“They can wait. Southeast,” he said. “Tide’s on the ebb, it’s rough at the point.”
“White water there, I can see it.” The sun had disappeared, the sky was darkening.
“Yeah, she’s a little dirty out there. We spent the night over Englishtown, tied up to the wharf, me and Billy and fellas you don’t know. Took a beating bucking out of that bay, five-foot swells when we hit the open water.”
“Fishing?”
“We none of us fish. Bores the shit out of me. Billy got seasick. We picked up a skiff in North Sydney, towed her back here.”
“What’s that, your lifeboat?”
He smiled wearily. “You could say that, Anna, and not be lying.”
They had their tea as if they had never danced in a hot embrace, or climbed her stairs together. But her small talk—Breagh’s clothing shop, the terrible rains, her plans for flowers in the ground—soon washed up against Livingstone’s reticence and she stopped talking. He stirred more sugar into his tea, the spoon clattering in the quiet kitchen.
“I meant to stop around, Anna,” he said. “Been so goddamn busy.”
She had not wanted that business to open up, she’d hoped to get him smoothly out the door without a word of it. Yet it was on her mind too, where an apology might take them, the measure of his sincerity. Would she learn anything new? What particulars of that night was he still remembering? Were they like her own? Probably not.
“Busy with what?” she said.
“A little enterprise in the works.… Performing some, a gig or two here and there.”
“I never expected you anyway, Livingstone. And there was Breagh to consider, wasn’t there?”
“Do you keep secrets, Anna?”
“If I make them.”
“Say, if somebody was to ask, was Livingstone Campbell around today, could you answer, yeah, after dark for a couple hours, say between nine and eleven or so? Would you do that?”
“It depends why you’re asking, Livingstone.”
“Can’t tell you. Not now anyway. You want some weed?” He took a rolled baggie from an inside pocket and held it up. “Free. I owe you.”
“No, Livingstone. You don’t owe me anything. What do you owe Breagh?”
“Breagh.” He stared into his tea as if weighing her name. “Drives me nuts sometimes. She’s pretty as hell, but a big distraction.”
“From what?”
“My music. Projects.”
“None of your music comes from distractions?”
“Some of it, I suppose. Yeah.”
“I don’t see what you’re complaining about.”
“She gets in moods, she wants to be on the move somewhere, our Breagh. I don’t know what she wants.”
“Ordinary things, I suppose. Attention. Love.”
“Too much attention. She does what she likes.”
“Like you, you mean. You left your sweater here,” she said, instantly sorry: it touched on everything.
“That all I left?”
“Yes. It is.”
He pulled out a cigarette, waved the packet at her, but she said no, go ahead. She watched him wince into the match, inhale deeply. His dark eyes were bloodshot, his forehead scored with fine lines she’d never noticed. “I haven’t forgotten that night in April, Anna, you and me. I didn’t forget it.”
“Hard to believe that.”
“I liked you in that dress. The wine-coloured one. A knockout.”
“It isn’t mine.”
“Oh, I think it is. I like you, Anna, you know.”
“Thank you, Livingstone. That’s comforting. And I like you,” she said.
“Oh?” He gave her a tired grin. “Maybe I should leave. You’re jerking my chain.”
“I didn’t know you had a chain, Livingstone. Finish your tea. I have biscuits. Made them myself.”
“I’ll take one with me. That’s all I’m likely to get here anyway, this afternoon.”
“Likely,” she said. That was not what she wanted to say, but she had to play out the dialogue she’d begun.
He leaned toward her on his elbows. “You ever see a Mountie boat out there? In the channel?”
“A police boat? I don’t even know what one looks like.”
“Doesn’t say RCMP on it. Just an outboard boat, red. Little cabin. You might not notice it.”
“There’s not much I don’t notice, if I’m looking.”
“How about today, this afternoon?”
“Just fishing boats.”
“Breagh said she saw them out there when she was home a few days ago. I don’t always trust what she sees.”
“Nothing wrong with those beautiful eyes, Livingstone. She wouldn’t make it up.”
“They patrol here every once in a while, that’s all.”
“That worries you?”
“I got busted myself, good while back.”
“On the water?”
“No, no. Mainland. Down in Truro. After a show.”
“Cost you some time, did it?”
“Jail? You’re in Canada now, girl. You can do some nasty things here before you get serious prison time, and even then it isn’t much for what you did. Look, we’re just setting a couple of bootleg traps out there, Billy and me. You had lobster yet?”
“A couple.”
“We’ll bring you a good hefty one.”
“An illegal lobster.”
“Tastes the same, Anna.”
“Where’s your boat?”
“Off MacDermid’s Cove, up there. Anchored. We bought the skiff to row back and forth. Billy’s not too hot on the oars yet, but he’s got a good back on him. We have life jackets.”
Outside, trees were bending in the shore woods, crowns swaying, clouds crowding above the water. At the point, where the channel narrowed to half a mile, the ebbing currents roiled white against the wind.
“You aren’t setting traps in this, I hope,” she said.
“After dark, yeah. Weather’s building but slow, we’ll squeeze it in. If you see lights out there, might be us.”
“Might not, too, is what you’re saying.”
“You’re close to the water here.”
“Yes?”
“If you should see a boat like that this afternoon, red, put the glasses on it. That’s all I’m asking. If Mounties are nosing around. Stick a rag or a hanky or something on your mailbox flag. Billy’ll drive by.”
“Actually, Livingstone, the RCMP wants all of us along here to watch out for drug smugglers, suspicious activity. You probably heard about that.”
“What do you mean?” His voice went thin and hard. “You being funny?”
“I’m just telling you what they told us. Out in your boat, you might …”
“I wouldn’t tell them a damn thing. And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t either.”
“You’ve been up all night.”
“Jesus, is it that plain?” he said angrily. “So what?” He got up and snatched his cigarettes from the table, mashed down his black brimmed hat. She would have had him stay longer, just for their give-and-take that made the day different, tense, anxious. Were it evening instead of morning, were they a little way along a certain path she missed, she might have said, Nap there on the daybed if you like. But it was afternoon, there was no background music, just themselves, mutually opaque. They’d had not so much as a drink, and Livingstone was annoyed with her and she was not sure exactly why, what, today, pale with sleeplessness, he had expected of her, or she of him. He stood at the door window and checked his wristwatch.
“I’ll crash up at Breagh’s,” he said. “She and Lorna still up at the shop, are they?”
Anna nodded. “Billy too?”
“What’s the difference? A nap and we’ll be out of there.”
“I guess you’re seamen now.”
“We’re getting there.”
Anna followed him out to a mud-spattered car, salt-stained and scabbed with rust, Billy at the wheel grinning.
&n
bsp; “Hey, Anna,” he said.
“Where’s your resplendent pickup, Billy?”
“My what? Oh. Not far.” A man sat behind him, his face obscured under the long bill of a ball cap, and next to him, looking glum, was Connie in his black coat. He raised a hand to her like he did when she drove by him, then turned his face away.
She held her hair against the wind, thanked Livingstone for stopping by, but he halted and looked sharply at her before he got into the passenger side.
“You’re just a visitor here, Anna. Don’t forget that.”
“I can’t,” she said. “You keep reminding me.”
“Hang on to that sweater. I’ll be back for it.”
Billy waved amiably as he pulled away, the car bouncing on bad shocks up the driveway, out of sight through the trees.
How had she handled him? Not exactly the way she’d intended—to be cold, give him nothing, cut him, at least. But he had other things on his mind besides her. Just a visitor. And she was not a cold person, that didn’t come to her naturally, even Chet told her, Anna, you were never cold, that has nothing to do with what’s happening between me and Alicia. Well, she had kept a distance at least, salvaged some pride. That was better, had to be, him still entangled with Breagh in whatever way, and Anna didn’t want any of that for herself, whatever Breagh still had with him. Maybe one more evening alone with him sometime would have been nice. Was that terrible, to want that? One night? Risks, of course. Murdock could find out, it might get around to him. Where would that leave her in his eyes? Did the men in that car know what she was doing with Livingstone’s sweater? How much did he care about her anyway? Just sex. Why not—as long as it was mutually enjoyable, singular, private, discreet, not a pale imitation of something else. But what did she know about him? Even less than she had, it seemed. One intimate night, little more. He wasn’t fishing lobster, for her or anyone else. Sorry, Livingstone. No rags on the mailbox.
She stayed outside in the swirling, electrical air, the wind swept coolly through her clothing. She braced herself in it at the top of the path. She had taken to daily swims, unless it was storming, and now clouds blackened over the sea, whites in them like the wild, rolling eyes of horses, charged, a little mad. Tiny waves moved over the pond like echoes, its gulls were gone. The shore stones would be restless, shifting under foam. She felt tremendously alive, anonymous, given over to this weather growing huge, until stinging rain drove her indoors.
THAT NIGHT the tail of a hurricane swept through, she woke in her bed to slashing, window-rattling rain. Shingles flapped away like wings. She stiffened at times under the storm’s eerie, cooling wind, wailing through the trees, not from the sound itself but the force it was announcing, a breadth of ocean so suddenly near, arriving from far away, hurling its grey and breaking weight against the land. She imagined, in the smothering dark, waves swelling from her shore, an angry spume surging over the bank and up her hill.
The storm’s thrilling racket did not unnerve her as it might have once, gasps of lightning lighting her room, sounds from old movies, from country-house terror in the rain—groaning woodwork, flailing curtains, moans in the eaves: her fear lay in her isolation, lightning-lit. She might even have turned it into fun were someone sharing it, a warm and humorous man perhaps, lying against her. At its height, she felt her way to the kitchen and picked up the telephone, just to hear that homely, levelling tone in the receiver, nothing more. But the line was only a loud silence in the windy noise. She swept a flashlight over the room, its beam glared in the rain-smeared windows. Who would she have called anyway? Breagh? Red Murdock? She didn’t need her hand held, but she’d have liked his voice. Chet? About what? That was all over. She was just picking at pieces that no longer fit. What she was in the middle of, he could never understand. Did she?
How would you like to feel? Donald John said. He was holding his glass of rum up to the big window light, sighting through the dark brown liquor.
Like a lighthouse keeper, Molly said.
Bird Island?
St. Paul ‘s.
You’re way out there, all right, girl. On St. Paul ‘s.
It’s an automatic light now. I meant the old days.
Billy Budge was a kid there. They were on their own, boy, the whole family. Burst your appendix out there, Jesus.
The little girl, they had to take her off there with a storm on, wind to kill you, and no shelter.
Oh, those rocks. St Paul’s is just bare bold cliff, the water right into the face. It’s always angry.
Hard but happy life, in some ways.
Oh, the little boy there, he had kind of a nervous breakdown, you know? They didn’t call it that but that’s what it was.
You never know what an island like that will put to you. Nothing but ocean all around you, and so near.
Some days you can forget it but not every day, every night. Surf crashing. Foghorn going. That light would tear through your dreams.
XIX.
THE PADLOCK ON THE ROAD GATE looked secure until Red Murdock yanked it. The shackle slipped free and dangled open from the thick chain. A corner of the brass had been dented by a hammer strike, it looked like. Beyond the gate, the soft treadway, scored with tire tracks, curved into the woods.
He drove slowly through the trees that all but hid the old house now. So much forest, silence, it had pushed out the former life here. The shutters he’d made were still in place and the grey of the spruce shingles showed through what was left of the white paint. He’d kept the roof patched but it would need a new one soon. He left his truck idling while he checked the doors. Nothing forced, he’d put in new deadbolts after a break-in that cost Donny a few family heirlooms, but they shouldn’t have been left there anyway, not in a house now so hard to see from the road. Robbie and Rowena would be saddened at that, God love them, to see their home blinded by forest, good people, they’d do anything for you, even if they did boil the same teabags over and over and not light a lamp until the room went dark. Robbie over ninety and still hauling eelgrass from the beach with his horse and cart. Worked right up to his death, a pipe in his mouth all day long till he got so he couldn’t pull it anymore and he’d ask Rowena to light it and blow the smoke in his face. He’d have killed for tobacco, old Robbie, he’d have smoked in his sleep. And sleep he did when the rum-runners were here, Murdock’s dad included, Robbie had looked the other way when a boat slipped into his cove after dark, and the crew made sure a case of liquor found its way to his barn.
Some vehicle had come into the weeds and poplar saplings behind the house, flattening them, then continued toward the cove. Murdock followed in his truck, the late sun filtered through the closely packed trees, until he emerged into a small, grassy, treeless field. Near the short path that dropped quickly to the shore, the turf had tire gouges deep enough to hold water from a recent rain. Had to be a truck, a van or pickup, and it got good and stuck here, rim-deep before they freed it, the site congested with the busy slide of boots where they had slipped and strained pushing it out. Mud-smeared pieces of board had given purchase. Scavenged from the barn ruins and scorched with rubber burn, they lay where flung. Up above ran the border of his own field: a lip of turf and wind-beaten spruce along the cliff edge, the clay face studded with rocks waiting to work loose in storm and surf. At the foot some were scattered among boulders still carrying wet clay from the hard rain a few days ago. Murdock couldn’t have heard much from the house, if anything, not when a wind like that was on, and he slept on the west side anyway, deeply.
A night operation, whatever it was, but after several tides anything left behind had been cleansed from the rocks and sand. Not a party. No burned-out bonfire or litter, apart from cigarette butts in the grass. But there’d been action nevertheless, frantic maybe, at some point. They’d wanted to get in here, and they’d wanted like hell to get back out.
Would they return? He couldn’t think why, not after miring themselves like this, and there was more heavy weather working its way up th
e coast. But he would make that gate a tougher barrier, more chain, heavier padlocks. If they came here for a good time, they could just walk in, he might never know or care, but these folks were not revellers. He couldn’t keep a vigil up, he had a trestle table to finish and bookshelves for a doctor, that damned pretentious desk for Livingstone. And now that swamped skiff he’d salvaged just off his beach. He was keen to make her seaworthy.
But he’d ask Donald John and Molly to keep an eye on the road once in a while, if they’d leave their picture window for a bit, and Willard was always watching of course, suspicious of everything. But none of them, you could be sure, would be up late. Maybe Connie? No telling what end of the road he’d be on at night or what shape he’d be in. Even so, he knew what went on here and who was in it, didn’t he?
Murdock plucked out of the mud a cheap yellow flashlight. Click. Batteries dead. Tossed. He was too late anyway. That’s the way it was now—things passed and you didn’t notice, you didn’t see them because memories were always coming at you clear, strong, seizing your attention. Like his father’s suitcase that he had called a grip. Why? Good God, he could feel its pebbled hide, could see it lying open on the bed, Dad carefully layering in his unpressed clothes, he didn’t have many and he was going to the hospital in Halifax for an operation he never came back from. You fold a shirt like this, Murdock, he said, crossing the arms into an X like a knight’s on a tombstone, your mother showed me once, and then years later Murdock himself laying Rosaire’s clothing into her red luggage, pressing a blouse of hers to his face for a few seconds of her scent.
IN SWIMSUIT and sandals, a white canvas hat, Anna made her way along the high tide line where rocks had diked against the deep strip of sea oats, green as hay. Clumps of sand grass whispered like taffeta. The oats ran to the higher, darker bulrushes, vigorous as a cornfield now, their new tufts coppery, iridescent, yielding gradually to the green, velvety catkins forming beneath them. She broke one off to draw at home. A red dragonfly chased a frantic moth, its jerky, evasive flight no match for the smooth bull’s-eye strike of the dragonfly—moth in mouth. Just under the pond’s surface lurked a thick feathery plant whose touch she would not care for. A bleached tree trunk was pushed into the cattails like the keel of a boat. Beach pea was in bloom at the edge of the grasses, and a red-winged blackbird hovered over the rushes before perching on the tip of a reed, trilling its warning.
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