Climbing up the hill in back of the house, he made his way inland, skirting a long U-shaped bog and heading for a dense thicket of elderberry bushes. The day was windy, full of bleak rain-filled clouds scudding off toward the northwest. Years before, at this same time of year, he had followed in his father’s footsteps as they went hunting to lay in meat for the winter. They would go out every day for weeks until the weather turned too raw and bitter, and even then they would sometimes continue if the game had been scarce. Those were the only times he had felt a bond with his father, although they rarely talked and then only at night, after they had skinned a rabbit or partridge and sat eating around the warmth of a fire. Sometimes his father would permit him inside the rigid boundaries of his fierce containment. Talking slowly of the past and his father and his father’s father and how they had always hunted this land and how as long as there were Hardins the land would belong to them. What great failing had caused Wesley never to allow his own son to follow, however briefly, in these same footsteps? Or strength, he thought savagely. Because it was over, all of this, it was only sport now and an old man’s ambiguous anchor to a past that Walker could and should have no use for.
A rabbit scampered in front of him and he raised his shotgun only to lose his aim as the rabbit darted off to the side. As if to test his resolve, he fired a round at the sky, the report shocking him and for a brief moment emptying his mind. He walked on, through the elderberry bushes and into the dense spruce forest that stretched for sixty miles to the other side of the island. It was quiet now inside the refuge of stunted windswept trees, and he sat down against a lightning-split trunk. He dozed and when he woke there was a light rain falling and there, through the trees, stood a slender doe, her head and flank exposed.
As he raised the shotgun, she turned toward him, her eyes and nostrils shuddering with fear. And then he fired, the pellets striking her head and neck. But she wasn’t fully dead, and plunging through the woods, she disappeared from his line of vision. He followed her to the edge of a steep ravine. He could see the trail of blood and hear her shuddering death agony beneath him, but the ravine was too steep for him to descend and once down he knew he would never be able to get back.
He sat on the edge of the ravine until he couldn’t hear her any more and then as the day turned suddenly, almost brutally dark, he made his way back, his body shivering under stinging gusts of rain.
Long wasn’t there when he got back, and he built up the fire in the stove and dried himself off, hanging his clothes on the drying rack overhead. Then he went up the stairs once more and lay in the dark listening to the rain until sleep finally rescued him.
In the morning when he came down again Long Hatcher was sitting by the stove.
“Is there still a boat?” Wesley asked. “I’d like to go out in a boat for a short while.”
Long walked over to the highboy and took out a full bottle of rum. “For the boat. The best of the rest.”
Wesley made a pot of coffee and fried up some potatoes while Long returned to his chair and fell asleep, snoring loudly. After Wesley had eaten, he stepped outside and walked around the house. The house had been built and added to over the years with lumber taken from wrecked ships, and its joists and beams were all solid oak. Although Long hadn’t bothered to bank it, the foundation seemed firm enough. Wesley sat down on the front steps and watched narrow avenues of fog drift in from the sea. Once in a while the sun broke through, lighting up the frost-shattered rocks.
Long came out. He had put on wool pants and a yellow mackintosh and was holding the bottle of rum. Wesley went back into the house and returned with his down jacket and a black toque that he put on his head, and then he and Long walked down the steep hill into the town. A few figures nodded and called out but he didn’t recognize them. Fish had been washed and lay stacked on wooden racks waiting for the sun to dry them. Long stopped to take some squid out of a barrel for bait, wrapping it in newspaper. Then they walked halfway down the dock to the Angie D., a wide-beamed dory with an open cabin. An old woman wrapped in a black coat sat against the Chevy motor in the middle of the boat, drinking coffee from a thermos.
“Get out of my fuckin’ boat,” Long stammered.
“I have a right to see Wesley Hardin,” she said calmly. “More than you, that’s for sure.”
They stepped down into the boat and Long primed the motor. The old woman ignored him, taking off her wire-rimmed spectacles and looking up at Wesley with a toothless grin.
“You don’t remember Annie Mae?” she asked.
Wesley didn’t remember.
“You and me and Long been down the river a time or two,” Annie Mae said knowingly. “We were in goddamn grade five together. Then there was that time we were swapping spit up at Huckle’s Point and old man Poultry come by, him that got caught on the ice in Thunder Bay.”
Wesley cast off and Long guided the boat slowly into the harbor. A loon flew over, disappearing into a pocket of fog, and then puffins and a razor-billed auk passed by. The boat cleared the harbor and they went past a line of breakers into the open sea. There was a gentle swell on, and they sat quietly as Long cut the engine and dropped anchor.
“You must be bringing TV to the Slab,” Annie Mae said as they set their hand lines with squid, jigging them fifteen fathoms down.
“Not me,” Wesley said.
Annie Mae chose not to believe him. “Heard you was bringing in twenty-eight stations. All from the States. I think you came back to the Slab to do just that and it’s a great thing and it’s what I come to tell you. I’m an old girl and when I can’t get about no more TV is goin’ to be my company. I ain’t goin’ to turn it off until they find me stiff as a salted cod.”
Annie Mae poured coffee from her thermos into tin cups and Long added large dollops of rum and they drank and waited for the fish. A migration of murres, looking like diminutive penguins, cackled maniacally as they flew past.
“You surely must be some wizard of wrong notions to come back to the Slab,” Annie Mae said. “Nothing here to do but die.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Long said.
“You’re goddamn right.” Annie Mae shook her fist at both of them. “Take Wesley Hardin’s own grandpa. I was a little bitty thing, but I was there. Times was hard. Nothing to eat. Takin’ bets on who would make it through that winter. Now old Granddaddy Hardin knew he wasn’t worth a lick in hell. Never helped out. Never had nothin’ good to say about nobody. Was ugly to boot. Finally he seen the light. Got properly likkered up and commenced to go to each and every family. He had his tell on those he knew and they on him and everyone had to have their share of eating and drinking and passing out so it took more than three days and nights for everyone to wind up at the Hardin house. I know you recollect the night, Wesley, because you was right there when your own pa took a sealskin rope from a chest and threw it over that stringer you got running across the living room. Most all the town was looking when Granddaddy Hardin stood on a little table and put the noose around his own neck and said he’d done the best he could, take it or leave it, and that he looked forward to never seeing their goddamn faces again. Then his own son kicked the table out from underneath him and he swung free, dead as a stone.”