Anna From Away (35 page)

Clouds white as snow bulged and sailed seaward into new shapes. The wind was southwest but should drop around suppertime as the land began to cool, and they’d have a smooth sea in the evening. Not far astern a cormorant surfaced from a dive, black and sleek, then fled, its rudimentary wings thrashing inches above the water as it bore like a projectile toward Bird Island. The oarlocks clattered hypnotically, he was soon soothed by his motions, the rustle of water along the hull, the rhythm of his own breathing. A small ketch passed south of him outbound, driving hard, its sails filled, and soon he rocked in her wake. He was sweating now, a little thirsty. Somehow he wanted Anna to stay, impossible though it was, selfish, into the mountain’s blazing autumn, into another winter she might now be ready for, he would have the sight of her, the chance of her company, clear of what had washed unbidden onto her shore. Rosaire, his dear Rosaire, she would understand this. She was always generous that way, about the world. What did he owe her now? Love, the love he had given only to her, forever. He pulled hard for Granny’s beach.

A
NNA HAD SPREAD A LACE CLOTH
, marred with a few coin-sized holes, over the big table in her room. She’d poured two glasses of white wine and placed two lit candles, waxed to tea saucers, in the centre. She’d had three glasses of wine before he arrived, nervous but pleased. Murdock sat across from her. On their plates were servings of swordfish and rice with chives that had bloomed in lavender near the back door. She’d made a salad from her own garden.

“I couldn’t get hearts,” she said.

“They’d all be small now, Anna. The big heart swordfish are gone.”

He raised his wine. “Here’s to you, Anna. In all ways.”

“Returned, Murdock. Many times over.”

“Safe home.”

They ate quietly at first, trying to ignore evidence of her departure. She had moved two shipping boxes to the parlour out of sight, but the walls were bare of her drawings and none of her belongings were slung about. Although neither said so, they were both half-listening for sounds. Anna glanced toward the kitchen: Murdock had set the bale near the back door, but the old brown blanket could not obscure its presence, its demands. She had hoped that their meal would be, as much as they could make it, festive, but around the edges of it they were attuned to the telephone or the purr of an engine in the driveway.

“This divorce business,” Murdock said. “Is it a hard go? Bitter?”

“I don’t want it bitter, or prolonged. We’ll do it civilly. There’s no children, after all. Not even a cat to fight over. Stuff to divvy up. Who cares about that? Not me, not Ivan Ilyich.”

Knowing that Chet would marry Alicia Snow, that he would take up again that kind of life with her, all its snares and responsibilities, gave Anna a feeling of peace, as if, storm-tossed, she’d come to a shore all her own.

“My mother might’ve, I suppose, divorced my dad,” Murdock said. “There wasn’t much of that in those days, not here. You lived through your grievances. Was running away better or worse?”

“Worse for you, I’d think.”

“I’ll never know. Like a lot of things.”

“Did you ever eat by candle growing up, Murdock?”

“Ate by Aladdin lamp, didn’t have lights until, hell, the sixties, out this end, electrical. My mother might’ve used candles in Boston, entertaining. We didn’t know just what she did, only that she wasn’t doing it with us.” He pinched a bit of tablecloth. “No wine stains in this.”

“My father liked candlelight. In a certain mood he’d get my mother to leave the lights off for supper. I can’t see my food, she’d say, this is silly. Sometimes I didn’t know why he loved her, but I know he did. I know that now.”

Out the window Anna could see, in the southwest, the upper half of a moon emerging above St. Aubin’s hills, faint yet in the early dusk.

“When should we leave, Murdock?” She wanted to get it over with, to return, enjoy this time with him. “We have to see our way without flashlights, don’t we?”

“We won’t rush away. We’ll have a moon. You’ve made a fine meal here, Anna. Let’s drink to that.”

They raised their wine and touched glasses. She brought out ice cream covered in maple syrup and walnuts, the very food that had seized her when she was stoned, that unyielding hunger, voracious, almost sexual. At home, a joint would have made the rounds already. Murdock joked that he didn’t use maple syrup like this, too dear.

“It’s delicious on almost anything, isn’t it?” Anna said. “I’ll send that portrait I did of you, Murdock. Finish it when I get there. Pen over pencil.”

“It’s kind of sober next to the other one. Hammer and fire, I liked that.”

“Speaking of fire.” Anna snuffed out the candle wicks, remembering Willard’s old house, last century’s newspapers balled-up in the walls, rural vengeance, fire, and she would be the cause of it.

“We’ll leave the rug rolled back, open the trap door,” Murdock said. “Leave the lights on. No spot they can’t find, look they high or low. Too late. They’ll know that soon enough.”

“Why ‘they’?”

“Could be just Livingstone. Could be nobody.”

After she dropped Livingstone’s sweater on the daybed, she followed Murdock outside, the bale in his arms, there was still enough light to see the path they both knew so well, though their breath was louder than usual. Their hurried pounding steps roused a small bird asleep in the wild roses. Ahead of them the moon was creeping higher over the hills of St. Aubin. Somewhere back in the mountain woods rose up a thin chorus of yipping, like dogs. Murdock paused as they neared the shore. “Coyotes,” he said. “They’ve got a kill.”

He’d hauled the boat up on flat sandstones where the path came out of the bank, but from this spot, because of the shorebank trees, they couldn’t see the house or who might come there. Soft swells crackled through the gravel and he steadied the boat while Anna climbed inside. When she was on the stern seat, he dumped the bale in. As he took hold of the bow, his fingers brushed the heart-shaped mark he had hammered into the wood, and that hitched him, just for a second. Then he shoved off, the water soaking his shoes before he jumped in and grabbed the oars.

“We’ll get out a good ways, Anna,” he said, breathing hard already from their rushed walk to the shore, “before we chuck it.” He bent deeply into his strokes and the shore fell away astern, he didn’t look up toward the house, the water was calm and each dip of the blades seemed the only sound there was, clean, he was into it now, steady, a good clip, he’d put some distance out until he had to rest. Anna was half-turned in her seat, looking back.

“I don’t see anyone,” she said. There was kitchen light in a rear window, framed in the white shutters.

Red Murdock slowed his strokes but kept them moving out to sea. His wake was true and he liked that, white, trailing straight. He knew where the shoals were, he’d steer them clear. He wanted to talk even if he didn’t have the breath for it, not quite, he didn’t know just what he should say to Anna Starling, what she might, on this occasion, want to hear.

“See that brook?” he said. “Cutting down through your little woods? My grandmother … used to wash clothes there … that was her water.” A seabird took flight ahead of them, its wingsound like the whip of a saw. “She’d build a fire under a big iron pot … pour in buckets from that cold brook until … she had a good head of steam.”

On the shore where Anna’s path ended, a flashlight flared and darted back and forth, frantically up and down the beach.

“One day a spark got into the dry roof … started to burn a hole in the shingles. Well …” Above the ridge of the mountain a black cloud stretched languidly into the very last of the light there. “Who was to help her, no man around? … She soaked a big quilt in the brook, my granny … then she climbed a ladder, we always had a ladder there then … she flung that wet quilt over the burning hole.” The flashlight was now aimed ineffectually toward the boat, Murdock could not tell who was behind it, just a figure against the shorebank. “She carried buckets down that ladder and up again … pouring them onto it. She put the fire out.… By God, she did. By herself.”

“See that flashlight?” Anna said, pointing back toward her shore. “I should’ve brought the glasses.”

“That light can’t reach us, nobody there can.”

The darkness seemed to accelerate as they moved further out, leaving the red house behind, and then Murdock’s, and MacDermid’s Cove, and further on Donald John and Molly’s, and Breagh’s as the cliffs got higher. A wash of dark blue was inking into the horizon.

“There’s nothing for them to find,” Anna said.

Murdock took three more strokes before he shipped the oars. He bent over, catching his breath. “It’s probably Livingstone behind that flashlight, and he won’t be there when we get back. He wouldn’t destroy anything.”

She scooped her hand slowly through the water a few times. “I’d like to think he wouldn’t.”

“He grew up the other side there, St. Aubin. He saw Granny’s house across the water since he was a kid.”

The moon was waxing pale in the west, shimmering faintly down the sea.

“Me and Connie, years ago, just young, rowed a dory out here, all the way to Bird Island. You could load that tub to the gunnels with fish, she’d take a good sea and get you back home. Light and cloud and storm. Excitement. Fear, sometimes. I miss it.”

“Is this a good boat?”

“Tight as a bottle.”

Murdock’s knife clicked open and he set to work on the bale, slicing hard through the plastic in several places. He pulled out one brick at a time and slashed it open wide so that the colas were wellexposed, like gurry, then he flung it overboard. Anna watched him, he didn’t ask her to help him, he would do it himself just for the satisfaction, he wished Livingstone was watching right now, that he could see this far.

“What was her name, Murdock?” Anna said.

He paused and looked back at the land, the mountainside a collection of shadows, small black valleys he knew, the odd clearing of moonlight.

“Rosaire,” he said. “Her name is Rosaire.”

Anna reached over and took a brick from his hand, she plucked out strands of marijuana and tossed them like flowers into the water, barely visible as they drifted away, then another and another.

“Let them smoke that, eh?” Murdock said. “Sea weed, they can choke on it.”

They worked on silently until the garbage-bag wrapping was empty and he crammed it into a small bundle and shoved it under the bow. They watched the litter bob clear of the boat as Murdock took up the oars and resumed rowing, just enough to put them under way.

“That moon,” Anna said. “A man I cared about a lot pointed its seas out to me once, named them. I didn’t forget. Mare Serenitatis, Mare Tranquillitatis, Mare Cognitum. They pull me somewhere way back in my life, Murdock, just hearing them.”

“They’re all dry,” he said. “This is our sea.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Beautiful for a while.”

Gentle rollers began to breathe under them, rising from the open ocean so slowly at first, with such grace, Murdock hardly felt their long, quiet rhythm, coming from a long way off, heralding wind, storm. A cool breeze came up, flowed over them, and he shivered. He could not see Anna clearly. He brought the bow around slowly until light ribbonned out behind them, and the moon was in her face.

T
HIS BOOK
was set in Requiem, an old-style serif typeface designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 1992. The typeface was inspired by a set of illustrations found in Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi’s sixteenth-century writing manual
Il Modo de Temperare le Penne.
The rest of the family was completed in 1999.

The author would like to thank Diane Bradbury for a warm house in winter.

D.R. MACDONALD was born in Cape Breton and grew up mostly in the United States. He has received two Pushcart Prizes, an Ingram Merrill Award and an O. Henry Award for his short fiction. His first novel,
Cape Breton Road
, received critical acclaim and became a national bestseller. His second novel,
Lauchlin of the Bad Heart
, was longlisted for the Giller Prize. MacDonald is a lecturer emeritus at Stanford University and spends his summers in Boularderie, Nova Scotia, writing and hanging out.

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