The Last Woman Read online

  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.

  He 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.

  The next morning, he’s sitting with Yvonne at her kitchen table when Jimmy comes in. Ignoring their greetings, the boy cuts himself a piece of pie and sits to eat it, to all intents and purposes alone.

  “So I stopped by Whitbread’s,” Yvonne says to him. “A job,” she explains to Billy. “Deliveries to the cottagers. He’d be out in a boat all day.” And back to Jimmy. “Perfect for you. Those running shoes you want, they don’t grow on trees.”

  “They’re racist over there,” Jimmy says after a while, in a muffled voice.

  “Come on,” she cajoles, darting a look at Billy. “You think they’re racist everywhere. If John Whitbread’s racist, so am I.”

  The click of Jimmy’s fork.

  “He won’t hold it open for you forever,” Yvonne says. “I told him you’d come in tomorrow.”

  “Could have asked me first.”

  “I did ask you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Sighing, Yvonne sends another glance to Billy, who lowers his eyes. He has some experience of what it’s like to be badgered by Yvonne Johnson. When the washing machine falls silent in the basement, she goes off to attend to it.

  As before, Billy feels drawn to his nephew, yet he can’t think of anything to say. On an impulse, he sets a lead sinker (he’s been rolling it between his fingers) on the table. It wobbles away and comes to rest against the ketchup bottle. “One fish in three days,” Billy says, as Jimmy looks up. “Been away too long. Fish aren’t where they used to be. How’re you finding it?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “I tried the black boulders there, where Watcher’s Creek comes in. One good pickerel – all I managed all week. Where do you go? Or is that a trade secret?”

  “We use a mask,” Jimmy says. “Old diving mask. When you look through it, you can see the fish.”

  “And lay the hook right on their noses. Pretty smart.”

  “Don’t fish much any more.”

  “No? How come?” It is out before he can think. Briefly, the boy’s gaze flashes with anger – not at him, but into the deep solitary space where, Billy imagines, Ross Shewaybick’s lifeless body hangs. For some time neither of them speak.

  “Thought I’d go out tonight,” Billy says at last. “Always got room for one more.”

  Jimmy glances up and for a second looks much younger than he is.

  After supper, Billy carries his tackle box and two poles down to the dock. A slight breeze has come up, setting the boats rustling, bringing a touch of coolness. He feels exhilarated by the change, and by the prospect of fishing with his nephew. But Jimmy doesn’t show. Finally Billy drives off alone and anchors in the lea of a nearby island. But he has little heart for fishing now, and after a while he starts his motor and heads back toward the lights.

  The next afternoon, in a dull mood, he goes for a walk. His way takes him along the shore path toward northern parts of the Island where no one lives. In some bays, the shrinking lake has exposed acres of bottom. He treks over mud flats among a scattering of large and small boulders. It is like a desert here – the sun fierce, the powdered mud rising in clouds around his boots. In places, animal tracks pepper the flats: moose, weasel, racoon, dog, fox. The heat is oppressive, and he’s glad to return to the path that keeps, for the most part, under trees.

  Big pines ascend a slope. The atmosphere has changed – the trees drawing him into the still, sun-pierced understory. He climbs among giant pines where the air is cooler and shadows stripe the rust-coloured duff: a deeply private place, holy to his mind, where he has often felt close to those no longer here.

  Many of the trees are browned by drought. Digging with his heel, he finds the soil like powder. Climbing higher, he comes to a plateau where the pines stand farther apart and the space between is littered with wind-felled trees. The fuller light is harsh, settling a relentless pressure on the brain. Balancing along a trunk, he catches a flash of white – patches of brilliant white, as if snow had persisted by some miracle in the July woods.

  Plastic bags: scores of bags, caught in bushes, strewn along the ground. Revulsed, he is about to turn back when a cry comes. It sounds only once, muffled and far away, a cry from the piney depths of the afternoon, so faint that he stands quite still, wondering if he has imagined it. There is something terrible in its brevity, as if human life had risen in an instant and as quickly vanished, sinking away forever into the heat and mosquito-plagued shadows of the bush.

  Creeping forward, he comes across several boys sitting or lying about in a clearing. In their hands are more of the plastic bags, which they keep lifting to their faces, as if peering inside. Their movements are slow, languorous – they are more like old men than boys, enclosed in a sickroom atmosphere, from which drifts, now, the overpowering stench of gasoline.

  A boy leans over and vomits, to the jeers of others. Another boy lies face down on the ground. One foot and then the other lifts and falls back, desultorily, kicking up puffs of dust, as if he is trying to walk straight down, into the earth.

  Before Billy can think, he is in their midst, their stupefied faces staring up at him.

  “Good work, good work,” he hears himself say, his voice breaking. “Killing yourselves up here. Good work!”

  It is as if they do not speak his language. Some fool is shouting. Nothing to do with them.

  “Well?” he demands. Already he can sense his helplessness here. He snatches up a tin. It contains a couple of inches of gas, as clear as apple juice, which he flings on the ground.

  “Great move, buddy,” a voice says.

  The boy is standing with his back to a tree. A rangy, good-looking kid of thirteen or fourteen whose blue eyes fix Billy with hostility.

  “Who are you?”

  “Who am I?” the boy echoes, his drugged, insolent gaze swinging to the others, as if to be asked for his name was something absurd.

  A few of the boys croon with slow laughter. The boy looks back to him now, with such victorious contempt that Billy has to resist striking him. The boy is beyond his power and he knows it. They are all beyond his power. Still, he must go about ripping bags from hands, knocking over tins. Most of the boys watch indifferently. One surrenders his bag with a worried look, like a student handing in an exam. Still leaning against his tree, their leader sends out his sarcastic commentar
y. Great move. Wow. Sign that guy up. Billy’s only consolation is that his nephew is not here.

  A shrill falsetto pulses from the deeper bush. Following the sound, Billy finds a boy kicking viciously at another. The victim, who lies on the ground, is doing nothing to protect himself. But with every kick he shouts like some great bird: Hak! Hak! The blows land with sickening force on his chest, his legs, his head. Hak! Hak! When Billy grabs the kicker and starts to pull him away, he struggles to go on kicking. And he’s weeping, Billy sees – his face burning with fury and grief, as if he were the aggrieved party – as if he were battering himself senseless on a door that will not open. Breaking finally from Billy’s grip, the boy staggers off.

  The other boy lies quietly now, with his head on his arm. A bubble of spit and blood glistens at the corner of his mouth. He lets Billy help him up, but as soon as he’s on his feet, he runs off, after his oppressor.

  Numbed, drenched by his own exertions, Billy listens to the boy’s cries that get smaller until the woods are quiet. Returning to the clearing, he finds it empty. Around him, the ground is littered with plastic bags, pop tins and candy bar wrappers, pieces of abandoned clothing, and the charred remains of a fire. Picking up a running shoe, he stares at it for a moment, then tosses it aside.

  At the base of a large pine, a little boy, not more than five or six, lies with his knees pulled up. His face is filthy, his chin slimy with drool. When Billy rouses him, he opens his eyes and smiles in a vague, trusting way. He’s too stoned to walk, so Billy lifts and carries him.

  He goes back the way he came, down through the pines. Here and there the sun, sloping on a shallower angle, bands the huge trunks with orange. On his shoulder, the little boy murmurs incoherently as he clutches at Billy’s T-shirt. He smells of gas, but his hair gives off a faint scent of soap: someone has cared for him.