Free Anna From Away by D. R. Macdonald Page B

ice, where he’d plowed after her. Maybe he should have stayed with her longer, sat at the table, watched her in case she took a turn. God knew he’d done plenty of that with Rosaire, watching over her, but if he didn’t get home he’d be sick himself. He yanked the trap free of the ice and sank it in the black patch of open water, remembering the night his father’s horse went through, that great neighing animal, and Dad raging in Gaelic in the dark, the thrashing, the splitting ice, and his father without a word tossed a manila noose around that mare’s neck, choked her so she reared up like a sea beast and got herself out of that ice and water like it was fire, whipped white by her hooves. Sometimes panic worked, sometimes it didn’t. The horse was desperate to live, that was the heart of it, she took wing.…
    By the time Murdock reached his own kitchen, he was stiff and muttering, he’d have to see to his own self now, God, moving like an old cripple. He stripped with clumsy hands, rubbed himself down with a rough towel until his pale skin was ruddy. He stood naked at the stove he’d stoked before he left, his cock shrivelled with cold. Rosaire would have joked about it, but Jesus, right now it just looked sad.
    He finished the coffee that had simmered since he left, his clothes steaming on a rope line above the stove. He wouldn’t sleep, he felt strangely depleted, wrung out—as if nothing mattered enough, not even saving that woman’s life. Get a grip, boy.
    Cloud watched him benignly from a cushioned chair, slit-eye dozing, still figuring him out, Rosaire he was not, he did not lift a cat into his arms and nuzzle him, Murdock’s turbulent pillow was not a welcome place for a calm animal, where her fragrant hair once spread.
    That Anna. She might have died from shock, if not a drowning. The poor dog saved her, really.
    Naked. With Rosaire. Oh, my.
    He rocked on his heels, rubbed his hands above the stove. The old anger crept into him, how casual she’d been about her health, and he blamed that sometimes, her stubbornness about doctors and medical advice. Jesus, she’d eaten and drunk whatever she fancied and never saw a doctor, not even after the headaches began, and then she collapsed in a seizure coming out of a movie in Sydney. Whatever gave her pleasure, she reached for easily, and guilt only seasoned her appetites. Heed what you eat, girl, he’d tell her. Yet she always looked great, that was the trouble. Oh, I can dance all night, can’t I? Do I
look
fat? There were mornings with her when, work waiting for him in his shop, he’d jump out of bed, I have to sweat a little now, he’d tell her, and she’d say, sweat with me, darlin’, it’s good for the two of us.
    Who the hell knew the cause of that cancer anyway, what evil speck of something had wormed into her brain?
    This need for blame, it came with grief, it dulled the pain, sometimes.
    Such a weight it seemed now to dress himself and go on, to wait for first light, boil oatmeal, brew coffee. Wait. For what?
    I N DRY CLOTHING , Murdock stood at the long-locked door of the forge shed. His breath smoking in the flashlight beam, he worked a key into the thick stiff padlock. He cracked it open with his fist, then hauled the door aside, forcing a neat quarter-circle in the snow. He inhaled the dark interior: rust, bare iron, its bits and lengths, the carbon of dead coals. The dry wood of the water barrel, the little brine tub, salt-stained, it had received red iron in crisp hisses, in plumes of steam.
    Not a big man, his dad, but he had arms long for his height, they’d seemed to direct his life, in motion even when he talked, like they needed to seize hold of something even at rest. He could quell that at the anvil, hammering out barn hinges, a wagon brace, shoeing a horse. And women. Until he married Red Peggy, Peggy
Ruagh,
he’d taken women tight into those arms, he told Murdock one night when he was drinking, I never made one stay that