Cape Breton Road

by D. R. MacDonald

  Innis rearranged the seedlings on their trays, rotating their places under the lights. He dangled a hundred-watt bulb nearby to give more heat. The thermometer under the loom said 58 degrees: could be worse, at least they were growing, though God knew where they thought they were. A dense, whipping rain resounded over the roof. But, yes, Starr was right, not warm, not spring. There were no buds anywhere in the woods, no sign of leaf. Except here, under the faintly lavender fluorescence of his artificial sun.

  The hall, the whole house, felt gloomy after the focussed cheeriness of his little garden. He lay on his bed listening, but through the rain could hear nothing of Claire beyond the wall. Had she heard him moving about? Be great to stretch out beside her, just lie there with her while she slept.

  The weight of his exile suddenly bore down on him, physical, oppressive. Despite the odd objects he’d brought to it, this room seemed to hold him in some vague past where only the old lived. The pitcher and bowl his mother and father and how many before them had washed in, the antique flowers on the wall, tiny sprigs of grey roses once pink, the oil lamps, their yellowing kerosene, the spool bedstead his grandfather had made on a treadle lathe. His mother had poured water into that bowl as a young bride, and his dad scooped water over his face, and they’d struck a match to that brass lamp, blown it out at bedtime. But Innis was born in a hospital in North Sydney and they left eventually for Boston, for Watertown. His mother wanted no more fields or woods or barns. I didn’t like people knowing everything I did, she’d told Innis, they all know you and they know about you. Where did her need for men begin, when not just one would do? Here? There?

  He heard Claire walk past his door, her footsteps on the stair. The tap ran in the kitchen. He didn’t feel like talking. The reception on his small transistor was bad, crackling with static now, but he kept it on low, picking up a rock song murmuring with a memory of Watertown, of lying on the floor in Mohney’s basement den smoking pot and bullshitting about joining the Marines, then breaking up with laughter, they could never get out of bed that early. Maybe they’d go saltwater instead, a tramp steamer. But then there was the spiral of arrests, convictions, a reckless pattern Innis himself could not explain and could not stop, and then they’d stopped it for him. Jesus Christ, Mohney had said, sending you clean out of the country and you can’t ever come back? Rain drove hard against the dark window. Why not snow? It was cold enough, the temperature had dropped. Around him were not streets or homes or buildings but woods and fields and hills, and the water in the strait would be a nightmare now, he wouldn’t go near it, wind and tide clashing, whitecaps leaping up. His humiliation seemed to fade like a long moan into the countryside, into dark wooded spaces. He got up and poured water from the pitcher to the bowl. He dangled his fingers in it: waking and washing.

  From the hall landing he could see a light in the parlor. “Claire?”

  She was half-lying on the sofa, her long legs stretched out. Her eyes had a dazed shine to them.

  “Innis, dear, I feel rotten, I really do. I almost passed out here. Fever. Feel.”

  He pressed her forehead the way his mother used to, as if she were telling his fortune. “Jesus, you’re burning. You better get back in bed. I’ll bring you whatever you need.”

  “It’s the damn flu, I know it is. I had it last year. It takes the legs out from under me.”

  His arm around her, holding her against him, he helped her upstairs. “I don’t want any fuss,” she said. She had come down for a bite to eat but was not hungry, just thirsty. “But you, you must be starved, Innis. I’m sorry nothing’s made.”

  “How do you think we got by before you came? I’m a mean cook.”

  Innis turned on the dresser lamp as she tumbled back onto the bed, her arm over her eyes. “Too hot,” she whispered, pulling at her clothes.

  “Hey, get under the covers. You don’t want to get chilled too. I know that much.”

  When he returned with a glass of water, she asked him to help her undress. “What? Me?” He laughed, a little too loud, and threw up his hands in mock horror. “Starr would love that.”

  “Innis, I’m weak as a kitten, I don’t care.” Her cheeks had fiery patches. “I can hardly lift my eyelids.”

  Her eyes were already closing as he drew her sweater up and over her hair, a breath of damp heat released from the wool. Her breasts were bare, her nipples small and dark. God. How could she stand that wool next to her skin? He tugged her jeans down carefully, trying to be quick without seeming to strip her. If Starr showed up, that would be something. No, not this soon, not in this weather, and so what, she was sick and he was seeing to her. And how could he not look at her, her pale blue panties, her smooth legs? Did that make him a bug? He pulled the blankets over her and tucked them in.

  Innis felt dizzy himself, hot. Was he getting sick too? Outside, the big maple drooped deeply, its branches glittering in the dim light from the streetlamp up at the road. Claire was sleeping already, her mouth open in a soft snore. Innis examined her belongings that lay strewn on the dresser. Some makeup. She didn’t wear much, didn’t need much. A touch of mascara, lipstick just bright enough to bring out her olive skin. A headband of summery yellow he had never seen her wear. A long-handled hairbrush, its bristles entangled with her hair. He ran it through his own and set it back, hoping he’d left a few strands, red woven into black. He quietly opened a drawer. The colors of her underwear startled him, scarlets and yellows and lavender, a shade she liked. He moved his hand through the silkiness, plucked out a pair and stuffed them in his back pocket fast, like a shoplifter. Claire had flung her covers aside, shivering now, drawn up like a child, and Innis covered her quickly and laid on a quilt from the old blanket chest at the foot of the bed. Her eyelids were darker than the skin around them. Were they always? He should call up Starr, ask him if he should get a doctor or come take her to one.

  But on his way downstairs the house went black, so deep he grabbed the bannister and froze, disoriented until he heard rain sweeping across the house. He felt his way back to his room, to the old oil lamp he’d never lit. He struck several matches to the mantle, his hands shaking, he didn’t know why, he wasn’t afraid, he just had to have a light quickly. The wick flared high and smoky, reeking of old carbon, but he finally got an even burn and slipped the dirty chimney into place. The room seemed to constrict within the glow of the lamp: this was the old light they’d lived by, died by, and he carried it to Claire’s bed, her face, composed in a gentle frown, glistening with sweat as he held it above her. Worried, he fetched the washbowl from his room and a facecloth, wringing it to a chill dampness and daubing her face, her neck, her arms. He dipped it again into the bowl and twisted out the cold water. He’d take care of her alone even if it scared him. His mother’s hands, when he was sick in bed, had hovered over him in a kind of talk sometimes, and she would touch his face like a blind person when she kissed him good night. He drew the bedclothes further down and lightly wiped her throat, her chest, between her breasts. Her nipples hardened under the cool cloth and he jerked back as if he’d burned her. She looked calmer, breathing in a deep whisper. What feverish dreams was she lost in? He took in the sight of her, then bent down and put his lips to the soft muscular flesh of her belly, its salty heat. He sat back and her eyes fluttered open and fixed on him a confused gaze before she slipped away again. Did she feel that kiss? She didn’t see it, not in this shadowy light, but his heart drummed as he snugged the covers under her chin. He folded the damp cloth and pressed it across her brow. That’s what they always did in the old movies when someone had a fever. He would stay awake all night if he had to. Give her apirin when she woke. Home remedies, that’s all they had here in this house once, that and prayer. Your grandmother was a healer, a midwife, Starr said. Maybe this was in Innis’s blood, this instinct.

  His legs trembled when he stood. He’d leave the lamp with Claire, she wouldn’t like waking in pitch dark. He couldn’t hear the rain anymore and wandered downstairs, the dar
k no bother now, and found a dim flashlight in a kitchen drawer. His seedlings, their cycle would be thrown off, there in the chilly dark, they could be stunted, traumatized. The phone had not given out its crazy rings for a long while: the receiver was dead against his ear. Lines down. He stoked up the stove in the kitchen until the embers snapped and hissed. He was thirsty, and Claire would need water too. But as he stood filling a pitcher at the sink a loud muffled crack came up from the lower field, too loud for a gun. He grabbed his jacket and stepped outside the back door into a stillness that stopped his breath. Ice, everywhere, every object he could make out was thickened, confected with ice. And the silence, like something had just come to rest a million miles deep. The junked pickup truck glassed like a huge ornament, the woodshed an iced box. Everything had been stilled so quickly time dangled or hung: there was not a tick or a drip anywhere. The rain had been caught, captured by all solid things, wind-whipped and frozen onto their shapes. It had blown like hair from the raingutter above him, rigid now, icicles angled as the wind had left them. Innis inhaled the cold, utterly quiet air. A silver thaw they called this, Innis had heard about it, but now, under a piercing moon the clouds had set free, the solitary trees were like teetering, translucent sculptures, laden with a lovely weight some could not hold, their crowns bent to the ground, their trunks bowed, gracefully tensed. Innis walked out into it, dead grass crunching under his shoes, every rut and depression giving way like delicate windows, every bare bush and cane turned to crystal. He wondered what the pines would look like way up behind Finlay and Dan Rory’s, how the rain had iced in their branches, leaning and bright. A breeze swept over the fields, a soft and brittle music, and the moon was closed away in cloud. Claire, she should see this, this alone would break her fever. The priest was wrong: not summer but this was glorious. He would draw it for her, in pen, all this nodding, hanging, suspended glass. As he turned shivering toward the house, somewhere in the dark a tree broke like the shot of a rifle.

  7

  WRAPPED IN A WOOL BLANKET, Innis sat watching Claire in a deep sleep. She wasn’t thrashing around anymore, coiling the bedclothes, tearing them loose. Good. She’d be better now. But he fell into a doze in the chair until an early sun woke him. Claire was awake too, in a bathrobe, straightening the quilts he’d laid over her. Then she sat on the bed and pressed her hands to her face, said if she looked like she felt, she must be a vision indeed, she felt so weak, she just wanted to sleep.

  “Claire,” Innis said at the window, “take a look at the sun in that ice. Look.”

  She stood beside him, puffy-eyed and pale, and he held her up with his arm. “It’s lovely,” she whispered. “Like blown glass, everywhere.”

  Neither of them had heard the Lada arrive, and just as his footsteps distracted them, Starr was at the bedroom door.

  “What’s this?” Unshaven, he looked haggard and older. “The house so cold you got to warm each other up?”

  “I’ve got flu, Starr.” Claire said, sitting on the bed, pulling the robe over her knees. He touched her face. “I can see that. But what’s his excuse?” He yanked open Innis’s blanket and Innis yanked it back. “Hanging around in his underwear.”

  “I looked in on her, that’s all, I fell asleep in the chair.”

  “He was a help, Starr, he was. I had a fever, I was out of my head. Let him alone.”

  “He’s got a fever too, I think. You going to help him with that?”

  “Oh, Starr, please shut up.”

  Innis turned away but his uncle caught him in the hall and wheeled him around to face him. Innis gripped the blanket tightly in his fists, he would hit Starr if he touched him again.

  “Stay out of her room. Anytime, day or night.”

  “She was burning up, Starr. She looked real sick, you weren’t here, the phones were out. Don’t come tearing in here like I did something awful.”

  “Go get some goddamn clothes on.”

  “You want me to move out?”

  Starr grunted, looked him up and down. “I told your mother I’d see you through the year.”

  “You don’t need to see me through anything, nothing.”

  They were a few hot words away from blows, Innis saw that suddenly and clearly and he backed away because the look in his uncle’s eyes was poisonous. They were both tired, frayed. And he did not want to move out, not now. “Fuck it,” Innis said. “Go see to Claire. You’re the doctor.”

  As he dressed he listened to Starr in the next room, fussing over her, telling her he’d been trapped in The Mines, the damned silver thaw had made the roads murder, so he’d done a little work in the shop, napped until the salt truck was out, did she want some breakfast.

  Innis drank a cup of coffee quickly and left the kitchen’s warmth for the upper woods, shaky, disgusted. The sun was painful, glaring in the thawing ice. An apple tree was beginning to drip, its wild branches flickering with sunlight. Meltwater everywhere, shedding the bowed trees slowly of their burdens. Brush and dead grass were turning wet, the butt end of winter once again. If this kept up there’d be mud, sure as hell. His plants would have to wait. He’d see how tough they were when he got a chance, but right now he wanted to put some distance between himself and that house.

  The footing was bad and he went sprawling on his back, knocking the wind out of him, he lay in the driveway gasping. His hip was sore by the time he limped to the road, past the Lada Starr had left on the shoulder, no wonder they hadn’t heard him coming. Up the right-of-way road to the power line it was already slick, the bare clay still hard but taking his boot print faintly where the filmy ice was gone. He passed a birch that had lost branches, then others, maples too, leaning, limbs torn. The crystal show was over. The more flexible fir and spruce had fared better, ice still glistened deep in the shade of their needles. He combed ice bits out of a bushy branch and watched them melt in his hand. He could have touched her any way he wanted. He could have done the worst of what Starr might be thinking, but he didn’t. Yes, he could feel his blood in his face right now, how could he not think of her, lying there hardly aware of him, but his desire was mixed up with something else, something he and Ned Mohney would never have discussed, never have known about.

  How long would it take a car to get clean off the island, not just St. Aubin but the whole of Cape Breton Island around them, a good car, not a truck grinding up the grades?

  Innis crossed the break to check the spring, Starr found the water cloudy last week and he wasn’t keen to make his way up here anymore, too long a climb, he said. Innis was winded himself when he leaned into the damp air of the little shed that sheltered the water. There seemed to be an almost invisible layer of ice on the surface and he tapped his fingers through: the water struck like an electric current it was so cold. He stirred it quickly. No, nothing there, no silt or anything that he could see. Starr was always holding a tumbler of it up to the light like a chemist. Best water in the world, he’d say. But it was open to things that might wander into it up here, this very water that ran from their taps. Later in the morning, if she felt better, Claire might bathe in it, it might rush into a glass she held. Innis touched his tongue to it, drew it back numb. He latched the door. There was a pawprint frozen in the clay mud of the entrance, the same one he’d seen in the snow by that other spring way up the power line. The big cat? But it hadn’t drunk here, not since a while ago when someone left the door unlatched.

  He was ragged out. He’d slip and slide back to the road and try to hitch to the old wharf, walk if he had to. Father Lesperance’s place seemed highly appealing, peaceful, almost his own. Starr had crossed a line, he’d never been this uptight before about anything. But there was sun in the sky, warm on Innis’s face when the wind let up. All around him the sheathes of ice were thinning, brightly transparent, trickling away.

  HE RAISED THE front room window of the cottage and leaned out, inhaling the air. He had napped on the couch for a little and now he studied the Captain’s house across the road. Captain John
MacQueen. Grew up in North St. Aubin. Lived in Florida until summer was well-arrived, then came back for three months, to that house. Snowbird. Snow goose. Who looked after it while he was gone? Nobody within sight, even on a clear day rising out of an ice storm.

  No, it wouldn’t be a break-in. He wouldn’t break a thing.

  Innis squinted into the crawl space: room enough. Cold pipes. The grey tufts of old spider nests. Stored lumber toward one corner said there must be a hatch nearby, and there it was not far from the water pump. He pushed up through a throw rug in the bedroom and did not move: fear and thrill of a strange house, of surprise, of alarm. Someone home, or not? The furniture was draped with plastic and old sheets, but he barely took a breath as he crept tensely through all five rooms, everything at rest and unused. He picked the receiver off the wooden wall phone, startled to hear a voice: the phone was still connected. Feeling as if his own breath might give him away, he started to hang up but caught a few words the woman was saying in her gentle, unhurried brogue: “… no, she’s just living there with him and the young fella, hhyes, well, you know what he’s like,” and the woman at the other end said, laughing, “Don’t I ever!” He wanted to hear more but was afraid to stand there with a receiver in his hand.