Anna From Away

by D. R. MacDonald

  But Connie was a boyhood pal, he felt a responsibility toward him, he knew his tempers. Even if liquor had burned away the best in him, there was still a husk of his old self, if you were patient enough to wait for it, to see it. He travelled Cape Seal Road every day, walking off his thirst, looking for familiar spots where houses used to be. If we weren’t lucky, or put together the right way, we might wander like Connie all our lives, fit for nothing special, happy nowhere. Murdock knew this was the only help he could give him now, a little booze, a little money, an ear. He stuttered less with Murdock.

  “Willard,” he said. “Should get him a new d-dog.”

  “Willard’s still cut up about that, Connie. You know, you’re about the only man his dog liked.”

  Connie tossed back the rest of his drink and slammed the glass to the table. “Barked too d-damn much,” he said louder than necessary. “K-kicked up a fuss every t-time Billy B-Buchanan stepped outside, at Sandy’s there.”

  “A lot of fellas back and forth there sometimes. You have to wonder if they did the dog in.”

  “How the hell w-w-would I know? G-give me a fill-up, eh?”

  “Calm down and I might.” Murdock poured him half a glass, then corked the rum. “Doing a little work for Billy, are you? You get along with him?”

  “A big k-kid. Some other shits c-come through there. Not worth a n-nickel.”

  “From what I’ve heard, you should steer clear of them,” Murdock said, pushing a twenty-dollar bill across the table. “There’s fresh tracks going into the tuckamore. Were you at my cliff this afternoon?”

  “No,” Connie said quickly. He stared into his glass. “I t-told him, I said, Willard, for f-fuck sake, let go of that d-dog, I can’t stand l-looking at you. One more, M-Murdock. Then I’m gone.”

  MURDOCK DROVE HIM to the bottom of his long unplowed driveway on the high side of the road and let him out.

  “Take a rest, Con,” Murdock said, knowing the man would nap in any case and resume his walking afterward. Connie stood unsteadily while he stared at tracks marking the way up the hill through the snow, he had lost his driver’s licence way back. “I d-don’t know what the fuck’s going on around here any m-more,” he said, then, with high, careful steps, set off toward his house.

  Murdock turned back in the direction of the wharf, he’d have a look at Sandy’s place, see who was there. In the front yard was Billy’s gaudy pickup, surrounded by tire burn down to mud and crazy swerves in the snow as if cars had made a wild, disorganized exit. The cottage, grey and peeling but sporting a new stark white door, was dark and quiet, no heavy music pounding from its windows. Funny, but years ago the Morrisons, childless, had been known for throwing parties and kitchen rackets, if there was a fiddler handy at any time they would pull him in, and sometimes when the waiting line for the ferry was backed up along the road, Sandy and Kate would fling open their door and hail inside waiting drivers and passengers. Good souls, they were, generous, hospitable. Who this current crowd was, Murdock could not say. But there was Livingstone’s pal watching him from a side window. Billy. No one had a bead on him, he was from New Waterford, somewhere over there.

  He was not Murdock’s concern right now: for the first time in a good while, he knew exactly what he wanted to do in the morning, and that’s where he put his mind. Skates for Anna Starling. He looked up at the mountain ridge, a single, smoke-blue cloud took hold of the hot red sun and, like a fist, closed it away.

  HE SPENT some time rehearsing, recalling the steps, jotting them down, sketching a little with a rough pencil on a piece of paper bag. Had to be sure he didn’t leave one out or have to backtrack. Chaff and dust filmed the tools, all the tongs his dad had made, for different uses, they hung on a rack on the wooden bin beside the forge, the cutters hot and cold, the chisels, punches, he made them himself out of bars of tool steel. Years of use still latent in wood and steel. There were the tin cans of rusty bolts, nuts, screws, nails, hinges, brackets, scavenged, saved. He could still hear his dad rummaging in one of these tins or a salt cod box, the dull rattle of iron bits as his fingers dug for just the fastening he needed. Murdock too would leave his own woodworking hoard behind, a legacy of thrift and necessity that he had nobody of his own to care about.

  He’d need coal for the fire, it wouldn’t heat the air but just be good to see going. Even when his dad had the forge roaring and was banging iron on the anvil, the room in winter never warmed, the tight little fire fiercely hot from the blowered draft, focused, and the heat went up the chimney fast, the gases and smoke, though in summer yes it could be suffering hot. The old blower switch was dead. His father had gladly given up the hand-crank blower late in his life when power came to the road. That and the grindstone were the only things electrical, and there was a blown fuse in the little wall box. He rummaged through ruined fuses in a dirty wooden drawer until he located one good fifteen amper.

  Under dusty burlap, frayed into tufts by mice, he found soft coal, old coal waiting for fire. In the spent ashes of the forge Murdock spread shavings from the ash stocks he’d been since yesterday carving roughly with an axe, then whittling them into a shoe shape.

  He remembered her foot in his hands, narrow, fine-boned. He formed the ash to suit it. He’d finish them smoothly, sand them to a sheen.

  But now the shavings flared from his match and he gently brought up the blower, building the coal until the draft was strong. In the stream of air soon the coal burned red. Into its heart he set one end of the steel bar and left it. This would be a blade. He took up a ball-peen and a hole punch and when the bar end glowed red like the nest of coals, he pulled it out and on the anvil hammered that red tip flat. Punching the screw hole, where the blade would be fixed to the wooden stock, was awkward, he had to balance the bar in his lap and it took a reheating and another try before he placed it over the hardy hole in the anvil and punched it through. Then the feathering, sharpening the top edge of the blade where it would set into the grooved ash, this was difficult, he remembered it, but would his hand follow? Maybe it was like swimming or playing ball, you never forgot how, you just weren’t so good at it anymore, and you had to concentrate like hell. And that was good.

  Murdock had to heat it again and again as he drew out both sides of the top edge with the hammer, but the lower edge would curl up, and then it came back to him how to beat it flat, heating a few inches at a time he beat his way toward the toe, feathering first one side, then the other, then flattening the bar. Then the little hump that went up deeper into the groove, he had to draw that out beyond the feathered edge and punch a hole clean.

  You’ve got the knack, I think, his dad said after a while, you got a feel for iron.

  He heated the blade once more and using the horn of the anvil pounded the front into the graceful curve that would thrust forward over the ice when Anna Starling pushed it. On the grindstone he squared off the bottom edge, then ground a slight groove the whole length of it. He went back to the blocks, they were like graceful little boats, the blade a keel, the hull narrower than the feet that would ride them so it would never touch ice when Anna Starling leaned.

  He drilled holes for three strap slots, then chiselled them out and ran a hot bar of metal through, cleaning the slots. He clamped the stock in the vise and started the long bottom groove with a saw, finishing it clean with a chisel to receive the feathered edge of the blade that he fixed in with wire pulled up tight and twisted. The straps, which he planned to fashion out of old reins soaking now in neat’s-foot oil, needed through-rings, and he cut two lengths of thin metal rod, rounding them hot over the horn, then scarfing the ends for a smooth weld, and put borax at the scarfing and the rings back into the fire.Welding is like bread, his dad had told him, it’s no good if you burn it. Leave it raw and it won’t stick, you need accurate heat at both ends. Watch your metal. When it’s just starting to melt, it’s ready.

  Murdock put an open ring on the anvil, worked the ends together, and with light taps of the hammer at first, th
en heavier, he welded the ring, then did the other one. If you looked close, the circles were not perfect, but they would do, he wouldn’t do them over.

  The air was still cold but he wiped sweat from his eyes, such had been his concentration, calling up memory, in head and limb, the muscles of his jaw felt clamped. He stood back and worked his stiff fingers, his forearm had tensed up, tightened. Jesus, this was only small steel, he hadn’t been banging big iron all day like his dad.

  He flipped off the blower and the flame withered into flickering coal and ash. He lowered his hands, dirty with dust, into the cold water of the brine tub, then rubbed them over the coals. He could hear the wind now, moaning softly in the chimney, amplified in the forge hood. The skates lay on the workbench still strewn with tools and dies as his father had left them. He’d sand their wood tomorrow, find small buckles for the straps, there was more old harness in the corner. A coat of varnish on the ash would brighten them. He wasn’t sure of the time but he knew he had pressed on through the afternoon, in the flow of memory, he’d had to keep moving through it, seizing the next step and the next before it was garbled or lost. He was tired, so hungry his knees were weak. I’m out of shape for this, he said, but he liked what he had done. Rosaire, God love her, she did not skate. But she danced, she danced.

  You know, I can still dance, she told him, I can step out. How is that? said Murdock, taking her hand as she lay there. He didn’t want to concede her any pipe dreams, not then, not anymore, much as he’d loved them, indulged them. Up here, she said, tapping her temple. I’m light on the floor, light as a shadow, she said. But nice, fast, would you dance with me, Murdock? Now? The way I look? Quick, before they burn me up, you can’t dance with ashes. Sure, dear, I’d dance with you, he said easily, you’re a feather, I’ll whisk you along. You’ll have to paste your wig on, but it’s a pretty wig, you’re right fine in it. Yes, and not a hair of grey either, she said. Why am I crying? For the love of God look at me, the tears. She closed her eyes and tears welled in her lashes. From the hall a nurse’s scolding voice rose and subsided. Through a haze of curtain Murdock saw in the parking lot below a woman hobbling to a car, a man shielding her with a black umbrella. God damn it, she was going home, on her own feet, what fortune. The asphalt was black with rain, puddles flickered under the street lamp. In the hallway a gurney hustled past, a clatter of equipment and murmuring attendants. I’m not sleeping, Rosaire said. Well, your eyes are shut anyway, Murdock said gently, sleep if you want. Pay no mind, Murdock. I’m still here. Her voice was soft, precise. I don’t want sleep while you are here, while you’re in the room with me. I hate to wake up alone. I’m not going anywhere, he said. Can I give you some water? She nodded and raised her head enough so he could slip his hand behind it. He put the plastic cup to her lips. He watched her pillow as she sipped, the shallow dent her head had made, oh so light now, in his cupped hand the thin, feverish hair. He eased her back. He knew she’d sleep, her face had relaxed, her lips parted as if for a kiss, and he kissed them. He wondered how deep she went then, how close she ventured to the edge you couldn’t come back from. Would she know it, would something change suddenly that said, this is a different dream entirely, girl? Or were you just out, unknowing and forever, if forever meant anything at all?Red Murdock leaned close to the dusty window above the workbench. In the waning afternoon light a chain of footprints paid out in the snow, coming up from the shore they formed an angle, its tip just beneath the window, one side from the east, the other fading off west, dark and fresh. Who would be at the shore? Anyone he knew would have tapped at the window, but cost him his momentum at the same time, the rhythm of memory.

  Couldn’t have been Anna Starling. Why would she come to this window anyway, much as he’d have liked to see her there?

  Ah, well, Molly said, I’ll tell you what a woman will do for her man. Tommy MacKinnon was fishing, this was some years ago, and his boat was in that gully, that kind of a tittle, they call it, between Goat Island and Sampson Rock, an awful force of tide there, rises up strong, and quite a breeze came up that day and capsized them, drowned them all, Tommy and the rest. The bodies got mixed up in ice and eelgrass, they washed to the shore a good ways off and they found them, but not Tommy’s, never showed. His wife, Georgina, she said, I’m going to find him anyway, and she walked the beach every blessed day, long walk from her house, she had kids to care for, weather didn’t matter, storming or not, cold, she prayed, she walked. One day, after a blow, there was a lump of eelgrass with a boot sticking out, she thinks, I know that boot, it’s his, he’s somewhere here. She felt it, you see, his body, that his body was there, somewhere. So she kept travelling the beach, and this day she went and she come on this big load of eelgrass in a big roll, and she got working, untwisting strands of it, and finally there was a hand, she worked him free of it, all of him, his whole body. Her husband. He wasn’t pretty. But she wouldn’t let him go.

  XII.

  ANNA HAD GIVEN UP ON a genuine spring, like ones she remembered from the Midwest. Her dad’s wish was that she attend his alma mater, a small liberal arts college in Ohio. Why so far away? her mother argued, there are good schools here, she could go to San Francisco, but her father said, No, she needs a different space, somewhere new, and he prevailed. She remembered winter giving over to warm rains in April and then the fragrant heat of May, the blossoms and ground flowers, and men soon in short sleeves, women in shorts, legs, flesh, muscle out there again, light clothing at a party, everything warm again, out in somebody’s backyard, the night, the air, the man next to you, the spice of shaving lotion and liquor, the old lilac beside the garage, the plain good humour of fine weather.

  Winter here still crouched off the coast waiting for an east wind, then the temperature would fall, all her easy expectations of summer would again recede. Off the coast of northern California where Anna grew up, grey whales would be migrating south, from shore cliffs she and her friends had vied to spot them, their erupting spouts.

  Now it was April and snow had just fallen after what seemed a slight thaw. Small patches of pond melt had, this Saturday afternoon, frozen again and flurries had dusted its surface. The strait had been empty but for an ice floe here and there like a small white boat adrift—drift ice is a sign of spring, Willard said, encouragingly. On the St. Aubin shore, through a grey dusk, the few, sparsely placed houses were already lost, and night was coming down. She had worked hard all week, a series of drawings in pen and ink, found objects mostly, sometimes with landscape or seascape as background—a striking piece of driftwood, a battered black pontoon from a hatchery float, a huge ball of manila rope so intricately tangled she could imagine the violence of the seas that had whipped it, wrung it into this deep, unravellable knot. She liked what such things could say, or be made to say, without words, their latent moods. Melissa had asked to try a few pen and inks in her gallery but Anna was still fussing over them, she lacked the will to pack them up and send them away. Not yet. Melissa’s garden would be abloom with azaleas and orchids, gorgeous hybrids of iris and lily, luscious globes of hydrangea. How lovely to inhale it, to float in its scents, a warm Santa Ana wind gusting through her yard.

  After that afternoon at Breagh’s, the possibility of a purely social occasion, which she had all but abandoned, pulled at her hard tonight, that old Saturday anticipation of conviviality and licence, of kicking loose.

  Breagh, however, was not at home, no answer on her phone, and doubtless in her own circle of fun, somewhere in town.

  After a supper of smoked haddock in white sauce, a now-favourite recipe she found pencilled in a kitchen notebook, Anna filled the bathtub with the entire capacity of the electric tank. She submerged up to her neck in hot water and steam, dozy, dreamy, unwilling to rise out of this bliss until the temperature grew tepid and forced her back into the cooler house. She quickly added wood to the Warm Morning and sat towelling her hair near the caressing heat. Flames crackled in the firebox.How long since she’d seen Red Murdock through the dirty
window of that blacksmith shed, drawn there by a smoking chimney? His fierce gaze as he worked, how intense it was, at that different fire, his jaw set, his eyes in shadow under the bare bulb, and then turning toward that core of coals that seemed to mirror his own burning focus. She’d stayed so still at the dusty glass, watching him, the beat of the hammer, a sound from another time. She had wanted to go inside, but she didn’t know how to break into that contained little world of his, to ask would he part with any of that array of marvellous iron hanging and in bins. That strange intimacy of the pond night had passed, frozen over. But how she would love to do a junk sculpture, though she wouldn’t call it that, the iron odds and ends, the tools in his hands, were not junk.

  What was he doing this Saturday night poised somewhere between winter and spring?

  Anna poked listlessly around her workroom, picking up sketches, setting them down. She’d done a quick study of Murdock at his anvil when she got home that day, a strong play of light and shadow, the outsized hammer raised high above his head, his brow darkened in a scowl. She would fill it out in oil pastels later, reds, deep yellows, all that glow and energy, power and noise. Sometime, if she got to know him better, she’d do a quiet portrait, just his interesting face, in ink.