The Last Woman (11 page)

“He’s fine, Ann. It’s really quite incredible footage.”

She is reminded of the snake but does not mention it: her snake can’t compete with their current excitement; and anyway, the snake is hers.

One evening she takes out her canoe. It is over sixty years old, her father’s as a boy, bought for him by
his
father from the factory in Peterborough. Inside the hull, its varnished ribs are a deep gold, its seats are made of woven gut. Kneeling on a life jacket, she paddles north, intending to circle Inverness.

With each stroke, her paddle sends a tiny whirlpool spinning away across the surface; when it emerges, it casts a swishing patter of drops. She passes the deck and soon afterwards the guest cabin; then the tennis court with its sagging net. Near Cigarette Point a gap between islands reveals the open lake. Nigushi is calm, under a low sun, the air so still she is lured into stillness herself. For a while she drifts, her paddle laid across the gunnels. Thirty years ago, she had paddled with her father on just such an evening. The same rocks. The same pines. The same light, suffusing Nigushi’s glass. In another moment, she will hear his voice.

Standing over his hospital bed, she had silently urged him to die. Shrunken. Rasping under his oxygen mask. She could not bear it, not after what he had been. Two nurses came in to “help him get comfortable.” One heaved him up while the other rearranged his pillows. Upright, he opened his eyes and stared – his blue eyes suddenly vivid through the room as if he had suddenly seen or understood something of absolute importance: some idea that had eluded him his whole life. At the same time a kind of deep, unearthly belch erupted from his mouth (the mask had slipped). The nurses laid him back down. “You’ll
feel better now,” one of them said, repositioning the mask. They left. Under half-fallen lids, her father’s eyes seemed frozen. Ann hurried after the nurses, but even before they came back with the stethoscope, she knew what she had seen.

She sat for a long time with him. Held his cooling hands. Tugged away the sheet and pulled up his gown. Seeing her father naked: that was what finally tipped her out of the state of numb competence she had occupied for weeks. Seeing not just the untidy clump of his genitals, shrunken under their grey bush of hair, but all of him, laid out for the first time to her eyes: the thin shanks; the dimpled, raw-looking knees turned outward; his head with its misshapen mouth. In a rage of grief, she wept for him, for herself, for the bitter joke of human life. She re-covered him and, sitting on the edge of the bed, smoothed back his hair. But it was no longer him.

She has reached the marsh at the back of Inverness. The light floods from behind her now, washing the reeds that bow away on either side as the hull pushes through. In a patch of open water, she drifts, until, bestirring herself, she takes a notebook from her basket and begins to sketch. The sound of the outboard infiltrates so gradually she only looks up a moment before it breaks off. Someone has arrived on the far side of the island. She thinks little of it – people are always stopping to fish. After a while, roaring back to life, the boat drives away.

Later, she opens the fridge and discovers the fillets. Two creamy white slabs on a blue plate. For a second, it is as if she has put them there herself and forgotten. A thickness of incomprehension, and then – remembering the boat, the motor – she understands.

For some time, she doesn’t move. Then she shuts the door.

After a while, she throws together a small salad, boils some new potatoes, fries one of the fillets in olive oil, and carries her meal to the porch, where she sits at a small table by the screens. The pickerel is sweet, dense, perfectly cooked. Putting down her wine, she falls into reverie, oblivious to her surroundings. When a splash sounds from the channel, she is not quick enough to see what made it. But she peers intently.

H
e sits on his front step cleaning his rifle. Taking care not to scratch the barrel, he works the cleaning rod through the breach until its flannel-wrapped tip protrudes from the muzzle. Handling the gun is second nature to him, its weight a comfort, the duties he owes to it, a plea sure. Sometimes, when he can’t sleep, he imagines carrying it in the bush above Nigushi: the willow flats west of Coke, good moose country; or the high, piney ridges above Charlton; or the blueberry hills along Silver where he shot that bear with the tag. Come August or September, he’ll go up there again and stay at Matt’s cabin (his cabin now), a thought that lifts his spirits and sets him working vigorously. A few
seconds later, he remembers a cliff on the Fife River. Matt had taken him there on one of their first hunting trips – eased their boat under the wall of rock that, swelling overhead, almost cut off the sky. Matt shut off the motor, and in the ensuing calm, as water lapped against the hull, Billy had looked up the rockface. They had arrived somewhere, he felt it instantly, a place with its own atmosphere, its own privacy, like when you step into a church, and in the dim coolness other kinds of thoughts are possible. The rock, he thought, seemed aware of them.

The first image was so faint he nearly missed it: two stick men, drawn in red. Then he saw the others. The canoe with its three paddlers. The tiny thunderbird. The open hand.

He had heard of this place, where the shamans of old painted their dreams in red ochre. Across the dun rock, the figures were engaged in mysterious actions. They were motionless, but he sensed this stillness was an illusion. In
their
world, they were busy at important work. The canoe was always making its way up the rock; the stick men were always releasing their arrows; and the moose under its great rack – he had not seen it at first – was always stepping toward the crevasse where a stain of water gleamed.

Reaching out, Matt deposited something on a ledge above the waterline. “For the little ones,” he said.

Years later he would leave tobacco there himself. For the little ones –
Mememguisiuk
, the old folk called them – mischievous helpers whom few people had seen, though everyone was familiar with their handiwork. A coffee pot
overturned. A favourable wind arriving out of nowhere. Once Matt had heard them singing, out of the rock.

His behaviour at Lola’s had taken him by surprise. It was as if some thin strand that had held him back for years had quietly let go. But Ann had not reacted well, and he wondered if he had spoiled something permanently between them. Then the idea of bringing her a fish occurred: a peace offering, an apology, an excuse to see her again. He stood in his boat, casting into the green-shadowed pool under Ferguson’s Rock. The pickerel struck almost immediately, as if it had been waiting for him. Playing the fish in, he had scooped it in his net, cleaned it on shore, and placed the wrapped fillets in his cooler: everything intensely pleasurable, because it was done for her. But later, driving to Inverness, he wondered if he was pushing too hard.
You make everything impossible, Billy
. Noticing her canoe was gone, he took it as a sign: he would leave the fish and slip off.

He had just closed the fridge door when he paused to gaze down the hall toward the front of the house. The late sun, infiltrating through the porch, cast quivering shards along the hardwood and walls. He had always loved the old cottage, and this evening it seemed alive, beckoning him down the hall to the open doorway of her first-floor bedroom. From a bedpost hung some silky, lilac-coloured thing: the sort of garment a woman would put on for a man. Nearby, on the floor, lay one of Richard’s enormous running
shoes. He could sense their marriage in the room – a density in the atmosphere, as if years of conversation and argument and love-making had left a permanent trace. Her life included so much more than herself. What right did he have to disrupt it? What could he offer in return? There were books piled on the bedside table. A drawer half-open below a mirror. Years ago, when he’d confided his feelings to Yvonne, she had commented, “If you lived with her, you’d get as bored as with all the others.” But as his gaze settled on the unmade bed, he knew he did not believe her.

Most days he visits Yvonne, who has a phone, to see if Ann has called, or the lodge with news of a job. Often he finds the house full of the children Yvonne looks after while their parents are at work or are in no shape to look after them themselves. Crayons underfoot. The TV blasting. Kids sprawled on the floor or spooning up soup ladled from the pot she keeps going on the back of the stove. “Union Station,” she calls her place with the pride he senses behind her complaints. His sister is the most competent person he knows. He has seen her walk into camp with a hundred pounds of moose meat on her back, from a kill she made herself. A wide-shouldered woman with a powerful laugh – though the grimness can show too, when she’s tired or fed up, like bedrock. He thinks she had too much responsibility too young. When their mother was in bad shape, it was Yvonne who held things together –
cooked and cleaned up and made sure he got to school, though she was hardly more than a girl herself. He can remember waiting outside their house, afraid to go in because their mother was on a tear. Then Yvonne appeared beside him. “Come on then, let’s get warm.” Somehow his sister knew how to calm their mother, and before long she would be sitting at the kitchen table weeping over a cup of tea and telling them how much she loved them.

One afternoon he goes with Yvonne and a few of the children to pick berries. Yvonne carries her baby, Pascale, in a Snugly, while Brenda and the others totter along the dusty road with their pails. On the way, they pass the old fastball diamond. Half the rusted backstop has fallen down. Hip-deep weeds cover everything, all the way to the collapsing outfield fence.

“Look at that,” his sister announces. “What a pity, you know?”

Yvonne has the irritating habit of asking him if he knows. You have to give her an answer, because she’ll say it again until you do. She says it again. He says he knows.

In the bright sun, a couple of the little ones squint up at him. “People don’t care any more,” Yvonne is saying. “We used to mow this every week. Now the kids hardly know what a ball is.” Where second base used to be, a bush stands like a stranded runner. “You should try for council,” she says suddenly, turning toward him. “Why not? There’s elections next fall.”

“Sure,” he says. “Climb back up on the cross. Just once more, for old time’s sake.”

“You were never Jesus,” she says.

“Somebody should have told
them
that,” he says, gesturing toward the houses.

“All kinds of people would vote for you,” she says. “We really could use you, you know. Your experience. The new chief –” She explains that the new chief, Margo Mackay, can’t get anything done. “Her ideas are good, but the old guard don’t want to try anything new.”

“I think I did my bit,” he says, turning away.

“You gave it more than a hundred,” she says, plodding after him. “But, hey, you had ten years off. That’s a good rest by anyone’s standards.”

They leave the road and wade into some low bushes. The strawberries are warm and small, with a flavour unlike store berries: little essences of summer. But he can’t enjoy them.
Ten years off
. Did she think he was on some kind of holiday? Already, his time away – the jobs, the people he called his friends, the cities he lived – seems no more distinct than last night’s dream. He never stayed in one place for long. He would be lying on some cardboard flat behind a factory, or beside some woman he hardly knew, and again the land claim would start happening to him. You said. He said. Arguments running in his head like a rat in a wheel. He couldn’t stop them, not even at the bottom of his eighth or ninth beer. So one morning he’d climb on a bus, if he had the money, or stand beside the
highway with his thumb out, and again the continent would come to his rescue – the skies, the retreating horizons, filling him with the conviction that down the road things would be different.