The Last Woman (4 page)

At noon, he looks up to see his sister strolling across the rock – his big, wide-shouldered, older sister, in her purple slacks and sleeveless blouse, skipping with a
sudden girlish lightness over a crevasse. The previous night he’d sat with her and her husband, Eddie Stokes, telling stories into the wee hours, while her two little ones, Brenda and Pascale, slept entangled on the couch. After ten years away it was strange to be there, at the familiar table with its blue and yellow specks, under the placid countenance of the same plaster Mary perched on the top of the fridge, laughing about Terence MacDonald’s piles as if he’d never been away. Part of him had wished he was still on the road.

Yvonne has brought him his laundry, the shirts and jeans still warm from the dryer. He carries two chairs outside and they sit in the shade of cedars, talking. Her eyes, so startling in their blueness, keep drifting to the lake, and when she sighs for the fourth or fifth time, he sits bolt upright in irritation.

When he asks if he can borrow her boat, she looks at him as if she can’t remember who he is.

“Earth to Yvonne,” he says, laughing.

“So where you off to then?”

“Get some groceries.” He shrugs, a show of nonchalance. He plans to drive down to Inverness; but he will not tell Yvonne because she will jibe him about Ann, as she had last night. When he asked after the Scotts, she’d commented, only a little sarcastically, “So ten years hasn’t cured you?” But she’d told him her news that wasn’t really news, since he had already learned most of it from Ann when he called her from the turnoff. Ann’s father dead. And they had a son now: Rowan.
They
. In his fantasies, he would go
down to Inverness and find her alone, as he had at nineteen, but they were still together –

Another sigh escapes his sister. “Things aren’t so good around here, you know.”

“Were they ever good?” he says quickly, grinning. It was how he was with her as a boy: joking away the shadows.

“Up north there, the traplines? It’s all clear-cut now. People are sick about it.”

He hunkers, determined not to get drawn in. Yet the whole cast of the day has changed. They had laid claim to that land. He had tried for a cash settlement too – some bands were getting millions. They would start their own businesses, build new houses, a new school.

“Some families –” she says.

“I
know
,” he says sharply, warning her off. He has seen the broken bottles. The smashed windows. She doesn’t have to rub his nose in it.

“Kids are sniffing gas,” she says. He looks at her. There had been no gas on Pine Island ten years ago. Booze, yes, the usual weekend binges. But gas! He has seen what gas can do, and anything else with solvents in it: kids slobbering about like sick old men. “Jimmy’s doing it,” she says. “I tried everything, Billy. He won’t listen to me. I was wondering, maybe when you been back a while, if you could speak to him. He always liked you.”

“Doesn’t Eddy speak to him?”

“You know how Eddy is – old school.” Old school: letting the kids learn on their own. If you put your hand in the fire, then you wouldn’t do it twice. But there had
been no gas in the old days. There hadn’t been a good many things.

That afternoon, he puts on a fresh T-shirt and jeans and goes down to the dock. Finding his sister’s boat, he starts the motor and backs away until he can head into open water, an unspeakable relief: to feel the cool breeze on his face and know that, behind him, Pine Island is rapidly receding.

The first time he met Ann Scott he was nine. The previous winter, Matt had taken him trapping. For two weeks, during the Christmas holidays, they had lived on Silver Lake, in a cabin so heaped over with snow that only the door and window could be seen, among silent snow-laden trees. Each morning he had woken to the sound of the dogs growling and fighting as his uncle got them ready. Then pancakes and fried meat and tea and porridge and Emma telling him to eat more: it was cold out there. And the morning moon, white as if cut from paper.

He was Billy Johnson, the son of Corrine Johnson and someone else who, he was to realize years later, must have had a different name. It was hard to think about a father you had never met. There were no pictures of him in the house, and his mother did not speak of him except sometimes, when her mood turned (it could happen any time, especially if she’d been drinking); then she might grab him by the ears and tell him that he looked too much like his father. Afterwards, he would stare at his face in the mirror, wondering what parts were like his father. His
nose? His stinging ears? He wanted his face to be like his father’s, and not, for when his mother was drunk it was hard to tell what was good and what bad. She could flip the world over in an instant, and where a father might have been was nothing.

They were living then – he and Yvonne and their mother – in a small house among the main crowd of houses overlooking the dock. That afternoon he had escaped – run over to Matt and Emma’s house, for no particular reason he could recall later, except that he felt safer and happier there than at home. Pushing through the screen door he saw a girl with pale hair cut straight across her forehead. She was sitting at his usual place at the table, watching him almost defiantly, as if she
knew
she had taken his chair and was waiting to see what he would do about it.

The door tapped shut behind him. Someone else was here – a man in a plaid shirt, a string of smoke spindling upright from the top of his head, who turned to regard Billy. Matt was at the table too, at his usual place, while Emma stood by the stove in one of the full white aprons she had made from flour sacks. All of them turned to him in a silence that seemed to spread from the deep shaft of sunlight through which the girl watched him. “You must be Billy,” the man said, and Emma, stripping off her apron, said, “Come and have a scone.”

Pulling out a chair, Billy sat beside the girl. Across the table, the man in the plaid shirt winked at him, as if sharing a secret, took a pull on his cigarette, and with slitted eyes expelled smoke that floated toward the ceiling and
hung there, like the bough of some blue, spreading tree. The girl’s hand reached out, took up a scone, and withdrew.

After a while the man – her father? – suggested the two of them go outside and play. The girl got up immediately, and when Billy did not move, she turned at the door and sang back to him, “You coming?” In a trance, he followed. Years later, she would tell him: “You were such an odd boy. You would hardly say a word. I was starting to wonder if you were mental!”

He would tell her he was terrified.

“Of what!” she would say, delighted. More than three decades later, he still does not know, though he can recall the sudden lightness of his body as he followed her into the sun. She wore a pink T-shirt and shorts, and when they stopped by the water, she looked at him with a directness he had never experienced from anyone, as if she had no shame, no fear, no notion of what might happen (what
would
happen?) if you looked at someone too long.

“My father owns a lumberyard,” she said, as if setting out an object for his inspection. Her shoes and socks were white; there was a bandage below her knee. “What grade are you in?”

He could scarcely remember what “grade” was.

“Can you talk?”

He nodded.

“So say something.”

“I go trapping,” he managed, in a voice he hardly recognized – his answer to her comment about her father. Since he did not have a father, what emerged was that
he
went trapping, though it was Matt who handled the traps. But he had helped Matt pull the drowned bodies of the beaver from under the ice, helped rub them with snow, and he had ridden on the sled as the dogs ran panting for home. Trapping – it was the most important and precious fact he could offer her.

She went on studying him, amused, it seemed, by his answer, or by his inability to say more. Then at once, her hands flashed out – he found himself sitting on the ground. She had run off, but she soon turned to contemplate him. “So chase me!” she demanded. “Don’t you know
anything
?”

He chased her: along the rock, across a sandy beach, up a narrow trail between boulders to a clearing where lush, flattened grass grew. While he stood hesitating, she flung herself down. The grass, he knew, hid pieces of glass where people had smashed bottles: here and there the shards stuck up like brown knives. “Sit next to me,” she told him, patting the ground. Warily, he crossed to her and sat.

On their backs, they watched the high clouds that made their way in from the lake and seemed, directly overhead, to form the banks of a deep white canyon with the blue sky at its bottom. An osprey slowly circled, and in the warm air above their faces a moth went fluttering by. He hardly dared moved. He felt he had arrived in a place that was so precarious it might vanish at any moment, like when the sun made a trembling, golden map on the panelling at the foot of his bed; or when he opened
Adventures of Olden Times
and – moments before his teacher took the book away – found (as he never found again) the picture of
St. George on his horse, tilting his lance as he galloped toward the dragon with its pine-cone scales.

When she gasped, he sat bolt upright, as she had, and stared, as she was staring, at her open hand. A thick red worm was oozing from her palm.

Meeting her terrified gaze, he seemed to see her for the first time. Her lips, pulled taut, revealed a gap between her front teeth. Her tears made glistening snail tracks through her freckles. But it was her eyes that held him. Washed of all confidence, they brimmed with something he would never have expected: a plea for his help.

He led her to the blue house, where Emma took down the box with the bandages and iodine. He knew what had happened was his fault, and the others seemed to feel that way too, for Matt was silent and Emma was mostly silent (she joked a little as she placed a pad and wound the tape) and her father, watching the proceedings through a scrim of smoke, was the most silent of all. The girl would not even look at Billy – she, who had looked too much, was acting as if he wasn’t in the room.

Later, slipping outside, he watched their boat grow small across the bay, and when he could no longer see it, he ran out to Gull Point to catch it again. But the channel, dark as blueberries between the islands, was empty.

His mother sat painting her nails, touching the tip of her tongue to her upper lip as she applied the bright red lacquer.

“So I hear you got yourself a girlfriend,” she said, pausing to examine her work.

Yvonne, making supper at the counter, said, “You promised not to say anything!”

“I never said nothing – what did I say!” his mother said, smirking. His mother was beautiful – everyone said so. Billy himself thought so. He liked to watch her when she was singing along with the radio, the way she pursed her lips and seemed to blow the words out. She sang as well as Dinah Shore, people said; she sang solos in the church choir. She would sing as she danced slowly by herself through the kitchen, jabbing at the air with her hips. Sometimes Billy danced with her. She would pump their arms as she whirled him around the room. But he had to be careful, because things could change. She might decide she didn’t like the way he was dancing. She might think of something somebody said to her last week. But when the change came, mostly he didn’t know
what
had caused it. She might suddenly slap him, in a rage: he would go off in tears, saying, “What?
What?
”

The word
girlfriend
shocked him. The boys who hung around the dock had girlfriends: that was the meaning of all that pushing and laughing; the meaning of going off by twos into the bush. His mother had boyfriends. They appeared in the house without warning. They ignored him or demanded to know what he was up to. And his mother might say, “He needs a father. Don’t you, Billy?” There was no answer to that; for no man would stay for long, he knew it better than she did.

Now there was a new one: Hooch Robinson. Billy had even less use for Hooch than he did for the others, because of the way Hooch swaggered around the house and poked a sharp finger in Billy’s shoulder, demanding to know if he was the real McCoy. A few weeks ago, Billy had ridden in the back seat of Hooch’s convertible to his house on the Black Falls highway. Hooch and his mother went inside, leaving him in the car with four baskets of blueberries set out on the hood for sale. He had sat for a long time behind the wheel, pretending to steer, while transports blew past and Hooch’s dogs yapped in their pen behind the house. Finally a pickup had driven up, and a man in a black undershirt had got out. Taking two baskets, he drove off without paying. Billy went into the house to tell Hooch, but Hooch and his mother were busy. For some time he stood in the hall, listening to the sounds they made, the chuckling of the bedsprings, the banging of the frame against the wall, then he walked out of the house and down the highway. After a while, Hooch and his mother drove up and his mother got out, her hair all crazy, and demanded to know what he’d done with Hooch’s money. Then Hooch got out and kicked him. Then Billy’s mother said no one kicked her boy and she kicked Hooch. Then, his tires screeching all over the road, Hooch drove off.

They walked home. His mother stalked ahead of him and when her heel broke, she swore and threw both shoes in the ditch. She told Billy she was going to send him to his aunt in Manitoba because he had just cost her the best man she’d ever had. But when they got to Carton Harbour,
his other mother appeared. She bought them cones at Whitbread’s store and they sat on a bench watching the boats go by. “I hope you go farther than me,” she said. Billy looked up. She seemed to have spoken to a passing sail. “You want to be one of the smart ones,” she said. “A doctor, eh? An airline pilot. Not like me. I had to drop out of school when I was sixteen – go to work in the mill. Not like me.” She took another lick of her cone. “You don’t get far without that piece of paper.” Billy wondered what piece of paper that might be. “You listen to me,” his mother said. Her voice had taken an edge. “You do your homework. It’s important. You got that?” Billy nodded, and for a while they sat in silence. “I always loved books,” she said, gazing out at the Harbour. “You got
that
from me at least.”