But I am here, Anna said,
here.
Breagh had left her phone number on a scrap of drawing paper but Anna did not recognize her name at first: she’d thought it would be spelled
Bria.
It was like coming upon a little etching on a stone—unexpected, rich with place.
She hauled a bucket of stove ashes to the back porch, then, in a snowy wind, she split kindling with an axe. Standing up, she thought she could make out a boat, a rare sight, no more than a swaying profile in the swirling snow of the strait. To the west, the pond was merging into the whiteness around it, the ice, with its dark stains, veiling over. Anna carried an armload of kindling into her room. Okay, she said, gorging the
Warm Morning
with wood. I’m okay.
Cash? Damn scarce here in the country, in them days, Donald John said. When I was a little fella, an old bachelor run a small store over home. Didn’t have much there. He was getting on and he needed a certain kind of help, so he paid me thirty-five cents a week for to bring him a jar of milk in the morning and put drops in his eyes. You see, he drank that goddamn red liniment, so he was going blind. He got into that when he was peddling medical products, I think. When soda pop came in, he had no cooler, so he stored it in a gunny sack in that little cellar under the floor. If you wanted a bottle of pop, he’d open the hatch and haul it up on a rope. He’d go down there himself sometimes to drink liniment, sit with his back to the cool wall with a dipper of water handy. It burned on the way down, you see, so he had to take it with water. If the hatch was open when I come in, I’d know he was down there. Nothing was giving him much bother. Here’s your milk, Charlie! I’d yell. Sometimes he could climb up that ladder, sometimes he just stayed where he was. Chain-Lightning Charlie. Thirty-five cents. Damn glad to get it.
R
ED
M
URDOCK SMELLED PISS
in the room as soon as he opened his eyes. His face burned, like he was a kid again shamed by wet sheets. He lay there without moving but he felt no dampness. Ah, last night he’d dug out an old chamber pot, first time since, Lord, before he took up the old pantry with a toilet and a tub. Something to be said for that china pot handy on the floor, after you’d been drinking, just stand up dreamy, do it, and then back you fell, catching sleep up where you left it. Yes.
But it shouldn’t get around, using a pot when he didn’t have to. Codgers did that, drinkers. In the old days the smell of your life was here in the bedroom, and you might die here too, laid out on cold boards in the parlour by your own people, the ones who loved you, the nearest, they washed you, after death, readied your body. Who in a house now could do that hard and distasteful act? Waked, and buried you.
He took hold of his sleeping cock, more in confirmation than in lust. He had tried not to think of Rosaire that way, it seemed disrespectful to her those first months she was gone, to his love for her. But yet, yet, the long, lovely curve of her back, her mouth on his, on him, the taste of her in a rumple of bedclothes kept coming into him, this mattered. And why not? She loved the long, deep, naked hug as much as he did, the groan of a kiss. But all this was grief too—joys gone, terribly missed.
“Cloud, you old bugger,” Murdock said, his voice rough with sleep. The cat slept at the foot of the bed sometimes, not near the pillow as he had at Rosaire’s. Murdock had come to like the weight of him there when he woke in the night, that solid little body at his feet. Sometimes awake in the dark he thought he could hear a faint, comforting purr. The cat swished its tail but didn’t move, studying Murdock with owlish yellow eyes. They had grieved together, the cat sitting on its belly for hours with its paws tucked neatly under its chest, not really sleeping, but rather inert, its eyes half-shut in a kind of trance that Murdock understood perfectly—turned into itself tight because it could not be touched by the one who’d loved it most. “I suppose you’re hungry, you little bear?”
Murdock emptied the chamber pot in the toilet downstairs, then bent to the little window, his breath colouring a haze in the glass: the strait was thick and silent with fog. What the water was doing he couldn’t tell, dark grey, razored with currents.
There’d been just the two of them, really, Rosaire and him, and then the rest of the world. That was so clear this morning, his chest hurt. They had done their daily living in different houses, apart, so they saved the best for each other. How many a man could say that, how many a woman?
Most of the time he had never minded his own company. He’d been led to believe, from way back, that that was a failing, and maybe it was. But his mother’s betrayal put marriage out of his mind forever, he didn’t need it, she had walked away from him and his father, leaving behind a bitter taste he could not swallow. It hadn’t mattered, anyway, for a long time until he met Rosaire Robertson at a dance. Great company right off. Hard to explain that, what went into it.Hers was … well, he had liked to be with her, in all situations. He’d never known that feeling.
He thought he knew sorrow before sorrow hit, but he hadn’t.
He filled Cloud’s bowl with chopped up chicken he hadn’t finished and then lay down again in the mussed bedclothes. The Black Rock lighthouse bleated, familiar as a heartbeat. One good day, and then he’d start to unravel again, as if there were a loose thread in him somewhere that wanted tugging. He was tired of his own tics and quirks, the repetition of them, saying, this is you and you and you, and you’ll never change a hair of it.
The woman down the shore, living there like she was, in Granny’s house, he’d spent many days there after his mother went away. Every detail of that bedroom, the old bed was still there, she’d have to be using it. Big, creaking, metal bed. God damn it. What if that woman had knocked on his door? The sight of him would have sent her running, unless, worse, he’d not answered at all, just hid deeper. Some awful hospitality, that. Why was he so plagued by that particular morning? She might have been drawing flowers, something in her head, for all he knew.
A mad flower, a small monster. He’d read about it in Sydney, the doctor hadn’t the time or patience to go into it much, after all he was not her husband, not kin, but a nice woman in the library had told him where to look. Rosaire at first had wanted to know what scary thing was happening inside her head, but quickly turned away. What’s the point, she said, of knowing that? But Murdock was determined to understand this sinister activity unfolding inside her. Nightmare stuff, blossoming vivid in the brain, blood-nourished, aggressive, pitiless, you could stagger it for a while but you couldn’t knock it out, the radiation only winged it, slowed it down, gave her a few weeks more of living the way she had, flat out, good food and drink and to hell with you. And then the chemicals killed all that, her joy turned to a foul taste and nausea she couldn’t describe. I’m sick as a dog, worse than seasick, she said, this isn’t the boat, Murdock, I want to sail out on. She started to walk badly, with an exaggerated grace at first, like the early drifting stage of drunkenness, later self-consciously, an unsteady actress entering a room. Then one day she fell, just walking along a sidewalk she went face-first to the pavement before he could catch her, bloodied her nose, her cheek, her knees. She cried not then but later, seated on the edge of her bed. It was terrible, Murdock, the humiliation, she said. She was soon in a wheelchair, and he pushed her wherever she needed to go, wanted to go, he would come there to her house, be there, any time of day, he’d have pushed her up the mountain had she asked. He saw the chemo twist her face. She didn’t smile much anymore then, her eyes took on the faraway look of treated pain, she was slipping into a place he couldn’t come to. She did smile sometimes, quick and warm to remind him the way she used to kid about people, Jesus, Murdock, isn’t this too sad by half? Seizures came at random. Her speech went, in patches at first, then just slurring and then the word sounds stopped coming and that embarrassed her, murmuring like an infant, she went mute, only when her feelings welled out of her would she make a sound.…
Murdock got out of bed again and pulled on his grubby jeans and a tattered black sweater. Lint. Cat hair. He had to pick himself up. Months of mourning had turned him limp and huddled, and the house he’d let slide, its slovenliness troubled him. Bones and joints still worked, when he got moving. Someday a stumble he would have once caught would carry him to the ground. Hills would steepen, he wouldn’t see the hanging branch, the flooded rut, the glib ice.
You had to look into the mirror now and then, see what was rough there. If you had a woman who cared.He had been difficult at times, he knew that, but he had toned that down after he met her. You’re a born bachelor, Granny had told him before she died, you won’t want a woman around much. But Rosaire, married once for a short time when very young, liked her own life the way it was, her own place, and so she and Murdock loved somewhere in between. They’d had their quarrels. But he never liked to be angry with her, and they had their own houses to retreat to and cool off in, and they’d come to miss each other quick enough.
Murdock shaved carefully. His ruddy face was florid from weather and wind and, lately, liquor. His hair was grey, but at the temples still a trace of his nickname, and in the grizzled hair of his chest.
He would never let himself be an old man shuffling along the street or playing bingo in the mall, they seemed like aliens sometimes, those fellas. Their limbs were shot of course, God love them, he understood that, the toll of factory and pit, all those wracking years break you down, cripple you. But the first sign he couldn’t get through a day by himself, he would disappear like a sick animal, up into the mountain woods where even his bones would be lost.
Wasn’t quick better, the sudden unexpected collapse? Too long in decline and people forgot you’d once been an able man, a man to lean on, to pull you up, to be awake for you when you couldn’t but sleep.
A
T THE FOOT
of the ladder steps to his low cellar, cracks of light showed back under the sills and the smell of cold, dug-out earth was strong. He groped for a string cord. A bulb dangling over a crock lit up. The crock sat on a long flat stone like those of the foundation. Willard and all that talk about rum-running and drug-running, as if they had any damn thing in common. Murdock lifted the lid an inch: ouch, last year’s pungent mash. He hadn’t cooked any liquor since she died, his own good silver, there was no pleasure in it, he drank bought whisky instead. Since he didn’t care for hunting, for killing animals, he had bartered a few bottles here and there for a share of venison, a portion of moose, a few partridge or rabbits, a poached salmon.
But here was a bottle he’d forgotten, he held it up to the light bulb: clear in the steam of his breath. I’m surprised, you know, Rosaire had said after the first taste, how smooth it is, and you
made
it. When she was ill and in bed, she’d asked for a shot in her water glass. It set her coughing, tearing up, but she said, Thank you, Murdock, a taste I’ll surely remember.
Back upstairs, he set about restoring the neat, clean rooms that had been his way until she died—the home not of a hopeless bachelor but a man who looked after himself. I don’t need a woman for my
house,
he’d told Rosaire, holding her in his arms. I just need you for
myself.
Well, dear, she said, I don’t every morning need a man in my house either, so maybe we can have fun in the middle somewhere, eh? And there were her ashes in a small canister on his chest of drawers. He had yet to make a beautiful box for them. That had seemed too final, a formal storing away.
Fog hung well up the back field, frozen, the air blank as paper. The walls of his house seemed so thin to him. You could crouch in corners, but it was no cover, something you didn’t want would always reach you.
Could anyone describe the kind of absence he felt? It hollowed him out, a cavernous space, every day he teetered on its edge.
The sun, oh, Murdock, it’s so low these afternoons, Rosaire said that December, her head turned on the pillow toward the window’s brassy light. I won’t see it high again, will I?
Why couldn’t Rosaire have died on a summer day instead of a night of blowing snow? He had to leave her on a night like that, she loved warmth and light, he drove slowly toward home on the slick highway, flakes floating like crude ash in his headlights. Before he reached the bridge, he pulled into a restaurant where they’d often stopped together for its view of the fjord-like strait and the long mountain running in from the sea. It was deserted and he sat with coffee by a big window, looking out, the dark water obscured, snow whirling like his mind, memories rushing past him, he could not slow them down, they dizzied him until he left suddenly and sped out of the lot. He wondered now which weakening part of his brain made him drive down the wrong lane of the road that night. He sometimes ran it through his mind, what it was like to see headlights coming at him, cursing at first because he thought
they
were at fault, maybe drunk, then glancing to his right where the double line streaked past, disturbingly yellow in the dark, it was all wrong suddenly, there, on his right, and he had to force himself nonetheless to cross it, to sheer into that other lane just before the oncoming car blared past in terror and outrage. He’d picked up speed then, raced, shaking, across the bridge toward home not because he was afraid the fellow might come after him but because he’d call him an old fool whose licence should be yanked. He had been proud, until that night, that he could drive anything with wheels. Now, another reason for vigilance lest he die—and worse, take others with him—sooner than he needed to. Did he have a death wish that night?
Did he turn to memories too quickly, did he suck the life out of them?
He wept, it flooded into him, all his anger and sorrow and pity, he couldn’t hold it back, alone in his kitchen, his face clasped hard in his hands. When it was over, he sat numb, exhausted but calm, glad for it, that it happened here, in this peaceful room. No one to witness it but Cloud. The cat sat in the chair by the stove, observing him intently, pupils big and black in his owl-yellow eyes. “That’s done with, kitty,” Murdock said, “you won’t see me like that again.”