Cape Breton Road

by D. R. MacDonald

  He sat on the ground, his face to the sky. The rain resumed, gentle, steady, and he caught it on his tongue, swallowing. But this was a thirst he could not slake.

  Aware that the seat of his pants was wet, he got to his feet and crisscrossed the clearing, parting the taller grasses, the clumps of spruce. Could be foot marks pressed into the sod, but hard to be certain if shoe or hoof had flattened the grass, or just the weight of rain. He sheltered against the trunk of an old birch, hunched and shivering, cupped enough fire to light a tiny roach. It wasn’t even cold really but the trembling ran through his body as he sucked the sharp smoke, bit it off in his tight lips until the ember burned them. Fuck, this was just about the last of it anyway, and there lay his plants. Slaughtered, that was the only word for it. He thought wildly of gathering them up, maybe cooking them, he’d read about that in the book, something about butter, but shit, how would he do it, in his uncle’s kitchen? And who’d pay money for butter with pot in it, he didn’t even want to eat it himself, he wanted smoke in his pocket, the feel of rolling it in paper between his fingers, fire, the quick high that could, sometimes, make things interesting again. He took the apple from his pocket and bit into it, ate it slowly down, and as his eyes followed the tossed core, they caught the sheen of cellophane, wadded green paper on moss. Cigarette packet. He opened it out, sniffed the tobacco shreds. Exports. Unfiltered. Navy Cut.

  He made his way down through the trees, staggering, dazed, as if the woods were strange again, his feet clumsy on the terrain, city feet, sidewalk feet. At the break he turned west, he hadn’t been west since March, since he’d brought the pine tree down. The power lines swooped overhead, trailing droplets in the still air. He walked on, through vigorous alders, across a narrow brook where he thought a fish skittered out of sight. He only wanted to keep moving through the high scrub, motion was what he needed now, the illusion that he was under way. A drizzle resumed, fogging the air, and he hardly realized he was near where the winter spring had been, leafed-out trees obscuring it, maples and ash. It was there off to the left in the hill. Moss marked the mouth of the small dark cavern, you could miss it easily, and he knew that close to it he would hear that tiny echo, water ticking faintly out of rock. But he didn’t stop, he walked a full circle around it, hoping he might find some track of the lynx as he had in the winter, then he turned down toward the pines, their long needles lush with moisture. The one he’d felled lay out dark and thinning amid their green, its greying branches still holding needles, the stump top black. He tried to pry loose a piece of sap but it had hardened. He almost expected Finlay to appear, but this time he would hear him, and after all, the deed was long since done, they were friends, Innis had nothing to lie about now, nothing to hide. Jesus.

  When Innis came out of the woods into the MacRitchie field, someone in a black sou’wester stood at the far end of the path like he’d been waiting for him. Innis paused when the man waved a stick in the air, then he went on: it was Dan Rory. He had never thought of him as part of the sea but of course they’d all had boats in the old days, men on this island, they’d all known them.

  “On your long walk again, are you?” Dan Rory said. His sou’wester was shiny with rain. Sweet smoke rose from his stag head pipe.

  “You going in a boat?”

  “Old barn leaks. I move things around in there, when there’s a new one. Were you up at our old spring?”

  “I didn’t drink. I went round it.”

  “But you didn’t go round it sunwise. Och, you’re free to take that water, it’s wonderful water there.”

  “I took it once, in the winter.”

  “I know. But you’ll be thirstier now.”

  “Is there fish in the brooks up above?”

  “Used to be trout there but I don’t think so anymore. Did you catch one?”

  “Saw one, I think.”

  “Almost as good. Come inside out of the rain, man, you’re looking weary.”

  “I have some things to do, Dan Rory. Do you know if Captain MacQueen is back yet? I’d heard he was coming.”

  “Wanted to meet the Captain, did you?”

  “I thought he might have some work, is all. Around the house.”

  “I suppose he might. He’s mostly recovered, from the surgery. Heart. They put a thing in his chest so it fires on all cylinders. He likes it here, he likes coming back home. Any day now, I suppose, we’ll see him. You’re right drenched, stop for a little.”

  “I can’t today. I’m sorry.”

  Dan Rory looked into his face. “You’re too young to be hurrying like this. Is it a woman that’s got you pale and your lips thin?”

  “I’ll be okay, when I get going.”

  “You afraid? I’ll tell you what an old man is afraid of. It’s that first time a stranger comes in to look after you, when they look around at your life and are already thinking how they’ll bring it into line with theirs, what of you is to be kept or tossed away, what they’ll let you do and not do. I wish I could shut it all out, close a door.”

  “Finlay’s still here.”

  “He could go before me. He’s not young. His teeth are whistling. Well, you go do what you have to do, Innis. I’ll leave you with this much, kinship will withstand the rocks. Ge fad an duan ruigear a cheann.”

  MIDWEEK PASSED AND she wasn’t back, and by Saturday Innis was missing her badly, already worked up over his plants. Not the same without her in the house: just Starr and himself, dangling like two bare wires waiting to touch. She’d lightened so many weekends, even when all Innis could do was listen to her getting dressed and watch her leave with Starr, an excitement trailed behind her, and he’d known he would see her again, hear her voice. Now it was Sunday and he had yet to tell her what had happened up in the woods. That was all that was holding him together now, that soon he could tell her, as he had told her about his plants that winter afternoon in the barn. This was a setback he was afraid to absorb alone, he was only talking to himself about Starr and what he said was disturbing. They hadn’t exchanged a dozen sentences, he and Starr, since Innis came down from the woods. Without Claire, there seemed to be no next step, only a sliding backward.

  Sunday afternoon he walked aimlessly through the lower field, buffeted by a sun-driven wind parting the russet grass flaxen, like the coat of a dog. Goldfinches were fading to green, goldenrod to brown, but blue asters were out and at the edge of the brook nightshade was in flower, its blooms intricate as jewellery, yellow stamens in indigo. He should call his mother, how long had it been? Months? She had gotten through on that old phone system one Sunday but sounded as if she were under water, an urgency to her voice that Innis didn’t want to hear, he’d have rather she scolded him than ask him question after question, all with a fearful edge, Don’t yell into the phone, Ma, he’d said, I can hear you, I’m not an immigrant. You calling underneath Boston Harbor or where? Don’t be wise, she said, there’s ten people listening at least. Starr said you had plans for leaving, when? Where you going from there? I’ve got cousins in Truro, on the mainland, they might help you find work, it’s a fair-sized town, and Halifax isn’t that far. Are you broke, do you have money? I have enough, Ma, I don’t need much money to get out of here. She said, Are you angry with me still? It’s not fair if you are, Innis, it isn’t. No, Ma, I’m not, not with you. Okay? This isn’t a telephone we’re on, you know, it’s a radio station, I’ll call you in a while. Put Starr on, I love you, you know. I want to say hello to him.

  Hello, Starr. Uncle. What in hell drew you up there to that very spot, that little clearing of mine? What harm was it to you or anybody else? You could have walked on by, cost you nothing. Innis lay back in the grass, spreading his arms and legs like a snow angel. He fixed his gaze on the peak of a spruce tree: clusters of small cones, resin clear as raindrops. Every time he breathed he took in Claire, every shift in the wind. The sun lay over him, the high white clouds complicated and cool and rushing. Hay and sweat, and all its fine gradations. A tinge of red in that mapl
e, in a leaf that had been distinctly green, when? Last week? Yesterday? Starr, passing through the kitchen, had said that he had seen geese the evening before, not the soaring arrowed formations of fall but early flocks, ragtag and scattered, nervous about the season. Then he got in the Lada and left, returning after dark.

  Innis circled his way back through the grass, through a tangle of wild roses, all hips and thorns now, and stood staring up the driveway, its gravel rutted with summer mud. Wind whipped the weeds along its edges, crackled in the unpruned branches of the cherry tree. Across the road white birches swayed against the dark spruce. White woods. Black woods. The futility of his waiting, of his vigil, was suddenly everywhere he looked. Why hadn’t he seen it? He rushed for the house, past Starr in the kitchen and on upstairs to the open door of her room. He didn’t have to go inside, didn’t need to look any deeper into the half-closed drawers. Hangers and someone’s old coat hung in the open closet. God, when had she been here, when had she packed her things and carried her things to the car? Or had Starr carried them for her? It was not surprise that hit him, that dipped his heart like a sudden fall: he had almost expected to see what he was seeing. The hurt was entirely new, bitter, an exhilarating mix of love and affront and despair, beyond his controlling. The telephone shrilled from the kitchen and he counted the rings. Another house.

  Starr sat facing the west window, the kitchen table cleared and clean, its scarred maple surface warm with afternoon sun. Placed neatly near his hand were a small glass of rum and a tumbler of water, casting streaks of light on the wood. He didn’t acknowledge Innis but kept his eyes narrowed as if he was looking a long distance, at the strait, the mountain. His chin had the shine of a fresh razor and his shirt was so white Innis blinked.

  “I knew it was you right away,” Innis said from the hall doorway. “How did I know, even before I found that empty packet of fags?”

  “What did you think?” Starr said evenly, almost wearily. “That I don’t have eyes, ears? That I never walked in my own woods anymore? Maybe you wanted it to be me. Eh? All right, goddamnit, I obliged you. Worse could have happened.”

  “Not much worse. Claire is gone, isn’t she?”

  “I was supposed to keep her around here for you? Christ, get some sense into you before it’s too late. I don’t need a woman here anymore. Find your own, one with fewer years on her, and you’ll be better off.”

  “What the hell did you say to her?”

  “I’ll tell you one thing, I told her if she wants to strip for randy young men half her age, there’s plenty of them in Sydney, she doesn’t have to do it here.”

  “In Sydney where? Where is she?”

  “She’s left the Island, she’s gone.”

  “I don’t believe you, Starr.”

  “Who else you going to believe?”

  “I’ll find her. You won’t be around to fuck it up when I do.”

  “Be my guest, b’y. She’s got a wicked head start on you, more ways than one. You’ve got the time, and the money, eh? You flying, by the way, or taking the train? You could go by car, see the sights. And there’s always the bus.”

  “You bastard, I would’ve had money. I’d’ve been okay. More than okay.”

  Starr looked at him calmly, then resumed his gaze at the back field. “If you mean what I think, I’d see you sent to Dorchester first. You brought that shit here. Take it away with you.”

  “Nothing to take. It’s worthless. You don’t know anything about it, any side of it.”

  “Tell me what I’m missing.”

  “It wouldn’t save you anyhow. You’re past whatever it could do for you.”

  “Did great things for you, didn’t it.” Starr lifted the rum to his lips, set the glass down. He raised the tumbler of water into the slant of sun and peered through it, rays on his face. “You better get a move on,” he said. “Maybe she’s waiting somewhere.”

  “When I’m ready to go, I’ll go.”

  Innis waited for his uncle to say you’d better go now, I want you out of here, but he said nothing more and Innis went up to his room and closed the door. A whimper of rage swelled up in him, his eyes teared. He wouldn’t do a damn thing tonight, he wouldn’t take one step toward getting out of here, nothing, he didn’t even know where she was, where she was travelling to. But then he was tugging tacks from the corners of his drawings, letting them flutter underfoot. He pulled out the suitcase from under the bed and flopped it open, his dad’s, black pebbly old-fashioned leather from another time, it had embarrassed him at the airport, lugging it like hand-me-down clothes. Smuggled whisky, shattered on a baggage cart, had stained the paisley lining, Cost me a customs fine, his dad had said. Just looking at it made Innis feel helpless and he left it empty and picked up the limestone rock from his dresser. He ran his fingers slowly over its sculpted curves and hollows, he had seen just the tip of this rock in the lower brook and he’d pulled it out of the mud, its buried curves revealed themselves, shadings of grey, light, dark. The skull of the eight-point buck, a spiderweb spun on the antlers, he’d have to leave it, like the stone, behind. Starr was wrong about that, the skull had not frightened her at all. What I want you to do, she said here on his bed, after the boat and the squall and the bluebead lily, after the taste of rum, I want you to dance your tongue, slowly, from my lips to my toes, around and around, everywhere, anywhere, even behind my knee, yes, that’s a lovely spot, whatever excites me chances are will excite you. I want you to cover me with you.

  Why didn’t she wait for him before she left, talk to him? Leave him a note, a number? Starr might have told her anything. Anything.

  He dug out his stash box and scraped from it every bit of dust and leaf that remained, from which he rolled, with conscious ceremony, one last joint, to be set aside, now was not the time for its sweet distractions.

  The framed Isaiah? He liked the old man, so he would take it, there might be a room, in some city, some town, where he would want to hang it.

  He gathered his drawings from the floor and laid them in the suitcase, the sketchpads on top, there was a little history in those pages he wanted to save, there would be a better time than this and he would go through them leaf by leaf, woods, fields, shore, ice, snow, people. Claire. Even his uncle. What had he failed to see in Starr, what clues were there that he would come into the woods the way he did, deep, off the beaten paths? Or that he was saving one rotten deed for the end of summer? Innis pulled out the pencil drawing he’d done of him and studied it: if that bit of meanness was there in his face, he had missed it. He balled the paper up and flung it at the wall.

  21

  HIS UNCLE HAD NOT returned by dark. Innis hoped Starr would be gone for the night, wherever he took himself now that he never answered the phone.

  Innis did not dare hitch a ride down Ferry Road, he walked the whole long way as he had the time he took the Caddy out for a dry run, leaping off the roadside at the first glow of headlights. But this was a Sunday night, more than usual traffic from the cottages at The Head. He’d get a stretch where he could cover some ground before cars showed up, some at such rates of speed the ditch was safer than the shoulder. Only two kinds of Cape Breton drivers, his dad said years ago, go like a scalded cat or a cow with a calf in her. The houses he passed were far apart, set back a long way in fields or trees, but if one was nearer the road with lights in the windows, Innis crossed to the other side. One here and there he’d worked in, like Mrs. Melchuk’s, an elderly widow, her father came from the Ukraine, Innis had cleared her snow, repaired her sagging steps, her eave spouts ripped by frost, she fed him meat pastries in her steamy kitchen, he’d love one right now, she liked to talk about her husband, a steelworker in Sydney for years and years, and this little yellow house in the country they were to enjoy when he retired but he died of silicosis. The MacLeod house with its wide white verandah, bought by Americans as a summer place where last fall Starr got Innis hired on a remodelling crew because the contractor was a friend, but Innis quit after a f
ew days, the men asked too many questions, What’re you up here for, b’y, no work in Boston? and Starr, disgusted, said, What the hell did you expect with an accent like yours? Sure they’re going to ask questions. There was Reverend MacLennan’s place, a huge old house he couldn’t get the bats out of, a retired minister, he hated them with a passion that made his big blue eyes widen when he talked about them, and Innis had waited one night in his yard, the minister standing behind him, watching bats stream out of the attic gable, startling gusts of them in the moonlight, and to pass the time he told Rev. MacLennan about the anthropologist he’d heard on the radio who’d eaten bat soup in Maylasia, tiny bones in it that crunched in your teeth, and the Reverend made an awful sound in the back of his throat, Look at them, look at the little devils, he said, shuddering, they scratch in the walls at night, horrible, and Innis went into the attic and plugged every gable opening he could find while the minister waved a flashlight under him, Hurry, hurry up before they get back. But there was no moon tonight.

  He trotted down Wharf Road breathing hard until he saw that both houses were dark, the priest’s, the Captain’s, but he circled MacQueen’s quietly, what if the old guy was inside and sleeping? He banged on the front door. No light, nothing, so he slipped under the house, last time for this funky hole, in through the hatch. He could tell someone had been here cleaning up, maybe MacKeigan getting things ready for the Captain, a smell of Lysol, and the curtains had been spread wide, but Innis didn’t need a flashlight anymore, he slid through the house like a cat burglar. The ship’s clock chimed and brought him up short, he’d not heard that before, and he froze until it stopped. Seven bells, whatever that was. The keys however were not in the mug and he went through the whole cupboard, Christ, who moved them? that was the Captain’s hiding place. There was not time to search elsewhere, he had to get out of here, could he hot-wire it? But in the garage when he opened the Caddy’s door, the dome light lit: battery already installed, keys in the ignition, dangling, ready. Sorry, Captain. It’s only a loan, no one will take better care of it.