Cape Breton Road

by D. R. MacDonald

  “He’s just my uncle.”

  “Yiss. You’d be Munro’s boy, I see him in your face. But your mother, her it was had the red hair, eh?”

  “Pretty grey now.”

  “Did you put the grey in it?”

  “Some. But that’s between me and my mother.”

  “Sally Ann. Sally Ann Lamont, from down Middle River. A tall girl herself, but so was her dad, wasn’t he, Finlay?”

  “He was so, Daddy. At least.”

  “You know everybody around here?” Innis said.

  “All that’s is and been,” Finlay said behind him.

  “Your dad and your mother came to this house, more than once, before they went off to Boston. You’d be Boston too then.”

  “Watertown, west of it. But Boston, yeah.”

  “Your grandpa and me were great friends. A better farmer he was, God, yiss, I never cared for the farming a damn bit but I had to do it. And here we are, me and Finlay, the last of the nine of us. All we grow is potatoes and trees. The spruce are put in by the devil, but the pines we put in ourselves. That pine, now, the one you brought down. What made you?”

  “I don’t know, hard to explain. It just happened. Before I knew it, it was down. I’ll pay you for it.”

  “Don’t think of it like money. There’s too much of that. But yiss, hard to explain. Well. You’ll be staying in North St. Aubin, working and such?”

  “Not long. I’ll be going out west, by fall anyway.” It was good to declare that to them: a sure thing. Nothing to prevent it, even if in September he was still a broke man. What else did the old guy know about him? Starr had said, I won’t tell anybody that immigration men escorted you to your airplane seat, we’ll keep that to ourselves, that’s what you want and that’s what I want. “Not much work around here anyway.”

  “Hard to come by. But you got to find work where there is work. Cape Bretoners been going off since my own dad’s days. He did it, carpentering all the way to Montana. Myself, I did threshing trains to Alberta after the war. But he came back and so did I. So I guess you’re coming back. Work that pays money always been short in this place. Work to be done though. Och, lots of that. Now, that pine, that was a special tree. A son of mine was killed and I planted it, up there.”

  “I didn’t know. I mean, it’s not like there was a plaque on it.”

  “It’s plaques he needs, Finlay. Better get up there and nail some on for this fella.”

  “Tomorrow, Daddy, first thing.”

  “How the hell did you know I was up there?” Innis said. He still couldn’t believe he’d been caught like that, surprised in that territory he thought of as his.

  The old man reached for his pipe and slowly tamped tobacco into the bowl. “You were at the spring too. My dad’s brother, John Allan, built him a little stone house up there. Lived up there alone, 1860 something. He went down to The States and we lost track. North Carolina, someplace there where they had the Gaelic.” He struck a wooden match under the chair and sucked flame into his pipe.

  Finlay said, “He has the taibhsearachd, you know, the Second Sight. He’s seen you before. But you don’t need to know about that now.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” Innis felt hot, lightheaded. A sweet tobacco smell, like cooked apples, seemed to come out of the dark wainscoating. He unzipped his jacket. He was suddenly uneasy about his planned set-up in the attic corner, it had seemed so clever a little while ago. “My uncle’ll be getting home soon, for supper. He expects me there.”

  “Och, you’ll have some supper with us,” the old man said firmly. “We didn’t expect you either. We’ll talk a little. Set a plate for the young man, Finlay.” He reached for a stout cane and raised himself out of the rocker, collecting his strength. Despite a stoop he was taller than Innis. “Dan Rory is who I am. Come along, Innis. I want to show you something. Not the fiddle there, I used to play it but my hands went slow on me, they won’t follow my head. Only thing worse than a bad fiddler is a poor piper.”

  He led him into a small cluttered room off the parlor, most of its space taken up with a cot whose sag suggested the long body of the old man himself. A blind hung halfway down the window where light snow fluttered past. Maybe his mother had fled a house like this, this light in winter, where she’d felt as Innis did, trapped and drowsy, inert, living like these men, back up here alone with white fields and woods and a drab sun in the curtains. From the crammed closet Dan Rory pulled out a khaki uniform, laying it out carefully on the cot as if it were alive. The dull brass badges on the shoulders said “Canada” and on the sleeves were sergeant’s stripes.

  “The Great War,” the old man said. “I learned about death. You know about death?”

  “Not that way. Not war.”

  “What way then?”

  “My dad was killed by a car. I’ve been to a funeral or two. The way most people know it.”

  “A good fella, your dad. Sad, he was young.” The old man smiled. “I can see him in the kitchen there, naked as the day he was born, hands clapped over his clachan, doing a little dance in front of the stove, and the women, well, drying him off, terrible for teasing him. He fell through the ice in our old pond, must’ve been six or seven.”

  “What was he doing on the pond?” Innis said, anxious to capture this memory of his father.

  “He was looking for fish.”

  “Fish?”

  Dan Rory poked open the tunic with the tip of his cane and exposed the dark tartan of the kilt, lifted its hem. Light shone in a tiny mothhole. “Blood and mud washed out of her now. When they formed up the Highland Brigade, the 185th, I said right, I’m ready, that’s for me. Wear the kilt, I’ll look so grand in it. I was older, see. Should have known better.”

  They both stared at the uniform. “You were wounded?” Innis said.

  “Twice. Gas is the worst. Awful. Mustard gas goes where you sweat. We had to give up the kilt in battle.” He shifted his cane-tip to the belt buckle, s-shaped bits of brass.

  “That’s a snake buckle. We liked those. Mheall an nathair Eubh. You know the Gaelic?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Starr should give you some then. You can call a man down to the lowest of the low in Gaelic, or praise him to the highest. The Language of The Garden.”

  “What garden?”

  Dan Rory raised his eyebrows. “Eden, of course. Eden. Your uncle should’ve told you that.”

  “He throws out bits of it but not so I’d learn. It’s for things he doesn’t want me to know. What would I do with it anyway?”

  “There’s things said in Gaelic you can’t say any other way, or hear any other way. But no, that wouldn’t matter to you, not in Boston. I see you’ve got no belt on your trousers.” The old man pulled the leather belt from the tunic. “Here, run it through your loops.”

  “I couldn’t take this.”

  “Och, I was skinny as you then. Buckle it up. How old are you?”

  “I’ll be twenty. This is part of your old uniform.”

  “They’re not going to bury me in it. You want to keep your trousers up. Starr has trouble with that, always did.”

  Finlay called them into the kitchen and they sat solemnly at the wooden table while Dan Rory said grace. “Lord, we thank thee for this bountiful food, and for bringing this young man Innis to our table, may he benefit like we have from the blessing and nourishment of God, The Father, Amen.” They quietly passed around the bowls of chowder and the plate of bread and Innis felt the ritual more than the meal, a ceremony, but he ate hungrily, buttering the bread thickly and savoring the white fish.

  “Now, the pine,” Dan Rory said after a few sips of tea that had simmered on the stove until it was black. “We’ll take work, not money. There’s work here needs doing.”

  “Trees that need cutting,” Finlay said, setting down his spoon. “There’s budwormed spruce in the lower woods dead to their roots. And a mess of windfalls. We’d like a path cleaned through that thrash to the road and I’m old for that.
”

  “The old path to the brook,” Dan Rory said. “I want to walk to that water without breaking my neck.”

  “Not a chainsaw,” Finlay said. “We don’t like the racket. We got a double-bit axe sharp as a razor, and a good crosscut can make short work of a tree, eh? It’s not easy work, but we’ll call it square when you’re done.”

  Innis sipped the last of his tea, cooled by a stream of canned milk Finlay had added without asking, and set the cup carefully on its saucer. “Look, I don’t want my uncle to know. All right? And the other thing is, what money I make is from odd jobs around, so I can’t spend all my time at it. I owe Starr for board as it is.”

  “Work it around your other duties. It’s not a great rush,” Finlay said. “The woods isn’t going anywhere.”

  “What about that priest with the old cottage?” Dan Rory said. “Alec says he’s looking for somebody to paint it up or something.”

  “Father Lesperance, down by the ferry wharf. There’s a job for you, Innis, his summer place there. He’s not rich but it’d bring you a few dollars.”

  “We’re not Roman Catholic,” Dan Rory said, “and neither are you, not that I’ve seen your uncle in church since I can’t remember.”

  “He doesn’t go, no.” Starr had said, I told my dad when I got home from the navy I wasn’t going to church, not any day, anymore. He nearly froze me out when he saw I meant it. He could turn to stone for long spells, my dad. Quiet as a shut door for days on end. He hated that he couldn’t talk, that he didn’t have the kind of heart to do that, sit down and say, listen, this is what’s on my mind. Oh, Jesus, no. Clam up. God, we were all that way, when I think about it, the whole damn bunch of us.

  “The priest is a decent fella. Am I right, Finlay?”

  “He is so. Had that cottage a few years now, and he’s not the sort to convert you, I don’t think.”

  “Nothing to convert,” Innis said. “If he’s got work, okay with me.”

  There was an air of business having been settled and they relaxed into an apple pie Finlay had baked, tough crust and all. Why in the hell had he cut down that pine? Two or three minutes of fury just to see it fall, and here he was bound up with these guys. He felt found out, more known than he wanted: people didn’t just look at you here, they looked into you, they inquired, and if you had a family connection, some of them expected, even at first meeting, if not your family tree, then at least a hefty branch of it. The maroon teapot was trimmed in gold leaf, similar to one his mother had, one of her “old things” she’d brought with her to Watertown. She’d known what it was like to be sheltered by family, to have strangers care about you because they knew who your grandfather was, your mother, uncle, aunt. But family could suffocate you too, want to know too much about you, and that’s what his mother had never missed in Boston: after her husband died she could disappear for an evening with another man and no one knew or cared whose daughter she was, or sister or niece, who she belonged to or how far back they went.

  “Starr shown you cousins?” Dan Rory said. “No Corbetts left here in St. Aubin, but you’d have MacKinnons and Campbells in other places.”

  “We haven’t got around much.” That was close to true, though Starr had taken him to see two aging sisters who shared a house in Sydney, Campbells, Netta was one and Innis couldn’t recall the other one’s name, skinny as a crane. They had talked around and over Innis as if he were a decent topic of conversation but didn’t need to be there, and they soon moved on to people they really wanted to discuss, those who’d had interesting surgery, real excavations, or awful deaths or a trajectory of decline even Starr could appreciate. And Alec who ran the store in North St. Aubin was a cousin too, friendly but distant, taciturn, not a prober or a gossip, and Innis liked him for that since he seemed to expect nothing more private from you than he was willing to give himself and that was very little. And Starr had mentioned cousins over on Southside St. Aubin and up the east coast of Cape Breton Island but didn’t seem keen to expose them to his nephew, fine with Innis since the less he saw of kin, the better chance to be taken on his own terms, the less enmeshed his fabrications, the less strain between him and his uncle who didn’t like the lies to begin with. We should be telling the truth about yourself, Starr said, that’s the way to start over, not like this. But I’m not starting over here, Innis said, am I? Can’t you understand that? I’m going west when I’m ready, but I’m not ready yet. No, Starr said, ready you’re not.

  Dan Rory lit his pipe and Finlay a cigarette, blowing smoke thoughtfully. “Saw your uncle Starr with a new ladyfriend yesterday,” Finlay said. “In Sydney.” But for the creases around his eyes he had the face of an old child, innocent but canny.

  “She’s not real new,” Innis said. “I haven’t seen her myself.”

  “Very pretty she was, yes. Arm in arm on Charlotte Street. He looked mighty pleased.”

  “He was always a good dancer, Starr Corbett,” Dan Rory said.

  “Liked a good fight sometimes too, at the dances.” Finlay took a deep drag. “Well, didn’t we all. Not so much of it now, even the youngsters.”

  Starr had never mentioned dancing, or fighting either, but sometimes if he felt good or nicely toasted he might break into a brief stepdance on the kitchen floor while Innis watched, amused.

  “I’ll drive you up home,” Finlay said. “A long walk from here.”

  Innis fetched his jacket from the parlor. He noticed on the wall a framed photograph of Dan Rory in the army kilt, young, all bony knees, a feather in the badge of his cap. The snake belt was clasped around his tunic.

  “What color was that feather?” Innis said, pointing at the photograph.

  “Green,” Dan Rory said. “It was a green feather. The feather is the first to go.”

  2

  INNIS STEPPED INTO THE attic room at the end of the hallway, into the shock of its March air and the dusty scent of dry wood. He shut the door carefully: there might be times when he would be inside here with his uncle somewhere in the house and he had to know every board that creaked, where he could crouch without announcing it, how gently he need latch the door. In the sooty darkness the door boards emitted cracks of light. He played his flashlight over the hewn rafters, the pegged beams, the trunks and boxes and pieces of furniture. The big wooden loom sat as his grandmother had left it years ago, a piece of rough grey cloth in the heddles. Her husband had built it for her, put it together right here in the attic, “over the kitchen,” and there she wove in the wintertime until arthritis crippled her. Innis had tried to imagine how she looked as she worked the loom, her feet and her hands moving, but he couldn’t, he didn’t know enough about that, not yet. He squatted beside the equipment he had collected within the loom’s frame, the old fluorescent shop fixtures he’d bought two new plant bulbs for, a simple timer, a warming tray. Start them off at maybe eighteen hours or so and see how they went. He had the pots, the soil, a small watering can, an old crock to store water in, tinfoil to drape over the length of the lamp to direct it down toward the seedlings. The loom was perfect to hang the fixture from: he could make a tent out of it with two blankets that would conceal the light and hold warmth. Even if Starr stuck his head in the door, he wouldn’t necessarily see much. If he poked around, well, the game was up, but such was the risk of secrets, and better found out now than later. Innis had pried up a floorboard and tapped a multiple socket into the wires in the kitchen ceiling. He was proud of his set-up, practically above Starr’s dinner plate. None of it had cost much, from a secondhand store in The Mines mostly, and he was keen to get this under way. Even in June there might be killing frosts, Starr said, and Innis’s seedlings needed this jump start if they were to grow well and amount to money: a dozen plants even half the size of the ones in the marijuana book, healthy sinsemilla with good flowers, could bring him a grand apiece, and no middleman. Find that trucker and fire up a sample for him, there’d be no problem unloading it. And then Innis could leave North St. Aubin, he would strike out
on his own.

  The fluorescents flickered and balked and then hummed into a steady pinkish light. He touched the warming platter: not too hot, just warm enough to make them happy. He’d germinate the seeds in a wet cloth, start tonight. Last night he had spread them out on a sheet of paper and, like a jeweller, poised a finger above them, selecting slowly, deliberately, each promising seed he would devote his risks to. Maybe here and there sat that one just waiting to sprout in a place like Cape Breton, one that had in it the desire for a new locale, far north, a need to rise out of cool boreal clay and grow like crazy, for the sheer hell of it. He draped the blankets over the loom: it looked like some old sheepherder’s hut out on a dark moor, he liked that. He killed the flashlight and stood there shivering, daring something to lay hold of him, in the dark sometimes he could feel it, if he’d had a few tokes. The first time he shut himself in here, things seemed to rush out of the wood, but they did not make him uneasy, not anymore. He could not say what they were, spirits maybe, but hell, he was probably related to them, it wasn’t as if they were strange. Pieces of the house’s history had been pushed into the attic. In this dark he felt most strongly what kind of house it had been. Mothholes of light appeared in the blankets, his grandmother had woven them, they were old. He had only known her when she visited them back in Boston, him a small boy at the time, but he was certain she wouldn’t want her loom sheltering a garden like his.

  Innis went about the house as if nothing had changed, despite the shrouded light in the attic, his little plot set up and sown. Downstairs, back upstairs, he was tense, a bit wired. Starr would be out late, that new woman was making demands on his attention. In the hall Innis dustpanned a spill of potting soil, searched for other traces of his hidden activities. Finding none, he flipped open a sketchpad under his bedroom lamp, unable to settle into the details of anything, scribbling a rough sketch of a woman’s face, boldly pretty, her hair swirls of dark pencil. Tomorrow he’d go back to the upper woods, far up where he’d staked out that spot, a clearing nicely concealed for summer planting. Still some work to be done there. His plants would need good light without being easily noticed by browsing deer or nosy humans. Apart from Finlay scaring the shit out of him that afternoon way down the break, he’d never run into a soul in all his wanderings up there, just three hunters he’d hidden from back in the fall when the woods were as new and foreign as everything else. You’re a Boston kid, Starr had told him, you get lost up there and we’ll have to send the Mounties in after you. But he knew the woods now, the woods were his.