Anna From Away (7 page)

Well, they put him, my little brother Andrew, in the parlour, see, Willard said, we was living with Uncle Alec then, way up Aspy Bay, poor times, we got farmed out. No stove in that room. Took the lounge in there and put him down on it, the windows flung wide open, for him to get his breath, you see. Pneumonia. Him just in his pajamas and bedclothes, imagine. But see, he had a fever, he wasn’t cold at all, he didn’t mind it. Frost in that breeze, but the boy was burning, you see, burning. And I sat in that room all night with a fur coat on me, my uncle’s fur coat. We couldn’t get my brother out till morning. Three sleighs it took to get him all the way to North Sydney. Seven and a half hours it took, all the way to the hospital. They had to put two dollars and fifty cents worth of brandy into him, in his system, soon as we got there. Injected it all through him. His heart stopped for a bit, Andrew’s. Nineteen thirties that’s what they did, that’s what they had. Brandy. He lived though, he lived it out.

L
ATE IN THE NIGHT
A
nna got up
, squatted half asleep on the cold toilet, a pale nightlight at her feet, shivering, thinking only, God get me back beneath those quilts quick. But a single, isolated sound crept into her hearing. Howling? Distant, pitched not with menace or alarm but with pain, the slowly waking side of her said, and a coyote wouldn’t bark like that, would it, give away its peril? Holding her breath, she allowed the possibility—knowing at the same instant its absurdity—that it was the dog from the bridge, somehow it had survived.

Chilled and frightened, she dressed quickly, pulled on her parka and heavy boots, stepped out the back door. The night was so still, the wind she’d fallen asleep listening to had spent itself, the cold sharp in her throat. She had not intended to investigate any further than the back steps, but the howling did not waver and it pained her to listen to it. The way it rose to a wail, stopped, then resumed drew her slowly down the steps. It seemed to be coming from the pond as Anna walked into the darkness, every crunching step telling her to go back for a flashlight, but the sound pulled her forward. She found her way along, picking out the familiar path of tramped snow. The dog, a dark form out on the pond ice, did not move but it must have seen her, heard her, because it began a slow, mournful yowl. Anna stopped at the edge, she could feel with her foot where the ice, having thawed a bit and refrozen, was lumpy and rough, beyond it a flat white surface. She started to talk, to herself at first, coaching her way along, then to the dog, urging it soothingly to come, Come here, don’t be afraid. She whistled, she made kissing sounds, but after lurching toward her in a rattle of chain, the animal took up again its pitiful call. Of course! Caught in a trap, poor thing, out there in the middle of the ice.

She swore at the man who’d set it. For what, the fox, the coyote, the mink, animals she’d seen and drawn, here, on someone else’s land,
her
land for now? She had to stop its suffering, this stupid cruelty. Would the dog see her as the cause of its agony, go for her hand? Why in hell didn’t she bring a flashlight. She moved closer, sliding her feet while scarcely aware of them. Of course it wasn’t the dog from the bridge, it was bigger, darker, and she knew nothing about traps, could she open the jaws? Okay, it’s okay, we’ll get you loose, she cooed, barely feeling the ice shiver beneath her.

A trapped smell of pond water hit her nostrils as the ice parted, a clean cracking, a zigzag sound like muted lightning, and the cold iron smell rose as her body dropped, her clothes screening for a moment the shock of water, a convulsion of cold quick to her body, into her fear of depth—Willard told her this pond was crazy deep—her scream brief, more surprise than pain, as her weight took her under, though not far, a deep childhood fear of drowning, from being swept off a winter beach by a rogue Pacific wave, stunned her. Her feet soon pushed into mud, her momentum sinking her into a crouch, silt clouding upward, toward faint light in the ice above, in the broken bobbing pieces, and she uncoiled herself upward, thrashing through the surface, her mouth wide and gasping, her wail in the brittle air weaving wildly into the dog’s yowl. Anna flailed, treading water, but her limbs were already stiffening, leaden, ice broke again and again under her clawing hands, she seemed to have no breath. Regrets charged absurdly through her, stunningly irrational, why did I come, why am I not home, there’s no ice there, reasons not to die after all, the simple gorgeousness of sun, warmth, of love, of safety. She would remember that it was not searing cold that killed her hope but the slow-motion weight of her body, dense, turning as slow as the primeval pond itself, and not far away the dog’s confused barking, the rattle of its trap. But then a beam of light swept the ice and someone clutched her under the arms and she was pulled backwards until her heels dragged bottom and she was set down on the snow. “You took a ducking, girl,” he said, his face craggy behind the flashlight. “Let’s get you walking quick. I’m your neighbour.” He helped her to her feet and held her steady as he led her back up the hill. Her voice came out wobbly and sobbing. “That dog,” she said, “he’s caught out there.”

“I’ll free him later from the other side,” Red Murdock said. “Ice always bad there, where you went in.”

She was shaking too much to talk when they reached her kitchen and she let him sit her on the daybed he called a lounge while he turned the fire up in the oil stove and stoked the
Warm Morning.

“Can you get out of those clothes?” he said, helping her off with her parka. Her red flannel pajamas were plastered to her skin, her jeans thick with water. “Dry off good and come back to the stove, you don’t want a chill now. Put a couple blankets around you.”

She fumbled with the laces of her leather boot but her fingers moved like claws.

“Here, let me.” He knelt and loosened her boots, tugged them off, shook water from them.

In the cramped bathroom, a former pantry, shedding her sodden clothing was difficult, more like moulting she shook so, maybe she should have let him undress her as well. She buried her head in one towel and then another until her hair was merely damp. The old metal smell of pond water rose from the towels she’d tossed into the tub. Her jaw ached from hard shivering but she rubbed and rubbed her body until her limbs, reddened from the towels, calmed. She looked dishevelled in the mirror, under the bare light bulb wild, like a madwoman in those nineteenth-century photos from insane asylums. Face flushed, lips pale, eyes glittering. Her cheek was scratched and she remembered Murdock touching it.

On the back of the toilet sat a green kitbag with makeup she hadn’t touched for a long while. It could hardly matter now, and the man in the next room was what, maybe fifteen years or so older than she was? But she brushed her hair viciously anyway, put on her heavy robe that hung on the door and the fleece-lined slippers she’d kicked off earlier. She turbanned her hair in the last dry towel and when her shivering subsided to an occasional tremor, she opened the door, self-conscious but too eager for the heat of the kitchen to care that a man she hardly knew was looking at her.

“Here,” Red Murdock said, holding up an open wool blanket and wrapping it around her shoulders. He followed it with a patterned quilt and urged her to sit in the rocker he’d pulled up near the stove.

“A lovely old quilt,” Anna said, trembling in the cocoon.

“Granny made it. Kept me warm lots of times, when I was a boy.” He took in the room as if he hadn’t seen it in a long while. “I lived with her for spells. Just me and my dad over there.” He nodded in the direction of his house. “Granny was more like a mother.”

He’d brewed a pot of strong tea and he took a metal flask from his hip and poured a shot into a mug—“Whisky,” he said, glancing at her—before filling it. She gripped the mug’s heat tightly in her hands. There was an enamel dishpan on the floor and the big aluminum kettle on top of the oil stove, and he told her it would be good to soak her feet in Epsom, feet warm the whole body toe to top, he said, but Anna said maybe she’d do that later, she had no Epsom, she didn’t want to move anything right now, not a toe or a finger.

“Ah,” Murdock said, “let’s get the blood going anyway.” With that he knelt, slid her slipper off and took her foot in his large hands. He began to knead its tendon and muscle, his hands were surely warm from the stove but in the numbness of her foot she could only feel the pressure of his fingers, soothing out tightness, bringing heat slowly to bear. She watched him, bent into this act of massaging, solemn, absorbed, a man who’d been shy and curt at the mailbox that afternoon she’d met him. His steel-grey hair, still thick and tight to his head, had a blush of auburn through it, his eyes deep-set in high, wide cheekbones, their colour not obvious at a glance, but they were hazel, flecked with green. And here he was kneading out a stubborn core of ice. She sipped the tea. Her throat felt sore, she’d gagged on pond water, that she remembered, and how the ice opened up sickeningly like a trap door, like an awful trick she’d fallen for, the cold so sudden, like a hard slap.

“There you go,” he said, after he’d massaged her other foot and set it gently down.

“Thank you, Mr. MacLennan,” she said.

“Murdock will do. I heard the dog, you see. I was coming over.”

Steam hissed soft as breath from the kettle spout. Then she heard the dog, more faintly than before, a thin, hopeless yowl and then silence.

“Can you save it? But, oh, it’s so late …” she said. “And you’re cold and wet yourself.”

“Have to be sure you’re up and running. We don’t want a fever. You had two bad choices there, girl, drown or freeze.” She didn’t see it as any kind of choice, but Murdock was smiling just that much, a flicker in his eyes. Did he say it for a reaction, testing? She didn’t understand the setting of his life, not enough, if she ever could, to gauge him: the weeks she’d spent here, the old photos she’d pored over, had given her some feeling about this house, about how they might’ve lived in it, but tonight told her only a little of that mystery, their calamities and pleasures, the nuances of their life, the words they said to each other, what they expected in response. When Anna stood at the stove it was not to cook a meal as they’d done, the women of his granny’s house, Anna’s atmosphere was nothing like theirs. What had they thought good and right and appropriate, here, amid family, the sounds and smells? Of this Anna had but a glimmer.

Yet she had drawn, in meticulous, intense detail, objects she had found here, as if the act of recreating them on paper would reveal them, bring to life a day they’d been put to use, and possibly the user—a small tin grater (for lemon peel, making a pie, a cake?), three thimbles of different sizes, needles and a cloud of tangled threads brown and white (darning socks by oil lamp?), a bottle embossed with a floral design (perfume? medicinal spirits?), a spindled device maybe for peeling apples.

“Do you mind if I light a pipe?” he said. “I’m off cigarettes.”

She said no, please, and he put a kitchen match to an old briar bowl, scorched and burnished. She watched him squinting, pulling smoke. Chet had used a pipe for a long time, extracting it from his breast pocket, playing with it, lighting up, gazing thoughtfully through smoke. But he never liked it really, the fussing and tamping and probing with pipe cleaners and the bitter juice on his tongue, the pipe was a prop, part of his dress, like the thick-waled corduroy jackets with elbow leather, and the bulky turtleneck from Ireland he wore next to his bare skin despite its prickly clamminess and woolly smell of sweat. Marijuana came along and he quit tobacco, a small wooden pipe appeared, an implement of transition, shared with others, passing it totemically, after a solemn hit, from one hand to another.

“Do you know the dog out there?” Anna said. “I can’t hear it now. I don’t want it to die.”

“Cottage people leave dogs and cats behind sometimes. Terrible, do that to a dog. I’ll get it out when I leave. It’s not Willard’s dog, his was little.”

“Summer. My God, how I’d love to feel it,” she said, more to herself than him.

“You’ll have a wait yet. Keep your stove wood handy.”

He told her they’d be well into April before they got much green, and some years there’d been snow in May, heavy. If you had drift ice, it could linger quite late, way out at sea, so far off it was invisible, but that east wind blowing through it?

“Did you come for summer?” he said. “Killing frosts in June.”

“Not just that. But I’ll welcome it.”

She wanted to be as honest as he seemed to be, to tell him, sometimes I’m not exactly
sure
what I came for, I’m sorting out certain things, but she did come to draw, to turn her work in a new direction, and maybe herself as well. And what would he think about that? She’d already set foot on ice where no one here would have stepped. She rocked the chair gently, it seemed to help, urging warmth into her, and but for Murdock MacLennan, she might be resting on the bottom of a pond. Could she have thrashed her way back to the shallows, found footing, groped her way out of that shattered ice? In her terrible panic, unlikely, she’d been wrenched out of the world. Those moments shuddered through her like a nightmare.

“You’re soaked through,” she said, “I’m sorry,” embarrassed she hadn’t noticed his jeans dark with wet, and his workboots, the small puddle at his feet.“Och, I’m drying, I’ve been wetter than this in winter. You’re looking worn out. A great shock to the body, this, is it not?”

“I only thought about seeing to the dog, not the ice.” She smiled. “I
am
lighter than I used to be.”

“We had fun on that ice. Skating parties, young and old. A man’d come up to a woman and ask her to skate, like at a dance. A strong fella would lead the whip, we called it, we’d link hands in a line and he’d start us twirling faster and faster until the last one had to let go, fly off. Oh, we chased around, us kids, played hockey with a stone for a puck. Nights like this, hard as glass. A fire on the bank, glowing up to the branches overhead, and the snow red up there and around us.”