The Last Woman (34 page)

After being with her for much of August, Rowan had gone back to Black Falls to get ready for the start of the school year. Ann was planning to stay on at Inverness until the end of September, to get as much painting done as possible before she moved into a rented place in town. But even with Rowan at the cottage, she’d been able to work three or four hours a day, the only time when she was tolerably free of anxiety about the pain she was causing. She was still not sure whether
The Last Woman
needed more work, and in the meantime, she had started in on a series of three smaller paintings. Rowan, for the most part, seemed to be adjusting to the new rhythm in his life, though it sometimes broke her heart to see the brave face he put on. When he asked when she and Richard would be living together again, she told him, “Honey, I don’t know. But you’re always going to have two people who love you more than anything.” He answered with terrific fierceness:

“But I
want
you to.” And he had gripped her arm so tightly, it hurt.

Three or four times a week, she and Richard talked on the phone. Dialling his number, she would find herself looking forward to hearing his voice –
needing
to hear it, really, for their life together still had its place in her. And often it was good for a few minutes, but then his anger would begin to seep through. At times, she felt, his vulnerability was palpable. Once, awkwardly confessional, he admitted he had been doing “a lot of hard thinking” about himself. “I haven’t been there for you, Ann, not really – always working. And I haven’t been the best listener. I want to change that – want to mend things with you. We can do it, I feel that very strongly. We’ve already come through the worst – I know we’re on better ground already.” She was moved by his sincerity, yet like a forcefield coming down the wire, she could sense his old willfulness. She wanted to tell him that people don’t change, at least not very much, only circumstances changed, but it would have been unfeeling to say so. She said something vaguely encouraging, instead, aware that she had not thought hard enough about what their separation meant, or where it was leading – the subject was simply too painful. She only wanted to cling to the ledge she had hauled herself onto, it was all she could manage.

Steeling herself, she’d told Richard that when she moved back to Black Falls for the winter, she was intending to rent an apartment of her own. After a long silence, his voice came, thick with rage: “This isn’t what you led me
to expect.” It took several calls before they settled back into smoother relations.
Would
she ever live with him again? One day, she came across a book he’d given her years ago. Barbara Tuchman’s
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
was not something she would ever have bought herself, and indeed she hadn’t been able to read more than a few pages. So much goodwill, on both sides; and yet, in some fundamental way, they had always missed each other. And it was her fault, primarily, wasn’t it? For she had wanted stability and goodness and a certain kind of maturity; and she had found them. But even at the time, she knew she was pushing against the grain of her own instincts. She had been, in her way, as willful as he.

One time, after a particularly stressful call, she went outside and made her way toward the water. She was in a state – her face hot, her breathing constricted. She reached the deck almost without noticing, and stood for some minutes before the evening began to make an impression on her. The shadowed water held a green limpidity and the air was scented with pine. It was as if the place itself had enfolded her in its balm, and she began to weep – knowing she had given herself, her whole family, over to consequences that could not be foreseen, and that many things, already, were unrecoverable.

Over the weeks, she and Billy had drawn closer, in the way that two people, who were once close, find a version of themselves in each other that is both familiar and open to new possibility. She could not imagine their living
together in any conventional, ongoing sense; though his absence, if it went on too long, would begin to hurt.

The sun is terribly hot. She asks him to stop, and as they drift for a while, she takes out a kerchief and drapes it from the back of her hat. Then they set off again. Ahead of her, under the skin of his back, his muscles churn as if looking for a way out.

The change, when it comes, comes silently and with little warning. At one moment they are in forest, paddling down a deep defile, in the welcome shade of trees. Then they ease round a bend into the next lake, and at once there is more light behind the trees. Then the trees themselves peter out and a dazzling expansiveness radiates from the hills. It seems to her – her paddle arrested in mid-stroke – that something in her rushes to meet this new reality, exploding into a vacuum. The bush that has all along accompanied them, the bush of shadow and unimaginable depth, has simply stopped, and in its place is another world, sunstruck, stark, pullulating with heat. On either hand, thousands of stumps – stumps and rejected logs and piles of debris and slabs of exposed rock – cover the ruined slopes.

They have both stopped paddling. There has been an assault here, an act of such violence it seems to evoke some other order of reality. The sun seems more ferocious; it bites at her face, her arms. It bakes the yellow hills where little dust devils rise up, twirl, and vanish – the only movement visible.

Conscious of Billy, what this must be for
him
, she keeps still. He has placed his paddle across the thwarts and is leaning on it while he peers up at the devastation. They are drifting: past a great boulder like a turtle petrified before it can escape into the safety of the lake, past a rotting log. He is rocking a little now, forward and back, in some gesture of self-comfort, though what comfort he might find here she cannot imagine. She feels it was a mistake to have come.

She has an urge to move: to go back, or at least to go on, to let action absorb what contemplation cannot. But she waits, for him. She is exhausted, soaked with sweat, and it seems, as they sit – several minutes have gone by – that they
cannot
move. The negative power of the place holds them, and they can only wait for worse: as if some new idea, some creature, some image must rise to instruct them. He has stopped rocking now and is gazing into the water.

They go on. The first shock has passed, and now a horrified fascination sets in. She must see exactly what this thing is, this presence that has gripped the hills. A few miles back, in the untouched bush of their last portage, she had felt wrapped in a green fecundity, invited into its depths. But here, she is radically repelled, her very spirit repelled. Yet she cannot stop looking – up the slopes of dusty yellow earth covered with stumps whose raw, open surfaces shine with sap. At the top of a hill, a clutch of tall spruce persist, their crowns bristling against the blue. Why were those few trees left? Some token gesture of
conservation? The surviving trees seem absurd to her – a quixotic flourish over a field of death.

Oddly, she feels she knows this place. She has a sense of bleakness at once familiar and obscure. She knows this place: in some way it belongs to her.

That night, they camp on an island where a few low, contorted pines twist up among several large flat rocks – a little Bonsai garden untouched by the loggers. The mood that wraps them deadens conversation. They talk only briefly, of practical things: what to have for supper, where to find firewood. They sit on opposite sides of their fire, prodding at it or shifting a pot, their small nest of light burning in the darkness that has hidden the devastation on the mainland – although the silhouette of a hill, teethed with stumps, humps against the faint glow of the western sky.

“How long will it take to grow back,” she says, wanting to connect with him: the only comfort that seems possible now.

Across the fire, Billy shakes his head vaguely. He doesn’t know. Or: it doesn’t matter. Or: it’s an ignorant question. She resents his dismissiveness, his continuing refusal to talk. Wrapping a rag around the handle of a pot, she pours out boiling water for tea and punctures a can of evaporated milk, holding it out to him.

“Billy? Do you want milk?”

“I said no.”

She refrains from saying, No you didn’t. She will give him a pass, for today. For the rest of the trip, if necessary. But something in her withdraws, and as they sit drinking their tea in silence, she understands how little she knows this man. She knows something essential. She has a certain
feel
for him. But there are rooms behind rooms, some of which he may scarcely know of himself.

They sleep outside – no need for the tent on such a clear, bug-free night – spreading their mats and sleeping bags on a patch of open ground. He is soon snoring softly while she lies on her back looking up at the stars: that forest no one will ever destroy.

On the afternoon of the third day, they reach Silver Lake. She has carried a hope that the bush in that area remains intact, for all along they have passed places where the clear-cutting has temporarily relented. But no: the devastation returns. Behind a thin screen of trees the empty, barren hills rise once more. They scrape ashore under a high bank. He starts up the slope immediately, while, knowing how important this moment is for him, she stays behind to unload the canoe. Struggling up the eroded trail with a couple of packs, she reaches the flat, open space at the top and sees the cabin. She has heard so much from him about “the cabin on Silver,” about the life his family lived here, that she must stand for some time, simply taking the place in. It seems so small, so utterly forlorn, with its holed, sagging roof. She can just make out Billy in
the little grove that survives near the cabin, holding up a chain from which some rusty-looking object swings. Dropping the packs, she approaches the door. Inside, in the shadowy depths pierced by sun from the broken roof, she discovers a small, overturned table, a section of fallen stovepipe, a half-destroyed mattress. There is a smell of rot, of animal excrement.

They pitch their tent on the edge of the bluff. Billy claims to be pleased with the view – a few trees, then the lake, then a few more trees on the opposite shore, with more of the scraped yellow hills beyond. His remark seems bitter – a blade turned against them both.

The next day, he sets to work repairing the cabin. She joins in, but wonders if they can ever do enough to make it habitable again. Using a small trenching tool, she scrapes away at the rotting floorboards, carrying out little piles of leaves, dirt, and shit, while he braces the roof and climbs onto to it to repair the hole. There is a pathos about their efforts, she thinks, as if they are trying, against all reason, to hold back a flood of ruin. Out of loyalty to him, she hides her sense of hopelessness, but it is a relief, finally, when he goes off to fish and she has some time to herself. Sitting under a kind of awning he has rigged up with a tarp, she tries to read her novel, but the words seem weak and irrelevant, unable to compete with the vast space around her, the brutal assault of sun and heat on the devastated hills.

That evening they eat the pickerel in silence. Forks scrape on their metal plates. The little fire crackles to itself,
with a kind of dry merriness, as if it knew something humans did not.

“We’ve hardly made a dent,” she says. “Do you still imagine you can stay for a month this winter? You said yourself the animals are gone.”

“We just ate one, didn’t we?”

“Well,
one fish
.”

“I didn’t say they were gone,” he says. “I said I couldn’t see any tracks. They’ll come back. There’s still lots of bushes around. The moose will sniff them out sooner or later.”

They are silent for a while.

“Tell me what’s been on your mind,” she says, pleading. “I understand that it’s hard for you here –”

He shrugs and blows out through his lips.

For no reason she can grasp, they are estranged. They sleep side by side without touching. In the day, they are civil, even cheerful in a brittle way. She laments what they have lost – so good together only a short time ago. She wonders what can be recovered, what they have in them for each other. Has she always felt most intensely for him when they are at a distance? When she is with someone else? Has she made him up?

Out of sight of the camp, she sobs. She comes back determined to get on with
her
life, and when she finds him sitting on the ground, picking at a tangle of fishing line, his total absorption in the task, his apparent contentment, enrages her.

“We’ll soon be out of food!” she announces, exulting. It means they will have to go back.

“I’ll catch some fish.”

“I’d really prefer not to eat fish for the next three days. I think we should start for home.” He has fixed again on his reel: the stoicism of a man waiting out a storm. “Anyway, you haven’t caught a fish for three days. I hardly think you’re going to now.”

“Whenever you like,” he says.

The decision to go generates a brief satisfaction. But the bleakness of her melancholy, her sense of estrangement, does not shift. Things are still wrong between them. Will leaving change anything?

Later they sit again at their fire. A few high, stately cumulus have drifted in, pink against the darkening blue. “Look, clouds,” she says, momentarily forgetting herself. “Maybe we’ll finally get some rain.”