Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [11]
Coming out of shock, realizing that her father was not going to stop, that he was going to kill him, Anna ran onto the deck and tried to pull her father away. But she could not separate them. Coop looked unconscious, wasn’t moving. The stool came down hard on his chest once more, and blood came out of his mouth. Again she tried to embrace her father and pull him away from the body, but she was nothing against his strength. She turned away from him, lifted a large shard of glass and pierced it into his shoulder, pushing it deeper and deeper into his flesh through the checkered shirt. There was a sound like that from a bull, and he turned and struck her with an arm that now held only half its power. He looked backwards and saw the triangle of glass still in him. Anna evaded him until her nakedness was between him and Coop. Her lover. Again her father swept her away. Again she put herself between her father and Coop’s body. His strong left arm came up slowly and clutched her neck and began to crush her windpipe. Then everything began darkening and she dropped to her knees and went limp. She was near to Coop, she brought her face beside him and listened for the sound of his breath beneath that of her own frantic breathing, and finally heard a whisper of it. But he was so still. She nudged him and there was nothing. One eye badly closed, covered in blood. She stayed beside him, her arms around her chest, as if protecting Coop’s heart safe within her.
Her father stared down at them. Then he walked slowly over to the bed, picked up a sheepskin, and came back and covered her with it. He ignored Coop’s body. He carried his daughter over the broken glass until they were away from the cabin and he could put her down, back on the earth. Then he took her by the hand, and never let go of her on the twenty-minute walk down the hill to the farmhouse, the quarter horse nodding beside them, and Anna screaming his name.
He could see nothing, he sat up and could see no frontier between land and sky. Storms had filled the valley. Rain and then sleet. Hail clattering on the corrugated roof. He found himself in the very centre of the room, as far as he could get from the smashed window that sucked in the gale. Outside, the five bannered flags that Anna had strung up a few weeks earlier flew parallel to the ground. Blue, red, green, the hint of yellow, and the now unseen white.
Only the cuts on his face felt sharp and alive. The rest of his body was numb and cold. He was going to die here. He would die here, or walking down the hill. Who was at the farmhouse now? He stood up slowly. The noise around him was so loud he could not hear his own footsteps when he walked across the room, as if he did not exist. He sat at the half-painted table and picked up a book of Anna’s. It felt cold.
When he woke he realized he had been asleep at the table. There seemed to be a momentary clearing, but the wind swivelled back and the cabin was again cut off by the storm. Just the flags snapping. He put his hand through the broken window, to test the weather. Was Anna at the farmhouse? All those times she had risen from the deck, laughing nervously, so that at first he believed she was laughing against him, or worse, at both of