The Last Woman Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN BEMROSE

  FICTION

  The Island Walkers

  DRAMA

  Mother Moon

  POETRY

  Going Under

  Imagining Horses

  For my mother,

  Jean Bemrose (née Reid)

  (1915-2004)

  It is difficult to grasp the sheer scale of Ontario’s north country. A place of vast, roadless forests intersected by thousands of lakes and rivers, it ranges from the Great Lakes to the arctic seas, and covers an area larger than France and Great Britain combined. Rich in resources, it supplies wood to the province’s mills, as well as metals (nickel, gold, copper, silver, uranium ore) to its industries. Its abundant wildlife is a source of furs, as well as a draw to sports hunters and fishermen who come here from all parts of the globe. Not least, its more accessible southern lakes are a favourite holiday destination. Many people in the province own “camps” or “cottages” here – waterside summer homes where they can enjoy swimming, boating or just “taking it easy.”

  – FROM AN OLD GEOGRAPHY TEXTBOOK

  I see men as trees, walking.

  – MARK 8:24

  The sun suffers through a cloudless sky. Week after week, it pulses from shoreline rock, floods the lake with glare. New reefs have surfaced – sullen herds strewing the channels – while in remote bays, floating carpets of lily and arrowhead have given way to flats of dried mud.

  To some cottagers, the drought seems proof of dire change – some critical shift in the climate, discussed over drinks or at the gas pumps in Carton Harbour, with that secret frisson of anticipation that so often accompanies rumours of catastrophe. But others tell stories of summers just as dry – a reassuring thought, finally, for no one wants life on the lake to change. Lake Nigushi is a place where people come to escape change, to enjoy the kind of summers they and their parents knew in their youth. The plunge from the raft. The Monopoly board or mystery novel on somnolent afternoons…

  She stands at the window with the receiver pressed to her ear: a woman in cut-offs and a sleeveless blouse, hair mussed from dozing on the couch in the dim room behind her, where the ringing of the phone made its way into her dream. She had been swimming underwater with a book in her hand, and then she flew up, lifted by a crane, cables screeching. And now she is at the window, staring into the fierce daylight with scarcely any sense of how she has got here.

  Beyond the screen, smooth, fissured rock pours away from the cottage toward the water. On the next island, pines stand in monumental stillness, their long, upswept branches pointing into a brilliant sky. The light has transfixed everything: a piece of driftwood, an empty deck chair, a little colony of dry grasses, all motionless in the heat. It seems to her that nothing can move, will ever move again, the afternoon caught in the paralysis of a spell.

  The trees draw past to the rhythmic scuff of his boots. Birch. Cedar. Poplar. A massive pine goes by – green, airy boughs afloat against the blue. Behind him, yet another car is approaching. Walking backwards now, he puts out this thumb. Sun floods through the windshield, lighting the face of a woman in dark glasses. She is watching him coolly, but he knows there’s no hope – a woman alone – and before she can blow by him, he has turned away.

  Hemlock. Pine. Pine. With each step, his canvas bag chafes his leg. His feet hurt and sweat scurries under his damp T-shirt. The road has been paved since he was last this way – an asphalt runway that appears to stop, in the distance, at a wall of greyish trees. But the wall opens; there is always more road. Maple. Pine. Birch. He is labouring in place. It is the trees that are walking.

  Ahead, the sky has plunged to earth. Picking up his pace, he arrives at a lookout where a rusty cable guards the edge of a cliff. Beyond, past sunken treetops and the roofs of the Harbour, Lake Nigushi unfurls its silver. Countless islands, bushy in silhouette, litter the brilliance. A tiny boat is coming in. Its wake flickers behind it, a burning fuse, while the drone of its engine lifts so faintly it might be a solitary bee, afloat in a field of light. It is as he remembers it: the lake with its thousand bays, its smell of rock and water and pine – the smell of life itself. Far out, in mid-sky, an osprey drifts over an island, finds an updraft, and slowly screws itself upward, into the blue.

  The main street of the Harbour is a steady fume of cars. Escaping down an alley, he makes his way along the public quay. The lake has shrunk, he sees: a mud ramp slopes to filthy shallows where two ducks paddle through a shoal of debris. Farther out, new docking extends over the bay and there, where an armada of hulls throws back the blinding whiteness of snow, people – more than he can recall even on the busiest of regatta days – bend to tasks or chat over rails.

  He passes an old woman asleep in a deck chair. A police car pulled onto the grass of a small park. Meeting a chain-link fence, he stops, wondering, as he hooks his fingers in the mesh: it was not here ten years before, nor was the new hotel on the other side. Under a scattering of umbrellas a few patrons linger. Nearby, a young woman is setting tables in a state of profound absorption that for a time draws him into its depths, held by the movement of her hands as they lay down the plates like so many cards. When she looks up, startled, he sees himself as she must see him: wiry, brown-skinned, no longer young, in jeans and a sweat-darkened T-shirt, peering like an inmate through the mesh.

  Detouring around the hotel, he returns to the water. There is no more development here, though a cluster of signs announces its imminent arrival. A rough track meanders among granite outcrops, passes the remains of a shed, climbs among dusty junipers, and brings him, at last, to an inlet where a steel boat has been moored – one of the eighteen-foot runabouts common on the lake. As he watches, the boat swings a little on its rope, bumps a rock, and with futile stubbornness – a mental patient slowly and softly striking his head against a wall – bumps again.

  Billy, is that you? Oh my God, Billy!

  Her voice is still in him. Held by its echoes, he gazes past the harbour mouth, to where the low cloud of an island has settled on the water. Behind it lie farther islands, hidden in the depths of the afternoon. In his mind’s eye, he can see them all, and the channels that wind between them, all the way to the old cottage tucked among its pines, on the island her grandfather had named Inverness.

  His wife is sitting on the deck overlooking the channel, her arms laid along the broad arms of a Muskoka chair, her face lifted to the sun. Richard is certain she must hear them – their outboard racketing down the channel – yet it is several seconds before she turns her head, almost lazily, in their direction. He raises his hand, yet the woman in the deep chair simply goes on looking at them, as if the boat gliding toward her were invisible.

  It is this that stops him – the long moment when recognition seems to fail. Instinctively, he touches his son’s shoulder, where he sits behind the wheel, and at once, with a violence that startles him, Ann twists from her chair and begins to climb swiftly through the pines toward the cottage. Something’s happened, Richard thinks. He cannot take his eyes from her. Sun flickers down her back as she hurries under the trees – and disappears around the corner of the porch.

  Minutes later, they find her in the kitchen, chopping vegetables. “So I didn’t hit the dock that time,” Rowan announces as he marches to the fridge.

  “Marvellous!” Ann cries, leaning back against the counter. The boy takes out the milk while Richard, a little on his guard, sets down the lunch cooler. “So have you brought me any fish?”

  “No!” Rowan intones.

  “What, no fish? Whatever will we eat?”

  “Mom, we’ve got food.”

  Richard listens to their banter in astonishment. That morning, wrapped in her terry gown, a very different woman had come down to the dock to se
e them off. Lethargic, distracted – her state for weeks, it has seemed to him – she stood with her hands in her pockets, gazing vaguely over the water while they readied the boat. Moved by her isolation, he had taken her in his arms, but she was so unresponsive he quickly let her go.

  And now: laughing at something Rowan says, she sends Richard a look of such unstinted joy, he feels his face heat. When the boy goes off, she turns to him.

  “So it was good today?”

  “Yes, yes. Apart from the fish. Too hot for fish, really.” He can barely meet her gaze. There is something daunting in her elation, the sense of a demand he cannot fulfill. Opening the fridge, he is rummaging for a beer when her voice stops him.

  “So I have some news for you.” She is watching him closely, her pale green eyes fixing anxiously on his. “Billy’s back.”

  It’s as if she has pricked him with something sharp, so sharp he cannot feel it yet, though he has watched the instrument enter his skin.

  “Our Billy,” he manages, a light, satiric note.

  “He called from that booth at the turnoff. I just happened to be in the house. I didn’t recognize his voice at first. I thought it was Dad. I mean, for a second – he called me Annie, the way Dad used to.” She is flushing herself now, aware, perhaps, of all her face betrays. “His voice was lower – it really knocked me, to hear him out of the blue like that. More than I would have expected. I’ve wondered often enough if he was – well, if something hadn’t happened to him.”

  “No such luck, I guess,” Richard says, cutting her off. For a long moment she looks at him.

  “Richard,” she says softly, and her worried, beseeching eyes go back and forth between his, as if one of them might yield the response she is looking for. “He was your friend too.”

  Sitting in his patch of shade, Billy watches the Ford Taurus descend the rock. Loose metal rattles as it slams into a pothole, speeds up a little, and swings toward the water, where it abruptly stops. The door flies open and a heavy young man gets out to walk a straight-backed, gunslinger’s walk to the trunk.

  Not bothering with socks, Billy pulls on his boots and limps over.

  “Tom,” he says.

  It is some time before Tom Whitehead stops rustling in his groceries and deigns to look at him. “Well, look who the cat,” he says. His voice is adenoidal, snuffling, and in his gaze is a message Billy has no trouble reading. Well, here you are after all these years: the high and mighty chief, who screwed up good, as we all knew you would – needing a ride like any poor Indian, and because I don’t think you’re worth the dirt on my boots, I’m going to make you ask for it.

  He asks for it. He wades out and takes a seat amidships, on a slab of stained foam. Behind him, the boat sags as Tom heaves himself in. Billy sits motionless as Tom rips at the cord – rips and rips again while the outboard flutters dryly. On the shore, the little tree where he was resting looks increasingly forlorn. You dream of coming home, but you can never dream the details. The taste of metal in your mouth as the things you have forgotten come back – the very things, perhaps, that made you leave in the first place. Ten minutes ago, half an hour ago, he might have changed his mind. Even now, he might climb out of the boat and wade ashore. But he goes on sitting, in a kind of trance, as the engine flutters and the air grows thick with Tom’s fury. Often he has seen a large animal take a small one and there is always a moment when struggle stops. The smaller may still be alive – its eyes glisten and even look around, as if curious – but it lies still in the other’s jaws, or under its talons, almost at peace it seems, immune to any notion of escape and perhaps even to pain. He has wondered at this – what it must feel like – and as the motor catches and they begin their slow troll out of the harbour, he thinks of it and not for the first time senses that for all his time away, he has only been circling this moment of surrender.

  Porcupine. Watson. Stoney. The islands go by in the reverse order of when he saw them last. Then, it was fall: he had huddled in his boat, fighting the waves that surged from the open lake, happy in the way of someone denying unhappiness, pounding his boat on the waves. The land claim was lost, and life had become intolerable on Pine Island. His enemies – the ones who had opposed the claim and the ones who blamed him for losing it – had painted messages on the side of his house. Yet it wasn’t the threats that bothered him – they had been pretty much standard coin ever since he and Richard Galuta had launched their claim to the band’s traditional territory, a chunk of hunting and trapping grounds that as one newspaper had put it was the size of Prince Edward Island. No, it wasn’t the threats, it was the knowledge he’d let his people down. He could see it even in the eyes of his supporters – that flash of hurt and embarrassment, that tactful evasion of him, as if he’d messed himself and it was the better part of kindness to look away. He’d put everything into it – worked night and day for years, though it wasn’t just exhaustion that finally caught up to him. It was the sense he no longer knew who he was. Before, he was the man, the chief, who for better or worse was pursuing a claim that, if successful – and he was certain it would be – would put Pine Island on track for generations. But when the claim was lost, who was he? He had spells of dizziness; a couple of times he watched himself at a distance, walking along with his head down. The defeat had gutted him, and though he thought of appealing (Richard Galuta with typical blind optimism had urged him to) he had lost the will to carry on – even supposing that people would still support him (and he was as sure they wouldn’t as he was sure it wouldn’t snow in July). He had resigned as chief, driven his boat to the Harbour, climbed into his ancient Chrysler, and headed south. His plan was to stay with friends in Toronto, but approaching the city, he found himself in the wrong lane, heading west. It wasn’t so much that he decided to keep going as that he surrendered to the momentum of the car. On he floated, past Hamilton, Stoney Creek, St. Catharines. On the bridge to Buffalo he woke from his torpor. Off to his right, Lake Erie danced and sparkled, and for an instant he divined the possibility – the wild hope – of burying himself in the depths of the continent.

  Pine Island dock is crowded round with boats – a mass of silver hulls set clashing and nodding by their bow wave. Stepping from boat to boat, he reaches the dock and goes on toward the small houses. He has the queer sense he has fallen out of time. It is no longer 1986 – or rather not just ’86. It is ’76, and ’61 – it is all those years and none – a single inescapable moment in which he has always existed just here, with the sun on his neck and the coarse sand of Pine Island beach gritting under his boots and before him, hunched on the rock, the familiar houses with their glare-blinded eyes. Some are well kept, flowers sitting out in pots. Others – more than he recalls – have slipped into neglect. Roofs patched with garbage bags. A punched-out screen. In the shade, a bicycle has been set upside down. One wheel revolves slowly, as if brushed by a passing ghost.

  He crosses an area of treeless bedrock. On the far side sits a small blue house half-buried in cedars. A padlock has been affixed to the door and it is as if he has met something that contradicts his idea of reality – an exception to the laws of physics. He stops. He stares at the house. You hear that someone is dead. You weep. You think you know: he’s dead. A piece of broken glass to be carried in your chest. Sometimes you forget it’s there. Then you move a certain way and, without warning, it cuts again. Putting down his bag, he climbs the steps and takes the cool, heavy lock in his hand. Tugs at the thick hasp. Retreating, he steps through bushes to a window. Inside, sun has lit the end of a table and a few scattered chairs. Down the side of an open cupboard, several postcards have been stuck with pins. They are curling a little, but he can just make out the turquoise sheen of the Caribbean. The white body of a shark. He counts five. Surely there were more! Hands cupped to dusty glass, he peers into the shadows of that familiar room, searching for more.

  Against the wall of his tent, Rowan’s shadow looms, shrinks, writhes – a shape-shifter trapped in a dome of red ligh
t. Detouring from the path, Ann stoops before the meshed doorway.

  Her son is poised on his knees with his back to her, under the cone of light falling from the suspended flashlight, hands raised like an evangelical receiving a blessing.

  “Honey?” She has to speak twice before he turns. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m killing mosquitoes.”

  “Are you feeling all right? Do you think it would help if you –?”

  “I don’t want one.”

  Ann hesitates. Perhaps he has no need of a pill. Every summer they take him off the Ritalin. Usually, Inverness supplies all the calm he needs, but today the place has not accomplished its usual magic. It had started at supper – talking a mile a minute while she and Richard made worried eye contact across the table. She suspected their time on the water: too much sun, maybe, and Richard not always as sensitive to the boy’s moods as he might be.

  “It’d make you feel better.”

  He lunges at another mosquito. “Shit!”

  “Rowan!”

  “Sorry! I don’t want a pill!”

  “I’m not saying you have to –” For Rowan hates his medicine and she hates fighting Rowan. The boy is frowning up at her now, waiting for his oppressor to leave. She knows he might be up half the night – tomorrow a misery of exhaustion, for all of them. And yet: the tug of her painting is nearly irresistible.

  It came to her just minutes ago, at the kitchen sink, a flash in which she saw it whole: not the painting she has been struggling with for weeks, but a new one. It was as if a door had opened and she had glimpsed the drama behind the placid surface of things. A massive, naked figure waded knee-deep through a crowd of smaller figures, in a boiling light: a sense of epic conflict, and at the same time ecstasy – there at the kitchen sink, seeing everything, with a dripping plate in her hands. Giving up the battle with Rowan, she hurries down the path to the boathouse. Inside, the beam of her flashlight picks out her red canoe, adrift in its bay, finds the screen door to the stairs, and precedes her up the steep well where, with the flick of a switch, her long, multi-windowed studio leaps into existence.