Cape Breton Road

by D. R. MacDonald

  The old guy beside him leaned forward quickly as the minister ascended to the pulpit, a little rumpled in his black robe. He plopped a Bible down and spread his elbows as if he were at a windowsill. Dan Rory said he was a retired minister, originally from lonely St. Kilda fifty miles out in the Atlantic beyond the Hebrides, he’d been evacuated to other parts of Scotland off that isolated island with the last of St. Kildans in the 1920s, so an island man too, what was it with these island men. A part-time chaplain in a British Columbia prison now, he’d once had a church up the North Shore when they all had the Gaelic at home, Dan Rory said, no English until school, and He was Dia before He was God. The man looked rough and ready, that nose had been busted. Thick grey hair, boyish, unkempt over his forehead. He didn’t seem to be preaching when he began to speak, it was more like conversation, just talking to these people, a few of them from his old church. A nod, a faint smile. The language washed over Innis, it hadn’t the schoolteacher edge Starr gave to it, Famous Gaelic Sayings to Inflict on Your Nephew or snatches of nasty comment he didn’t want you to hear, though Innis could tell when it was raunchy. The minister’s voice was gentle, almost bemused. If he had fire in him, he must have burned it out earlier, having preached in English at another church this morning. No, he was here for them, the old people, and they for him. Innis fixed his eyes on the long blonde hair in front of him, sometimes he believed he could put his thoughts into someone else’s head if he concentrated exceptionally hard and wanted to tap into their mind bad enough, so he let an intimate wish drift toward the blonde, nothing dirty, just frank and cool desire, he still had momentum from last night when everything with Claire seemed to occur in some smooth and natural sequence toward a sweet combustion. But the girl was not picking up his silent signals, she was listening intently to the minister, chin lifted, though maybe, like Innis, not to the words themselves.

  Then Innis too perked up: the minister had switched to his burred English to welcome visitors who hadn’t the Gaelic, and then he referred to “the men downstairs” who would lead the sacred singing of the Psalms. Below the pulpit sat a row of eleven men, in dark suits that might have had a shine in the seat some of them, facing the congregation. They had the bearing of Sundays, long Sundays, so it looked. It wasn’t that they were all so old, not as old as Dan Rory, and a couple not much older than Starr, but to Innis there was something ancient about them, strange in their privileged solemnity, plain, without vestments, hands folded around black books in their laps. These men were all from down north, Finlay said on the drive over, where good Gaelic speakers were still found, though almost gone on St. Aubin, and this no doubt the last generation of “good and tone” Precentors, no young Gaelic voices coming along trained or inclined to take their places, and why anyway since a Gaelic service like this was only a rare event now, a piece of our churchgoing past.

  The Precentors stood up, a line of uneven heights and postures, and the lead Precentor put out the first lines, Arduicheam thu, mo Dhia, ’s mo Rìgh, d’aim beannaicheam gu bràth, the other men picking it up on the last word, repeating the line, carrying through, and then the leader soloed out another line, continuing the pattern. This was the traditional way, the old way of The Fathers, Dan Rory said, the way your grandfather did it. The men drew out their wavering intonations, unsweetened by any youthful or feminine sounds, to Innis a dirge, slow, unmelodious, not even an organ swell in the background, no adornments or flourishes, unlike the robed, roundmouthed choirs he had heard in those Easter churches back home singing hymns with the enthusiasm of a glee club. Dan Rory’s lips were moving silently, Och, those fellas, they learned the precenting tunes with their ear and their heart, he’d told him, and you’d never hear this in a cathedral. Innis thought that was likely as the lead Precentor held the final dour note until his tenor faded away, the minister gazing down at the men gratefully while they took their seats, coughing and clearing their voices.

  The minister put on blackrimmed spectacles, surveyed the congregation once over the tops of them, and began to read from his Biobull, putting more feeling into it than Innis had sensed in the Psalms. Innis was watching the girl’s long, slender fingers comb slowly through her hair when Dan Rory nudged him and placed an open Bible on Innis’s lap, tapping the passage in English the minister was reading in Gaelic. Innis nodded, dropped his eyes dutifully to the page. Job, it said in the upper corner, and okay he would pretend to follow, and then he did read in case Dan Rory asked him about it later, the minister’s voice moving behind these words, rising and falling: For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground, yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. But man dieth, and wasteth away, yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up, so man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep. Oh that thou wouldst hide me.… The minister had stopped and Innis looked up to see him pull his glasses off and tuck them away as he moved into the sermon, his Gaelic soft and easy, almost casual. If that passage he’d read was a grim note, it didn’t sound like it now. Innis handed back the Bible to Dan Rory, smiling thanks, but the old man was absorbed in the words from the pulpit, savoring them, his eyes shut. Rain streamed faintly down the grey translucent windows, gothic but without stained glass color in the light. The church had warmed, the air had a humid scent of damp clothing. Innis’s eyelids drooped but he jerked them open, fingering the small cut on his kneecap to stay awake. Afterward Claire had joked, we don’t even have a cigarette, either of us. Innis couldn’t stop touching her, tracing her face, her body, he wanted to call it all up in his fingertips later, like now, brushing sand from her skin, from the curve of her back. Did you hear Starr? he’d said, I thought he might find us down here, and she’d said she wasn’t worried, he was just some noise up in the woods, but he must never know about this. Innis said, what will he suspect? Anything he wants, she said, suspicion has its own joys, doesn’t it. They dressed slowly, dreamily, it seemed to Innis now. They didn’t talk much, the stars were gauzing over with high clouds. The mood was broken by the thrum of a gypsum freighter moving up the strait and they lingered until they saw its running lights and its wake hissed along the shore, and Innis kissed her again, and perhaps, recalling it now, his lips were more eager than hers, more hungry.…

  The Precentors were standing, clearing their pipes for another Psalm, but this time the congregation, still seated, joined them as another Precentor led, a man with sandy grey hair who ignored the Psalm book in his hand, putting out the long slow line and the worshippers picked it up and sang it back, and the volume rose now with all the added voices, old voices gathering strength. But there was something else: they had begun to rock slowly, almost imperceptibly, as they sang, Dan Rory too, and the others around him, even the girl slightly, she could not resist, Innis himself could barely hold back when he detected a slow tapping that soon turned into a measured thump of hidden Sunday shoes, at first only here and there as if some were shy or it had been so long they had to be roused to it, no hand clapping or wailing or crying out, only this diffident thumping of feet out of sight, marking the beat, to Innis it was the rhythm of his axe, of his tree felling, this cadence of their singing. It echoed something deep in them that went a long way back, this foot beat, he could feel it even though he didn’t know what it was and his foot was going, if lightly, discreetly, after all this was beyond him, before his time. These people did not rock in trances or weep on their knees, this was the only passion you’d see from them in this holy house, this was their opening up, rocking in the cradle of the old tongue. There were two more Psalms before the eleven men, eyes high and hymnals closed, brought the singing to an end, and the minister delivered a benediction in Gaelic, Deanamaid urnaigh, surely the last one some of them wou
ld ever hear from a pulpit.

  Amid the shufflings and stirrings that followed, people rising into talk, Innis slipped out a side door, he didn’t want to repeat that agonizing processional, him the mute relative lost in others’ reminiscences. The rain had lightened to a blustery mist and he clutched his collar shut, wandering into the churchyard. Jesus, be a shame if he ruined this coat and tie, in Boston they’d arrest you in a getup like this. He hunched under a birch tree, looking out over the gravestones, granite, a few newer with polished red faces, older ones white or grey, their lettering abraded, obscured by lichen. Beyond, the strait, its grey water snarled with white, widened toward the ocean. Last night they were in the dark, after all, he and Claire, it was all touch and breath and tongues in the darkness. He wished he knew what was in her head. She was older, she had other things in her life, other men. The girls Innis had known, they had all been new to it just as he was, just as clumsy, uncertain, blindly excited, no other intimacies in their past, or so he’d thought. Starr, on the ride home, had said not a word, his steering a bit unsteady but good enough to stay on the road, Claire staring out the passenger window humming quietly, inside herself, Innis in the back seat again like the kid after a family outing, strapped for any line of conversation that would draw in the three of them. He hadn’t wanted to talk anyway, only to reach out and touch Claire, lay his hand on her shoulder to remind her, listen, we have been somewhere tonight, for a little while we left everybody in the world behind. It drove him crazy that he could not be alone with her now, that Starr was there, worse in his silence than in his gab.

  Innis wandered among the headstones, reading names and inscriptions. So many died young, years and years ago, young and sometimes close together. Sickness probably. Two MacLeods, brothers, drowned at sea 1886, one Innis’s age. Well, if you had to die young, that wasn’t a bad way, was it, sink in a storm? Would have been a sailboat of some kind, that. So man lieth down, and riseth not. The truth of that was all around him. But it only sharpened his sense of luck, that he was wet and breathing and could smell fresh roses on the next grave. Maybe he could get work on a fishing boat. That was suddenly appealing, rain streaming down his face, there was something about this weather that thrilled him. But he remembered that on the way here they’d passed through Big Bras D’Eau where most of the fishermen moored, selling their lobster at the government wharf, but the season was over, the boats were hauled out.

  17

  IT DID NOT SURPRISE him that Claire went cool on him. Not that she wasn’t friendly or wouldn’t talk with him, she just wouldn’t talk about them, her and Innis. She would hug him hello and goodbye in the kitchen, Starr looking on, she’d even kiss him, a loud cousin kiss, self-conscious, almost comical, though Innis didn’t laugh. Only once, when they met at the top of the stairs, she gave him a quick, fierce kiss as if it were a hit and he’d have to take whatever high it gave him. He went along, maybe he was colluding with her to douse whatever Starr remembered or thought he remembered about the night of the dance. The man had nothing but suspicion to go on, and instincts, which were, in this case, too sharp to take lightly. All right, Claire blurted out at supper one day, tired of his barbs, flinging her knife on her plate, we went for a swim, it was hot, so what, for Christ’s sake, leave it alone. A swim? Starr said, turning to Innis, and what is it you’re good at, breast-stroke? Backstroke? Of course you had your suits on under your clothes, eh? His uncle’s sarcasms went on until Claire blew up, told him she would leave if he didn’t quit. So he let the subject fade when she was around, but prodded Innis with it like a sharp finger in his back. You sneaked off, you little bastard, he said to him when they were alone, the two of you, don’t ever do that to me.

  By himself at the shore, leaning against the old skiff, Innis called up Claire with a fine-tipped ballpoint, in detail meticulous as an engraving. Can you do this, Starr? There were the faintest of lines at her eyes, the almost invisible beginnings of middle age, but her eyes, gorgeously large, were what the drawing noticed. He gave her body little quirks and flaws, but they only enhanced what he loved about it. He was watching her differently now. He was sure that it would happen again, that mood and day and circumstance would come together, but it was nothing he could demand. When he finished, he flipped back through the pad, pausing at certain pages. A tiny flower with twin, nodding blooms. A truck abandoned in the woods whose rusty blue patina had caught his eye, an intricate orb web in its windshield. An osprey’s hefty nest on a powerline pylon, all twigs and branches in the crossbeam. A dead bat lying in grass like a discarded glove. Claire at the dance, her face hidden in swirls of hair. A bouquet of marijuana collas, the way he hoped to see them up above. A crow on the clothesline plucking a button off one of Starr’s shirts. The hemlock plant—he’d forgotten it, his plan to harvest it for Ned. He went off down the beach to see if it was still there. Yes, taller now, its tiny flowers fully formed in radiating clusters. Was it getting stronger, did it mature like pot? He would get back to it soon, it wasn’t going anywhere.

  He worked hard on the wooden boat, sanding flaky spots and painting the hull. It was sound enough, Starr said, but the seams would leak for a spell, and so they had while Innis rowed back and forth in the cove on calm days, teaching himself to work the oars, to take the boat on a straight course. Turning was too damned easy, the oars yanked him this way and that the first week, so he was often one-oaring it, re-sighting the bow at a shore mark again and again until he could put the boat directly there with both oars pulling. Water sloshed at his feet until he got nervous and dragged the boat up on the sand, bailing it out with a cut-down bleach bottle. The wood soon swelled and closed the leaks and it was just the hollow clack and swivel of the oarlocks as he ventured further out on a slack tide, but even then there were subtle eddies, and when he had to row against them, when he could feel the boat respond almost eagerly to a current he couldn’t even see, he pulled hard for the cove, his heart pounding, tasting sweat. It never looked like a mile across to the mountain shore until he was out in the water a ways and that’s when he lost his nerve, afraid the tide would turn on him. And that was all it was really, nerve, he’d get it, he had to.

  He hiked into the upper woods, glad to see the power line crew was gone, though their slash was tossed wherever. They’d cleared out not just alders but every mature tree in a gulley that traversed the break, birches, maples, not one of them a threat to the power lines above. You could see a long way now in both directions, the crests of the break as they climbed into the distance. He approached his little clearing as he always had, on a slim, curving path through trees and ferns, you would have to look for it, and even then it could be a deer path, the woods were laced with them. But as he came into the open he stopped dead: his plants were waist high and sturdy in the breeze, their fan leaves fluttering, but he felt that someone had been there, and not an animal. So palpable was it that he walked the perimeter of the clearing, spreading bushes aside, peering into the trees behind. He knelt in places where maybe the grass had been disarranged by a foot, a patch of moss pressed flat. But maybe not. He was not an Indian, not a backwoodsman yet, he couldn’t read broken stalks of soft rushes as anything more than that, he couldn’t say what bent them. Like Starr, he only had suspicions. But the feeling was strong, and sometimes you had to listen to that. Once assured that he was really alone, he went from plant to plant, rubbing their stalks in his thumb and finger, then sniffing his skin: yes! resin! not turpentiney like conifers, but with a sweet component, a tingle in the nostrils, designed for inhaling, it would never thin paint, not this. Three were showing male flowers but he couldn’t bring himself to pull them out, to hell with it. So the females would not be sinsemilla after all, he would still get good money, even males were okay smoke and more than good enough, who’d know the difference here, weed was weed. Nobody could have been here, could they? Too far up, no action up here but the trampings of animals, their night forays, sheltered in darkness. After all nothing was really disturbed, not a le
af was missing or nibbled. He could hardly stand guard up here anyway. The plants were getting serious, another few weeks. There’d been decent rain, so he wouldn’t have to haul from the spring. More damn sun would help. A day of lowering sky, threatening rain, but the clouds were wan and thin, marbled grey and unmoving. He circled the edge of the clearing several times, he would lay down his scent, like the lynx, this territory is mine, enemies take notice. He stood at the head of the path, watching his plants as if they were his flock, straining to detect any sign that a wolf had been through.

  But hell, what more could he do here this afternoon? He had a job painting an old barn up the road, Mrs. MacKenzie’s, she wanted it red the way it had been years ago, and its dry shingles were sucking up gallons of stain. Today, on the highest rungs of a long ladder, he would reach the first high gable. And then, in what was left of the afternoon, he would go down to the boat.

  His garden was still on his mind as he rowed from one side of the cove to the other, rocking in the gentle waves, thinking. Of all the spots in those woods he might have chosen, had he picked a dangerous one? To lose those plants seemed more terrible than any prospect of arrest. But there was no real evidence of anyone’s having been there, or was he just failing to decipher it? Lulled by the splashcut of the bow, he shipped the oars for a rest, letting the boat slowly revolve. And there she was on the beach. White blouse, a gay striped towel over her shoulder. Innis took a deep breath, waiting for Starr to appear out of the trees, but he didn’t. Claire saw Innis and waved, but he pretended he hadn’t seen her and with one oar pulled the boat around until the bow was shoreward and he was looking out at the strait. If Starr was on his way, if he was due to show up, then Innis would take the boat further off, up the shoreline, out of hailing. He did not want to be on that sand with her and his uncle, he wouldn’t listen to his talk, not today, no one could make him. But he heard her voice, she was calling to him. He rowed as slowly as he could, his back to her, not looking over his shoulder until the keel scratched gravel and she waded a few steps in and grabbed the bow.