It had never occurred to him they were local topics, Starr and Claire and himself. Things got around fast here, true or untrue. Had Starr even thought he could put it over that she was only a boarder? He had never seemed to care much what people thought when it came to him and women, but suddenly Innis didn’t want Claire seen as some kind of tart, Starr’s mistress or live-in girlfriend or whatever. Some other woman, it might not have mattered. But now they were other people’s business, both of them, and “the young fella.” Even so, they knew nothing about Innis, what he’d grown up with in Watertown, the gusts of merriment that at times had swept through his mother’s apartment, when he was taken up and joshed, fed Saturday night snacks men and their girlfriends brought in brown bags. Or once in awhile when their noise was not like celebration but deranged almost, craziness, everyone shouting in different voices at once, the clumsy, mean jokes, roaring, bawling, the night wearing into the shocking sound of glass—tumblers clattering, busting on the floor, bottles colliding, the sharp hiss of beer caps, an ice tray splintering open like wood. And the sudden turns that sometimes happened against his bedroom wall, a jarring crash. Then the murmured sounds of cleaning up. Someone, maybe his mother, remembering he was in the next room, You want him to see the police here, is that it? And one time they did come. Their dark uniforms, which made them seem enormous to him, changed the tone of everything and Innis was afraid they had come for him. He could hear the buzz of the light over the kitchen sink, nobody talking now but the cops, sometimes polite, sometimes bullying and irritable, but regardless they were bad news, nothing good ever came in the door with them, not when he was a small boy and not later. Innis would see them again and again, the police, not because of a brawling kitchen party but to ask if Innis Corbett lived there and was he at home, they wanted to talk to him, and he might be lying in that same bed just off the kitchen, his door closed, waiting for his mother to lie or not lie, depending on her mood or how he stood with her that day, to send the cops packing or step aside. But these were things the women on the phone need never know, or Starr either.
In the stone fireplace, its mouth smeared with soot, the chimney whispered as chimneys did. He thought he heard dripping but it was the movement of a quartz clock in the shape of a square-rigger. On the wall at eye level was a brass barometer. He tapped the glass as he’d seen Starr do. The needle rose a notch, into “change.” Good. No, he would not rip it off. He would steal nothing in this house.
He opened doors as he found them, looking for signs of the Captain, of his captainness and his MacQueenness. Another bachelor. Everything stowed seaman-neat, boxed, wrapped in plastic, bound with cord and expert knots. In a hall closet two navy blue uniforms hung, gold braid visible through the grey garment bags. Innis pulled out a coat and tried it on in the door mirror, the man must be shorter and stouter than himself, but who couldn’t look good in this getup, all bulk and braid, anything could be an order, a demand, a dressing down with this on your back. Innis buttoned it up. Along a wall was a framed print of a Nova Scotia schooner, sails huge with wind, a river of sea over her lee rails. Underneath it two more framed ships, Great Lakes freighters, dignified in black and white iron, their blunt bows pushing into the sea, trailing grey reliable smoke. Innis had cousins who’d worked the lakeboats, they’d come through Watertown on their way to spring fit-out and after lay up in late fall, stopping for a night or two, travelling that Cape Breton road, part of the kitchen crowd. Lots of Cape Bretoners down on the Lakes, Starr said, good place for you, good pay, if you could get on with the Canadians, the American outfits couldn’t hire you of course, not now. Of course.
A sink tap emitted a gasp when he turned it. Dry. His uncle’s face lingered in his mind, something had sparked in his eyes Innis hadn’t seen before.
Another door. It opened into dark, but he smelled it: a clay floor, pungent with old oil. Touches of sheen, of polished metal, and he stepped almost reverently down into the garage. White winter light flared along the edges of the locked doors and his eyes adjusted to it and picked out the car slowly. He ran his hands along its cold smooth lines. Christ, it was a Cadillac; just about brand-new and beautifully kept, black, had to be black with the chrome standing out like that. The man had waxed it before he put it away. Innis bounced the bumper: yes, that ride, smooth and heavy, a dream. He put his nose to the slightly lowered window, smelled the cool leather inside, the carpeting that would absorb the hush of his own breathing. Who would have guessed a Caddy lurked in this old shed of a garage stinking of spilled gasoline, suited more to a beat-up truck or tractor? In the dusk the white sidewalls glowed, and Innis could hear the crunch of gravel, big tires just beginning to roll, backing, then the pause, the pulse of the engine as you pulled away, sweet and deep. Then you were gone.
He blew on his fingers as he frisked the fenders and panels. No. A guy like old MacQueen wouldn’t keep a key here. But Innis couldn’t stop touching the car: he wanted that wheel in his hands, just to sit there, light up and let it take him somewhere, the radio on low. In ten minutes that Caddy would be warm as a bed. Crazy to think about it. Fed up hanging around the house like a grounded kid, he’d find the key, he’d be back.
He returned the uniform coat to the closet, spread the rug neatly over the floor hatch, just like MacQueen would, a man who shared his taste in automobiles, then he slipped out the back door, setting the lock behind him. Piece of cake.
A miner on his day off picked him up, driving back to The Mines with his family after a spin around St. Aubin Island. The ice was pretty, one of two girls said from the back seat, bouncing up to her father’s ear, lowering her voice. “Wasn’t it, Daddy?” “It is,” he said, turning to Innis. “It’s the silver thaw we came out for, but damned if it isn’t melting fast.” The dad had forearms so white and bare they seemed too large for him, he steered with cramped movements as if there were fog and not a damp cold glitter everywhere, a blood-slow thaw, clear as glass. His wife spoke sharply to the two little girls sharing the seat with Innis but he said, “They don’t bother me, I like kids,” which was a lie, all kids were a pain in the ass, they just kept you back, curtailed you, nailed you to the floor, like he’d done to his mother. At the mailbox the girls yelled goodbye to him a dozen times.
8
INNIS KEPT CLEAR OF the house as much as he could. Starr stayed home while Claire got back on her feet, tending to her until she grew irritable, impatient with sickness. Starr took to staring hard out windows, a cigarette burning in his hand. Innis preferred his uncle talking, he missed the easy focus it gave. Silences, then a few words Starr refused to spin into conversation, and Innis thought, fine, let it die. It wasn’t for him to string small talk along. Starr was the man, it was his house. Another Friday loomed, a day Innis hated: it just dumped him into the weekend. Not even any fun in the kitchen now, Claire and his uncle strained and housebound.
Returning from the woods, he crossed the drab sod hard as stone underfoot, the day closing into cold again. He wanted to smoke, so he turned toward the barn. The culvert ditch had a membrane of ice, slivered with wan afternoon light. Earlier the sun, now a dim glare along the mountain ridge, had softened the dead grasses, glinting hillocks of old hay. Innis grabbed at brittle bush canes and snapped them as he passed. Snow, receding into the shadowy edges of woods, looked like the stranded foam of waves. He pulled down a chokecherry branch: not a bud. Saplings in the fields were no more than switches. A low shrub grey as lace, he would learn its name when summer arrived. That is, if he was still here, instead of sticking what he had in a suitcase and getting lost in a city on the mainland. Ways of getting lost. He’d be an expert, the way things were going. What about Halifax? St. John in New Brunswick? He’d have to find out about those towns.
But there was a woman in the house.
The old barn, isolated, no tracks to it, man, animal, vehicle, nothing connecting it anymore to the house or little pig barn where old lumber and junk were stored or the milk house where Starr stacked firewood or t
he toolshed. Innis had inspected its gloom through a stall window but had never entered, since nothing they used was kept there. It sat as he had sketched it in the fall, grey against the lower woods, waiting to be overtaken like the pasture behind it, ruined with advancing trees. One of the tall threshing doors stood ajar, sagging on its pins. Innis slipped the rope latch and heaved it just wide enough to step inside. Small low windows cast a dusty light through the stalls. The animal reek had long faded into a dry smell Innis could taste in his throat. In the lofts was dishevelled hay the color of the winter fields. Something fluttered, stirred. Mice, a rat maybe. Not a cat. Starr had drowned the last ones he found here, so he said. Shitty thing to do, dump them in a sack with stones and toss it in a brook. That was the farm way, no room for the sentimental. Yet no one, when he was in a certain mood, could be more sentimental than Starr.
Innis climbed up into the loft and settled himself in a grotto of broken bales, making a seat in one whose binding still held. A fine, musty dust hung like frost. Here and there the hay was rank with mildew. Leaks. From the CBC he’d learned about hay, its different grasses, the danger of wet bales spontaneously combusting. He was picking up things from the radio now and then, what caught his attention he remembered, just the way it had been in school. A program called Quirks and Quarks put him off at first, posing gee-whiz questions, What do dinosaurs taste like? or, Does the Sasquatch really exist, and if he does, should we shoot him? or, Could there be water on the moon? Innis’s first reaction was, Who gives a shit? But some of it stuck in his mind, like how birds navigate over long distances, or the intelligence of a virus, or the mating calls of frogs, Brazilian tree frogs and Argentinian desert frogs and Canadian grey frogs. He fished out a thin joint, he was rolling them thinner, and lit it. The gable window was cracked and bird-soiled. The metal roof, a grey cavern pinholed with pitchfork light, shuddered in the wind and the whole barn responded, beams straining like ship timbers. A cold touch of air from some opening he couldn’t see, and he hunched deeper into the hay. Would this stuff burn? Jesus, all that old dried wood. He held up a match in front of his eyes: a horny kid, am I, Starr? Dangerous in my underwear?
But after two deep hits of weed, he lay back and any wish for fiery destruction fled, revenge, anger. Friday night. He’d like to spontaneously combust. He and Ned might get stoned and cruise the glare of the Combat Zone, feel the energy of all the sexual hustling, check out a topless bar with their fake I.D.s, Ned always passed for twenty-one anyway, but Innis preferred Harvard Square, tripping with the street musicians and the girls in their funky clothes and Hari Krishnas jingling around, the guys looking more like convicts than spiritual messengers with five o’clock shadows on their shaved heads.… But Mohney was seven hundred miles away, out on the town for sure, maybe at The Groggery where live rock music could crack your skull, but lots of bodies packed in its freaky atmosphere, he liked bars more than Innis did. Was he dealing weed with a new partner? Yet Innis was only reminiscing, he did not yearn for those times exactly, they were past, used up, he didn’t fit into them anymore, there was a childishness about that urge to find entertainment all the time, day and night. What would his mother be up to? For a while, she might’ve missed her absent son, but she was pissed at him too. I love you, Innis, that’s the last thing she’d said when he left, it all got reduced to that. Was she still with that last guy she was stuck on, a jerk, an amiable bullshit artist? Funny, but now he could see his mother’s situation more clearly. Alone, her husband dead, a kid on her hands. She could have gone out and enjoyed herself but there he was. What do you do with him? She didn’t drag him along at least, you had to hand it to her for that. Innis had the flavor now of confined evenings, having to stay home, and they had no taste to them. Just the phrase “staying home” was a downer. He could speak to that. And his mother had had them too, those nights when the only world worth your energy, your spirit, is out on the streets, in the lights. Of course even here he could go out, but he couldn’t get anywhere, not at night. Fifteen miles to The Mines, the nearest town, and cars were not plentiful until you got out to the main highway. Could be a damn cold wait, never sure if they would take you all the way, maybe let you off at Little Bras D’Eau and you’d have to hunker at the roadside awhile longer, spirits diving. What would he find when he got there anyway? One bar, that he knew of, a serious drinking hole where he doubted he’d be welcome once he opened his mouth, regular brawls there on weekends, Starr said. He couldn’t just walk around Commercial Street looking for an invitation from a sweet girl. More hitching would take him further south, North Sydney, and Sydney was where the action was, an actual city. For his mother, at least her fun was never far away.
Spoiled hay, great seat for a Friday night. It would be in his jeans before long, the dead barn smell. Wind tremored in the walls. The heavy breath of cows and horses. Innis staggered about on the lumpy hay, beating up its tired dust. The floor of the loft, exposed in places, was laid of spruce poles, unshaved, their bark dry and curling. A ladder of small boards nailed into the wall studs led up to the gable hatch. He gripped the crude flat rungs and climbed with that deliberateness grass always gave him, a microscopic attention to the physical, and to physical consequences. A crack of light outlined the hatch where they used to swing in hay bales on the hayfork, the tackle dangling as if someone had just released it. Innis flipped the rusty hatch hook loose and the small door yawned outward and suddenly his height from the field below seized him and he hugged the rung. Cape Breton from the air, that plane flight in: the thick nappy green of the forests, tiny inhabited spaces here and there as if shaved out with a razor. And the water, always water somewhere, spills of lakes, streams and bays, ponds flaring like mirrors, and the ocean or some reach of it never far, and the houses specks in the vast green, so few of them it scared him, that he would be sequestered in that. Pulp roads lay like discarded rope. Woods a bristly carpet, worn in spots, frayed. And he was living now on one of those roads maybe he’d seen from the air, pressing his face to a wooden rung, in an old barn. The weakness passed, leaving him trembling, breathless. He opened his eyes slowly to the fading light: there was the house he lived in, smoke in its chimney, set down near woods a million miles from where he wanted to be. Someone was at the back door, the glass panes, a dash of color. It was her, she moved out from behind the door and stood on the steps. She pulled a yellow scarf from her head. A regular flower, that girl.
Then she was stepping gingerly along the field. Afraid of cow turds? Snakes? A flash of resentment brought tears to his eyes: she had broken the simple arrangement of his life, he and his uncle getting on, making his way slowly and carefully and without much trouble toward September, yet it thrilled him to see her appear on this landscape. To the west the water of the strait lay slick as metal. He thought he could smell it, the salt, and the resin of the evergreens thick on the mountain among the grey leafless hardwood. Exile, you’re going into exile, pal, Ned had told him when he first heard, loving the word, grinning like it was something from the movies, or a joke. Ned didn’t know it was like being turned out of your own house in the middle of the night, like somebody ripping the covers off you in January and ordering you into the snow, but big-time, way up there in pain. He eased himself down the ladder, conscious of the drop at his back that even old hay might not save him from.
He hardly breathed when she came into the threshing floor below him, but he watched her poke about, brushing imaginary webs from her face. The light was poor but her hair, black as the crows Innis fed bread to in the snow, caught touches of it. He watched her tap the hard leather of a horse collar, shake a dull tinkling from harness chains hanging from nails. She was moving through a museum. Innis was sure that she, like him, had secrets. It excited him that she didn’t know he was there above her. He could frighten her, but he heard her laugh softly at something on the wall.
“What’s so funny?” Innis said.
She started as if a door had slammed but she didn’t cry out. She raised her
face to him calmly. He could see the slow light of a smile.
“A photo of the royal family, nailed to the wall here. The queen and her sister, they’re just little girls.”
“My grandmother’s, I bet. She loved the royals, Starr says, but as far as he’s concerned, they can kiss his arse, it belongs in the barn. What brought you out here?”
“I like barns.”
“They’re quiet.”
“It’s not like the house is noisy.”
“Could use a little racket, couldn’t it? Laugh a minute.”
“I was out of sorts for a while. I’m sorry. I need to get back to work.”
“No big deal. What’s Starr’s excuse?”
“He thought there was some little thing between you and me, I don’t know what. I set him straight. He likes to talk, Starr does, but he doesn’t say much about himself, what’s inside of him.”
“He won’t like us in here then, will he, all by ourselves?”
“Oh, he’s having a bath. Taking me to Sydney for dinner. I wouldn’t worry about it, dear. I’m not.”
“I might move out to the barn, the way things are going. Hey, you don’t have a coat on. You’ve been sick.”
“Indeed. I lost six pounds. That’s enough of that.”
“I wouldn’t say you had to lose an ounce. Why don’t you come up here? It’s warmer.”
“Is it?” She regarded him, her head to one side. “Help me up then.”
He took her warm hand and pulled her up into the hayloft. She was wearing a purple sweater with a high collar and black bell-bottom jeans.
“Nicer up here,” she said, stepping into the bales. “Like being a kid, in the hay. A long time since I’ve been on a farm.”
Cape Breton Road Page 10
