Red Murdock remembered the sled. Didn’t Breagh ask him to straighten a runner on it? Lord, how many weeks ago was that? She had stopped coming by the time of that bad spell when he would pass out on the kitchen lounge and not hear the door, not care to hear it. He felt terrible about that now, he was fond of Breagh and her little Lorna, but he’d been so deep into himself, selfish with grieving. “How are they faring, Molly, those two?”
“Oh, Lorna is so sweet. I had her here the other day while her mother went to Sydney with that young fella, the one she’s hot and cold over. Livingstone Campbell.”
“She can do better than him,” Red Murdock said. He knew the man since he was a boy, over on the St. Aubin side, but he didn’t trust him, he had treated Breagh poorly at times, took her for granted, frosted her out. Not that she was a flower easily wilted, she could hold her own, when she wanted. But men she had a fancy for, she let them get away with too much sometimes. Breagh had that kind of straight beauty she didn’t have to do anything with, it was just there, it hit you the first time you saw her.
“He’s from a good family, Livingstone is,” Donald John said.
“That doesn’t make him good. He has to be more than his name. He was after renting my granny’s place. Write to Jenny, I told him, anyway the woman from California is in there for a while.”
“That buddy of his, Billy Buchanan with the fancy pickup truck? He’s staying in Sandy Morrison’s house. I seen him and Livingstone jawing with two fellas out front one day. I didn’t like the looks of them,” Willard said.
“Drug-runners were they?” Murdock said.
“I don’t know just what they were. My dog knew. Now he’s gone. You don’t know what goes on at that house. Some awful rackets on weekends, cars coming and going? Way out here on this road?”
“And what
is
going on? Plenty of kitchen rackets when Sandy was alive. You’re blowing it up, Willard. Nobody’s there now, and we did the same things on that wharf in the summertime, a lot more of us too, raising hell. Rum for us, moonshine, whatever you had on your hip.”
“Well, now, Murdock, I don’t think we got crazy like that with drugs,” Molly said.
Donald John laughed. “Thin ice you’re on there, girl.”
“Yes,” Murdock said. “People jumped off the wharf with their clothes on. Danced like fools sometimes, didn’t we?”
“Still, it wasn’t drugs,” Willard said.
“Booze was all we
had,
“ Murdock said. Out the window there was fresh snow in that sky, colder, and the open sea beyond the black cliffs had turned the hue of storm, rollers white-eyed, wind-driven. Far colder than that water was the day he’d realized for the first time that Rosaire’s love was not there
for
him anymore, that it was no longer available, its comforts and pleasures and solace were slipping away for good, she was separating from the world. They could say all they liked about the lingering spirit of love, the grave cannot kill it and all that, but yet, but yet he had lost the woman who
loved
him, all her actions of love, and it had been no mean and easy thing to be loved like that, by her. No one exactly like her was left in the world, he was standing in their space alone. He had toppled backwards into a vast emptiness and she could never catch him up—there was no Rosaire love to be had, anywhere.
“Speaking of booze,” Donald John said, “Connie Sinclair was on the road yesterday. Dressed for walking.”
“He walks miles, that man,” Molly said. “One end of the road to the other.”
“He’s looking for something, it seems like, and not just a drink,” Murdock said. Connie stopped by Murdock’s house now and then, they’d been boyhood friends and he knew he could cadge some liquor there, a few dollars, and a sympathetic ear. But Murdock had stopped answering the door, to anybody. “Hasn’t a cent to his name anymore since he’s come back home. We had some good times, Connie and me, when we were young fellas. He was smart enough, he just had that goddamn stammer.”
“Used to be white shirt or nothing for Connie,” Molly said. “Shirts are grey now. Who’d hire him? Lost every job he had.”
“I seen him shovelling the driveway at Sandy’s place,” Willard said. “Billy Buchanan gives him a few bucks, I guess.”
“That’s not hiring,” Murdock said, rising, wanting suddenly to be by himself. He’d found it hard, going out and around after she died. A man who had come home years and years to an empty house and thought it fine, felt now, in a friend’s kitchen, as if he wasn’t quite there, that something of himself was so missing he couldn’t feel comfort in company, only an aching hollowness. “Weather’s turning. I should be getting on.”
“Well, we won’t be out on that water, neither of us,” Donald John said. “Our fishing days are over, boy.”
Murdock did not want to concede that, Donald John being older than himself. “I might have a boat again, even so,” he said.
He looked into the parlour on his way out—there was a big rectangle cut in the seaward wall where two old windows had been. Clouded plastic was stapled to the fresh lumber that framed the opening. The plastic crackled and breathed with the wind. “Jesus, Donald John. Why in God’s name are you getting a big window put in this time of the year?”
“We got the man cheaper. He’ll be back with a new one tomorrow. Picture window, Murdock. Big.”
“Ah. Pictures. I’ll stick with my old ones.”
“A good sou’easter,” Willard said behind him, “she’d blow out that plastic like a paper bag.”
Outside, Red Murdock stood by his truck, the March wind teetering him, the little sack of rum cake warm in his hand. He could thread a needle, he could sew a patch. He had fished, here along the north side of the Great Bras D’Eau, out to Bird Island, years ago. He knew the raw rocks, where current and wave, combined against you, could tear out the bottom of your boat.
Sometimes he just stopped where he was and thought, where to now? as if any next step were pointless. It scared him a bit, that nothing mattered enough to take it.
S
O DRAFTY WAS THE HOUSE,
cripplingly cold at windows and doors, Anna had early sequestered herself in the room off the warm kitchen, probably once a dining room, appropriating a worn but sturdy table of wide maple boards and an electric space heater, a boxy affair with glowering coils that looked to be out of the 1940s, always a few watts away from a blown fuse if she switched on the kettle or another lamp. But there was a wood stove too and here she did her drawing and her reading, the southerly light was good, and she wrote a few letters by hand at a small pine desk, its dark varnish dented and scarred. She read in the embrace of a stuffed armchair that gave out a mildewy sigh when she sat, so she’d draped it with a moth-holed blanket of some pale tartan.
Every room she’d explored, dug into cupboards and chests, trying to learn from what remained, to get a feeling for it, anything redolent of its past. A large copper boiling pot and, dropped inside it, a washboard of corrugated glass, now cracked, on whose surface women had reddened their hands scrubbing clothes. The solid but well-made furniture, her spool bed, the pine commode, the old dresser in her bedroom, its maker’s initials incised in the scalloped frame,
A
one side,
K
the other, the top drawer’s hairpins and red ribbon and spent elastic smelling of stale face powder. There was a pitcher and washbowl decorated with violets. A bluebelled chamber pot. A roll of shelf paper with cherries on water-stained white. A set of china dinnerware in plain cream, one plate chipped, one with a hairline crack. A mirror that reflected a garbled, impressionistic image—more than adequate, she felt, a dreamy, timeless vision of herself.
She found in a tiny bedroom closet a garment bag containing a dress, dark burgundy through the foggy plastic. Why this one left behind? A fragment of a woman’s life, in this house and its occasions.
The first day of grinding cold and wind reminded Anna that winter here had force, it could kill you if you were careless. Cracking sounds from under the house turned out to be foundation stones contracting as the temperature fell. There was a high stack of firewood against the house where mice and woodlice had nested. Willard had the oil tank out back filled before she arrived, and he showed her how to operate the oil stove it fed in the kitchen, and bank the wood stove in her workroom so it would last the night. Its brand name amused her, the pure optimism
—
Warm Morning
.
Poorly insulated if at all, walls were cold to the touch when she got up. You’ll survive all right, Jenny in Cleveland had assured her, our dad’s family did, our grandmother to the end, no more than a kitchen stove for heat and a brook for water and the worst winters in Canada.
Survival, in that sense, had not been Anna’s main concern, but still there was the scrim of ice in the bedroom pitcher she’d filled the night before, thinking to wash her face in the china basin—a quaint homage, she did not repeat, to those who’d awakened there. And the line of feathery snow whose gentle chill she brushed from the sill one morning. Yet, the first window frost lit with sun so delighted her she scratched into its patterns a rearing unicorn, the crystals pleasantly sharp under her fingernail. Other mornings, urging herself out of bed, she whimpered down the stairs, shivering in the bathroom while she waited for the water to run hot. It was not that she’d never known cold and demanding weather, she grew up in the fog belt of California’s north coast, where, in that deep dampness redwoods loved, frost was not unknown, this was not sun and surf but hard-nosed California, a cold ocean you didn’t wear a bikini in. But snow and ice, frosted windows? No.
Her father taught art in high school and moved there in his middle age to get away from city life, well before the hippies’ back-to-the-earth movement, and built an A-frame house in the cathedral shadows of those enormous trees. Her first memories were the long, misty rays of sun slanting through their high branches, the sound of the fog they drank drizzling from needles onto the roof shakes, a night sound, soft and steady, the winter storms off the Pacific, violent and wild, littering the ground with redwood branches, clumps of sword ferns beaded with moisture in the morning, the air always cool somehow even in summer when the rain stopped but the fog still fed the trees in the evening, the vanilla scent of sweetgrass her father picked and dried and burned like incense when he smoked pot in his bedroom, playing his jazz LPs, his eyes closed. Anna’s mother did not want her to know that he retreated to his studio sometimes not just to do yoga on an oriental mat but to smoke.
His wife had agreed, under his pleading, to move from San Francisco to this simpler life, he hated the hassles of the city, the raucous, strife-torn high school where he taught, but she was never happy on the north coast, with its village life, she longed for San Francisco’s energy and activity. I like to see fog shroud houses and buildings, not just trees, she said, I like to see it on the street.
Anna even as a girl could detect her mother’s discontent, her parents argued behind closed doors but whatever troubled them was moot after her father died suddenly of a heart attack while building an addition to the house, a room with wide windows and skylights to amplify the meagre ration of sun, this for his wife, this offer of light. He had encouraged Anna’s love of drawing, his gentle comments and suggestions as it matured, though her mother was disappointed when she planned to study art, It didn’t take your dad very far, she said. But other things did, Anna replied, for she had loved him dearly, a man an odd mix of free spirit and the conventional, okay with hippies when they drifted in to set up homes in the woods, not keen to embrace all their hang-loose ways, their permissiveness and lassitude, though he did swap marijuana with them, and cultivate his own. I grew up in Ohio, I’m pretty straight deep down, he told Anna once, but I’m okay with that.
Her mother thought even less of her son’s trajectory. Anna’s brother was almost twelve years older than her and their dad had taught him to play guitar which led him to seeking stubbornly a career at electric bass and that took him out of Anna’s life almost completely. He played for warm-up rock bands in New York until he tired of that grind and married a woman from upstate, ending up as a DJ in a small town station. They exchanged messages at Christmas, but he was so much older than Anna, he seemed more uncle than brother, nearing sixty now. Her mother returned to San Francisco and remarried, an act that cooled Anna’s feelings toward her, even though she knew that wasn’t fair.
Sometimes she wondered about that house her dad had built, she could see those long shafts of smoky light angling down through the redwoods. Unlike this house, its history was short, but it had been all their own. Misty, damp, chilly even in summer, that place, but no, nothing like this.
T
ODAY ANNA WOKE
early and the house was bone-cold. Willard was right. Whatever heat lurked downstairs never seemed to reach the second storey, so she slept beneath a heap of quilts, buried in their woody smell. She pulled her legs up and watched her breath smoke into the dim light. An icy floor awaited her, but she would dress next to whatever comfort the
Warm Morning
had to offer. She’d always liked to go to bed late, sleep late, and Chet had sometimes brought her coffee there. She missed those little kindnesses, indications that he’d cared about her, his concern for her even when she knew he was attracted to other women and the fun of pursuing them, whether he succeeded or not. Alicia Snow, of course, had changed everything.
All right. Anna had spent years with a man who proved a disappointment. Then again, what did that mean? What had she wanted from him that she should be disappointed when he failed to provide it? Not money certainly, not goods, her hardened feelings toward him did not lie in his being or not being “a good provider,” a term Anna loathed, a favourite of her mother’s, ever-practical Joan, who’d urged her daughter, if she was going to be muleheaded about sticking with art, to at least teach it in school like her dad. Yes. It made him so happy, Anna said.