Cape Breton Road

by D. R. MacDonald

  “A dead farm, this one.”

  “There’s life here yet.”

  “You could have fooled me, but I’m new to it, I guess.”

  “Yes, you didn’t get that accent in St. Aubin.”

  “I didn’t get much of anything in St. Aubin.”

  “You got born, didn’t you? You go a long way back here, Starr says, your family.”

  “That isn’t much good to me now, is it? I’m not going forward, that’s the point.”

  She let herself fall back into the nest he had made. “I remember my uncle’s farm when I was a girl. Fun, that warm fresh hay.”

  “This hay isn’t fresh.” Innis grabbed a handful. “Been here for years. Starr’s dad took it in before he died.”

  “Your grandpa?”

  “I never knew him. My mother didn’t like him much anyway. Too religious. He wouldn’t let you take his picture on the Sabbath. He got very sorrowful in his later years, she said. He would sit like a wooden man for hours on a Sunday.”

  “Starr doesn’t have any of that, does he.”

  “It’s under there. Scratch him deep enough.”

  She tested a strand of hay in her teeth. “So it’s no good even for horses, but it’s fine for us.” Her voice was warm and easy and he let himself believe they might have planned to meet, in this very space, so close they could whisper. When she turned her head, her pendant earrings caught a dangle of gable light, a glint of silver.

  “Look at this,” Innis said. He huffed a breath toward her. “We’ve got some winter left.”

  “Oh, I’d kill for a summer day, just one. I want to bake in the sun somewhere. I want it to be hot and sticky and all those summer things we can’t stand in July. It’s a wonderful cure.”

  “For what?”

  “Winter. We need thawing out.” She stood up, unsteady in the soft footing. “The winter here gets to me. It got to the man I was living with too.”

  “There’s bits of hay all down the back of you,” Innis said.

  “I can’t see them.”

  “Should I brush them off or what?”

  “If it’s messy.”

  “Starr would wonder where you’ve been.”

  “Let him.”

  Innis plucked the bits as gently as he could, as high as he could reach without standing. His legs felt shaky. The weed, and the curve of her jeans. “I’m in a hurry for summer myself,” he said, almost whispering.

  “Are you?” She looked down at him, amused. “Well, you’re young. Summer is your time, isn’t it.”

  “Fall, more like.”

  Innis got to his feet slowly, braced himself against a post. He wanted to tell her, to draw her into it.

  “I need to put plants in the ground,” he said. “But I’ll probably have to cool it till the last frost is gone, in June.”

  “I didn’t know you were into plants, Innis. Starr never mentioned that.”

  “The less Starr mentions, the better, as far as I’m concerned.” Innis opened his hand and peeled back a layer of tinfoil, exposing the seeds he had saved. Claire held his hand steady. She sniffed, raised her eyebrows. He saw the word come soundless on her lips: Marijuana?

  “This is what you’re planning to grow? Lord, Innis. Not in this country.”

  “Why not?” He looked into her face.

  “Well …” She laughed. “The Mounties could come down on you, for one thing. We wouldn’t like to see that. For another, that’s not a plant that thrives here, I think.”

  “They grow in every corner of the States, Claire. They’ll do fine here too. There’s ways to encourage them, if you know what you’re doing.”

  “Oh, I’d give them all the encouragement I could, if that’s all it takes.”

  “It takes other things” He packed the seeds into a ball and jammed them in his jeans. “I’ve read up on it. This stuff grows everywhere now. Even Alaska. I’m not kidding. I’ll have good buds by late August, September and I’ll bag them and sell them.”

  “That could bring you trouble, Innis. Prison.”

  “It’s hidden. Nobody goes where I go, way up above. I know of a trucker who’ll take it all off my hands. One transaction. As soon as I get that money, I’m off, I’m splitting. I’ll take up somewhere else, out west.” Watching her face, her faint, skeptical smile, he wanted to kiss her mouth, hard.

  “Does Starr know?” she said.

  “Jesus Christ, Claire, he doesn’t even smoke the stuff. He knows the world isn’t flat but he’s never had weed. Something, huh?”

  “It’s not for everybody.”

  “So you’ll tell him?” The barn had slipped into dusk. The tiny roofholes cast no light. They stood in the uneven hay as if they had waded into a pond.

  “What good would that do, any of us?” she said. “Of course I wouldn’t tell him.”

  Innis took her hand and touched it to his lips like a sip of water. “Sealed. Look, I’ve got a good roach here in my shirt.”

  “Aren’t you the eager one.”

  But Innis had already put a match to it and drawn a whistling toke.

  “Innis, just one,” she said. “I’m not real steady on my pins yet.” She took it like a fly by the wings, kissed it quickly, passed it back.

  “You and my uncle are pretty tight by now, I guess.”

  She laughed. “Listen, we’d better go. Look how the dark’s come down!”

  Women in his mother’s kitchen, voices mingling with and cutting across his mother’s. Men, the subject of men, made them talk a certain way. But none of them sounded quite like Claire, none that he remembered.

  “Go on ahead, I’ll come later,” he said. “Here, I’ll help you down.” He kept hold of her hand after he’d lowered her to the threshing floor, made her look back at him. “You be careful,” she said. “Bye.”

  He pitched himself back into the broken bales. Claire in summer. She must have been something. She was older now, true. But he liked that, that she’d been in the world longer than he had. In the flare of the match he’d seen tiny lines at her eyes and her mouth. He regretted now that he hadn’t done a drawing of the ice storm, given it to her as a gift.

  Lying back, he narrowed his eyes to slits. The scattered pokeholes in the roof were dim stars. Summer, summer. When the frosts were done he’d be ready. He didn’t need a barn, no kind of machinery, just himself. Smiling, he lay where she had sat, riding a buzz, until the cold crept into his feet.

  9

  BY EARLY MAY SNOW patches had shrunk into the shade of woods. The last snow had thudded from the eaves of the barn, leaving its metal roof gleaming, and the last tooth of ice had trickled away from the gutters. Sometimes a sunny afternoon turned rapidly cold, an east wind scooping up the chill of drift ice that still lurked in the Atlantic, beyond sight. Then the May hay appeared, a fine green in the stubbled fields where it was mown, and in Starr’s, unmown for years, it found its way through the folds and humps of dead grasses winter had laid down, thickening the mat of the sod for another fallow year. The trees were still without leaves as Innis’s cleared path was nearing the MacRitchies’ little footbridge over their brook. In running streams blackflies bred, tiny devils that could leave you bleeding, but soon he’d be finished with this job, he could work at it fast now, slinging limbs and logs and brush, heaping them for a last burning before the woods were too dry for fire. New birds appeared, easy to pick out in the bare trees and bushes, and he’d have to look them up back in his room, he seemed to spot a new bird every day. A small brown one with a thin curved bill spiralled up the trunk of a maple, looking for bugs, no more than an arm’s reach away. It seemed unconcerned about him or the noise of his axe, his saw. Innis had heard but couldn’t see a woodpecker high in a bare birch drilling for insects stirring under the dead bark, a head like a hammer. Innis took a break to watch a handsome little guy, black and orange with touches of white. It was like seeing a flower bloom after months of drabness. The brook he was approaching was loud, charging through the hillside
, much higher than it had been in the fall.

  Sharing his secret with Claire had given his plan, as Innis saw it, some class: it was between her and himself, Starr had nothing to do with it. Or that illicit kiss, which some days he hoped she did not remember, other days he wished she did. He watched her carefully for any sign, allowed himself sometimes to think she did remember and was holding it, like he did, out of sight until the right time came to bring it up, or even that she might have, in some odd way, liked it. But Jesus, it was such a pathetic thread to cling to—he couldn’t spin much of a fantasy out of it, not that it stopped him from trying. He saw little of her, he stayed in his room when he was home, came down for meals, and she sometimes worked later in Sydney, Starr arriving home ahead of her. Innis missed the high spirits of her first weeks in the house, her laughter, the way a glass of wine seemed to glow in her blue almost black eyes, her spontaneous hugs, her kidding with him, a bright headband in her blue-black hair, a silver choker against her olive skin, long earrings that twirled against the taut muscle of her neck when she laughed or turned her head quickly when she spoke. That had fallen away after her illness, after Starr doused Innis with ice. Every now and then Innis had to mock himself, ridicule his stoned scenarios, if alone in the house with her what he’d say, what he’d do, it was silly, movie stuff really and he’d end up laughing at himself. He would swing off his bed and check out his muscles in the old dresser mirror, its glass rippled like water: he’d pull back his shoulders, filled out now, broadened. He had lost the lazy fat around his waist, that little tire from lounging in Mohney’s basement smoking weed and munching junk, they could mash staggering amounts of chips and dips and pretzels. He didn’t even miss the TV, the boring movies, the awful afternoon shows, lame and depressing, it was just filler for living, something to jeer, then doze to. He could feel a thin sheath of muscle over his ribs now, and his belly he could pummel hard without a flinch. The ponytail had bared his long thin face, turned it more severe and serious, the hawk nose he’d been ashamed of once but had now grown into he’d got from his grandfather, his mother’s dad. If you didn’t feel like a teenager anymore, why look like one, hair falling over your eyes. Trim, and tightened up, that’s how he liked to look at it: his arms, his hands, they were useful, not just stuck in his pockets as he slouched down a street in Watertown, Mass.

  When Claire and his uncle were gone, Innis hunkered over his plants, as if just watching them were a nutrient. He kept their location from Claire, fearing something might slip, and he still liked having this secret of his own, right here under the roof. The seedlings were reaching their limits with an electric sun and a half gallon of soil. The foliage looked brave but leery. In their former lives they’d popped up under a wide, hot sun, South America maybe or California—places Claire had flown to in her stewardess days and said she’d like to visit again—but what could they expect here, ice floes lying out in the ocean in May, refrigerating the wind? No sun-struck breezes, just wan rays of fluorescence and cold darkness beyond. Innis gently massaged their stalks, turning firmer now, and he’d have to risk the early June frosts if the stems got woody. Jesus, pot was related to rope, it had to be hardy, didn’t it? He rubbed the leaves between thumb and finger to stimulate their circulation. Like fingering money really, value growing day by day, if he could get it in the bank. Soon he would have to carry his plants up to their clearing in the high woods, their new home. They were over a foot high and crowding and it would be nothing short of tragic for Starr to find them now, their leaves clearly criminal even to him.

  Late one night Innis woke to a soft rhythmic tapping, like rain off a roof. Just enough to pluck him out of sleep, it cut across his heartbeat, doubling it as he realized the sound was Claire’s headboard patting the wall. He thought at first she was alone, moving to her own fingers, and his face flushed, he pulled himself closer to the wall. But then he heard the smothered sounds. Two voices. Goddamn them, did they think he was deaf or what? He rolled out of bed, slamming his feet to the floor, and sat there with his hands over his ears, feeling stupid, on the margin of everything.

  At breakfast Starr, in a fresh white shirt that had flapped on the clothesline the day before, seemed unusually cocky for the early hour, teasing, but Claire was cool and silent at the stove scrambling eggs. Innis stood at the rear window finishing his coffee while he watched a raven with a slice of bread in its beak take two hops to get airborne, chased by three resplendent shrieking jays. He hadn’t slept much but he was wide awake. A long line of thick white fog hovered above the water. He could see far along the mountain, east or west, miles. But what good did it do him, to see so far in the morning?

  Starr had the radio tuned to the CBC news and was chuckling over the antics of a terrorist group called The Armed Proletarian Nuclei. “Now there’s an outfit,” he said, pointing to the radio like it was someone’s face. “They like the big words. You notice? Nuclei? Pinheads.”

  “They’re fighting for us, Starr,” Claire said, “working people like you and me, aren’t they? That’s what I heard.”

  “That little clump of flies? They don’t have a clue about work, any kind of it. Eh, Innis?” He looked from Innis’s back to Claire’s. “You’re a frosty lot, the two of you,” he said, digging into his eggs.

  “You could use a little frost yourself,” Claire said. Innis could feel her watching him but he ignored her.

  “No, no, dear,” his uncle said, “the sap is up, it’s spring, not that you’d know it without a little help from me.”

  Innis grabbed his jacket and was out the door, heading up the driveway, Claire calling after him to wait, she wanted to talk to him but he didn’t stop until he was nearly to the power line break, his breath seething. Starr had gone to her bed on purpose last night, he knew that now, in case he had any doubt, in case he’d never heard them fucking in Starr’s bedroom down the hall, and he hadn’t, he never listened, he didn’t want that. And she’d let Starr reach for her in the middle of the night, knowing, knowing.

  By midmorning he was lost in the tedium of laying tile, Finlay in the bathroom doorway giving advice, Dan Rory rocking in his chair in the parlor listening to scratchy fiddle music on an old record player. The room was steamy from someone’s morning shower and Innis hated this fussy work, fitting corners and edges, but they were paying him for this and he needed it.

  “That’s a very good-looking woman in your house,” Finlay said after a long silence. Innis could hear Dan Rory thumping out the beat with his cane. He pressed a tile into place with the concentration of a stonesetter.

  “She’s just a boarder,” he said. He didn’t want her mentioned, her name was raw in his mind.

  “Yes. Well,” Finlay said, drawing hard on a cigarette. “He never had a boarder before, but he knows how to pick one, God bless him.”

  “Only temporary, till she gets on her feet,” Innis said.

  “Yes. Feet.” Finlay leaned over him and tossed the cigarette, psst in the toilet. “Likes the country, does she?”

  “Likes it okay.”

  Did she? He knew one thing she liked. What were the women on the telephone saying about her now, about him, about Starr?

  When he broke for lunch, Dan Rory told him it was a good morning for music. “Look at that fog coming in,” pointing with his cane. “But we don’t get to do a damn thing, eh? No seed to get ready, nothing to plow, no cows, no horses in the barn. Just our potato patch. You like our violin music, Innis?”

  “Haven’t heard it much.” His father had listened to it on the radio at home, and his mother still went to Down East dances Saturday nights at the Watertown Canadian-American Club, but it had never grabbed Innis. It all sounded the same, old-fashioned, distant, a hundred years away.

  “Summer’s the time. Not the big dances they used to have but there’s music around, oh yes, good music. You’ll hear it. How’s the woods coming? Flies bad?”

  “I got welts in places you wouldn’t believe. I’ve pretty well cleaned up that patch
, down to the brook anyway. Then the road’s not far.”

  “I’ll send Finlay down for a look. Listen, a letter come to us by mistake, addressed to you but the wrong box number. Finlay, fetch that for Innis.”

  “Me? I don’t get letters.” He didn’t count his mother’s, brief and mostly questions (Are you eating good? Are you still angry with me? To hell with you if you are), as if she had to imagine his life here piece by piece, and he hadn’t written back.

  “Well you got one now,” Finlay said, lifting it off the window sill.

  Innis tried to save it for later, like dessert, but he pulled the letter out of his back pocket and read it kneeling in the bathroom. Yo! Mohney wrote, carefully in pencil on lined tablet paper, went down to the Combat Zone last night, great time got a massage yeah! You didn’t like that stuff, paying for it but I’ll tell you those ladies know some tricks. Nothing like high school. You finding any ganja there? (I hope some Canuck P.O. worker isn’t reading this huh?) You get the package? The “candy” I sent? It was primo California more bounce to the ounce. I figured you could use it up there. Must be lots of space to grow “things” when it isn’t snowing. Risky shit. Hope this address is okay. Deborah the girl who used to be Debbie, remember? was asking how you like the great white north and I said go up and see for yourself he’s probably horny enough. Nobody can figure out how it happened to you why you can’t come back. Lawyers is what they all say. You had a stinking lawyer but I told them the lawyer didn’t matter fuck all. You in jail? Just goofing. Hot here today good weather for weed. The Great Order of the Leaf? Millions of members. Hope you found some up there. May’s a crazy month you want to fuck around so much. You remember. Trouble is I’m getting fucked with. Remember that big prick Tony and his retard brother? Ripped me off, half a key. If you were here maybe I could do something but shit I’m on my own. Believe me I’d like to hurt them I’m broke busted. Things are getting too hot, hard for a small-timer, you get pushed out. So what the fuck are you up to? I heard its mostly trees there. I don’t know what to tell you if I can’t see you man. I don’t have the scratch to come up there wherever the hell St. Aubin is, sounds like a church. Mohney’s voice, from a great distance. If you could not go back to a place, ever, distance in miles meant nothing, it was somewhere in space. Watertown was harder to call up now, trees and fields and water had absorbed it, diffused it, but if Ned were to show up outside that bathroom window and shout, Innis, Let’s go get those bastards!, that would be a joy. They’d find a way to get even with Tony and his stupid brother, two guys tough as shit but not smart. Innis wished he could send Mohney something useful, a gun, a good knife, anything practical for vengeance. Words were worthless, but he was glad for these. He stared at the page: after Mohney had scratched the last line, he probably got in his Mustang with the dual glasspacks and drove to Izzy’s to shoot pool, or maybe he didn’t do that at all but something new. The day Innis left, they shook hands and said See you later. Later. Mohney pledged to visit, as if Innis were bound for jail, but Innis knew that was the last he would see of him. This called for friendship Mohney didn’t have in him. Innis’s circumstances nothing in Mohney’s Boston could explain. A taint of strangeness in this deportation stuff, you’re my best pal but, it’s weird. Innis had already disappeared from their small talk, Mohney and the rest, he knew how they were, how easily they moved on if you weren’t there in front of their faces, talking. Why should they care how he handled what he had become? Debbie? A fox, but snooty under the skin, not a friend you’d ever count on.