Cape Breton Road

by D. R. MacDonald

  He knew these upper woods better than his uncle ever had, he was sure of that now. Apart from trips to the spring, Starr hadn’t walked up this far since the old fields had grown in years back. Was all cleared up there once, he said in one of his moods of recollection when the farming he had hated took on a soft, rum-colored glow, we pastured right the way up that hill. Starr didn’t care to beat his way through thickets anymore, over the budwormed deadfalls, spiked with sharp branches. Leave it to the holiday hunters, Starr said, those damn fools from town. But Innis had found lots of paths, a network of narrow trails deer had cut, their hoof marks in the sod, the moss, the mud. Not that they had the same journeys in mind that he did, the same ends, and he’d picked out his planting spot partly because he had never seen deer near it, no tracks or scat. He pushed on, winded but excited now, over the boggy ground beneath the power lines, catching a whiff of the thawed mackerel in his backpack that Starr had tossed in the garbage thinking they were on the turn.

  Through a stand of spindly maples Innis beheld his clearing. Well above the power line break, he had never seen hunters this far up last fall. It was conspicuous in no particular way, at least on this afternoon whose sky had gone from blue to dank white, the sun’s heat strong but the light diffused. Birch and maple ringed it, and a few spruce stark and brittle, ashen, as if an incredible frost had blasted them, but in fact just tiny worms, a plague that had passed. Young spruce were straying into the clearing and that was good. There in the new grass were the pine seedlings he’d brought here months ago, stuck in the ground like sticks, not a needle on any of them, rusty as old metal. Christmas pines? More like grave markers. A forlorn time anyway when he’d planted them, desperate to put anything down in this place, to say mine. And the clearings were always attracting him then, in the fall, he’d turn toward one and then another because he expected something living to be there, he didn’t know what.

  He set to work with a pleasure no other task had matched, spacing the pots zigzag so they would look natural, like weeds, if someone did happen by, seduced, like him, by the light of a clearing. He chopped through mats of sod and stubborn roots, worked the soil clean of stones. Tougher than Claire’s little plot, but oh what flowers would be blooming here! When the reddish clay was as fine as he could make it with a trowel, he prodded each plant free of its pot, nesting carefully the white net of roots into its hole where half a mackerel waited, tail, or head with its foggy eyes. He shaped a small basin around each one to hold the water he’d have to carry to get them started, and keep carrying if the summer was dry. A few pails from the spring. A good hike but still closer than any of the brooks. That spring only dried up once, Starr said, in the worst summer for rain we ever had, when I came home from the navy. The guy in the pot book said, Those roots got a trauma, pardner, if you know what I mean, and they need a nice deep drink of water to ease their pain. Innis whittled small branches from a willow, poked them into the ground and made plastic tents for each plant out of five-pound potato sacks. They’d keep off a late frost, and maybe deer too if they were nosing around. Would they even eat marijuana? Wouldn’t hurt them to try it, might tune their ears even finer, sniff out a hunter downwind. The book writer didn’t mention deer, but how could he know? He never thought about north, he didn’t know these boreal woods, so removed from a pot-loving sun.

  Innis stood back admiring the snug protection of his tiny greenhouses, hardly visible in the low brush. Suddenly he sensed something behind him and whirled, raising the mattock like a club: nothing. But it got his heart going, he was edgy anyway, Christ. Some animal. Maybe the cat? He made a wailing, mewing sound, friendly, not fearful, and listened again, he didn’t know just what sound this cat would make. But there was only the mute trees, the misty green light of new leaf. A tall gaunt spruce, grey with lichen, creaked against a windfall it had captured in its branches. The plastic tents fluttered and breathed. Nothing but what was always here when the wind capered through woods, the subtle sounds of branch and needles and leaves. Innis drove the pickhead hard into the ragged brown bore of a stump and left it standing. No one could ruin this, not after the weeks of nursing those seedlings, whispering to them, holding his breath every time Starr walked along the upstairs hall, or was curious as to why the ceiling light in the kitchen dimmed sometimes, but he never bothered to investigate it. Well, the plants were safely hidden now, and who could prove Innis owned them anyway? Deep in trees nobody cared about, a dozen plants whose leaves and buds people liked to light up and inhale, harming no one. The whole operation here could be over by early September, maybe sooner if the weather was right, Innis gone and the pot too, not a soul this side of the island tainted by anything Innis had done. Over and out.

  Innis hid the basket in a clump of young fir. He’d have to fetch a few pails of sweet water from the spring, and the seedlings, so dry from their pots, would draw it up like blood.

  But first, the skinny joint he’d saved, once hoping to share it with Claire in this very clearing, to give his seedlings a lucky send-off with her lovely touch, then watch her kiss a toke, and when she passed it back to him, he would inhale a taste of her. Instead, it was just him, loading his lungs for a good buzz. The wind was cooler, the sun seemed underwater. He felt real affection for his plants, arranged there, free of Starr’s house, on their own, their roots already beginning tender investigations of this new, deep ground. You live a little differently when you have room, Starr said once of the country, though he didn’t say just how. Innis laughed. Love. Damn it, this was the only love he was likely to get, the hot and roving fancies of good weed, and there were lots worse things to put your lips to. He got up and wandered about the clearing, pressing his footprints down into the soft sod. He pissed against the scarred bark of a birch tree. How’s this, Mr. Cat? Raise your tail here tonight if you want. The pick stuck up from the stump like a stroke of Chinese writing, black against the greening woods. He pressed his palms together: Lord, give the deer everything they love, leaves and buds and wild apples, but let them pass my cannabis sativa by.

  From far down on the road, the faint buzz of a car with a bad muffler, soon gone. Here, out in the sticks, you’d have to be careful and clever: a stolen car could stand out like a firetruck. Be a challenge, though. He’d never stolen the cars for money—with one exception—not for anyone but himself and his own escape, a particular high. People often left the keys dangling there, asking to be turned. Richer the better, the careless ones accustomed to money, dropping things casually in their wake. All you had to do was open the door, and later a guy would come out of a bar and could not believe his luxurious set of wheels had vanished, he would rush all over the lot, up and down the street thinking he’d done something wrong, forgotten where he parked it, embarrassed. Innis was well away by then, taking the crazy back streets of Boston, laid out for horses a long time ago. Staying off the roads the cops cruised, didn’t he always leave it on a side street before daylight, clean as when he’d driven it away, maybe smells in the seats and leather that weren’t there before? All except that one, that Porsche he’d stolen for money because he’d been drinking then and was cocky and stupid when the hard guys asked him to steal it, Just park it a certain place and there’s a grand in it for you, Innis. There wasn’t, there wasn’t anything in it but grief, and what was he to do about it? Go after them with a gun?

  Still, he’d never seen himself as a criminal. He didn’t think it sexy or macho to be hustled into a police cruiser in cuffs while neighbors looked on like he’d just knifed his mother, to be preached at by a juvenile court judge, to spend time in a detention center with toughs and fuckups. He’d just wanted the cars, couldn’t stop himself from taking them, each one grooved him into a mood he needed. And the court convictions, they seemed to accumulate in a dream, and finally they’d crashed through the ceiling. As a kid, when his mother yelled him out of her hair or argued with his dad about money or about things to do with Cape Breton—they never seemed to agree on how to think about “down h
ome,” they loved it to tears one day and the next recalled ways it had held them back—on those days Innis would wander up the street trying car doors, looking for one shiny and big and unlocked, and he would sit inside, the windows rolled up, in the deep plush comfort of its seats, eager for whatever flight. He would play the wheel that could turn him in any direction he wished, his voice for a motor. The silent hand of the dashboard clock advanced, just an instrument among others, measuring he didn’t know what. And always that smell of new, all new. More than once he was found asleep in the back seat, but no one accused him of felonies, a boy sleeping in a car not his own was not illegal, not yet, and his mother was crying when they brought him home, but she slapped him too, angry because she was scared, undone. He would undo her many times more, fraying her, later, especially when a new man came home with her, he gave her a hard time. But he had never heeded what his mother told him until it was too late, the one thing he truly needed to remember: You are not a citizen, they could send you straight back to Canada some day. And after the final hammer came down on his head, he asked her why in hell she hadn’t made him a U.S. citizen, for Christ’s sake. Listen, Innis, she said, it wasn’t my lookout, it was your dad’s, he tended to things like that, not me, and he always thought we might go back home, I never thought about it later, not a citizen myself yet, I didn’t think it would ever come to this, how could I?

  He savored his supper that night, two salt codfish cakes fried crusty in butter, washed down with ice water. The sun was sliding into dove grey cloud above the mountain, burning like steel on the sheened surface of the strait, glimmers of sequined light, thrilling, then gone. A calm excitement in every simple action, the last bite of food, drinking cold water from a glass. He had an itch to sketch. A cat, its still-mysterious face, burning too, tufted ears alert. Paws big, the size he’d seen in snow. Dan Rory told him there’d been a mountain lion on the island once, he’d seen him, quite a beast it was, he said, but it was shot in a trap eventually. Eventually. Innis flipped a page and did a quick take of Claire, leaning into her spade, smiling, a bit tousled by her labor, her blouse undone deeper than it had been, a sexy hitch to her hip, a pose she might have assumed for a joke, if he’d asked her. He liked shaping her with his pen, now she knew he could draw her well. Okay, the impulse had been juvenile, but the nude sketches were good. This ballpoint pen in his hand could turn out a vision of her, and yet she was up there someplace in the green hinterlands of Cape Breton, doing something not like this on the paper at all, her expressions would be totally different from what he had drawn, her hair would be tousled in a different way, her leg, arm, hip angled some other way from how he had her in these lines and hatchings. She and Starr now, maybe, heading for a motel on the Cabot Trail. Getting away, that’s what lovers did—they excluded you. No surprise in that. Well, he’d sown his crop. Leaving wasn’t just another vague, murky intention. A red spill of cloudy light, the mountain a long silhouette beneath it: it had once looked only like a wall to him, and Starr had said, if you want to go west, you got to go over that mountain, and I don’t mean just by car. Through the screen door the wind turned suddenly, carrying with it distance, momentum, places it had passed through, the fragrance of trees, the sea. At night now Innis opened his window high to feel it sweep over his body.

  His plants, in that cool clay, deep in a woods their genes had not prepared them for. Was there a Gaelic word for pot?

  He tidied up the attic, around the loom, swept up traces of soil. Pushing a trunk aside, he found a long-dead mouse behind it: a grey puff, dessicate as bird down, its tailbone tiny beads. Not really a mouse at all but a misty grey aura that dispersed like dandelion seed when he blew on it. He was tempted to look into the trunk, but no, this was not the time to pore over the old things of this house, he was moving forward. He unfastened the lights from the loom, carried them and the warming tray out to the toolshed and stashed them in the loft, maybe Starr could use that kind of heat and light someday. One big risk, the attic risk, was over. He was sorry, in a way, it had charged the air at times. Like the evening the lights went out when they were all in the parlor. Good Christ, Starr said, why are we cooking so many fuses? I’ve screwed in a goddamn boxful. He dragged impatiently on his cigarette, it glowed bright, and Innis had listened to Claire’s breathing, it was easy to hear it in the dark, until she said, I guess it’s my turn, and went off to find a flashlight. It’s the old wiring, Innis said. Something new in the old wiring, Starr said. But he never sought it out.

  Just about dark, Innis hitched a ride on a propane truck that dropped him off at Dan Rory and Finlay’s. He walked up the hill across the brook, through the path he’d cut, and found Finlay bent into the weeding of their potato patch below the house, Dan Rory at the end of the row talking away but not about weeds or potatoes.

  “You referring to the power in those damn lines up the hill there?” Dan Rory said, waving his cane toward the upper woods. “It shoots over our heads to the mainland. What good was the Wreck Cove Project to us?”

  Finlay flung aside a fistful of weeds, smacked a mosquito. “That was a feat of engineering, Daddy. That’s the modern world.”

  “Come out of those potatoes, it’s after getting dark. Listen, they blasted rock and dug out the earth and cut down thousands of trees, yiss. They messed up the old lakes there in The Barrens, linked them with concrete. What are you trying to tell me?”

  “We got lakes to burn, Daddy. Important places have dams and things, for Jesus sake. The fish are fading, the mines shutting down. But the Wreck Cove Hydroelectric Project, now that’s a different pig altogether.” Finlay stood up, rubbing his spine. “Look, there’s Innis himself. How’re you now?”

  “I’m good, Finlay. On my way home from Father Lesperance’s, just wanted to say hello.”

  “We were on about the Everlasting Barrens, way up in the Highlands,” Dan Rory said. “A maze of little roads there now, after the Project, I’d get lost myself.”

  “I shot a moose up there years ago,” Finlay said. “Felt bad about it. They invite their own killing. Deer will gambol away but a moose, he’ll just keep eating, he’s that kind of animal.”

  “Or charge right at you. Have you eaten moose, Innis?”

  “Never had the pleasure.”

  “Och, they’re a big beast. Come inside for a cold drink.”

  Innis said no, he really couldn’t, Starr would pick him up on the road any minute. He idled long enough to discuss the bats flowing out the west gable of the house, dozens of them, “We don’t care, Finlay said, “they can have the attic, eat mosquitoes by the carload, you know.”

  A thin moon had crept above the southern hill, up toward the power line. Innis would have preferred a darker night.

  “Have you seen that sight before, Innis?” Dan Rory said, pointing his cane over Innis’s head. The sky above the mountain ridge pulsed with flickering, shadowy lights of unimaginable size, their source hidden by the mountain, their rays wavering in the dark blue sky. A chill rushed up his back.

  “No,” he said.

  “Northern lights,” Finlay said. “Something to do with the polar ice, I think. I’ve seen them brighter.”

  “We thought they were the breath of dead warriors,” Dan Rory said. “A long time ago.”

  Innis glanced back at the tall upstairs windows already lit and that brought him down. They went to bed early, these old men. He bid them good night, leaving with an alibi, should he need one.

  He jumped the ditch into the trees whenever he heard a car. He didn’t want anyone to see him walking toward the Wharf Road, not tonight. And there was a chance that the priest might be at his cottage now that the weather was turning. But no, it was dark. Captain MacQueen’s silver poplar loomed in full leaf, shadowing the little house. He was nervous, he hadn’t expected that, and so he continued on past the Captain’s garage, stopping for a dutiful look in the priest’s window. He tried the door to see if it was busted. Nope. If he got caught in the Captain’s, they wouldn
’t send him away, they would put him away. But at the moment he was comfortable in his innocence, he basked in it, he was almost sorry to cash it in. I’m a good boy, Father, not a Catholic but I’m okay for the moment. Have I done anything lately bad enough for confession? I wish.

  He stood on the wharf, the water beneath him slapping through the blackened timbers, their bolts and pins exposed and harsh, they’d rip a hull quick. A lively place once, a ferry back and forth, cars, people, the priest’s cottage was a thriving store. A rough stretch of water sometimes, squally seas when the wind tore over a strong tide. He wished he had a boat and the knowhow, he’d sail her right down that strait, under the bridge and into the ocean. Ports were great places to start over, their wharfs clustered with boats. The distances here, a glance could take in miles of mountain, long sweeping looks you wouldn’t get in a city.

  Telling himself it was precaution, making sure he was alone here, he plodded along the beach. A car had spun deep ruts, somebody parking for a hot session, beer bottles flung into the sand, before or after. He had not often seen cars here in the day, not in winter, except for the odd one come down for a gaze at the strait. He arced a bottle end over end into the water, a white splash in the small, steady waves. Starr could fix TVs and stereos, but there he was in a grubby old shop, a throwback, totting up bills on an adding machine you cranked, paper tape unspooling over the floor. But Starr didn’t care, it didn’t matter if people came to him only by word of mouth, that there was nothing in the window but the twisted, dusty blades of a dead aspidistra. And Starr didn’t care, no matter what he might say in his cups, to go any further than the boundaries of Cape Breton Island, and most of the time St. Aubin Island itself, tucked safely inside it, would do him. But Claire? How long would she hang around? If she was still here in the fall, the fall …