The Last Woman Read online

  “This place is no good,” Giorgio announces after a while.

  “Patience, Giorgio,” his father says wearily. Billy understands that Giorgio’s father does not need fish to make it a good day. But Giorgio exudes a roiling, angry energy. Men in such a state never catch fish, Billy knows. The fish will have nothing to do with them.

  The others have some success: a small pickerel for Frank, two bass for Jim. Giorgio casts in a desultory way, and winds in sullenly, his impatience stilled by the hammer of continual disappointment. It’s he who rummages through the containers until he finds the beer.

  Billy suggests they break for lunch, and they ease into a landing spot where the rock drops off as abruptly as a dock. He sets out the lunch things in the clearing above, where a kind of rude table had been made by nailing some boards between cedar trees. They sit in the shade, on folding chairs, eating and drinking and gazing toward the river as it slips around rocks with a steady, soothing hush. The older men talk, but Giorgio sits on the edge of his chair concentrating on his pastrami and cheese sandwich, scowling at a bit he removes from his mouth.

  “So you used to be chief,” he says to Billy suddenly. “You know, I don’t get this land claim business. You laid claim to all this, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  Giorgio shakes his head and goes on chewing. Billy hopes he’ll drop the subject, but after another swig of beer, he adds, “So, like” – he is grinning collusively at the others – “are we supposed to give the whole country back to you?”

  “That would be a start,” Billy says.

  Giorgio frowns at his joke. The others are listening with a stillness that suggests they are embarrassed, their heads down.

  “At least we’re doing something with it. You weren’t doing that much with it, seems to me.”

  “Well, we were living off it,” Billy says quietly and at that moment hears the machines. It is as if a door has just opened and the faint clanking of caterpillar treads has entered the place where they sit. Then the door closes and the sound stops. Billy glances around; he can’t believe the others haven’t heard.

  “Yah, yah, back to the land and all that,” Giorgio is saying. “But the returns weren’t much, were they, the way you used to live? You got cars now, houses. It’s not right you should want your land back too. You made your trade. If you’d stuck to teepees, maybe I could see it.”

  Frank sighs. “Giorgio. This is too nice a day for arguments.”

  “Just making conversation, Papa. I think you guys should concentrate on getting your act together. All your problems. I mean, we give you billions and nothing changes. Welfare corrupts – and I’m not saying just Indians, anybody. My father came to this country with nothing and he didn’t ask for a thing. He just got to work.”

  “Giorgio.”

  “Well, you did. You started with nothing. Now you’re a big man. I’m just saying, it’s possible.”

  “That’s good to know,” Billy says, getting up; his appetite is gone. He goes back to the boat, pulls up the chain of fish, and begins to clean them on a board. After a while, Frank Carpino arrives to stand nearby. He lights a cigarillo.

  “You smoke these things?”

  “No, thanks.” He’s sliding his knife along a ribcage, his fingers coated in the watery, slippery blood.

  “My son is a bit of a hothead.”

  “Well,” Billy says, as his knife emerges near the tail, “I guess it’s the privilege of the young.”

  “He’s not as young as he looks. Or acts sometimes.”

  Billy understands he is being offered an apology. For a while, they are silent. Billy slips the fillet onto some waxed paper. Then the door opens again and the grumble of heavy machinery slips through. Overhead, in a drift of blue smoke, Frank, apparently oblivious, is saying, “You know, I’ve built things all my life. Condos, apartment buildings, malls, houses – God, the houses – I’ve covered whole counties with houses. We do them on a theme, you know, we give them pretty names, as if they were real places.” Frank takes a long drag on his cigarillo, blows smoke as he looks around vacantly. The door has closed: the only sound now is the hush of the rapids. “Where I come from, there are houses everywhere. Houses piled on houses. You couldn’t talk in your own kitchen without the neighbours hearing you. In Europe, everywhere you turn there are houses, people – somebody behind every bush – not like this.”

  The old man walks off and stands for a while urinating at the base of a cedar, his cigarillo clenched in his teeth, his stream pattering fitfully. Returning, he gazes over the water. “Just to stand here and know it’s wilderness all the way to the north pole – you sort of start to breathe again.”

  The next day, Billy sets out for the clear-cuts. Dragging his boat onto bedrock, he walks for some distance down a narrow bay that used to be water, climbs a shallow bank, and reaches the mouth of the trail that winds through the shadowy, sun-pierced bush. On either side, the trunks of virgin white pine thrust up among the lesser trees. Here and there, one of the giants has fallen, its body ridged with fungi or buried in ferns, their filigreed leaves motionless in the heat.

  Pausing on the trail, he hears again the clanking of treads – a sound so small and faraway it seems almost a memory. He begins to run toward it – he cannot help himself – over rock ledges, over roots, the pounding of his feet and rasping of his breath masking the sound he is running toward.

  The fall after Ann Scott left, he and Matt made plans to go up to Silver Lake. Usually it was the most exciting time of the year for him: the launch of the trapping season, when supplies had to be bought and gear mended, and anticipation of a winter in the bush ran high. All over the Island, families were making their preparations and saying their goodbyes. It might be Christmas or longer before they met again. Every morning saw some new departure: another heavily loaded boat droning out across the placid lake, through the bright mists ignited by the frost, on the first stage of the journey that would take them to the lakes north of Nigushi.

  But this year held no pleasure for him. He did not want to go north. Other than Ann Scott, he did not know what he wanted. He was sullen, distracted, and, two days before they were to leave, managed to drive Matt’s canoe onto the rocks.

  Matt being Matt, he said nothing. Billy found his uncle’s silence torture – fresh evidence for his conviction that he was no good. Why else would she have left him? He was not strong enough to keep her, not good-looking enough or smart enough or educated enough. There was this thing in him – the expectation that he would screw up. It had been there as long as he could remember; it was there when he had to sit in the corner of the classroom with the dunce-cap on his head; it was there in Father McReavy’s livid face that time the priest caught him drinking the communion wine. This dark, perverse belief in his own inevitable failure – a thing that could drift out of some backwater of his mind and choke him. Ann Scott had left. He had wrecked Matt’s canoe. He had seen the rocks coming up and felt powerless to move the tiller of the outboard; then, running the hull over those jagged teeth, hearing the wood crunch and splinter, he had experienced, for a moment, a bitter satisfaction.

  Over the next few days, as Matt repaired the big canoe, Billy’s shame deepened. He stood silently, watching Matt work. He fetched tools. He was tempted to run away. But he sensed there were further depths of shame lurking in that direction, and he stayed.

  They were the last boat to leave the Island. Droning at the flat stern, their little outboard pushed them up Nigushi, through the northern islands, down a long bay to the first portage. He set out with the canoe on his shoulders, glad of its weight, of the cut of a thwart into the back of his neck. Just ahead of him, visible under the sloping hull, Matt threaded the narrow trail with a big pack on his back, another balanced on top of that, in a silence that seemed aimed at him.

  After two days, they reached the cabin on Silver. Immediately, there was wood to be cut, meat to be hunted, nets to be set – no end of work for which he was also g
rateful; for plying a bucksaw or digging a new trench for the latrine, he could expend some of his fury. He felt he had no right to this anger, but there it was: a pressure behind his face, a desire, at times, to shout at Matt (he never did) or fling his axe through the trees (he did once).

  Increasingly, the older man irritated him. The way he whistled softly and tunelessly through his front teeth. The way he would stand staring for twenty minutes at a time, lost in some thought he never cared to share, so that Billy was left with the impression that Matt would have preferred to be alone.

  Emma was spending the winter in Black Falls to tend her sick sister. They were two men on their own: two mostly silent men, doing what needed to be done. They had no instinct for the extras that were second nature to Emma. There were no sweetcakes, no doughnuts, no bright cloth on the table. The little stove seemed to flicker less cheerfully.

  After freeze-up, when Matt walked back to Pine Island to get the dogs, Billy stayed behind. At first, he experienced a loneliness that verged on panic. He lay on his bed, staring up at the gear hanging from the rafters. Eventually, he took his rifle and went out.

  When he discovered the tracks of a moose, he followed them across the light snow – the deep, splayed prints, the wispy trail of a hoof, little craters filling with dusk, leading him into a grove where the animal had stopped to chew on a branch. With evening coming on, he gave up the chase. He was in a swampy area at one end of Silver Lake: a tiny lake in itself, where grasses had begun to blow dryly in a rising wind. On an impulse, he lay down, and after a while aimed his rifle at the sky. The echo of his shot seemed to split several ways at once, as if the ice beneath him, the whole bush, were tearing apart.

  They woke each day in the dark to ice in the water bucket. Billy would make breakfast while Matt got the dogs ready. The men ran behind the sled, while ahead the dogs lunged under the cloud of their own breath: through spruce, their snow-sheathed spires motionless against the deep blue of dawn, or under the trunks of leaning pines that now and then let slip a glitter of snow. The lakes were dazzling: held in a silence so deep it lent to any sound – the snapping of a branch, a rifle shot – the significance of a spoken word.

  They trapped mostly beaver. They would find a lodge – its mound of sticks frozen to the hardness of cement – and hack their way down through a foot or two of ice to the underwater entrances, where they set their traps. Often when they hauled them up several days later, they found them empty. Once, they found the beaver had escaped with all but two nails. “I guess we’re toenail trappers now,” Matt joked. But on those times when they found the heavy, sleek body of a drowned beaver, there was a quiet sense of celebration. They dried the beaver by rubbing snow on it. Then it was on to the next set of traps, the next lake.

  After the long, cold day, they were glad to reach the cabin. Usually, they hung the by-now frozen animals in the rafters to thaw. They worked on the pelts in the evening, scraping the hides clean, lacing them onto homemade stretchers to dry them flat.

  Matt opened up a little, telling anecdotes from the past, often about Emma, set off by something she had made – a bit of beadwork, a cake of dried blueberries. The older man seemed to take more notice of him now. He might grunt his approval over a pelt Billy was working on or tease him about his cooking. One morning on the line, they stopped to boil up some water for tea. As they hunkered close to their little fire, raising and lowering their mugs of steaming tea, Matt began to tell a story Billy had never heard – the story of how when he got out of the army in ’45 he had come back to Pine Island. “I was in pretty bad shape. Nerves all in a tangle. I couldn’t sit still for ten seconds. Jumped when the door slammed. Emma didn’t know what to do with me.” Matt chuckled at the memory. He was sitting on a pack, with his ear-lugs sticking out, grinning as though having your nerves in a tangle was a bit of a lark. He had come up to Silver Lake by himself, and except for returning briefly to Pine Island at Christmas, he had stayed up till spring. “I was a madman,” he said. “Bad dreams. Bad thoughts. They should have locked me up.”

  “You trapped up here?” Billy said.

  “Trapped. Did the things you do up here. It put me right. Not right away. I wouldn’t listen at first to what it was saying. But eventually.”

  In the little fire, the spruce sticks snapped. Deep in the trees, a raven was crying, and for a moment Billy sensed the deep bush all around them – bigger and deeper than any man could think. He felt like weeping, but held it back. He felt as if something were being offered. But he did not know what.

  One day, when they had stopped on an open lake, he saw a wolf trotting across the ice. It had its head down, and though it must surely have been aware of them, it did not bother to look in their direction.

  The dogs, who had lain down, had not smelled it yet. But Matt had knelt to the sledge and was sliding out his rifle. And suddenly, Billy was in dread of him shooting the wolf. He could not have said why: only he felt connected to the wolf, and knew that it must live.

  Matt raised his rifle: wolf pelts were getting a good price that year. But he did not fire; he turned his square face a little from the stock. Billy had never been able to meet Matt’s eyes for long; in fact, it was a mark of respect not to stare at an elder, or at anyone, for that matter. But now he fixed on his uncle’s dark, questioning eyes, which held him in return. All his self-consciousness was gone, as he pleaded in silence. Matt lowered his gun. Across the lake, the wolf trotted behind the next island.

  They never spoke of the wolf they had let go. But a sense of release, of quiet gratitude, welled in him. Without knowing quite how it happened, his anger and shame began to fade.

  Before him lies a dried-up slough. The hill on the other side has been half-stripped of trees – a vacancy of stumps and yellow dirt. Off to one side, a treaded machine is working. Wielding a mechanical arm, it grasps a big spruce at the base, cuts it off with a scream of its saw, then lifts the tree aloft where for a few seconds it seems to be dancing – its pliant boughs whipping and flowing like the hair of a crazed woman. But almost at once, the mechanical arm turns the tree on its side, runs it through its “fist” and, with a sound like a wooden box being crushed, strips off every branch. The tree – now a pole – is tossed aside.

  Crossing the slough, he starts up the hill, struggling through a heap of debris as he makes his way toward the summit. He has no further interest in the machine: along with its driver, it seems an irrelevance, and he has soon climbed past it, arriving at a small plateau where two pickup trucks have been parked and several men lounge about eating lunch. He strides past them. One, as if readying himself for an attack, stands up. Billy walks quickly, his gaze locked straight ahead. “Hey, chief!” another of them calls after him. “Where’s the fire?” Ignoring their laughter, he goes on past the last truck, past a splintered tree trunk, past a boulder sparkling with broken glass, up the deeply rutted road toward the sky. Nothing left, Billy. He had refused to believe her.

  Before him, now, lies a desert. The trees are gone, or mostly gone. Here and there a solitary grove persists or an isolated poplar. But what dominates is an empty plain speckled with stumps, churned by the tracks of machines, stretching toward the horizon. He has seen clear-cuts before, but never here, on his home ground, and never on such a scale.

  In the distance, windshields glint where machines chew at the remaining bush. Clanking treads float their music in the heat. A road has been cut down the centre of the clear-cut, and along this a truck is advancing toward him, dragging behind it a rising hill of dust.

  The day is hot, still, overcast – a disappointment after weeks of blazing clarity. Richard only prays it won’t rain. Stooping, he bounces a ball and regards the tanned, bald man crouched with his racket at the far end of the court. Reg Benoit is an intense competitor, but – as Richard has discovered – not a particularly skillful one. It’s a problem: he can’t go drubbing the man whose blessing he is counting on.

  Across the net, Ann stands in her whites, tappi
ng her racket idly against her bare leg, frowning at some private thought. He wishes she wouldn’t make her lack of interest so obvious, her displeasure. The previous afternoon, Rowan had made such a fuss when Richard dropped him off at the Ducettes’ that Richard had lost his temper; and though he’d tried to settle things down, he evidently hadn’t done a very good job, because at Inverness, Ann, primed by a phone call from their son, was ready for him. “He says you yelled at him. Really, Richard, I don’t see why you couldn’t have brought him.” “I don’t yell,” he’d responded grimly. He didn’t dare admit the truth: that he’d left Rowan behind because he wanted a child-free weekend, though he hadn’t framed it that way to Ann. Leaving Rowan had made him feel shabby. Driving away from the Ducettes’ had been hard.

  Again, he bounces the ball and takes another swipe at a moth. For the last half-hour, the little creatures have been fluttering out of the woods.

  On Richard’s side of the court, Marilyn Benoit faces her husband. A petite, shapely woman in a pleated tennis skirt that thrusts out at the rear, she’s a good twenty years younger than Reg and given to outbursts of enthusiasm in a voice that seems not to have changed much since she was thirteen.

  He serves.

  “Out!” Reg calls, readying himself again.

  Richard bounces his second ball, waves aside another moth, and delivers an easy serve that Reg slams straight at Marilyn. Raising her racket as much to protect herself as anything, she lets out a squeal and the ball deflects to Ann, who takes a half-hearted stab and misses.

  “Marilyn, you genius!” Richard tells her.

  “I just stood here!” she says with wide eyes. Beyond her, Ann is ambling off the court as if she were on some solitary walk. Retrieving the ball, she strolls back toward the net and tosses it over, underhand.