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

the hatch and haul it up on a rope. He’d go down there himself sometimes to drink liniment, sit with his back to the cool wall with a dipper of water handy. It burned on the way down, you see, so he had to take it with water. If the hatch was open when I come in, I’d know he was down there. Nothing was giving him much bother. Here’s your milk, Charlie! I’d yell. Sometimes he could climb up that ladder, sometimes he just stayed where he was. Chain-Lightning Charlie. Thirty-five cents. Damn glad to get it.

VI.
    R ED M URDOCK SMELLED PISS in the room as soon as he opened his eyes. His face burned, like he was a kid again shamed by wet sheets. He lay there without moving but he felt no dampness. Ah, last night he’d dug out an old chamber pot, first time since, Lord, before he took up the old pantry with a toilet and a tub. Something to be said for that china pot handy on the floor, after you’d been drinking, just stand up dreamy, do it, and then back you fell, catching sleep up where you left it. Yes.
    But it shouldn’t get around, using a pot when he didn’t have to. Codgers did that, drinkers. In the old days the smell of your life was here in the bedroom, and you might die here too, laid out on cold boards in the parlour by your own people, the ones who loved you, the nearest, they washed you, after death, readied your body. Who in a house now could do that hard and distasteful act? Waked, and buried you.
    He took hold of his sleeping cock, more in confirmation than in lust. He had tried not to think of Rosaire that way, it seemed disrespectful to her those first months she was gone, to his love for her. But yet, yet, the long, lovely curve of her back, her mouth on his, on him, the taste of her in a rumple of bedclothes kept coming into him, this mattered. And why not? She loved the long, deep, naked hug as much as he did, the groan of a kiss. But all this was grief too—joys gone, terribly missed.
    “Cloud, you old bugger,” Murdock said, his voice rough with sleep. The cat slept at the foot of the bed sometimes, not near the pillow as he had at Rosaire’s. Murdock had come to like the weight of him there when he woke in the night, that solid little body at his feet. Sometimes awake in the dark he thought he could hear a faint, comforting purr. The cat swished its tail but didn’t move, studying Murdock with owlish yellow eyes. They had grieved together, the cat sitting on its belly for hours with its paws tucked neatly under its chest, not really sleeping, but rather inert, its eyes half-shut in a kind of trance that Murdock understood perfectly—turned into itself tight because it could not be touched by the one who’d loved it most. “I suppose you’re hungry, you little bear?”
    Murdock emptied the chamber pot in the toilet downstairs, then bent to the little window, his breath colouring a haze in the glass: the strait was thick and silent with fog. What the water was doing he couldn’t tell, dark grey, razored with currents.
    There’d been just the two of them, really, Rosaire and him, and then the rest of the world. That was so clear this morning, his chest hurt. They had done their daily living in different houses, apart, so they saved the best for each other. How many a man could say that, how many a woman?
    Most of the time he had never minded his own company. He’d been led to believe, from way back, that that was a failing, and maybe it was. But his mother’s betrayal put marriage out of his mind forever, he didn’t need it, she had walked away from him and his father, leaving behind a bitter taste he could not swallow. It hadn’t mattered, anyway, for a long time until he met Rosaire Robertson at a dance. Great company right off. Hard to explain that, what went into it.Hers was … well, he had liked to be with her, in all situations. He’d never known that feeling.
    He thought he knew sorrow before sorrow hit, but he hadn’t.
    He filled Cloud’s bowl with chopped up chicken he