Read Online Anna From Away by D. R. Macdonald - Free Book Online Page B

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