Cape Breton Road

by D. R. MacDonald

  Innis could have told him, No wonder the spring is low, all the baths you’re taking lately, but he didn’t because he wanted Claire to feel she could bathe whenever she liked.

  “I’ll have a look tomorrow, Starr. There’s a bed for Claire made up. Two quilts and another folded if she needs it.”

  “You’re right on top of things,” Starr said. “We’ll ring if we need you.”

  “Thank you, Innis,” Claire said. “I’m going to need that bed pretty soon.”

  He left them talking and wandered outside. The wind had turned damp, he tasted fog in the air. Through the steam-streaked window he could see his uncle leaning across the table, taking Claire’s hand. She said something to him, smiled, stood up. Then she stretched, arching her back slowly, and Innis ached watching her bend toward Starr and kiss him.

  In the toolshed, the lightbulb above him smudged from his dirty hands, Innis pushed tools around, lifted them, dropped them noisily. He honed the big axe with a whetstone, brightening the blade-edge. There was a smell of old grease and metal and rust. He’d started on those goddamn woods of Dan Rory and Finlay’s, busting his ass for nothing, not a penny. He slipped off his belt and buffed the brass snake with a bit of steel wool, rubbed an oily cloth over the leather. Wind gusted in the door and he looked out at the house: a light in Starr’s room, and the bathroom. They were going to bed. He’d wait for awhile after the lights were out.

  The cold air of the attic surprised him and he feared for his seeds. Surely they were getting heat from the kitchen ceiling, this had been Granny’s weaving room, it couldn’t have been too cold for her. He had not looked under the loom for three days or so and the seeds were overdue to pop up. He lifted the tinfoil curtain a few slow inches, prepared to scuttle his vision of five-lobed leaves swaying in a hot breeze. But God, there they were, all of them, sprouts curling out of the soil in odd little postures, lifting their seed heads out of sleep, their jackets open and still clinging, duller than when he’d peered at them in his palm. He held them one by one, puffed motes of dry soil from their heads and stalks. Underneath the small peat pots tiny white roots were already probing and soon he’d have to put them in bigger pots. He dipped each one in the water crock to soak the peat and set them back on their bed of gravel, the fine stone warm to the touch. Good. Cold water was fine to taste but not for growing. He could not stop smiling, he wanted to squat there and watch them ease their heads toward the light, be there when the first leaves appeared. But he was already shivering, as much from nerves as from the early April air. He had followed the book like a catechism. The author, a portly young man in a bushy black beard and a T-shirt that said FLOWER POWER, wrote in a chummy tone Innis had liked immediately: they were both engaged in a conspiracy against authoritarian forces devoted to coming between them and good weed. This enterprise involved high risk and a measure of love. The book was more like talk than a text, like maybe the way Innis’s grandfather had instructed Starr about farming, in a commonsense but feeling way, even if the crops were different, to be sure, and Starr had come to enjoy reminiscing about that hard work, not performing it, whereas for Innis the pleasures and rewards had just begun. Soil? the author said. Just dirt, pardner, and if it ain’t good dirt, you don’t get good weed. Innis had studied the illustrations of cartoon pot plants: over-fertilized, their mouths rounded in alarm; water-starved, they hung withered and mournful. Chemical stuff is poison, pardner, if you don’t use it right, so go easy. But water is life. Innis knew that the ten-foot marijuana stalk the man stood next to on the last page of the book had not grown anywhere near Nova Scotia, not in Cape Breton for sure. The guy didn’t know the conditions on this island, the short summers and killing frosts in June. So Innis was writing a chapter of his own. Make them happy any way you can, the author said, they have to be happy to thrive. That made sense. Innis could not say he was happy himself, but he was harder and wiser than he had been, and that was good enough for now. He lowered the moth-shot blankets over the loom, preserving his corner of early summer.

  5

  INNIS’S AXE SOUNDED SHARPLY through the trees as he notched a tall spruce, dead from top to root and ready to fall with the next storm, its crown lost in mist. A fine dry rain of needles flickered into his hair. He had worked up a good sweat and sore hands, coming up here early in the morning out of a restless sleep, certain he had heard Claire’s dreamy murmurs through the wall of the next bedroom. But maybe he’d been dreaming, though when he woke he remembered only feelings, a tender, unfocussed desire that had everything to do with her. Sure, he had a boner but he had that every morning: sex or death, that flag would fly. He drove the axe bit in so deep he had to rest before he levered it out. Jesus, he’d listened at his bedroom wall a good many times until his mother realized that he was growing up on the other side. He’d been just her little boy in the next room who was supposed to have other things on his mind than putting his ear to the plaster. She couldn’t guess how he was deciphering what he heard, that his imagination made up in power what it lacked in accuracy. But Claire, well. Claire.

  He rubbed the calluses on his hands, hard but raw, then took up the crosscut and put his back into it, biting quickly through the bole of the tree, drawing the damp morning air deep into his lungs. Did Dan Rory know he was down here slaving away? Ought to, with that X-ray vision or whatever it was. Around noon he would meet the priest. Innis and a padre. Celibate life. Good, clean. That’s what he needed. Smother his unclean thoughts. He stepped away as the trunk gave out a tentative crack, shifted slightly above his blade, and then plunged with gathering force, striking the debris around it like an enormous switch. He stood panting amid vibrations of dry branches, the dust of dead needles and bark. Around him lay trees already tumbled, busted deadfalls, splintered trunks, spikes of broken branches you could barely climb through. Out of this mess he was supposed to clear a path, to the brook and beyond? Green spears of spruce were struggling up through it. Good luck.

  As the sounds died away he heard it, again and always, in autumn and winter too, at some distance in the trees, the snap of a dry branch, then silence, then the slow compression of leafy matter, of duff, of crusted snow, the satiny sweep of a needled branch springing back, held, released. Deer, he’d thought at first. Or, later, the big cat who’d left his marks up by the spring, who would never let you see him. Starr said, Sure, you’re hearing a buck up there keeping clear of you, checking you out, and one afternoon a doe had busted out of the trees, scaring him so good he froze until its white-tailed rump disappeared in its crashing flight. But this sound he heard now and then seemed different, heavier, oddly careful, even cunning. He knew a good deal now about what noise the woods could make. And after he smoked a joint, his ears were so tuned he could hear bugs breathe, the fine trembling of a spider’s web strummed by sunlight, a hawk’s feathers swimming through air. Nothing could get by his ears when he had smoke in his blood, and this sound seemed to him like footfall, neither nearing nor receding, but simply there. He strained to pick it up again but couldn’t. There was only the fog now into which the trees were sinking back, slowly advancing as if it were rising from fissures in the ground. Innis hacked away branches, sawed the tree into sections he could kick away. Bushy brittle foliage was sticking up every which way and he wanted some level sight here, an indication of progress. He piled the thrash for burning, broke for a few swigs of water, and then made his way out to meet Father Lesperance.

  AS THE WHARF ROAD curved down toward the derelict pier, the priest’s cottage came in sight, small and square, once a store when the ferry was running. The dirty white shingles could use some paint all right. A slush-streaked Chevrolet sat at the curb. The only other dwelling on this short stretch of road was the house of a retired Great Lakes captain across from the cottage, old too but newly shingled in red cedar, with a new dormer gazing toward the strait and the mountain, the broken concrete piers of the wharf. The captain lived in Florida most of the year—a snowbird, Starr called him, he flies back whe
n it’s warm. The attached garage looked a bit rickety despite the fresh shingles. What kind of car would a captain drive?

  Innis expected a man in black, the collar and all, but a big man appeared from the direction of the wharf, hunched into a long grey mule coat, a red earflapped cap on his head, moving up the sloped street in labored strides. He had his hand out long before he reached Innis.

  “Well, well, I think I know who you are.” He was breathing hard, his blue eyes tearing. “Innis, is it?” He gripped Innis’s hand and gestured toward the cottage. “Come inside, young man. I was down there at the water. She’s calm and dark today, not a bit of wind. But oh that’s a mean current there sometimes. Eh? I’m Henri. I’ve misplaced the front door key, Innis, we’ll do the back.”

  “Father Lesperance, right?”

  “Right you are. Henri’s fine.”

  The priest ignored the lock and shouldered open the back door, exclaiming at the state of the kitchen. Dirty dishes and a skillet were piled in the sink, a cold smell of frying in the air.

  “They’ve been here again. The little rats.” He didn’t sound angry. He opened the fridge. “Well they didn’t eat everything, Innis,” he said heartily, “left us baloney and bread. Sandwich?”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  He put together their lunch as he explained that the lock had been forced several times already by the kids—“troubled boys”—he brought out here from the industrial towns in the summer. “A dose of country life,” he said. But a few had returned on their own at night and ripped off the few valuables he’d had—his TV, old golf clubs, an electric kettle, the binoculars he liked to watch passing boats with. He admitted that it hurt, but he shrugged it off. “There wasn’t much here in the first place, and there’s even less for them now, so maybe they will have to do good and shape up. You didn’t come here to watch TV anyway, did you?” he said, handing him a hefty sandwich.

  “There isn’t much on to watch. I’m here to work.”

  “But look, make yourself at home when you’re working, Innis, whatever’s in the fridge, whatever.”

  Innis could tell that the priest was a little tight, his eyes puffy like he hadn’t slept, a high color to his face and it wasn’t just from walking in cold air. But he was in a good mood, showing Innis the other two rooms, one for living, he said, one for sleeping. He pointed to an odd piece of furniture. “A prie-dieu, Innis. A woman gave that to me, when I had a parish, and anytime you wish to kneel on it and pray, go right ahead. It’s about the only thing they didn’t steal. Hard to fence, I suppose. Not much call for them in Sydney.”

  “What kind of trouble do these kids get into, Father, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Breaking and entering mostly. The Cape Breton vice. Fighting, boozing, the two go hand in hand. Drugs now too. Marijuana, even young ones get into that.”

  “That’s something they sure don’t need.” Jesus, he sounded like a kiss-ass, a choirboy. He had needed it, needed it now. Innis swallowed the last of his baloney and white bread, enough mustard on it to make his eyes tear. Ned Mohney had given him that first hit of pot. Not primo, what they got ahold of, but they worked the tobacco out of two cigarettes and tamped the grass in with a pencil. They’d seen Ned’s brother smoke it, so they took their puffs and held them down until they coughed and were soon giggling and rolling around and half-sick. It was the day Innis knew he was not a kid anymore: something crazy but sharp had colored his mind, and it wouldn’t let him be young the way he had been, no matter how he might seem to others, to his mother, his few friends. No one could fool him again, he was sure of it, not while he was high, not in any way that mattered, though there were times when he had managed to fool himself. A couple years later he and Mohney would take the MBTA over to Cambridge and deal some weed in Harvard Square, small-time, mostly college kids, enough to keep things moving.

  The priest flung the curtains open and turned on the lone table lamp in the front room. The kerosene heater gave off whiffs of smoke, but when that cleared away the room began to warm, like the tubes in the old brown radio, its red glow dead center in a big round dial the priest turned until the sounds of a French station emerged. “My sound system,” he said. “They lifted my cassette player. Do you know any French, Innis?”

  “I don’t, Father.”

  “Tant pis, but that wouldn’t single you out, my friend, not in much of Cape Breton. But there are parts of it where French is king, oh yes.”

  The priest cocked his ear toward the radio, even in French it had the cranked-up urgency of news, but even the CBC news in English had little to say about the U.S.: it didn’t matter that much anymore, not in detail, The States weren’t the center of the universe here, and Innis himself wanted to hear less about a place he could never go back to. Starr always passed over French stations in a flash, as if angry that the language was there at all.

  “Well, Innis, what color should we put on these drab walls? Something bright?”

  “How about yellow? Not loud, I mean, pale.”

  The priest ran his hand over his bald pate slowly as he looked at ceiling and wall. “You pick it.” He pulled out a paint store chart from under his coat and laid it on the chair. “Pick the color you think best. I’ll be back in a few days with paint. The walls need washing anyway, wouldn’t you say? A little scraping on the woodwork?”

  “I’ll clean it all up first, Father.”

  “Well.” The priest clapped his hands together. “We’ll make this place like summer. It’s for summer, after all. I bought it for a song, Innis, as they say, not that there was much music here. No land came with it to speak of but I’ve got the wharf and the beach down there, and the water and the mountain to enjoy. I hope you enjoy them as well, my friend. Just don’t leave anything valuable here.”

  “I don’t have anything valuable.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  The priest showed him where he stored cleaning implements, and where to turn the water on and off under the house: there would be more freezing weather and you had to protect the pipes. In the little bathroom he kept a bowl of 15-amp fuses for the fuse box. The old well-pump blew the circuit if you had too many lights on.

  “Innis, it’s all yours,” he said. He pulled on his cap, shook Innis’s hand, and drove away, trailing exhaust and a rattling bumper.

  Innis was pleased to be alone, relieved that the priest hadn’t pumped him for information about himself but just took him as he was. There was a stack of National Geographic and outdated Maclean’s to thumb through, and he could nap on the nubby blue couch after the room got toasty. His back and shoulders hurt. Chopping and sawing. What a future. Grunt work. Innis touched his breast pocket, then worked out a roach like a piece of lint. A lipscorcher but it would do. He squeezed a couple good hits out of it and stared out the kitchen window at the stretch of shore, water the color of lead, the tide slack beneath the gently drifting fog. A cold, frozen beach. He could not envision warm sand and swim-suited girls lying around in it, but oh man, thinking about them hurt more than his muscles.

  He wandered into the priest’s bedroom, spare as a jail. The juvenile housebreakers had snatched a good lamp from the little table, the priest said, and the grey wool blanket he’d used as a spread. But they’d spared the crucifix on the wall. Good Catholic boys. Like Ned Mohney, who always, on the way to or from a bit of sin, crossed himself when he passed his church in Watertown, St. Patrick’s, or any church of his kind, even St. Theresa’s of the Child Jesus, a name that made Innis want to look inside that church but he never had. The crazy bastard, mailing him this dope, but the package had got through and nobody showed up to arrest him. Without Innis, was he still dealing pot on his own, selling it to the college kids, his baggies on the light side of an ounce? Mohney wasn’t the sort for a letter, and what could they share now? For letters, you had to have a future. Innis was gone, a dead-end. Send him some smoke and forget about him. But Innis had envied Ned the religious rituals that seemed always
available to him, and that Ned never questioned regardless of what trouble he got into. Whenever he crossed himself, his hard, humorous face was fleetingly meek and peaceful. Innis sometimes had longed for that feeling, whatever it was. He wanted to call upon those names, murmur those phrases, pull rosary beads from his pocket and work them through his fingers. Ned had given him a St. Christopher medal, said he could wear it for a while since Innis wasn’t really anything, didn’t go to church at all so maybe he could turn Catholic sooner or later. But Innis’s mother yanked it off his neck like it was a voodoo charm and threw it out the kitchen window. Sometimes when Innis got stoned he could still feel the thin chain, the metal resting on his breastbone.

  When he was young, the Easter after his father was killed his mother took him to a Presbyterian church, dressed him in a new wool jacket the weave of which was on his fingertips right now. The church was filled upstairs and down. Pale yellow paint on the walls, and cream and white. Flowers and people, flowers on the altar, everywhere, all those once-a-year souls pressed in stiffly side by side, dressed to the teeth. Straw hats and white hats and bright corsaged dresses, and the little girls in white shoes, small boys like himself stiffwalking in suits and sportcoats, flowers in their buttonholes. The only time his mother ever took him, ever went herself, so far as he knew. I had enough church at home to last a lifetime, she’d told him once, my dad was Gospel Hall and I ran screaming from it first chance I got. Tough? Lord! No dancing for those people, no make-up, no movies, no music in the house but hymns, not a drink stronger than tea. The mackerelsnappers were allowed to have fun, God, she’d say that for them.

  Innis lay back on the bed. The mattress gave off its damp coolness along the backs of his legs. Upside down, the crucifix looked a little worse for wear. Maybe the damp salt air dulled the finish. Father Lesperance probably had a better one at home. The sermon from that Easter morning was about an orchid, about two girls who felt sorry for their hardworking mother and saved their meagre coins until they could buy her this orchid on her birthday. But instead of being cheered by it, the mother scolded the girls because they were poor and the flower was merely beautiful, a waste when they needed things to eat and to wear. But the orchid, in the minister’s way of looking at it, was really love, he said, and he approved of it, he took the girls’ side. Sometimes we need an orchid, the minister said. By that time the church was filled with rustling sounds, as if the flowers were stirring on their own, but it was all that Sunday clothing, all that new cloth. He remembered how sweet the air smelled, how he sniffed it until he felt dizzy.