The Last Woman (3 page)

What she had lost, what
they
had lost, she believed, was not just a friend but a way of life. For during the years of the claim, when Richard and Billy were close, it seemed to her that something rare had settled on their lives. Triangles were supposed to be unstable, but for those few years when they were in their late twenties it seemed theirs was the exception: a balance of friendship and, yes, she would say it, love, where jealousy and rivalry had little part. She had never painted better than in those years. Never been as free, for so long, from her periodic glooms. As for Richard, he had never seemed more engaged by his work, more eager to embrace new experiences. His friendship with Billy (which at first she had been skeptical of, for what good could come of a liaison between a former lover and her husband?) showed her a side of him she’d never seen: he became more relaxed, more given to outbursts of unguarded exuberance. After Billy had hired Richard as the band’s lawyer, he often stayed overnight at Inverness or at their Black Falls house, plotting strategies. She remembered the topographic maps they taped together and spread on floors, the boundaries of the claim sketched out in pencil and finally, Magic Marker; the vista of lakes and rivers bearing coffee and tea rings, pizza crumbs, notes
added by Billy in his awkward hand. House and cottage were often full in those days, as visiting scholars and native leaders stopped by in support of the claim. There was a sense of excitement in the air, of energy put to some higher use – for it seemed to her that they were not merely claiming the old hunting and trapping grounds of Pine Island, they were helping right the old, continuing wrongs perpetrated against the country’s original inhabitants.

Billy and Richard seemed never to tire. They would talk half the night, and though sometimes they argued, their bond of dedicated bonhomie seemed only to strengthen. The next day, after Richard had left for the office, Billy would rise late, and he and Ann would talk over coffee. They talked about the situation on Pine Island, where Billy had made a number of enemies by pushing for the claim; they talked about Billy’s chronically troubled relationships, of which there were more than a few in those days. Listening and offering advice, Ann played therapist with the benign presumptuousness of one who had once been his girlfriend herself. She knew him, she felt: his gifts, his faults, the burden of his moods. Their own affair, started and finished at nineteen – long before Richard came on the scene – rarely came up, but she felt its presence as a ground of intimacy in which their relationship had sunk deep roots.

Sometimes, Billy and his latest, along with Ann and Richard, would eat at Lacy’s in Black Falls; or they would fly down to Toronto for a weekend of shopping, a film, a hockey game. Ann could remember walking along Bloor Street beside Billy’s current flame, while the two men
strode along in front. Richard was a Leafs fan, Billy followed Montreal – and they were arguing over the merits of their respective teams. Richard, at six-four, with a rugby player’s build, towered over the slimmer Billy. When they began throwing hip checks at each other, first gently, then with increasing exaggeration, the effect was hilarious. Egged on by the laughter of the women, the men marched down Bloor Street bumping hips.

And then, after the claim failed, after their work of years had gone up in smoke, they had, it appeared, fought in earnest.

“Why won’t you tell me what happened between you two?” she cried once to Richard. “I mean, how bad can it have been? So you quarrelled – it was almost to be expected, wasn’t it? You were both exhausted, Richard – and then that awful decision came down. People can’t go on blaming each other for a few harsh words.” As she spoke he shook his head and smiled in that gently superior way he sometimes adopted: she didn’t,
couldn’t
, understand. “Say something, for God’s sake,” she pleaded. “Nothing to say,” he said, his voice strangulating a little. “Water under the bridge. There was tension between us for months – through a lot of the trial. I never really told you how bad it got. Then we had this blowup. These things happen, Ann. I really would thank you to let it go.”

“But if you could –”

“Ann.
No
.” His fierceness shocked her. His ordinary manner was swift, ironic, light. But something else showed now: an anger that reddened his face and seemed
to lodge in her chest. She did not ask him about the quarrel again.

Pouring herself a tumbler of white wine Ann goes into the living room and sits, impatiently flipping through a magazine. She can take nothing in but surfaces – the thin, elegantly clothed women fly by like hoardings glimpsed from a speeding car. She is back in her studio still, with the pages she filled with preliminary sketches, with notes, with measurements. Throwing the
Vogue
aside, she sits in a trance. It is some minutes before she notices, through the open front door that leads into the screened porch, her husband working at his table. He sits with head propped on his hand as he writes, his big, sunburned face tilted a little, frowning under his drooping forelock – a hint of the schoolboy, sulking at his lessons. At supper, he had acted with a blithe, faintly wounded nonchalance: Billy’s return was nothing to
him
. Swept with affection for him – for whatever burdens he carries in secret – she goes out to him.

“Rich, let’s swim.”

“We’d be eaten alive,” he says mildly, not looking up.

“Not in the water. Come on, Rich, we haven’t for ages. I really want to.” For suddenly she does: a swim is something they absolutely
must
have. “We’re turning into workaholics. Don’t you want to swim naked with me?”

“Always,” he says. But he goes on filling the margin of a page with his quick, tiny hand. Nearby, his computer makes one of its periodic whines, like a mosquito, and she
can sense the immense pull his work has for him. Often he will not come home from the office till eight or nine, and weekends hardly exist for him. She has never quite got used to this, and though she is convinced she loves him, she worries they are living their lives in distant parallel. Leaning forward, she playfully flips shut his book.

“Honey. This case –”

When she retreats to the kitchen it is not so much with a sense of rejection as of waste. He doesn’t understand what she’s offering: she has joy again, she has energy – no telling how long it will last! At loose ends, she peers through the screen toward Rowan’s tent, like a giant boulder in the woods. She scrubs furiously at a stain on the counter. When Richard appears from the hall, she is on her hands and knees, struggling to unstick a drawer.

He seems amused by her frazzled state.

“
What?
” she demands.

They go out naked with their towels, through the porch and down the rock still warm from the day’s sun. In the dark, the path is a little strange, ghostly pines lit by the porch lights. The deck is nearly invisible and the channel itself is a blackness off which the faintest hint of coolness rises. “Well,” Richard says, dropping his towel beside her. He plunges in with a tremendous crash while she stands on the deck, watching the flashes of water as he swims out into the dark. Then the noise and flashing stop: he has vanished.

“How is it?” she says.

He does not answer.

“Richard?” Is he playing some game? “Richard!”

“What?” Gasping.

“Nothing. How is it?”

“Beautiful. What’s keeping you?”

She does not know. A mosquito brushes her cheek. Idiot, she tells herself: wanting, not wanting. She knows she
will
dive, she
will
join him, but something’s holding her back. Off in the dark, past her husband’s pale, waiting head, a ripple gleams.

T
he mortar and pestle stop him, as so many things in the blue house have stopped him. He picks up the little porcelain bowl. Inside, a few dark grains give off a smell of flowers. At once, he sees Matt kneeling in the shade of a tree as he carefully unearths a root. His uncle handled his plants with the no-nonsense tenderness of a good doctor. Sometimes you could hear him murmuring to himself or to the plants, or singing bits of some old song in Ojibway, his lips scarcely moving, so that Billy, watching him as a boy, felt that the song was not coming from him but from far away, from underground, maybe, or from the frail plants themselves. Matt simmered his concoctions on the stove, ground them into powders, put them up in jars:
medicines for his arthritis, for sick people on the Island. Birch for pain. Rosehips for colds. People would come to the door in the night, and Billy, waking, would hear him go off. He’d always intended to learn some of the old lore himself one day. But now: he puts down the pestle. Knowledge, a life’s worth, snuffed out by the side of a road.

After their mother drowned, Billy and his sister had come to live in the blue house. Matt was their great-uncle – their grandfather’s brother. He and Emma had no children of their own. They were different from his mother, a thing he had trouble getting used to, for he never knew what his mother would spring on him next – a blow from the sky, a rain of kisses. Matt and Emma’s steadiness unnerved him. He kept wanting to yell, to hell around, to break things. He didn’t trust their goodness. And maybe there was something in him that needed a harsh word or a beating, that craved the justice or injustice of it – it hardly mattered which – just to staunch the craziness that buzzed in him. Yet no matter what he did – and years later, he would cringe to remember – the harsh words and beatings never came.

After his sister moved out, Billy lived on in the blue house with Matt and Emma. In the winters, they ran a trapline from their cabin at Silver Lake; in the summers, he and Matt did building and repair work at cottages around Nigushi. Working with Matt calmed him. The way Matt took his time when he measured a board or the way he pondered where they should hunt – taking days if necessary, while he watched the weather and the plants, and waited
for the right thought, the right dream, to guide him. It drove Billy wild at first, though in the end he had managed to take something from it – a deeper patience, an alertness that showed him more detail (that twig where a moose had nibbled) than he had known existed. The calm wasn’t permanent though, and it didn’t run all the way through. He might be sitting in a bar, a ball game murmuring from its high corner shelf, while before him his third beer offered a forgetful afternoon, and under the table, his foot would be going like sixty. There were things in him he couldn’t explain and didn’t like. An energy that chased itself. Ideas he couldn’t shake. Sometimes he thought he’d been born into the wrong life. He should have been a soldier, a boxer, the man who swung the wrecking ball.

One time in Atlanta, he worked for a painting company that did shoddy work. The foreman was always after his men to hurry up, hurry up, and one day when Billy was angrily slopping paint up a wall the thought of Matt came to him – his patient, careful strokes, the hint of humour in his face, as though he knew it was finally pointless to take so much care with a wall; after all, the paint would peel one day, the wall would fall down; but it was a kind of game with him, and a point of pride, to put up a good job in spite of everything. Disgusted, Billy quit on the spot.

Drifting to Savannah, he went to work in a boatyard, scraping hulls. One night he went to a party in a house on the edge of town. Upstairs, on a bed covered with coats, he dialled Pine Island and heard his sister’s voice tell him that Matt was dead. He had hitched into the Falls, she said,
to pick up some things at the hardware store. On the way back, his first ride dropped him at the Red Lake turnoff and it was there, while he was walking along the shoulder, that someone had struck him and not stopped.

Billy had made his way outside, into a yard that overlooked the river, under a close, leaden sky torn by the roar of a jet. Half the world had broken off. He could feel the ragged edge running inside him; it was out there too, in the dark over the river, an absence that sucked at whatever was left, a regret so violent he pitched against the fence and vomited. He could not stop thinking that if he had stayed home, Matt would have lived, because he would have given him a ride to town. They had taken the trip together many times: winter, a blaze of snow, Hank Williams on the tape deck, and Matt beside him in his fur hat with the flyaway lugs, eyes shining in his kind, leathery face.

His boat sits upside down on logs beside his house. People – kids, he supposes – have covered it with insults, threats, crude images of monsters, several shitting bums and outsized cocks, a fish drawn with surprising skill – a crowded catalogue of the Island’s hates and longings in green, black, pink, and yellow paint. Apparently painting his boat has become a local sport. Working with a scraper, in a couple of hours he manages to clean a quarter of it.