Cape Breton Road

by D. R. MacDonald

  “I don’t think so, Father. Well, sometimes.”

  “Of course, I knock on wood, I fling a little salt over my shoulder. I grew up with that.” The priest turned away from the window. “You have a boarder where you live, I guess?”

  “Since a while, Father.”

  “Claire Wiston, yes? I knew the man she used to live with, over there in Black Rock. Sometimes he showed up at the church where I assisted. Stress and strain brings a man back to the church sometimes, they want the comfort. They fall away from it when life is smooth, but give them a rocky spell and there they are at the door.”

  “I don’t know him at all, Father.”

  “No, I guess you wouldn’t. You getting on with Claire? She’s a nice woman, from what I could tell.”

  “Sure. We’re just boarders, the two of us.”

  “Of course, of course. What do you think of this?” From behind the sofa the priest pulled out a large kite of wood and red paper emblazoned with the golden head of a roaring lion. He held it up high. “The lion is my idea. I like lions.”

  “It’s a good day for them. Isn’t it?”

  “Lions or kites? Oh, both. A man I don’t like very much, Innis, I had to give him some hard advice. He told me, Father, why don’t you go fly a kite? Yes, I said. I’m perfectly capable of that, and it’s a pity you are not. Shall we?”

  They strolled down toward the old wharf, the strait lively and blue under a brisk sun. Two young children were in swimming, shrieking at the small waves that washed over them, their parents, dressed, sitting on a blanket watching, smoking cigarettes, dad’s trousers rolled up his white calves, mom with a cup in her hand. Innis looked for girls in bathing suits but it was not that kind of beach, not enough action, there weren’t any boys making fools of themselves with a Frisbee. Innis sidearmed a flat stone at the water but the first skip was swallowed by a wave. Downbound toward the sea, a sloop, driving hard under the westerly wind, galloped along in midchannel, cutting the chop, spray cracking white off its bow.

  Father Lesperance inhaled deeply, beaming comically at the sun, the kite close to his chest like a shield. “This island was all French once, did you know?”

  “I wondered about the name.”

  “Eighteenth century, a Frenchman owned the whole works, every square meter of it. His own farm was up on the eastern end. Good farm, sophisticated in its day. But the fortunes of war overtook him. After the Battle of Louisbourg, it all fell to the British, and he was a French officer, decorated one in fact. And later on of course, you Highlanders came in, Innis, my man. But we had a foot here first, oh, yes. I know a very old woman down the road who remembers French gravestones in her woods when she was a little girl. All swallowed up in trees now. Sooner or later, the woods have the last word here. Give me a hand, Innis, if you would.”

  Innis held the kite while the priest backed away, spooling out line.

  “Do you like boats, Innis?”

  “I wouldn’t mind riding along on that one out there. Where they heading, do you think?”

  “Oh they’re out of Baddeck, I’d say. Maybe they’ve been cruising the lake. Might be making for somewhere up or down the coast, anywhere. They’ll be in the Atlantic soon, at any rate.”

  “Could they go all the way to Boston in a boat like that?”

  “Why not? That’s got to be about a forty-footer. Why, you want to go to Boston?”

  “I wouldn’t mind a trip back.”

  “No money?”

  “Not yet. I’ll be okay.”

  “What are your plans, Innis? Long-range, I mean?”

  Innis laughed. He almost felt he could tell the priest the truth, he seemed like a guy who might understand it: Father, I’ve got a little crop of dope up in the woods and it’s going to get me out of here and into a new life. “Nothing specific, Father. Not since Boston.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, some bad habits. And my mother and me didn’t get along too well. So … I came up here.”

  “What kind of schooling?”

  “High school.” Schoolbooks, he never had the patience for them. He could not concentrate on them at home, though he could draw for hours, shaping things to his own eye. The television had always been there, a murky voice in the living room. He filled small tablets, then larger ones until he started buying sketch pads and decent paper, good pencils. A teacher or two had captured him for a while—Innis, look, you’re far smarter than the work you’re doing, you can do better than this. An art teacher in high school said he had talent, he should think about art school or college, but Innis said I just do sketches, that’s all I want. “I almost graduated. I didn’t like it enough.”

  “Schooling comes from all directions, Innis, it never stops. Okay,” the priest yelled, “let her go!”

  Innis lifted the kite and the wind took it up and slashed it back and forth, paper crackling, tail whipping. Father Lesperance laughed, his battered hat blew off, his bald head glistening as he unreeled the kite higher and higher over the water until it was a bit of red dancing against the long green mountain. Innis raised his fist high, feeling only sun and wind and water.

  14

  THE BLACK ROOF SHINGLES had soaked up the day’s heat and Innis tossed in his bed, tormented by a mosquito’s needling, looping drone. A moth flittered across his cheek, startling him. In the lamplight, blots like brown ink on its creamy wings. He dozed again in the dark but a bat woke him, veering near and away, a flutter of warm air, and he made no move to drive it off. Was she scared of bats? He lay with his arms flung back, waiting for window light, thinking of Claire, angry he couldn’t keep her out of his mind. Amazing. One kiss, weeks and weeks ago, but the taste of that ran all through him when he had nothing to do but lie here and remember. The house was too quiet. No snoring down the hall, no stirrings on the other side of the plaster. If he held his breath he could just make out that distant rustling of the tide, the sound of broad water moving on a still night. Starr had finally persuaded Claire to quit her job in Sydney, she wasn’t that keen on it anyway, I’m too old to smile when I don’t feel like it, she said, and Starr said Amen, and forget about money, we’re fine. Innis didn’t see how that could be true, but off they’d gone for Isle Madame, Starr hadn’t much business anyway, people were outdoors, it was an uncommonly warm summer so far, more sun than Starr had seen in years, fine as long as the spring didn’t go dry. He told Claire if she liked beaches so much she’d love the sand of Ingonish up north, softer than sugar, and on the west coast the water was warm from the Northumberland Strait. She was dark as a Greek now. A summer person, she bloomed. What would she want with a winter man like Innis? He’d been a small diversion once, on a foggy afternoon.

  A muggy morning shower arrived, over by the time he got out the door. He tramped into the upper woods, there was his little plantation to attend to, thank God. Starr had told him again to check the level of the spring, the water seemed cloudy. But Innis knew what silted it: the bucket he drew through it a dozen times one afternoon. Steam rose faintly from the rocks and rough clay ditches and he was sweating under the backpack that held a small shovel, a bottle of fish fertilizer, a baloney sandwich and two apples. The grade was steep until he reached the power line. He rested on his walking stick by a shallow puddle where tadpoles, saved by the rain, squirmed and skittered. Innis flicked a pebble into the water, scattering them, but they soon clustered black again, nibbling for air. That little round ditch was their very life and a few sweeps of his boot could fill it with dirt. But that wouldn’t give him a kick anymore. Anything alive here now he’d rather watch than kill or scare, except blackflies, deerflies and mosquitoes. He looked back down the overgrown road he’d come up through: trees framed a short section of the highway at the bottom of the hill, and the old hay fields and the house deep at the rear of them, small and distant, and the flat, calm strait burnished after the rain, and the mountain, the sky, the watery strokes of cloud—everything lulled and hushed, as fixed as a photo. Not far fr
om the barn he could make out a meandering path of mown hay Starr had cut with the scythe, charged up that day with some crazy urge, and maybe Claire had cured it.

  Cut brush and slash flung every which way told Innis that the power company workers were afoot. Their half-track vehicle had dug deeply across a patch of soft rushes but at least they weren’t spraying chemicals. Bullet holes splattered the DO NOT SPRAY sign his uncle had nailed to a line post. There’s springs all along that hill up there, Starr had said, and we don’t want weed killer in our water. A chainsaw rattled into life: in the east, where the corridor crossed the next property, three men were wading into alders that had sprung up in the break. Innis moved on before they could spot him. If things ever got hot up here, they would allow him an alibi: why wouldn’t they, just fellas like himself, be tempted to bootleg a patch of marijuana where nobody but hunters showed up, and easy ways to disguise it? Those hunters from town in their camouflage outfits probably wouldn’t know a pot plant from a raspberry bush, and Innis would be long gone by deer season anyway. He had seen them last fall when he was new to the woods, prowling and crouching through the trees like movie commandos. Stay out of those woods for a while, Starr told him, unless you’ve got a neon sign on your back, sneeze and they’ll plug you. Higher up the slope, west of the deer trail his comings and goings had now widened, Innis caught sight of his clearing through scrawny maples and moosewood, a small oasis of light among the shadows. He pushed through the last of the ferns, ferns helped, they hid the path.

  He tended each plant, rubbing its leaves gently in his fingers. Spend time with your green things, pardner, the man in the book said. Talk to ’em. They like to know you care, and they like company too sometimes. Give ’em a little chuck under the chin, sing ’em a little song. Good vibrations are everything, happy plants make happy weed. Sure, okay, that guy had been smoking too much of his own stuff, and it had to be a lot stronger than what Innis was looking at. Though green and growing, free of their little tents and high as his knees, they were coming along more slowly than Innis had imagined. The weather had been dry, sure, but he’d hauled water like a donkey, brought up hay from the barn and packed it around the bare circles of dirt to hold moisture. Water was the magic now, and surely that and a few more weeks of decent sun would shoot them up. They could grow very fast. They were weeds, right? Fragrant collas by September, flower tops, that’s where the money was. But the summer was dragging. He was trying to be patient. That was part of it, wasn’t it, of leaving Boston behind? He knew what he had to wait for and what he could get right now. Not Claire. He didn’t even know how he wanted her or how he could have her. Much older than him. Yes. But at ease with herself, not like girls his age, edgy, too aware of how they looked and what you were making of it, not sure, some of them, what kind of woman they wanted to be one day to the next, and they all had marriage in their eyes if not on their lips.

  Work. Keep moving. He fetched the plastic pail from under the low, winglike branches of a hemlock fir. Starr had worked the farm when he was young, and now, except for a fit of pointless scything, he had Innis mow the grass out front the house and made sarcastic comments about Claire’s little garden. Yet he must have learned a lot of things from his own dad, Innis’s grandfather. Fathers pass that on. But in that cramped apartment in Boston, what had Innis learned from his while he was alive? His dad worked night shift, his face puffy and numb at the supper table, not much to say. Never a talker, your dad, Starr said, I made up for it I guess, your dad was a good fella, but he was a bit soft in the heart, and your mother, she worked it in her hands, she could stroke it or wring it, and she did both. Then he was gone for good, took that flight above a city street where, in Innis’s memory, he remained suspended. Torn up, his mother drank at home quietly for a while, later with a woman friend who said, Listen, girl, you’re young, you can’t bring him back, the two of them started going out, and going out some more. His mother brought home a man Innis had never seen before, hungover and clumsy in the kitchen, nothing for Innis but pats on the head and bar tricks that didn’t amuse him. His mother sometimes let him roam outside in the evening if a man came by, and he fell in with other boys who liked streets and had time on their hands. But he knew very early that he would want to do it alone, that he would find the cars he wanted and do his own thing inside them.

  Coming on the weathered wood covering the spring, hidden in alders and grass, always gave Innis a flush of pleasure. Something about that little house sheltering the water of his own life, and it had come out of that rock ledge year after year in a steady, unfailing trickle, for him, for his uncle, for all of his family who had lived here. The warped grey boards were warm to the touch as he unlatched the low door and ran a stick around the dark opening. He couldn’t blame the spiders, it was such a lovely cool cave out of the wind, but he hated the cloying webs. He dipped the pail through the small pool. Silt rose like ink. Innis, why is this water murky? Starr would say. The spring is low, I guess, Innis would tell him. Starr would threaten to go see for himself but he never did because in a day or so after Innis had watered his plants the clay particles had once again settled on the bottom of the shallow reservoir. His uncle would take a tumblerful from the sink tap and hold it to the window while the spring water swirled with tiny bubbles. A bit better, he would mumble, and then he’d drink, declaring, without fail, this was the best water in the world, a goddamned tonic.

  Purple fringed orchids had poked up here and there in the grass. They were not luxuriant like their name, their blossoms tiny, but they were pretty and he plucked a few as he walked. They didn’t grow down below, they’d be new to Claire. Rasping chainsaws were not far away. That power line crew, they made him nervous. He took up the pail and the flowers and got himself out of sight.

  By noon he had soaked a dark ring around each plant, a pail as full as he could make it and a dollop of fertilizer dissolved in each. Tired and sweating, he ate sitting on a stone where the clearing caught a breeze. The baloney sandwich tasted wonderful, washed down with spring water in an empty soda bottle. He chewed slowly, satisfied that his labor would show results. Wasn’t that what kept a farmer going, day by day?

  Partway through his first apple a wild thumping approached the woods and seemed to percuss the whole area. For a few seconds he could believe it was a diesel gypsum freighter chugging up the strait, but the sound grew louder too fast and he was running through a hail of vibration, the helicopter beating the air above his head. A tempest smeared through the grass and weeds and saplings and he caught a glimpse of the pilot, his dark visor, before he fell to his belly in the ferns. He thought he might pass out, he was hyperventilating, but he didn’t move and the chunk-chunk-chunk faded off toward north over the strait. Christ. They weren’t police, he knew that, knew it was probably the forestry patrol or a spray plane but God. From the air what could they see but trees and brush? He didn’t even have a plot here, just a few staggered plants, it was pathetic, nothing, not worth a bust even. Why did the bastard come in so low? Power lines maybe. Somebody lost. His hands trembled for a thin joint deep in his shirt pocket. Come on, Innis, you’re not a hick in the boonies, you know what choppers sound like, and sirens, the noises of alarm and pursuit. But it had been awhile, been awhile since he’d heard them.

  He let the smoke sit in his lungs until he could hold it no longer, then the breeze pulled it slowly from his mouth. Spring water might be a great tonic but some things it couldn’t cure. Later that day after the three of them had returned from the beach, Starr had cornered him alone in the toolshed: I’ll put it to you plump and plain, he said, you have the hots for Claire, don’t you? Well I’m telling you to forget it, there’s no room in this house for that. This time Innis did not protest or deny, he just smiled and said, Sure, Uncle Starr, whatever you say, and Starr said, Stop calling me Uncle Starr or I’m going to pop you one.

  Wind came through the clearing in soft, calming sweeps through grass and ferns. The leaves of his cannabis shivered, turned li
ke feathers and flashed the paler green beneath. The hardy young spruce, the fir, the dead pines barely moved. A woosh as faint as a whisper ran through the maples behind him. Where was the lynx? Cowering? Never. It was a master of its territory, of concealment, of stealth.

  15

  IT HAD BEEN AN afternoon of blue calm, a bluish cast to the air, trees, the mountain, and by early evening the sky was pearled with blues and creams. Everything clear, quiet, the water a brilliant matte, a flatter shade of the sky, so calm Innis could pick out voices from the other side, their tones almost intimate though a mile away. A dog’s bark echoed across the water, solitary, sharp. Saturday night, people getting cranked up for the weekend over there on the other shore. Innis sat in the skiff he had uncovered and turned on its keel. He was sure he could row it when the surface of the strait was like this, the tide slack, no wind stirring it up. The oars needed varnish by the looks of them but they were functional. He might try his hand at them here in the cove, but he hadn’t quite the nerve yet. He had seen those swirling eddies, this wasn’t a pond and it could shift in a hurry into yelping whitecaps, a dark surface of mad white hounds. No, he’d sit on the thwart for now, work the oars in the oarlocks, get the feel of it. He watched a powerboat cut through the silence until it was beyond the next point, its wake opening in a graceful V, a smooth wave that touched the shore. A motor could take you someplace on a night like this. Innis slung the tarp over the skiff and left.

  Before he reached the house he could hear Claire’s raised voice, and he stopped shy of the screen door. Starr had a letter in his hand and she tried to grab it but he held her off.

  “You have no business opening my mail, Starr, any of it. You knew it was from Russ. Now give it to me.”