Cape Breton Road

by D. R. MacDonald

  “I’ll remember that, Professor Corbett.”

  Before it dropped down toward the cove the path rose, giving a view of the marsh that spread back to grass cliffs studded with scrub spruce and alder. A large bird was lifting into the breeze on long slow wings. “Crane,” Starr said. Innis had seen that bird more than once, he’d looked it up, it was not a crane but a blue heron. But this was Starr’s show. Naming, naming. The marsh grass was a lovely fine green, and dark water wove among it, but as they crossed the single plank bridge over the inlet, you could see how clear the water was, that only the black mud bottom and its twigs and leaves were dark, mottled with white oyster shells. Minnows veered in a silvery flash.

  “Used to be full of oysters here, just off the shore,” Starr said. “Munro and me, we’d come down with our dad and get a bucket in ten minutes. We’d have a stew of them for supper, in fresh milk.”

  “What happened to them?” Innis said.

  “Fellas from town came in their boats and fished them out. The old story. We didn’t own them, but we didn’t wipe them out either.”

  Claire said she didn’t like fresh milk, too rich, and buttermilk was plain awful, but Starr said no, no, on a hot day nothing could refresh you like a glass of buttermilk, slightly sour and just cool from a springhouse.

  “Oh, Starr, please!”

  On the hard sandy ground behind the beach, they passed through a few wind-bitten spruce, then a long band of daisies, laced with blue vetch. Gooseberry bushes, Starr said, plucking a translucent green berry. There were plants that looked like oats, and ropes of eelgrass, dry and stiff-white but underneath still dark, damp, laced with stones and wood bits. Small blue butterflies touched briefly upon one orange hawkweed bloom and then another.

  “Starr, what about that old boat up the beach there,” Innis said, “with the tarp over it?”

  “Your dad’s, a fella up North River built it, a Morrison. Well, we all used her at one time, after our father gave up his. She’s still sound, I think, somebody borrowed her last year. I’m not for rowing anymore, not like your dad was. Now your Granny, Innis, she knew the wild medicines. See that? Cow parsnip.” He fluffed the big white flower heads of a sturdy plant, waist-high. “She made a tea from the roots. Good for sore throats, headaches. But that over there.” He led them to a tall solitary plant whose white umbels, just emerging, were more delicate, loose, its thin stalk streaked with magenta. “People have confused this with other ones you can eat the roots of. But any part of this will kill you.”

  “What is it?” Claire said, stepping back.

  “Water hemlock. I heard of a kid—see, the stalk is hollow—he made himself a whistle out of it. It killed him just blowing on it, the juice got on his lips, his tongue.”

  “Good Lord, yank it out,” Claire said. She was backing off toward the shore.

  “Why? We know what it is,” Starr called after her. “Doesn’t attack, never bites. So we’ll just leave it alone. Right, Innis?”

  Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t. He lingered there, barely touching, as if they were electrified, the leaves, the stiff squarish stalk. He wiped his hand hard on his jeans. He’d seen this plant somewhere. The shorebank maybe, near the marsh pond. But knowing he’d seen it was not enough. Suppose he had chewed on it, made a peashooter for the hell of it like he had as a kid out of hollow canes from a backyard bush. He could feel his lips on the hollow stem, the poised breath—pooh, a pebble stinging someone’s head, but that little meanness, if he’d done it here, could have cost him a sudden and surprising death simply because he did not know what water hemlock was. He pulled a small pad from his back pocket and sketched the still-forming flower heads, the stalks, the fern-like leaves. No strange markings, just another weed, like an alder or willow shoot. He heard Claire calling him and he backed away slowly, thinking.

  Down in the soft sand Claire was pulling off her shirt. A one-piece swimsuit, a dark wine. He had tried very hard to keep her out of his mind, but there she was. Now he seemed to forget everything except her, sorting out every little thing he had observed, heard, felt, for her, from her, about her. And the pages of drawings she had not seen, hidden under his mattress, a few of them harsh when he was angry with her, others erotic, flattering, true to his fantasies.

  “You going in, young man?” She was lying out on the long beach towel, her hands folded across her tummy. Her eyes were shut to the sun and she was smiling. Innis watched Starr, pale and wiry in a pair of khaki shorts, stomp into the water, roaring until he dove and disappeared. The surface of the wide cove was barely skittered with a breeze. In the shallows, red-brown seaweed swayed, clinging to small rocks, its shadows moving on the light sand that faded away into dark water, and a mile across was the long green mountain, feeling higher, nearer, extending west toward Red Head, east toward the bridge, the wooded slopes losing their wooly texture and becoming tight and fine. In the high sun it took on the easy green sweep of a sea swell, streaks of lighter and darker green, like light on a rising wave.

  “No swim trunks,” Innis said. That wasn’t true, Starr had lent him an old pair that showed his balls if he wasn’t careful, but he felt paler than his uncle, awkward, his body lanky and white, wintered. He used to slouch into his height, too skinny to bear it, too visible. Claire looked darker than before, as if she belonged on sand with the sun above her. Sitting on a stump of driftwood, Innis pulled his shoes and socks off and wormed his feet into the cooler sand.

  “Go in without them,” Claire said. She lay like a sleeper, none of her moving but her lips. Without lipstick they looked soft and innocent.

  “Without what?”

  “Trunks.”

  “You kidding?”

  “Chicken.”

  “Starr would love that.”

  “Don’t do just things he would love.”

  “That’s not what you told me before.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s something else I’m telling you.”

  “Jesus, Claire.”

  “Come sit next to me.” She patted the sand, let a scoop of it run through her fingers. “Take your shirt off. It’s summer.” Starr was swimming out into the channel, pounding the calm surface, all arms and legs and spouts of water. Starr had to be out of shape and yet there he was churning away, not far from those long, snaking currents where the light reflected differently.

  “Look at Mark Spitz out there. He better make it back. I can’t save him.”

  “Would you?”

  “Not while you’re around.” Innis looked frankly at her, from her red toenails, painted for sandals, up her legs, up the wine suit, to her chest, her composed face, her closed eyelids. “Are you bored, Claire?”

  “Summer is a different time. This is good as Bermuda. Are you?”

  Innis lay belly-down in the sand, looking out. Starr was returning, swimming slowly on his back.

  “Sometimes. But I’ve got plans.” It had now occurred to him that he might chop that hemlock plant into bits, wrap it tightly in plastic and send it to Ned, with instructions. A dangerous weapon, bad magic from the north woods. See how the likes of Tony T. and his stupid brother could handle that. “A little pot helps too.”

  “I suppose it might.”

  Innis brushed his finger over her leg, barely feathering the faint golden down of her skin. He could hear Starr staggering through the water, yelping at the stones, his tender feet. Innis groaned. He gave her leg a light smack.

  “Deerfly,” he said. “Bite like a bitch.”

  Claire smiled, opened one eye at him. She patted his backside. “You have a nice hard butt,” she said, folding her hands serenely over her stomach. Along the edge of her swimsuit, on the inside of her thigh he could see a few short curly hairs. He wanted to touch her so badly he ground his teeth. Starr tiptoed up the sand, shaking himself like a dog.

  “She’s brisk, b’y, but good for the blood. What are you two doing, lounging at poolside? Let’s see you in the water.”

  “He forgot his trunks
,” Claire said. “And I’m too hot right now for water like that. Maybe later.”

  Starr dried off, his head lost in a white towel, muttering. “You said you wanted a swim, not a sunbathe.”

  “The sun’s good for you too, Starr,” Claire said. “There’s a long winter to burn away.”

  “Burn’s the word. There wasn’t a lot of sun way back in the Hebrides. Our people aren’t noted for browning up. Look at Innis there, half an hour he’ll look like a lobster.”

  “I’m okay.” Innis laid his head on his arm. His face, turned away from Starr, was inches from Claire’s leg and he could smell the coconut oil, so redolent of girls in bathing suits, arranged on towels just as Claire was, bare, all midriff and shoulders and legs, it might have been an aphrodisiac. The sun soon made him dozy and Starr was dancing on one leg, struggling into his trousers, beating sand from his shoes.

  “I’m not much for lying around like this,” he said. When he was dressed, he stood looking out to where he had swum. “We used to use that water, all of us. We’d go back and forth shore to shore, up and down here. Was like a road. Damned few around now jump in a skiff at two in the morning and row home. People drive across the bridge, they don’t know it anymore, that water. Just fishermen. We lost something there, lost another hold on things. We came into houses the back way, up from the shore. A little thing, that way of coming, but it gave us … a different look at each other, another way of greeting. Eh? Yes, you come by boat, you come different.” Innis felt the long pause of his uncle’s shadow. “I don’t want to keep telling you stuff like this, I know it doesn’t matter to you. I don’t want to tell you this cove was full of oysters and we could rake up a bucket in minutes. Why should you care? I could tell you we swam here in October, me and my brother and our cousins, in our clothes, the water would turn your balls to stone. But we’d build a big fire on the beach and steam ourselves in it. It was just something we did, maybe no one else in the world swam like that in October, I don’t know. And why tell you about Peter MacAulay, depressed so bad he wanted to drown himself, he couldn’t get it up anymore. But he only waded out to his waist and then he turned back and went home. Too cold, he told his wife, I think I’ll hang myself instead, but by summer he died in his chair.”

  “You’re awful cheerful today, Starr.”

  “We need to get away for a few days, Claire. Let’s try some other part of the Island, a place you haven’t been. I need to get away.”

  “Starr, I’m working, I have a job.”

  “Quit. Dump it.”

  “I can’t. I don’t want to. Can I just soak up a little sun?”

  He was quiet, folding and refolding his towel. Innis knew Starr did not want to leave them like this, even though Innis was lying next to Claire head to feet, even though he only had his shirt off and was sleepy and probably a bit singed. But fuck him, let him say so.

  “I’m going back up,” Starr said. “You coming?”

  “I’ll be up in a little, I just got here,” Claire said, frowning.

  “Even you can get a sunburn, miss,” Starr said. Innis heard his uncle’s shoes chopping through the sand and he was gone.

  Innis did not want to say a word. Proximity, just lying there with her, he’d settle for it, it couldn’t last long. He waited for Claire to speak but she didn’t. Something hit the water, too quick and sharp to be a fish.

  “He tossed a stone from the woods,” Claire said. “Ignore it.”

  “I’m not moving. He’s probably spying on us. Not that he’d get an eyeful of anything.”

  “We won’t give him an eyeful of anything either. Right?” Claire, her face toward the sun, did not move, just her eyes, barely slitted. She smiled.

  Innis took his time buttoning his shirt. Starr was right, his shoulders were tender.

  “I guess I don’t understand you, Claire,” he said. He squeezed a small warm stone in his fist.

  She wiggled her toes, raised her head slightly to observe him. “Why would you want to, Innis? There’s no fun in that.”

  13

  THE RAIN HAD PASSED, but every minute or so the ceiling above the priest’s bed produced a single drop that fell emphatically on the plastic tarp below. That sharp splat made the room seem derelict somehow, and though he didn’t like asphalt roofs, Innis intended to silence it. He pulled a crude wooden ladder out from under the house and crawled over the roof where a patch of black shingles broke into coal-like bits when he pried them and the wind whipped them about. Last autumn the colors had flamed along the miles of that mountain, making him ache for October afternoons back home, the sidewalk leaves he’d kicked through, the smell of their dust, their smoke. He was rubbing grit from his eyes when he heard a car below, a honk. Father Lesperance, in a summer outfit, his portly belly expanding a big blue T-shirt. Bermuda shorts, a bit too long, but neat black stockings in black shoes. He was clutching a bag of groceries. Innis climbed down to talk to him and as they shook hands there was a whiff of liquor in his words, then it was gone.

  “St. Swithun’s Day, Innis. A healer and a bringer of rain. Forty more days of it if it rains on St. Swithun’s, but I think we’re safe by the looks of that sky.”

  “You been enjoying the cottage, Father?”

  “I’m happy you’re after that leak. I had to sleep on the blasted couch last time.” He whipped off his battered khaki hat and stepped back a few paces, squinting at the roof. The purplish tinge in his cheeks seemed deeper today. “Yes, yes. Good, Innis, good. Not much rain, but a damp bed is misery. Did you find those bundles of shingles? Two will do it you think?”

  “Plenty, Father. It’s just the one spot.”

  “Come in for a rest then, come in.”

  The priest hustled about in the kitchen, pulling open curtains and drawers. Innis noticed the painting had been hung and he moved closer. THE JESUIT MARTYR-SAINTS OF NORTH AMERICA the caption said and listed their names. A watercolor? A group of priests, eight, in cassocks, standing or kneeling, one holding up a crucifix, all suspended in the sky and gazing toward a heavenly radiance of pale blue where angels and cherubs hovered. But below them, in the nasty world of frontier Canada, a smaller scene of their martyred deaths, a mayhem of Indian treachery. A peaceful campfire in the center of a loghouse settlement, three seated Indians, one in full headdress, poking sticks in the embers under a big kettle, getting ready to torture a priest who was bound to a stake. Around them there was plenty of tomahawk action, priests knocked to the ground or crouching in fear or unwittingly shaking an Indian hand while another Indian reared up behind, two-handing a tomahawk toward the father’s skull. No blood yet, it was all stilled in the act, hatchets raised but yet to fall, the consequences clear. In the background a lake, spiky spruce trees, Canada wilderness but little different from what Innis wandered in every day. He didn’t know the story behind these murders or who was to blame for what, but that’s where the action was for sure, hatchets and blood. The upper part of the picture didn’t have much going for it—serene, the angels cute and sweet. Weren’t angels ever mean, little streaks of meanness in them? Innis would have drawn them that way, and he wouldn’t have the priests floating in clouds of pale yellow and blue. Too hokey. These had to be tough men.

  “Interesting, isn’t it?” Father Lesperance said behind him, holding a can of orange juice in each hand. “Not great art of course, but it’s direct and innocent. And the little narrative below.”

  “They had a hard life, I guess.”

  “They did that.”

  He listened to the priest in the bedroom. A drawer opened, the clink of glass, a pause, the drawer closed.

  “Nobody’s broken into the cottage, Father, not that I could see.”

  “No, no,” he said, returning. “We’re still intact. I brought a few kids out last week, we tramped the shore and up the woods. They liked it until it rained and then they were disappointed I had no television.” He leaned in from the kitchen. “You know one of them has cousins up on MacLean’s Cross? Their cousi
ns’ dog was killed a while back, at night, struck by a car. The bastard just drove away. A terrible thing to do, and them heartbroken. A car chaser, that dog, true, but they loved him.”

  Innis looked closely at the painting, tracing its surface with his finger. “They see the car that did it?”

  “A dark car, that’s all the kids could recall. Shiny, new, they said.”

  “What was its name?”

  “Name?”

  “The dog, that they hit.”

  “I don’t know it myself, Innis. It wasn’t much more than a pup.”

  The priest spread the front window curtains wider and stood looking out. “Innis, the old Captain, he keeps a very nice automobile over there, stores it until summer.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I hear.”

  “Funny but somebody saw it on the road. Captain MacQueen’s not there yet, so of course that’s a curious thing. But I went over and there it is, the Cadillac sitting in his garage. I looked in the crack.”

  “Somebody was mistaken then.”

  “It would appear somebody was. People see things in the country, of course, that aren’t always there for the rest of us. Take Dan Rory. He’s got the second sight, they say. Forerunners and that sort of thing.”

  “He can tell when a person’s going to die,” Innis said. “I don’t believe that myself.”

  “I’m skeptical too, Innis, yes, I am, about those kinds of powers in a man. But if you’re here at night, you know, it’s not like the city at all. I saw a single firefly in a warm night breeze, against the trees it moved more like a bird, in dips and sweeps, a bleep bleep of light, uncommonly glowing. Almost supernatural. Wouldn’t take much to see it that way, I suppose. But then again, I didn’t want to believe it was anything but a firefly. Other eyes could see it easily as something else, a premonitory light perhaps, a spirit. In the Celtic world, there are sites they call ‘thin places.’ I love that term. Places where we’re likely to experience the spiritual. These were ancient sites, already spiritual, and so churches were often built on them. There might even be a thin place or two around here. My mother was Irish, a Roche. Norman name, like yours, Corbett. Oh, they got all around, Ireland, Scotland. But we’re not superstitious, not you and me. Eh?”