The Last Woman (7 page)

R
ounding the corner of a house on Pine Island, Billy finds Fred Plante standing in a blue hospital gown, smoking. Fred had not been old when Billy left; now the man’s hair is white – as if old age has come upon him in a single night, like plague out of the bible. His hand trembles with the cigarette he lifts to his mouth.

Billy stops, respectful. This man knows as much as anyone on the Island: bush lore and stories and family history. It was said that long ago he killed a man. “Killed his man,” as people put it, as if for every man another man was reserved for just that purpose.

“You escape from the hospital, Fred?”

“Rather die out here,” says the rasping voice. “Ten minutes out here worth a year in there.”

They stand without speaking. Billy feels no particular discomfort: on Pine Island silence is as much a form of communication as words. Billy has nothing to say, and perhaps Fred doesn’t either, but how will they know unless they wait for a while? As if prompted by the same thought, they both turn toward the lake, where, far off, a few gulls are circling. “My grandfather had a dream,” Fred says, and pauses to take another drag. There are ordinary dreams, and there are dreams that float up from the heart of things – dreams told to few and handed down like heirlooms. For a while Fred squints toward the lake. “When all the trees are gone, the people will be gone too.”

Fred tosses away his butt and for a few seconds watches it fume beside a rock. “But then what did those old farts know anyways, eh?” He shuffles away, leaving Billy with the sense the remark was aimed at him. By launching the claim, he had ignored the advice of several elders. Others, including Matt, had supported him. The divisions had spread until a kind of civil war had infected the Island. Friends had stopped speaking to each other. Old feuds took on fresh momentum. Apparently, it isn’t over yet. He watches the old man go off. In the open back of his gown chevrons of fat, spotted with bedsores, quiver with each step.

As the days go by, Billy has the deepening sense that something’s coming unstrung. The sun isn’t just hot, it bites. The lake doesn’t
look
right. Passages between islands have turned into pastures of dried mud. There are new animals in the bush, new birds in the sky: the old folk talk of it constantly. Several times he’s woken to the cries of people drinking and fighting; once to the stertorous roar of a chainsaw – no good sign at four a.m. And in the morning, blood on a rock, licked by a dog.

Yes, something’s unravelling, something so old, so basic, so taken for granted, so beyond the power of ordinary words to describe, that now it’s coming apart, people can only feel angry and confused.

And yet, the limpid evenings come as always. Out on Nigushi, the islands drift in purple and mauve. He thinks of Ann Scott often. In the kitchen, as she wept for her father, he had touched her shoulder: he can still feel the coolness of her skin. She had told him they were going to Black Falls the next day. Rowan was starting hockey camp. Richard had his usual appointments. He thinks about Richard – this new, substantial Richard, pompously aloof one minute, genial the next. Over dessert, Billy had caught him gazing at him, those small bearlike eyes bright with some unreadable emotion. Richard had looked quickly away.

Yvonne throws a barbeque to welcome him home. People sit around the yard on chairs while the smell of burgers floats from the grill. Billy sits chatting with friends,
pleased to discover he still has a few on Pine Island. His niece, Brenda, wants to play catch with a beach ball. The little girl laughs when he lets it bounce off his face and runs off to twine herself around her father’s legs.

On the high porch overhead, the kitchen door opens and slaps shut.

“Jimmy!” Yvonne calls. “Come down and see your uncle.”

Billy’s nephew was three or four when he left. Now, looking up, Billy sees a long-haired teenager peering over the rail. A good-looking, smooth-skinned face. Widely set eyes – Johnson eyes. As the boy comes down the stairs, Billy gets to his feet, galvanized by a sudden sense of youth, family.

For a while they make hesitant small talk. After a few minutes Jimmy collects a handful of sandwiches and drifts off to an empty chair. His nephew wants to be an underwater engineer, Yvonne has told Billy. “There were some divers working on the lake last year – something to do with one of the wrecks. I guess he got talking to them.”

Billy watches the boy as he eats – the way he keeps drawing back his hair, with an almost girlish fastidiousness; the way he stops chewing and stares, abstracted, into space. After a while, Billy moves to a chair beside him. “So what the heck is an underwater engineer?”

At first, Jimmy does not respond. Then a foggy adolescent’s voice sounds. “Like if they’re building a bridge, the underwater engineer designs the parts that are under-water. Or if they’re going to blow up a bridge, he has to go
down and look at the underwater parts – tell them where to put the dynamite.”

“So it involves diving?”

“I did some last summer.”

Billy waits for more, and when it does not come, he tells his nephew a little about his own diving experiences: the red fish, the blue fish, the barracudas pivoting like compass needles. The boy appears to be listening, but after a few seconds, his attention sinks away. “So you have to take training, I guess.” Blinking, Jimmy looks at him. “To get your diving papers – you have to take a course or what?”

“Lots of courses.”

“You need high school or –” Yvonne has mentioned that Jimmy talks all the time about dropping out.

“I guess. Yeah.”

Another silence falls. His nephew’s isolation seems deeper than a normal fourteen-year-old’s. There is something stunned in him, Billy thinks. Remote from life. He has the boy on his mind the next day as he works on his boat. When Yvonne drops by, he asks, “You sure he’s doing gas?”

“Sometimes he gets these sores around his mouth. Or you can smell it on him.” Minnows of light flicker over the hull. “There’s a whole gang of them. A year ago they were all good kids. Then something happened. I date it from Ross Shewaybick.”

He has heard about Ross, the boy who hanged himself.

“Why do you think Ross –”

She shakes her head. “It was Jimmy who found him. Up there at Pepper Point. I don’t think he’s ever got over it. He
won’t talk about it – just gets mad.” The minnows go on swarming. “Sometimes I think there’s something they see, these boys. Something they can hear, you know, calling to them. You can’t argue them out of it. They don’t hear you.” He knows what it is: the dark place. He knew it when he was young, even before his mother drowned. He knew it worse afterwards – the thrill of coming close to it, without letting it take you. In some moods you felt you could play the game and never be caught; in others, you didn’t care.

The next day, driving his boat onto the lake, he heads for the Blue Osprey. He has never liked crossing the open lake – Nigushi six miles wide at this point, hundreds of feet deep – but it’s the shortest way to the lodge. Around him a vast silken calm spreads toward the crayon stroke of the far shore.

Off to his left, a gull flaps up. Its beak is open, and though his outboard muffles all sounds, he seems to hear it cry out.

The December afternoon before his mother drowned, she had danced him around their tiny living room. “Tonight’s my night,” she told him. “I got a feeling in my bones.” He had witnessed these eruptions of optimism before and knew they came to nothing. When she said that tonight was her night, she did not mean finding a man: finding a man was no trick at all for a beautiful woman. She meant finding
a man who stayed, a man she
wanted
to stay: a good man, in other words, not like Donny Pace, who had broken her arm, or Hooch Robinson, whom she’d caught stealing from her purse, but a man with some kind of steadiness: a man you could count on to do the ordinary things with you like eating or shopping without turning them into some test of his power or a chance to put you down.

She had caught a ride into Black Falls with Bart and Mary Simmons, who ran the post office in Carton Harbour. They had dropped her at the Rendezvous – so he discovered many years later when he read the police report. By then, he was familiar with the Rendezvous, with its bolted-down chairs and metal mirrors – a windowless, low-ceilinged place where you never knew what time of day it was and the golden pitchers of beer rose and fell like the pistons of some slow-motion destruction machine. She socialized in other places as well, better places, and why that night, given her mood, she had chosen the Rendezvous was one of the many questions he would never answer. Others had noticed her there – “Intoxicated. Danced with several partners” – but according to the report, no one had seen her leave. The report picked her up again at the Harbour, where someone happened to see her trudging by through a light snowfall. By then, she had already walked, the report surmised, from the turnoff – a distance of six miles; and she had eight more miles to go, by the shortest route, over the ice. He could barely bring himself to think about the next part of her journey, for she was on her way back to him and Yvonne. They had gone to bed expecting they
would wake to her, or at least to a phone call, as they had so often in the past. While they were sleeping, their mother drowned.

He could see her trudging over the ice that had little snow cover yet, though there must have been enough to disguise the hole that was waiting for her. The night was mostly overcast. Perhaps a few stars had shone intermittently, and in the snow’s glow she must have made out the dark thin reefs of bush along the larger islands, the gleam of light from a cabin. She was wearing boots and carried her dancing shoes in her purse. But she must have been cold in her skimpy coat, the wind cutting, and perhaps it was this and not alcohol that had disoriented her, the cold settling too deeply. Perhaps she was singing to herself to buoy her spirits. What he could not bear was seeing her, in his mind’s eye, progress toward the faintly steaming slit in the snow, while he was unable to cry a warning.

They had not found her until spring. He was not allowed to see her, though her white coffin was set at the front of the church, with a bunch of evergreen on its lid. The priest, old Father Donahue, spoke of her at some length: he had known Corrine Johnson his whole life, he said, he could remember the hot summer night she was born. His kind, rough voice went on, describing the time she was chosen to play Mary in the Christmas pageant – and what a fine Mary she was, he said. Listening to him, Billy glimpsed a mother he didn’t know, who’d had another life as a child, as a young woman who one day, kicking off
her shoes, had plunged into icy water to save little Peter Squance. Who was this person?

Afterwards, he followed her (what they
said
was her) in her white coffin along the trail to the graves. It had snowed a little that day, idle flakes disappearing on the coffin lid, among the crosses and spirit houses, among the gloomy pines, with the choir singing in their red robes. Standing between Matt and Emma, he and his sister watched her go down into the ground. But he had not seen her and did not entirely believe it was her, and so for a long time afterwards, in certain moods, he would watch the lake, remembering how she had told him that one day she would find a good man; and she might go off with him for a while – this man who owned a nice house, who would buy her nice clothes. And then (he could depend on it), she would send for him.

The Blue Osprey sits at the end of a long bay – a rambling log structure overlooking a lawn where twin poles fly the flags of the United States and Canada, drooping in the windless air. He walks up a brick path and passes through the front doors into coolness, the lustre of distant skylights. Others are here, but they are not the fishermen and hunters he remembers from the old days, in their plaid shirts and assorted caps, with their gun cases and tackle boxes and cartons of Molson Ex. These patrons wear tennis whites and golf clothes. They hurry through the lobby with their racquets, or drift out of the dining room where the checked cloths have been replaced by white, and the stuffed
head of the moose has disappeared from above the stone fireplace, and the waitresses bustle through a setting of white and cream, of tinkling water and tropical leaves, bathed in music so soft it is possibly an illusion.

A young woman clutching a handful of menus hurries toward him. Baring her teeth, she flicks a glance down his body to the boots he blacked that morning with a burnt stick.