Anna From Away

by D. R. MacDonald

  “That what I think it is?” Red Murdock said, placing the brick on the table.

  “It’s what the Mounties asked us to watch for, Murdock. It’s worth some money all right.” She untangled a long cola, sticky with resin, and put it to his nose like a flower. “Marijuana. Pot, grass, weed, boo, tea. Wacky tobacky.”

  “You know about this stuff then?”

  “Part of my era, Murdock. College days, and after. It’s what we had fun on. Like liquor for you, I suppose.”

  He sniffed it. “What’s it do?”

  “I guess it depends. It can make you feel better than you might otherwise. High, euphoric. Some people overdo it, like they do with booze, with anything. But that’s always the way, isn’t it? It’s much kinder to your mind than liquor, I can tell you that. It takes me out of déjà vu.”

  “It won’t be kind if they catch you.”

  “Who would catch me in my house? The Royal Canadian Mounted Police?”

  “I couldn’t say anyone would. But you might’ve been seen, hauling her home.”

  “Unlikely, don’t you think? Late in the day, after a big storm? The shore was deserted, like it usually is. I didn’t notice anyone up or down the beach.”

  Murdock closed his pocket knife and sat down slowly. “Anyone can be seen there from a long way off.”

  “Are you trying to frighten me?”

  “No need to be frightened, I think. Just something you should know.”

  Anna poked the colas into the packet, folded it shut, pushed it into the bale, as if that would take them both two steps back.

  “Well, there was a man on my beach this morning,” she said, casually. “Looking toward the house, at me. I thought, what would he want, staring so long?”

  “How can you be sure his eyes were on you?”

  “I guess I’m not sure. But I wondered what brought him here, today.”

  “Hard to tell, Anna. Sometimes people come from a long way to walk the shore. Could be anybody. Maybe the Mounties’ll give you a medal when you turn this in.”

  “You think so?”

  “Would get it out of your life anyway. Mine too.” He smiled.

  “It’s not really in yours, is it, Murdock? It needn’t be. I won’t tell anyone you sniffed some marijuana.”

  “But I know about it. I know you. So I’d be concerned, wouldn’t I?”

  Out Anna’s window green onions hung in a bunch from the porch post, beating in the wind. He’d brought her a small basket of beach peas he’d picked from the shore. Her pickling cucumbers were starting. There was an outdated Globe and Mail on the daybed, a Saturday edition she’d been nursing.

  “Suppose I didn’t,” she said. “Suppose I held on to it, hid it away.”

  “My Lord, that’s a whack of drugs you’re looking at, girl. What do you mean to do with it?”

  “I don’t know, Murdock, exactly. To be honest with you.” After the day Livingstone had come by, perhaps into her morning walks, into the routine of cooking and tending to herself, studying moods of sky and sea and self, even into the reading and drawing, there had crept a taste of boredom she was afraid of because it seemed wrong, so against what she valued here, the work she had done. The old house and its wild sea fields, the small discoveries, the lovely yellow-red irises that suddenly bloomed below the kitchen window where their bladed leaves had been lost in grass, the twisted apple trees leafing out, the black fox that strolled past her back steps as casually as a neighbourhood dog, a dead rabbit in its muzzle. But there it was, sometimes, a hint of ennui, her staring off at a blank rainy ocean, a book as limp in her hands as the rabbit in the fox’s mouth. Did she really miss flea markets, art films, concerts on campus, small parties with old friends with whom she could get pleasantly loose and gabby and high, openings at Melissa’s gallery?

  “You don’t want them to think you were after selling it,” Red Murdock said solemnly. “They’d hang you for that.”

  “Oh, no, not sell it, never. But surely they wouldn’t hang me, Murdock, just for finding it? Livingstone says sentences are ridiculously light here.”

  “You wouldn’t look good in jail, Anna, I don’t care what Livingstone says. You didn’t tell him, did you?”

  “About this? I barely know him, I’ve only seen him once since …”

  She took a swallow from the wine she’d poured before Murdock arrived. His attitude made her stubborn, and she could not explain herself to him. “Look, Murdock, it just … washed up. I didn’t order it, I happened upon it.”

  “But here it is. In your kitchen.”

  “Like a fugitive, isn’t it? I wonder where it came from. Did the boat sink? Did they have to toss it overboard? It’s had a long journey, maybe from South America, the West Coast, California. How did it end up here? Don’t you want to know the story?”

  “I think I’ve heard it before. It was liquor then.” Red Murdock opened the back door, stared out at ocean light the colour of slate.

  “The storm brought you a bale of dope, me a boat,” he said.

  “A boat? You’re safer with that gift, I guess. Not a police matter, is it.”

  “She got blown to my shore and I salvaged her out,” he said.

  “Well, there you are, Murdock. Salvage. If not our beaches, someone else’s.”

  “Suppose them who owns that come looking for it?” he said.

  “How would they know?”

  “People like that know more than you think.” He closed the door.

  “I guess I’d have to call on you, then. Murdock to the rescue. Or Dudley Do-Right. Sorry. I’m joking.”

  He turned to her. “Listen, put it away somewhere for the night, eh? God, you can’t leave it out like this.”

  She had an authority now, of some kind: she could act or not act, say no or yes and there would be definite consequences. She knew things about what was in that bale that Murdock did not. And now it was hers. “Okay. Give me a hand.”

  He followed her upstairs to the spare bedroom, bearing the bale in his arms. Anna knelt inside the closet, yanking clothes from the deep, camphorous trunk, heaping behind her a dark wool suit, trousers, shirts, a blanket. She beckoned to him. “Here,” she said. “This is perfect.”

  “No such thing.” He dropped the bale inside with a disapproving grunt and stepped away. Anna covered it with clothing, shut the lid, the closet door. They stood awkwardly in the waning light.

  “The bedrooms are small,” she said.

  “We only slept in them. Mostly.”

  “Me too. It’s warm up here. Mostly.”

  “You sit in that chair?” Red Murdock said. The old varnish of the rocker was nearly black in the evening light. Anna raised the window slightly, a breeze quickly cool on her skin. Her eyes went to that spot on the shore where she’d seen the man: no one.

  “I like to look out from it,” she said.

  He tugged at the bed’s thin coverlet. Under it, Anna knew, was a hard, bare mattress. She’d lain on it occasionally, arms at her sides, staring up at the stained ceiling like a penitent. This was her thinking room sometimes, spare and unforgiving.

  “What do you look at?” he said.

  “Whatever’s out there,” she said. “You know what’s out there. I don’t.”

  “I used to. I’m not so sure anymore.”

  “Has the view changed that much?”

  “Oh, Lord.” He touched the rocker, set it creaking softly, then stopped it. “Before the bridge went up, people’d row across sometimes, if it wasn’t too rough, they didn’t always take the ferry. There was this young fella here liked to do it, he’d skip the ferry if he could. Kept a small boat at the shore there. He took her back and forth, he had work in the summer on the other side, a farm. His uncle was old, you see, confined to this house, and anxious about him, and so he’d watch for him late every afternoon, from that chair, until the nephew was in sight, rowing home. One day the young fella, a few drinks in him and fed up with his uncle always at the window like an old woman
, he laid down in his boat when it got near where the uncle could see it. Hid himself in the bottom and let the boat drift like, so his uncle’d think he’d drowned. But the man was so struck by the empty boat his heart just quit, gave out, right here. Died in that rocker, right there by the window.”

  “That was cruel,” Anna said.

  “He didn’t mean it. You don’t think when you’re young.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  She followed him out, embarrassed when he glanced into her bedroom with its unruly bed and tossed clothing. She hadn’t slept well and left it turned out on this particular morning.

  “You can call me up if you like,” he said at the door. “If you need any more advice you don’t want to hear.”

  “I don’t want to make trouble for you, Murdock.”

  “It’s your own trouble I’m thinking of.”

  “It’s just you and me,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

  “For now, girl. For now.”

  Your dad ran rum, didn’t he, Red Murdock? Willard said, slicing a scone.

  You know he did.

  He was a fine man, we everybody liked him, Donald John said, a terrible good neighbour. Shoed many a horse for my dad.

  He had a boat in the rum for a while, yes, Murdock said. Lots of men did in the hard times. But no one ever drew a gun, not the runners or the Mounties. That’s what he told me. Oh, it was quite a game, boy, a lot of fun in it, he said.

  I don’t see the fun, the way the world is today, with dope and heroin and all the killing, Willard said.

  Rum-running was not like that, not here, Red Murdock said. Respectable men, trying to get by. Nobody got shot up. There wasn’t any hatred between them, the government men and the runners.

  Seems all hatred now, what I hear of it, Molly said.

  Wendell Northcutt was a Mountie then. He hated searching homes, the worst part of it, turning things inside out, looking for floor hides. I had no stomach for it, Donald John, he said to me, I knew those people.

  They never found one jug of my dad’s. It wasn’t any popskull either.

  That don’t make it legal, Willard said, dipping jam.

  You and your legal. Everything comes down to that, is it?

  I’m just saying.

  Brought a little cash in damned hard times. An awful lot of worry to it, and hard work. Nobody here got rich.

  Who’s getting rich now? Nobody we care about, Donald John said.

  People from away, Molly said.

  I wouldn’t bet on it, not all of them are from away, Murdock said.

  XXI.

  IN THE REAR OF HIS WORK SHED Red Murdock planed a board he’d cut for the thwart. The skiff, keel down on sawhorses, took up too much space, he ought to finish it or move it outside. Shavings, releasing a scent of spruce, curled out of the plane and dropped like hair to the floor. He’d lost heart to work on it. As soon as he’d seen the skiff the day after that hard squall, laden with water, near to drowning in the swells, he’d felt his uncle’s panic, what the sight of an empty, drifting boat must have done to him all that long time ago, trapped in a rocking chair. The clarity had stunned Murdock for a step or two, as it often did now, and then he’d calmed himself and thought, I will get this boat, I will fix it and row it.

  He’d waded into the surf still washing high and whirled a small grappling hook over its gunnel, hauling it near enough to grab and drag clear. He’d tipped the water out, turned it keel up on the rocks: she’d taken a knocking, but not a bad boat. No oars or nothing. A busted thwart, a spread plank. Sound, on the whole. Some refastening, caulking, a coat of good paint. Must’ve got away from somebody in the storm. He hadn’t seen a boat like it around here since he’d given up his own. Trim it up, see how she’d go, why not. Rosaire’s name on the gunnels, the stern. He’d promised her one, that he’d teach her to row. You could row here safe enough, if you watched the weather, if you knew the tricks of it, the water itself, he told her.

  Someone hadn’t known, though. And maybe it had carried a bit of cargo. For MacDermid’s Cove.

  But he was not in the mood to work wood this morning, his or anyone else’s. Five cigarettes a day he’d been keeping himself to since he’d put aside his pipe, for the cost and because he was tired of the packets’ bold warnings about strokes and heart disease and death, thank God he had his granny’s arteries. Now he was smoking one after the other, as he had after Rosaire died. He was trying to hold on to the Anna he knew before yesterday, and while he worked at his tool bench, he almost could. But what had he known of her anyway? Some days she seemed settled in, like she had no future but here, just the way she was living now. Then that damned bale tumbled out of the sea.

  Murdock lit another Export, grinding the match out carefully into the earthen floor. He was not in a hurry, nothing in his life could rush him now. But any pause today seemed to bring Anna’s kitchen to mind, the dull knife sawing the tape, the stuff inside packed like rough tobacco. Jesus, it was over there in the old house right now. He knew how polite a Mountie could be just before he collared you. Predicted rain had not come but the air was sticky, windless. Out the double doors of the shed, flung wide, the sea was pressed flat by the grey weight of the sky.

  He unvised the board and sighted along its edge toward the open door. He’d seen a fibreglass boat with a red hull this morning. No insignia but he was sure it was the Mounties. They wouldn’t chase much down with that rig if the weather got dirty, only a big outboard. Just an every-now-and-then patrol. Still.

  He’d felt angry with Anna: he didn’t want to be pushed and pulled, or tangled in a woman’s affairs, not after Rosaire. It bothered him that she wouldn’t get rid of the stuff quick, that it was there in his grandmother’s house, tucked away in his mother’s trunk. It was help she asked for, not advice.

  If she were not pretty, if she were small or mean or a bad neighbour, would he turn her in? Probably not. He couldn’t rear up like a minister and tell the woman what to do. She didn’t expect that of him besides, she wouldn’t have had him cut open the bale. He was not high-minded about this drug business, had not paid it much notice except when it was in the news, its lurid causes and effects, but then the local rumours began, people at Sandy Morrison’s old house near the wharf, cars in and out a lot late at night, party noise, tires tearing gravel. Willard going nuts, about them, about his dog, still. But the drugs had seemed to come at them here from away, and that was part of the problem: tied into movies and the TV, and those caught up in it didn’t care anymore about their own people, they answered to criminals way off somewhere. It made local men act differently than they might have once. Bootlegging liquor, the profit was here in their own hands, or in later years they bought booze at the Liquor Commission and resold it for double to thirsty men caught short on a Saturday night or Sunday. It all stayed here, the money, such as it was, and nobody pulled guns, they didn’t act like gangsters. God, in the old days, men were working all the time, the money was terrible but they worked like hell. If a man was not working, there was a dangerous hole to fill. But the hard fellas were hard differently now, with the drugs sometimes they just didn’t give a damn about anyone’s life. The stakes went beyond your name, who you were and who you knew, what family you belonged to. But here in what was left of Cape Seal? Hard to imagine what they called a Drug Problem. Even so, he had to wonder. Anna’s bundle didn’t drop out of the sky.Murdock had seen drunkenness all his life, after all, seen it good and seen it crazy, been whacked out himself at times, woken up face down in dirt. But he’d sung with it too, danced under it, drawn out some good talk he would never hear again. It was just what you knew, a man in the country, you got half cut and you let whatever happened happen. But this other stuff they lit up, sniffed up, put into pills, he couldn’t see any good in it.

  Before last night, except for a fella he’d traded moonshine to offering him a smoke of marijuana he declined, saying, Whatever it does I’m too old for it, he had never seen drugs. Now he’d seen it in her hands
, smelled it, heard her talk about it. Upstairs now, under his uncle’s moth-holed suit, shiny in the knees and elbows. That bed she slept in he had slept in many times. Her bare feet padded over the same floor. The white iron bedstead looked more frail than he remembered.

  Seeing her suddenly on the shore on a warm afternoon, stepping slowly from rock to rock, searching for objects—that could lift him up, some days.… He had come to like that, having Anna not far away. Now it was like a strange man had moved in with her and it gave him a knotted feeling in his gut. Had Livingstone, damn him, gotten to her somehow?

  Her naked in that drawing drifted into his mind more than once, he had to admit. Not just that it was clearly her, unclothed, but that she had done it there in that room where his grandmother used to sit, she had stood there undressed in the window light long enough to make that picture of herself. In an ordinary day. What did she get from such a likeness? A drawing was always for somebody else, wasn’t it? Maybe not. He wondered, as he sometimes had with Rosaire, what it would be like if he could, for even a few moments, see things exactly the way she did, in the atmosphere of her own mind, what brought and kept her here, made her what she was.He was disgusted that he had tightened up in front of her, that the whole affair had shaken him some. He had no cause to be righteous about what these drugs did or why they were liked so, he knew that. Alcohol was not soda pop, if you overdid it you paid a price, long-term or temporary—look at poor Connie, for God’s sake—and the word “high” meant the same thing everywhere, it didn’t matter what got you up there, you were glad for it, whatever worked would do. He understood that, that didn’t trouble him. But with booze, everybody seemed to know the rules. Who was going to die for that? Maybe the spaces it had to fill were bigger than they used to be.