The Last Woman (2 page)

S
itting in his patch of shade, Billy watches the Ford Taurus descend the rock. Loose metal rattles as it slams into a pothole, speeds up a little, and swings toward the water, where it abruptly stops. The door flies open and a heavy young man gets out to walk a straight-backed, gunslinger’s walk to the trunk.

Not bothering with socks, Billy pulls on his boots and limps over.

“Tom,” he says.

It is some time before Tom Whitehead stops rustling in his groceries and deigns to look at him. “Well, look who the cat,” he says. His voice is adenoidal, snuffling, and in his gaze is a message Billy has no trouble reading. Well,
here you are after all these years: the high and mighty chief, who screwed up good, as we all knew you would – needing a ride like any poor Indian, and because I don’t think you’re worth the dirt on my boots, I’m going to make you ask for it.

He asks for it. He wades out and takes a seat amidships, on a slab of stained foam. Behind him, the boat sags as Tom heaves himself in. Billy sits motionless as Tom rips at the cord – rips and rips again while the outboard flutters dryly. On the shore, the little tree where he was resting looks increasingly forlorn. You dream of coming home, but you can never dream the details. The taste of metal in your mouth as the things you have forgotten come back – the very things, perhaps, that made you leave in the first place. Ten minutes ago, half an hour ago, he might have changed his mind. Even now, he might climb out of the boat and wade ashore. But he goes on sitting, in a kind of trance, as the engine flutters and the air grows thick with Tom’s fury. Often he has seen a large animal take a small one and there is always a moment when struggle stops. The smaller may still be alive – its eyes glisten and even look around, as if curious – but it lies still in the other’s jaws, or under its talons, almost at peace it seems, immune to any notion of escape and perhaps even to pain. He has wondered at this – what it must feel like – and as the motor catches and they begin their slow troll out of the harbour, he thinks of it and not for the first time senses that for all his time away, he has only been circling this moment of surrender.

Porcupine. Watson. Stoney. The islands go by in the reverse order of when he saw them last. Then, it was fall: he had huddled in his boat, fighting the waves that surged from the open lake, happy in the way of someone denying unhappiness, pounding his boat on the waves. The land claim was lost, and life had become intolerable on Pine Island. His enemies – the ones who had opposed the claim and the ones who blamed him for losing it – had painted messages on the side of his house. Yet it wasn’t the threats that bothered him – they had been pretty much standard coin ever since he and Richard Galuta had launched their claim to the band’s traditional territory, a chunk of hunting and trapping grounds that as one newspaper had put it was the size of Prince Edward Island. No, it wasn’t the threats, it was the knowledge he’d let his people down. He could see it even in the eyes of his supporters – that flash of hurt and embarrassment, that tactful evasion of him, as if he’d messed himself and it was the better part of kindness to look away. He’d put everything into it – worked night and day for years, though it wasn’t just exhaustion that finally caught up to him. It was the sense he no longer knew who he was. Before, he was the man, the chief, who for better or worse was pursuing a claim that, if successful – and he was certain it would be – would put Pine Island on track for generations. But when the claim was lost, who was he? He had spells of dizziness; a couple of times he watched himself at a distance, walking along with his head down. The defeat had gutted him, and though he thought of appealing (Richard Galuta with typical blind optimism had
urged him to) he had lost the will to carry on – even supposing that people would still support him (and he was as sure they wouldn’t as he was sure it wouldn’t snow in July). He had resigned as chief, driven his boat to the Harbour, climbed into his ancient Chrysler, and headed south. His plan was to stay with friends in Toronto, but approaching the city, he found himself in the wrong lane, heading west. It wasn’t so much that he decided to keep going as that he surrendered to the momentum of the car. On he floated, past Hamilton, Stoney Creek, St. Catharines. On the bridge to Buffalo he woke from his torpor. Off to his right, Lake Erie danced and sparkled, and for an instant he divined the possibility – the wild hope – of burying himself in the depths of the continent.

Pine Island dock is crowded round with boats – a mass of silver hulls set clashing and nodding by their bow wave. Stepping from boat to boat, he reaches the dock and goes on toward the small houses. He has the queer sense he has fallen out of time. It is no longer 1986 – or rather not just ’86. It is ’76, and ’61 – it is all those years and none – a single inescapable moment in which he has always existed just here, with the sun on his neck and the coarse sand of Pine Island beach gritting under his boots and before him, hunched on the rock, the familiar houses with their glare-blinded eyes. Some are well kept, flowers sitting out in pots. Others – more than he recalls – have slipped into neglect. Roofs patched with garbage bags. A punched-out screen. In the shade, a bicycle has been set upside down. One wheel revolves slowly, as if brushed by a passing ghost.

He crosses an area of treeless bedrock. On the far side sits a small blue house half-buried in cedars. A padlock has been affixed to the door and it is as if he has met something that contradicts his idea of reality – an exception to the laws of physics. He stops. He stares at the house. You hear that someone is dead. You weep. You think you know: he’s dead. A piece of broken glass to be carried in your chest. Sometimes you forget it’s there. Then you move a certain way and, without warning, it cuts again. Putting down his bag, he climbs the steps and takes the cool, heavy lock in his hand. Tugs at the thick hasp. Retreating, he steps through bushes to a window. Inside, sun has lit the end of a table and a few scattered chairs. Down the side of an open cupboard, several postcards have been stuck with pins. They are curling a little, but he can just make out the turquoise sheen of the Caribbean. The white body of a shark. He counts five.
Surely there were more!
Hands cupped to dusty glass, he peers into the shadows of that familiar room, searching for more.

A
gainst the wall of his tent, Rowan’s shadow looms, shrinks, writhes – a shape-shifter trapped in a dome of red light. Detouring from the path, Ann stoops before the meshed doorway.

Her son is poised on his knees with his back to her, under the cone of light falling from the suspended flashlight, hands raised like an evangelical receiving a blessing.

“Honey?” She has to speak twice before he turns. “What are you doing?”

“I’m killing mosquitoes.”

“Are you feeling all right? Do you think it would help if you –?”

“I don’t want one.”

Ann hesitates. Perhaps he has no need of a pill. Every summer they take him off the Ritalin. Usually, Inverness supplies all the calm he needs, but today the place has not accomplished its usual magic. It had started at supper – talking a mile a minute while she and Richard made worried eye contact across the table. She suspected their time on the water: too much sun, maybe, and Richard not always as sensitive to the boy’s moods as he might be.

“It’d make you feel better.”

He lunges at another mosquito. “
Shit!
”

“Rowan!”

“Sorry! I don’t want a pill!”

“I’m not saying you
have
to –” For Rowan hates his medicine and she hates fighting Rowan. The boy is frowning up at her now, waiting for his oppressor to leave. She knows he might be up half the night – tomorrow a misery of exhaustion, for all of them. And yet: the tug of her painting is nearly irresistible.

It came to her just minutes ago, at the kitchen sink, a flash in which she saw it whole: not the painting she has been struggling with for weeks, but a new one. It was as if a door had opened and she had glimpsed the drama behind the placid surface of things. A massive, naked figure waded knee-deep through a crowd of smaller figures, in a boiling light: a sense of epic conflict, and at the same time ecstasy – there at the kitchen sink, seeing everything, with a dripping plate in her hands. Giving up the battle with Rowan, she hurries down the path to the boathouse.
Inside, the beam of her flashlight picks out her red canoe, adrift in its bay, finds the screen door to the stairs, and precedes her up the steep well where, with the flick of a switch, her long, multi-windowed studio leaps into existence.

On her painting wall hangs a portrait of a seated woman roughly her own age, in sombre oils, her expression distracted – on the verge of some troubling awareness. Behind her, outside a window, a girl is hanging upside down. Her pigtails droop past her head and her eyes have fixed angrily on the woman in the chair.

This painting, Ann has come to feel, is a failure. She finds its drama unconvincing, and it is layered with so many corrections that the oils have built up into a kind of bas-relief map. “Great texture,” Richard has commented, in the same tone he might say “Great bod” of some passing woman. But texture by itself is nothing, she knows; texture’s a scam if a painting doesn’t live.

Putting it aside, she drags out a much larger canvas, strips away its plastic cover, and stands back to contemplate the white, gessoed blank.

She was asleep when he called – dozing on the leather couch where she had lain down after lunch, “just for ten” as she so often puts it to herself, in the comforting illusion she is free to sleep as little or as much as she likes. Sleep is her frequent companion these days. Sometimes she will go back to bed after breakfast –
just for half an hour
– then wake to the stark light of midday. It is worse
in winter, in their Black Falls house, where she feels the pull of hibernation.

She hides her habits from Richard and Rowan, guilty and ashamed for all the time she spends in bed. It’s her father’s death, she tells herself. She’s still working through the grief. She has had him much on her mind these days: his presence so strong at Inverness. His tools in the boat-house. His hat collection – the baseball caps and berets and Stetsons and straws hung on pegs along the hall. Richard has suggested, gently enough, that it might be time to retire the hats, but she hasn’t got the heart for it. She suspects that she’s still, in some way, waiting for him to come back. And maybe that was why, when Billy called, she thought he was her father. Against all reason, for an electric half-second, Charles had come back.

But no – a moment of confusion, followed by a surge of emotion: Billy.

It had been two years since his last postcard: that picture of the Grand Canyon, addressed to them both. Richard had no time for Billy’s cards – he would toss them aside in a fit of angry dismissal, and she learned to keep them to herself. The two men had quarrelled after their defeat – she had guessed that much. But the details remained a mystery to her, for her husband would tell her nothing. As for Billy, she’d never got to ask him, because he had left soon after the decision came down – left without calling her. She would not have expected this, for she felt she and Billy had their own friendship – a corner of tenderness they preserved as their right, a thing as old
as their childhoods. Billy had no phone, and when she called Billy’s sister, Yvonne told her Billy had gone south for a few days. Three weeks later, hearing nothing, she called again. Billy was in Pittsburgh, Yvonne told her. Why Pittsburgh? What came back was a verbal shrug: “Well, you know Billy.” No, Ann did not know
that
Billy, who could turn his back on her like that. “He’s all right then?” And Yvonne said, “Seems to be.” And fell silent.

Then Billy’s first card arrived, followed by others, at intervals of months or even years. His messages were the kind a tourist might write, brief descriptions of sights, of weather, of anything he happened to be looking at. She sensed there was a kind of ironic joke in them, for him: he was masquerading as an ordinary traveller, though at the same time the pictures he chose were suggestive – she did not always know of what. The kitten creeping away from the spilt milk was obvious enough. But what was she to make of the cigar-store Indian with a Hawaiian lei around his neck?

In the long periods between bulletins, she contemplated his absence with a sadness that became habitual – indistinguishable, in many respects, from the lethargy that increasingly gripped her during those years. She might not actually think of him for days at a time. But then, prodded by some chance occurrence – the flash of an obscure channel between islands – he came back with a force that often surprised her. She couldn’t imagine the life he was living; at times, she wondered if he was alive. And again she would try to talk with Richard about him,
for it seemed – and she knew this was irrational – that it was their quarrel that kept Billy away, and that if she could in some way bridge the distance between them, if she could soften her husband’s hostility, or assuage his hurt, if he was hurt, she might effect some change in a situation that threatened, she feared, to become permanent.