Anna From Away by D. R. Macdonald

didn’t want to stay, they liked me or they didn’t. He stared at his arms held out in front of him like they belonged to someone else. Then he placed a large hand on Murdock’s shoulder. Not strong enough to keep your mother though, were they? he said.
    His dad had quit it all suddenly, not many months after the bridge went up and the ferry closed down. Shook off his leather apron one afternoon, his face flushed and sweating, closed the door, let the fire go to ashes. Little need for a forge anymore, not here, he said, it’s passed us by, I’m tired, the horses are going away for dogfeed, minkfeed, for Christ’s sake. Follow your carpentry, Murdock, this is no good to you now.
    But he had to do it again, he didn’t know why. He would have to work at it to make it come back, and whatever he fashioned had to be good, nothing crude or ill-made.
    Murdock hefted a ball-peen hammer.
Òrd.
With the flashlight beam he picked out the anvil,
innean gobha,
blackened and scarred. Remember these at least, his dad had said, our old words for things. Only a few could Murdock call up.
Balg-séididh,
the bellows hanging near the
teallach,
the forge, an old backup for the blower. A dozen kinds of tongs,
teanchair,
nippers, nail moulds, the duck’s nest. Punches, there was a heart-shaped one somewhere, he’d have to find it for Rosaire’s box. Hammers of various heads, the flatter, the set hammers, the swage blocks and the drifts, the nail-maker’s stake anvil, reamers, clippers, shears. Buffers, rasps, hoof parers, fullers. Some were missing, people had tried to talk him out of the tools over the years, and they’d made off with a few before he padlocked it, they were worth money now, that’s how it worked. A man from the States had offered him a thousand dollars for the whole works, he wanted to move the shed, the forge, all of it to his summer property, It’ll be like a museum, Red Murdock, he’d said. But no, it would stay where it was, as it was, and he didn’t want anyone poking around anymore, pricing things in their heads. Leave it in the dark. His father had been here,
bam-bim-bim,
in the small focused roar of fire, bent to the work, fire to anvil to water, iron took shape out of the machinery of his own body, his muscle and brain.…
    How Rosaire slipped when her time came, oh, Jesus, it was not right. Her hair and her looks, and whenever he came to the hospital in those days he lugged the stone of his sadness with him. To see Rosaire looking beautiful, a joy, always. But the drugs had puffed the features from her face, the face she would die with, rounded and soft like a baby’s, a pale mask of illness, of death, not the face he had loved, its moods and glances, its fire. And it disgusted him that he could not feel quite the same way about her as she lay in her last days, her looks so different, he hated himself—
she’s not beautiful like she was
—it was selfish, terrible, by any lights it was awful of him to hold such a thought. And so he’d spent every minute possible with her, he had to assure her that she mattered to him desperately, and that was as true as the sun, his love for her, yes, yes. Still, there was that sharp sadness that he could not
have
her beauty anymore, could not daydream about it, wake to it, touch it, take it into his arms, take it, yes, for granted: that face of sickness he saw then would stay with him too, not just the face that had excited him for so long. He grieved over that loss, even as he grieved at her bedside, at her and her leaving, leaving it all.
    Back in the kitchen Murdock pokered the stove to life, then sat at the table and drank. He watched the light across the water slide from black to inky blue along the hills of St. Aubin. A lone window lit up near the shore: someone awake for work. Not a Bonner, they had the place at one time, he didn’t know who had it now. He needed to
finish
something, complete it. His woodshop sat dark and cold, every piece of work, on the bench