Anna From Away

by D. R. MacDonald

  The new thwart fit snug and he fastened it with brass screws. This boat had good lines, she would sit in the water sweetly. A smuggler’s boat, he’d bet money on it, you could haul three or four of those bales in her, and they’d probably got who knew how many ashore before she swamped. They might have lost more than one over the side, washed ashore maybe other places along these waters, people puzzling over them, then wrestling with what they’d found. Some would turn it in, some wouldn’t, if they knew there was money to be had. Hard to blame them, here cash had always been scarce. Nevertheless, he’d never know for sure. You couldn’t connect any of this to MacDermid’s, not this boat either, nothing remained there but what had always been. Maybe just as well for Anna Starling.

  Red Murdock flicked his cigarette outside and turned the boat over to start scraping the hull. He’d been about to cast the boat back out to sea, shove it off to sink somewhere. But here it was, he would make it good anyway, respectable, paint it a fresh clean white. Trim the gunnels in blue. Blue was Rosaire’s colour, blue was her eyes. He said her name aloud and all of her appeal seemed to rush his heart, staggering him for a moment, so deeply did he want her.

  ANNA HEARD SWIMMERS, they seemed further off than the shallow cove behind the point. Their voices and play were comforting, protective. She wouldn’t swim today. She sat down on a large, flat stone at the water’s edge.

  The tide had left kelp, cinnamon and dark yellow, like bands of thick, shed skin. Swells, faint shadows on a metallic sea, broke softly and fell back, crackling through the shoreline gravel, small, polite versions of the waves of last week. Civility would do. Calm. The slow rustle and slide of stone.

  There was the red boat again, the one she’d noticed yesterday, meandering along the channel, stopping here and there. They weren’t fishing, the two men, and they didn’t seem to be heading in or out, but they did cast a heavy line, pull something up, toss it back. Her binoculars were in the kitchen but she thought that underneath their orange life jackets she could see khaki, and she had never noticed a fisherman here in a life jacket. The red boat rose and fell lazily, like the afternoon, as if the boat were merely part of its motion, a daub of colour against the bluffs of Black Rock Head toward which it now turned, cutting a wake.

  Would Livingstone want to know about it? Might be a Mountie boat. Too late? Too bad. She would never tell him, not anything, even if she knew where he was. If that dirty white boat was his, it was nowhere in these waters today.

  She fished in her jacket for the cigarettes Red Murdock forgot the other night, two of which she had smoked. She lit a third, certain she wouldn’t crave them again. There was no reason to suppose any link between that boat and herself, between what they might be searching for and what she’d hidden in her house. Had they suspected, they would be on her shore right now, wouldn’t they? But they never even looked her way. She turned the cigarette packet over in her hand, read the stark white-on-black warnings, English one side, French the other, “strokes” and “heart disease,” then ”des maladies du coeur.“ Ailments of the heart. No wonder she’d quit.

  The red boat was now just that, someone fishing in the distance perhaps or cruising around. The sun had turned the water blue and friendly. Her shoulders were warmed, her hair. Red Murdock hadn’t been around since they stuffed the bale into that heavy old trunk with “S. MacL.” stencilled on it. Was he wary of her now, afraid to be involved? The sea looked benign, everything—water, cliffs, the low table of Bird Island. Flat calm, levelled. Maybe she was in this alone.

  Anna closed the card to Chet without adding another line. She could not sustain a greeting card voice, the neutral cheeriness she’d opened it with. Too tense, restless. She didn’t know what she wanted to write to anyone at home, on the back of a pictorial scene, the cliffs of Cap Rouge, up the west coast where she would love to run off to for an afternoon, if she did not have something at home that begged for her attention.

  Behind her, the sand dissolved into the golden summer grass of the point, shivering with wind. In it pieces of antlered driftwood crouched, prehistoric, they startled her sometimes, skeletal, hunkered there like crazy animals. Driftwood could fool you—a duck at the edge of the pond? A heron frozen in the shallows? Some unknown creature poised in the sea oats? She’d done many sketches of them. Not today.

  There was her home above the pond, up the small hill, the mountain rising beyond it in a faint, cool haze. She felt differently about it from here: as if she were taking in a piece of the landscape, a faded red house with a steep-pitched roof, one of its white shutters torn away in the storm. Who lives there? she might ask, and what does she do? A woman from away, or a certain man on the beach, might answer, She is hiding a few thousand dollars’ worth of marijuana somewhere in her house.

  Long swells that Murdock called rollers had arisen, as if some great vessel had passed unseen behind the horizon, the waves spread higher and louder through the stones. Surf had roamed high, scattering stone and wood far back into the rough sand, joining old trees and limbs and trunks, as far as the pond where, bone bare, they tangled in the iron-tinted water. She’d thought an afternoon like this could only ease her mind, weather she loved.

  Not quite. She shaded her eyes toward the old wharf a quarter-mile west, just visible jutting out into the strait. The other night she’d heard whooping at a bonfire on the shore below. Kids, teenagers? Faces firelit, moving in and out of the flickering light. Willard’s enemies? Hers? They’ve got the devil in them, Willard had said. But she’d seen no stranger on her shore even though she had often looked for one.

  ANNA OPENED the closet trunk and teased out a single flower top, like lifting jewellery from a treasure chest, then sealed the bale up again. With the curtains drawn, amused that she could still do it so deftly, she slowly rolled a joint in a small square of tracing paper, twisting it tight in her fingers. She lit it with a kitchen match she struck on the bed frame. Sweet weed, despite the harsh paper, as sweet to the taste as the point’s grass to the eye. Primo. Two deep hits and she tamped it out in a Mason jar lid, spread the curtains wide and sat in the rocker, rocking gently, lulled, smiling. Something pleasantly illicit about being indoors like this on a lovely afternoon. Like sex with hot sun at the window. She should get back into the dog drawing while she had this vision, this piercing, intense recall.Red Murdock’s cat crossed the field below, freezing suddenly as a goldfinch shot from a thistle bud, then resumed its deceptively casual stroll, its grey fur soon diffused in the weeds. That cat would never come to her, she tried to entice it with tidbits in her most coaxing voice, but it would watch her from a distance calmly, unafraid, something or someone else on its mind. She should get a cat, she’d love the company, a warm bundle of fur in her lap. But then, how long was she to remain here? Was that a question that was opening, or closing?

  She fixed her eyes on a sailboat cutting past the point, heeled over in the same wind lifting her curtains, pulling in the yells of children at the swimming beach, their exuberance remembered from her childhood, though she played only on the cold edges of the Pacific. Languid in the warm room, she closed her eyes. Stony grass, oh, yes. The Blue-Eyed Elf was upon her, denizen of her own tales, dancing in her mind. Maybe Red Murdock had a version of that sprite, out of some excess of his youth, underneath his reticence. But it wouldn’t be old Blue-Eyes, those ice-blue marbles under his brow, helping her juggle her own, soaring, nostalgic high, stitching past into present. No sense to the sequence of memories, one tumbled into the next, yet each one made crystalline sense, sheer sensuous clarity its own truth, it could put her there or here in a wink.

  Chet. What things had he spoken only to her, never to Alicia Snow? Maybe that his given name, Chester, he hated, it reminded him of a character out of a cartoon or a comedy, a sidekick, a bumpkin? In college he insisted he be called Chet because there his boyhood no longer hung like a shirttail, he was free to clothe himself as he wished, to be hip. Chet had the musicians’ cachet—Chet Baker, Chet Atkins, it had th
at curt, plosive sound that was mildly aggressive and amiable at the same time, like Che or Chico, whereas Chester was more like a piece of furniture in a middle-class den. This he confessed to Anna after they fell in love. He told her he’d grown to fit the name anyway, so where was the harm, the phoniness?

  Pot brought him clearly into her mind, but not now with that old affection. She could easily conjure, perhaps too easily she now realized, embarrassing incidents that Chet dismissed with a laugh (I passed out in the Warners’ bedroom? I hope Brenda was in there!). But maybe that’s what saved him, what allowed him to accept his desires and actions, a kind of delusional irony she was not capable of. His sense of humour when he was drunk or stoned was always heavy with irony, often directed at her and which he barely remembered later on. When she put him down with a remark, he would reply, Touché, Ironista!

  Irony, so much a part of their intellectual era, hers and Chet’s, but when it infected a married life, it could become destructive, could absolve the ironist or the ironista of mutual involvement, all give and no take, a contest over who could slip in the last stab before bedtime. They had seen their good grad school friends Paula and Mitch take turns nicking each other with words, like razors, subtlety was not appreciated any longer, their tone with each other got heavier, even seething, Mitch could barely cross a room without an ironic comment. Then Paula had a fling with an older man, a painter and mutual friend whose attraction to her was intense and sexually refreshing, and when Mitch learned of it, he pulled from their walls one winter day the man’s bad paintings and tried to set them on fire in a broken-bricked barbecue in their overgrown yard. But he failed to get a good flame going, and failed too to recall that he had only recently ended a sexual affair himself, not out of morality or remorse but waning interest, a subject that Paula, before acting on her own feelings for the painter, had been tolerantly ironic about. She came home to Mitch standing there in the cold beside a heap of canvases, their scorched abstractions somehow more engaging now, his angry breath visible but looking himself merely weary, an empty matchbook in his hand. Paula didn’t say anything to him that February afternoon, she had no irony available. They split up the following year, loathing each other with a passion nearly equal to their former love, even the good times had been sullied, blackened, revised. Grounds for divorce—excessive irony, then a lack of it? Anna was glad at least that she and Chet, their ironic stances aside, had not descended into acidic war: he had laughed it off, Mitch’s indignant attack on the lover’s artwork, how the man’s penchant for melodrama obliterated his sense of justice, Come on, Mitch, if it was fair for you, it was fair for Paula.

  It was not irony that tugged at Anna now but a gnawing concern: how deeply did Murdock care that she had marijuana hidden in a bedroom closet? She wanted to keep the stash, but only for a while. As he’d said, for now. Now was what she was in. Just give it up, watch it float away? No. Not yet. She rocked faster.

  XXII.

  RED MURDOCK WAS GLAD to see Anna at his back door near dark, holding out his packet of cigarettes, one of which she was smoking. A moon the colour of buttermilk was low and large behind her, a sliver of cloud lidding it like an eye.

  “Peaceful, isn’t it?” she said. “Look.”

  In the window frame a green spider, big as a grape, was knitting up its web, trembling in the wind. He asked her if she would like a drink.

  “That hooch you said you make?”

  “Hooch?” She had never tasted his liquor anyway. “Women have liked it.”

  “Thanks, Murdock, it’s not what I need right now.” She turned toward him, smiling, a smile with shades to it. “Listen, I’ll have a drink of your stuff with you, if you’ll share some of mine with me.”

  “Yours?”

  Anna took from the pocket of her blouse a joint with a twirl on one end. Red Murdock nodded.

  “Ah,” he said. ”That stuff.” He sighed. Not the same as a drink of his liquor, not at all. They had, he and this woman, shared a few things these last months and shared them well. But she hadn’t mentioned the contraband in her closet and he hoped that somehow it was gone. Her dark eyes seemed to be sizing him up, and he did not want her to see him as old-fashioned, as just country. “Why?” he said.

  “Why do you drink, Murdock?”

  “Not for fun, not anymore.”

  “But it must give you something you like, you enjoy. Doesn’t it? And you like drinking with other people?”

  “Not so much now.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t mean you.”

  Anna lit the joint, held the smoke, breathed it out. “Don’t look at me as if I were shooting heroin, Murdock. This isn’t anything wild.”

  “I wouldn’t know just what it was.”

  “Here. I just want you to understand its appeal, why I might like it. You might like it.”

  “You go ahead yourself. I’ll get a bottle of mine from the basement.”

  “No, listen, I mean it. Don’t be silly now. You, and me.”

  “You don’t give a man much choice.” He accepted it, scowling as he puffed.

  “It’s not a cigar, Murdock,” she said. “Take it in gently and hold it a little.… There. That’s the way.”

  He told her he didn’t feel a thing, that an unfiltered Export did more than this, but down in the cellar his head suddenly went light and his feet wandered a bit before he set them carefully down. He studied the light bulb swaying at eye level and his mind seemed to sway as well, slowly, broadly, everything clear but demanding more attention than he would usually give it. He listened to a drop of water, a single distinct spat somewhere in the dark crawl space, and for a few moments it magnified into a leak but his sense told him no, it’s condensation from a water pipe or a little weeping around a joint, nothing for worry. He smiled, and then more widely. A little giddy. Guanach, his dad would say. How did her funny cigarette get that name? He started up the stairs but had to back down because he forgot the jar of liquor. Up we go. He couldn’t seem to quit grinning. His eyes burned a little, like he’d been on the water in the sun. He asked Anna if she would take his moonshine mixed with pop and she said sure.

  “Murdock, I thought you died in that basement.”

  “I’m old enough. I could’ve.”

  He poked noisily around the kitchen for a bottle of ginger ale until he could stop smiling. He had no idea if anything was amusing at all or just everything, but did not care so long as he didn’t look foolish. He measured out the drinks, held each one to the light, frowning like a chemist. It seemed important that all this be done exactly right, without rush, and he almost forgot Anna was in the room. He had framed her forge drawing and hung it on the wall and he studied it now with new attention, its powerful colours and shades, they seemed to have sound: the raised arm and the fist gripping the hammer, they were supposed to be his (weren’t they?), the flamelike light, the interior dark like a cave.

  “You don’t feel old, do you?” Anna said.

  “Not this minute.”

  She’d pulled him into the flow of her mind, it seemed like. Things sang in his head. Her voice a ripple of light, of sound. The drums in his own life had quit, he knew that. There had always been some music he’d hummed to without thinking. He could taste the excitement of it, the life of it, and Rosaire had brought it back to him. God, how he would love to have her with him, in his arms, tell her every damn little thing tumbling through his mind.

  He didn’t know what to talk about while he was feeling this way. I’m getting lighter day by day, Rosaire said, everything else heavier. See those little things of mine, Murdock? I couldn’t even pick up that paperweight over there. Pretty though, isn’t it, that crystal? Not that little marble box you gave me either, couldn’t lift it now. I’ll lift it for you, he said. No, she said, that’s not the same thing. I love you though.…

  His sight drifted toward a back window: Black Rock Head, blunt in the sea’s blue darkness. Down the strait, a boat light swung. There was an e
arly star, solid as the head of a spike. He wanted to know more about Anna, he hadn’t guessed he would. Her hair, glistening black in the ceiling light, had been teased by the wind, it was always fetching, her eyes dark and ambiguous under long lashes. She had put on lipstick, he didn’t remember seeing it before.

  He said, reeling a little but catching himself, “This makes me your partner in crime, looks like. We’re in this together.” His voice was joking, he smiled, but his heart seemed to be beating loud enough to hear: she was from away, and she had brought that thing into Granny’s kitchen, that domestic place he’d known all his life.

  Anna smiled. “Anyway, what are we in? Something deep and mysterious, I hope.”

  Suddenly he was unsure of her tone, her intentions. Was she having him on?

  “We should haul that bale back where it came from,” he said, then hearing his own gruffness, went on more lightly, “we could row her out and drop her, you know, let somebody else have the headache of it.”

  “But I want the headache of it, Murdock. For a little while. I want to see what it’s like just to … have it.”

  “It isn’t just you.”

  “For God’s sake, Murdock, I’d never implicate you. It’s in my house, not yours.” She touched his hand.“My grandmother’s house. I’d go to sleep hearing her down in the kitchen, baking something maybe, or just fussing about. She used a spinning wheel, for God’s sake. A conch.”

  He drank his liquor quickly, open to its masking heat. It was different from the smoke and he wanted to tell her how. Then he wanted to tell her a detail of his father’s only suit, that in the black gabardine cloth its pinstripe had been all but invisible. This was all tied up with her, with her company. Something came into his nerves, he felt it but he couldn’t describe it, some kind of gentle force had him, like filings lining up over a magnet. Warm. Like fine memories, like touch. His mind was easy with it now, he wasn’t afraid. She had relaxed and talked and he wanted to tell her things too, and his enthusiasm for it made his thoughts shift swiftly, each one as in need of telling as the next. Like the day Anna had baked him oatmeal cookies and he’d sat in his kitchen that evening with a cup of tea, the cookie tasted good, for a first go, but as he was chewing he felt a hair on his tongue. He pulled slowly through his teeth a strand of fine black hair and laid it carefully, without disgust, on the white saucer, trying to pinpoint its taste, the odd feeling it gave him. He’d imagined her at the old table, bent over a bowl, mixing the batter, her dark braid loosed in the effort of that homely task.