Free The Last Woman by John Bemrose

the side of the dock. A few feet away she stopped and began to unload. “I won’t be in your way a second,” she told him. Walking by with a pack and a woven basket, she disappeared into the boathouse and returned seconds later to haul up the dripping canoe and overturn it on the dock. Again she went past. Her voice was lower, but her face – she had removed her sunglasses – yes, it was Ann Scott. He had not seen her since the summer he’d first met her.
Some time later, she returned. “Dad wondered if you and Matt would like to stay for supper. I’m Ann, by the way,” she said, looking down from the dock.
“I know,” he said, shading his eyes.
“You know?” A hint of playful remonstrance. “So, and what’s your name?”
When he told her, he could sense something stop, behind her eyes.
He helped her carry plates to the porch, setting them out on the table where purple and white asters poked from a glass. He drank her in: her broad hands cutting cheese; the faint, blonde hairs lacing her forearms; the strong-looking fullness of her compressed mouth. She was the same and yet not; and the change seemed to have come upon her in an instant, like in one of the old stories Matt told, when a woman was changed to a bear, or a girl into a star.
Her parents had divorced, she told him, fussing at a napkin. She had gone to live with her mother in Montreal.“For a long time I hardly came here at all. I used to go to my mom’s cottage in Quebec. I guess that’s why I never saw you.” She paused to regard him. “So tell me what you’ve been doing for the last ten years.”
He grinned at the impossibility of this, but what he saw was fire: a torrent of flame pouring through the canopy of a spruce forest with the roaring speed of a train, while he and the other firefighters turned to run for their lives. It had happened the previous summer, when he’d signed on with a crew near the Manitoba border. Two men had been killed in that incident and he had helped carry out their charred bodies. But he did not tell her about that, there seemed no way to begin, no place for it here, among the plates and folded napkins. “Nothing much. Helped Matt around the lake.” He shrugged.
At the table, her father described a hunting trip he had taken in the Rockies. The smoke from his cigarette floated upward, forming the cliffs and peaks where the ram he had stalked for three days eluded him yet again. Matt smoked too – Charles lighting his cigarettes for him – and to Billy’s surprise talked more than he usually did in the presence of whites, telling them of a storm he had survived on his trapline twenty years before: all night long, trees had blown down around him. “I kept trying to boil tea, to keep from freezing. But that old wind, she kept blowing my fire out.”
Listening with her head propped on one hand, Ann Scott was rapt. Billy felt it too: the excitement of life stretching before them. Because it was a wonderful thing to sitthere with the old folk talking, and to be young: to feel the adventure of life laid out by their stories, and to know you would go there yourself one day – into the country of your life. He did not realize he was there already.
When she said she wanted to draw him, he followed her out to the boathouse and up the stairs to the room she called her studio. The ping-pong table, now pushed to a wall, bore jars of pencils, brushes, cans of turpentine, stacks of paper, stones. There were drawings stuck to the wall with masking tape, painted canvases propped on the floor: a wind-tortured tree, a green face with one eye.
He sat on a chair while she leaned over the board she balanced on one knee. She studied him, then looked down, her pencil moving. He had never posed before, found it uncomfortable, would have laughed had it not been her sitting a few feet away, studying him with a gravity that commanded him. Still, it was odd having her look at him as if he were a thing. Her eyes flicked to his hair. His