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.
TODAY 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.
Yet holding down a job those early years with Chet, she had languished as an artist, living in the background of her husband’s needs. At that time all she’d really wanted from him was love, uncontested, felt, visible, completely theirs. But in the long haul of a married life, that might not have been possible anyway, she realized, with any man—or with the woman she was. She had had her own affairs, but they were harmless. Weren’t they? And it had been a long time since she and Chet had been truly close, the clarity of that astonished her now. Hadn’t they loved? Yes, passionately, once. But they had ceased to be intimate, entwined, long before Alicia struck Chet like lightning. Maybe that was better—disentwining was painful enough, the tighter, the worse. Or could that keep you together in the first place? She did not know anymore. She had a solitary streak in her, always, she’d often wanted to be alone, like her dad, though she had never been alone like this, and neither had he.
This morning seemed to focus cruelly all her doubts. She could feel tears coming and she gave in to them, cried softly. But soon the luxury of feeling thoroughly and unashamedly sorry for herself, under her covers, became a kind of tonic, and who would know anyway? After a few minutes, she wiped her face on the sheet and got up. The women who’d lived in this house would shame her.
Once comfortable in her fleece-lined boots, gripping a hot mug of tea, Anna stoked the Warm Morning with more wood and turned to the sketches she’d laid out across her big table, the disturbing immediacy of the dog. It seemed at times that it had been tossed to her somehow, that she was intended to witness its fall. Absurd of course. And sometimes she was not certain that she had seen it. Keeping control of her mind was crucial, she knew that, alone and isolated as she was, points of reference so unfamiliar. Charcoal figures on white paper, what could they say? A series of mingled perspectives—the dog in the air as a bird might see it, or its killer, revolving, diminishing, and from below as Anna had, but now its jaws yawning grotesquely as if to devour its own incomprehensible fate.
Spirits low or high, she had worked every day, landscape, seascape, all kinds of objects, still lifes, in pencil, pen and ink, charcoal, oil pastels, a medium she liked, it could mimic paint, oil paints had never attracted her. But her main project was still the dog in the air, in moments of pure knowledge—I am running, falling, I cannot fly.…
WHAT MADE HER drive to the bridge so late that night? The unbelievable stillness when she’d stepped out the back door? A white moon above the cold black lines of the bridge, sending an icy shimmer over the water of the strait? Restless, at least, that night, a bit down, she had the urge to drive, to get out, but she’d gotten no further than the bridge.…
After the third curve, she’d passed the defunct ferry wharf, its rotting timbers invisible, just west of it the cottage where sometimes cars were parked haphazardly, lights on but no party ablaze that night in its windows, and on the high side of the road the white-shingled former church, now Willard’s house, its steeple shorn, no lights in the tall grey windows either. The dirt road, roughened by bad weather, rain and old snow, jolted along the foot of the mountain, potholes, thinly iced, shining like water in her headlights before the tires crunched them. Her high beams caught the breakwater rocks protecting the road on the water side, the strait beyond them black as the sky.
When she reached the dry highway and swept down the long, forest-lined hill toward the bridge, she wanted only the sensation of coming out of the trees and crossing it in the darkness, to feel a kind of nowhere beneath its girders, free of this strange, demanding terrain.
But instead, just before highway rose into causeway, she wheeled onto a service road closed off not far in by a cyclone fence, gated and locked. She parked, waited until she abs
orbed more of the car’s heat, then skirted the fence where it ended at the shorebank. She walked the unplowed road, the sharp squeak of her steps the only sound, until she was near that composition of girders and beams and shadows high above her. Were it not so cold, she would have brought a big pad and sketched out something rapid and rough that might have reflected her mood, the odd atmosphere and perspective, detailing it later, warm in her room. Just the idea of drawing in moonlight had pleased her, the mysterious form her lines might take, but already the cold was working into her limbs.
The stars were like ice-points, cold tingled her skin and she huddled deeper into her parka. Only faintly was she aware of a car curving down the mountain road she had just travelled, it seemed almost alien in the stillness, not fast, slowing as it gained the causeway, climbed to the bridge above, where, beyond her line of sight, it stopped and sat idling. She could hear the soft rumble of its exhaust, and then a door seemed to open to the sharp yaps of a dog. She looked up at the figure at the railing backlit by headlights, something in his arms. A trash bag? He paused, then flung it upward as if releasing a bird, and Anna saw a silhouette of legs scrambling in air, the animal giving out a single, tortured bark as it plummeted, turning over several times slowly before, with a tiny splash, it penetrated the sinuous currents beneath the bridge. Above, there was yelling, men’s voices. Doors thumped shut. The car turned around, slowly, not in flight, just leaving, what they came to do had been done, and it returned down the causeway, gathering speed back up the mountain highway.
Crying out, Anna rushed to the shorebank but halted when she felt the slippery, unstable rocks, saw the hushed dark water moving, undisturbed. Gone, over. How could she have come here and seen a dog flung helpless from a high bridge? Was this a way of putting it down, was it hopelessly sick, unwanted, like newborn pups? How horrible if that man was its master. And if he wasn’t, then why? What was she to do?
She had no connections here: who would she tell? The Mounties? And what could they do without a licence, a description of the man, of the car? She didn’t know even her nearest neighbour, and it could be a toxic story for a stranger to trouble him with. What would people think of her when it got around? That she made it up? And what had she been doing beneath the bridge at such an hour? Could she tell them she had to shake herself out of depression, out of doubt? No. This was hers, alone.
Inside her car, through the faint fog of the windshield, the atmosphere seemed stained with cruelty. Daylight would drive that away, wouldn’t it? The dog was surely knocked senseless when it hit, it would have died quickly. Its terror lasted but a few seconds. But it swam through her mind, tumbling slowly, just one confused bark, then no sound as it fell, as if it had been too focused on righting itself, finding a purchase for its feet, or some way to fly. It was dead, forget it. Food for crabs, for fishes, its bones might wash up on the shore, picked white, she’d draw them, turn them into art. This was not for her to solve, there was nothing to work with except shock and pity, a dead end, forget it, an incident linked to nothing else in this place, to no one she knew.
She drove home in a daze, the deserted road rocking her numbly until her high beams picked out a man striding determinedly along the shoulder, his back to her, hands deep in the pockets of a dark topcoat, his hair black and slicked as she swerved past him, he was not hitching, his hand was not out, but it frightened her, coming upon him, his long black coat and his black hair, bare-headed on a night like this, how could she have offered him a ride anyway, it made no sense, strangers, both of them, and even though he was much too far from the bridge even to have seen the dog in the air, Anna drove on, she was not capable of the kind of conversation that would have to take place, though yesterday she might have stopped, because after all, where could he have been going but to one of the few houses that had lights in them in the evenings, like the little house across the road from Willard’s, lights in its windows now, late, a car out front that hadn’t been there on her way out. Her whole body ached as if she herself had fallen from the bridge.… I live here. This is where I live.…
A small dog turning slowly through the night air had altered everything for a few days, she had to erase it, but that was proving difficult. She searched her own frozen shore for the corpse, hoping to find it, but afraid too to see it maybe mangled, half-eaten, bobbing in grey slush. She interpreted shapes wrongly, sometimes crazily, creeping up on a clump of driftwood sticks or dirty brown carpeting, her heart in her mouth.
V.
ANNA’S INSTINCT WAS TO IGNORE the knock, as she would have back home in her studio, working, but now a rare and actual someone might be at the front door. Maybe only Willard Munro, caretaker cum handyman. A few things did need his attention.
Through the frosted pane she saw a splash of colour, and she opened the door to a young woman with striking red hair curling from beneath a stocking cap of royal blue. In her arms she held a small child of maybe three or four.
“How are you today?” she said. “I’m Breagh Carmichael, from up the road? Will you look at that,” she said, laughing. She pointed behind her to a small worn sled listing in the snow. “One of the runners came loose but we got a long way on it, didn’t we, Lorna? Could I use your phone for a minute?”
“Come in. Mine’s sometimes on the fritz but I don’t phone much. I’m Anna.”
The woman brought into the hallway a rush of energy and youth, her face bright with cold. The child wore a pink snowsuit with cheerful polar bears on it, the hood drawn tightly around her curious, brown-eyed gaze.
“The phone’s in there,” Anna said, “on the kitchen wall.”
Breagh set the girl down while she dealt with the telephone. Her conversation, with someone she called Liv, was short and tense, Liv had not shown as expected. Anna knelt by the little girl who gave her a reluctant smile. Her cheeks seemed flushed. “Yes, I might be out in the sticks,” Breagh said, “but I’m not about to sit around for you until you’re good and ready,” and she hung up.
“We were going to stop at our Uncle Red’s,” she said, “he’s just over the way. Weren’t we, honey? Not really our uncle, is he, but he’s like one. Not home or not answering, I guess. We don’t see much of him since his woman passed away.”
“His wife?”
“Girlfriend. Well, she was more than that. It’s been a big hurt, losing her.” She bent down and kissed her daughter on the cheek. “This is my Lorna.” She pulled out a tissue and wiped the child’s nose. “She has a bit of a cold, don’t you, honey, but you know, she never complains.”
Anna urged them into the warm kitchen. Breagh pulled her daughter’s hood away, her curly hair a darker red than her mother’s, unzipped her snowsuit and set her loose. She wandered the kitchen with a shy smile before opening a low cupboard and carefully removing one by one the tin baking pans of different sizes, stooping to arrange them inside each other to her liking. Breagh moved to stop her but Anna, amused by the child’s solemn concentration, said let her go, she never used the pans anyway, with their little dents and scorches from banging in and out of ovens.
“Oh, you’re an artist!” Breagh said, getting up. “I draw too, but mostly figures, clothing.” She moved close to the sketches Anna had pinned to the old wallpaper. “Is that our bridge?”
“They’re just studies, nothing finished really.”
“Is the dog flying or falling through the air?”
“I’m not sure myself sometimes.”
They talked while the girl played with kitchen utensils. She seemed to enjoy the shape and motions of a flour sifter, a wooden masher, a set of tin measuring cups that telescoped into one.
“Maybe she’ll be an engineer,” Anna said, watching her.
“Or an artist. She loves drawing. Oh, she’ll go on in school, I’ll make sure of that. We’ll move back to Sydney before then. I had to get away from there for a while.” She smiled. “Men.”
“Yes.” Anna smiled. “Men.”
“Red Murdock found us the house
up the road I rent. You met Murdock?”
“Not really.”
“The old fella, Dougal, died there, in our house and his wife’s in a home, so it was available. Have you people here, Anna? Is that what brought you?”
Anna explained only as far as she felt like going, focusing on her artwork, how the landscape had drawn her here, the light, she’d read about Cape Breton and seen photographs, a research trip, really. She dodged personal details or made them up, which she found oddly enjoyable. Gossip was bound to be a hot commodity in this little corner and she wasn’t about to donate her story to the cause. What would this woman, her life with men barely begun, understand about Anna and Chet’s life together, what broke it apart? She apologized because there was no milk for tea or for Lorna but she did give her a cup of orange juice which she sat on the floor and drank in one go so she could get back to turning the crank on an iron meat grinder.
“The weeks I’ve been here and I still don’t know half what’s in the place,” Anna said, pulling open a low kitchen drawer. “Okay, Lorna, it’s all yours, sweetheart, there’s nothing sharp in there.”
“We should get home, Anna.”
“Your husband’s at work, I suppose?”
“I’m on my own. No husband.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have …”
“Don’t worry about it. He wasn’t fit for a husband or a father either, so no loss there.” In May she and a friend would be opening a clothing shop up on the east coast, in an old schoolhouse along the Cabot Trail, designing and sewing their own clothes. She was getting by on government money and some help from the man on the phone. She didn’t have Willard’s brogue, maybe because she’d grown up in the city, in Sydney.
Anna From Away Page 3