a fibreglass boat with a red hull this morning. No insignia but he was sure it was the Mounties. They wouldn’t chase much down with that rig if the weather got dirty, only a big outboard. Just an every-now-and-then patrol. Still.