Cape Breton Road

by D. R. MacDonald

  Innis squinted past her at his uncle climbing out of the car, looking over at them, cupping a cigarette to his mouth.

  “That grove of old hemlocks, in the lower woods. I was hoping we’d go back there.”

  “You want to draw me in those trees again? This wouldn’t be the day for it.”

  “Is there going to be a day?”

  He watched her make her way back through the field, combing the heads of goldenrod as she went. They were both watching her, he and Starr, but each other too as she moved between them, and Innis would have to give her up to him for another afternoon, another day, another night. He remembered that first afternoon when she meant nothing to him but a woman in a wide-brimmed hat, kissing his uncle, but she did not kiss him now, she did not linger in his embrace, and after talking briefly they went into the house, Claire waving to Innis, motioning him home.

  Innis moved deeper into the field, skirting that grassy depression in the ground marking the only time the spring had gone dry, the well Starr dug drunk, angry, coming home from the navy, they had to lug pails up from the brook, and he told his father, Dig a decent well, for Christ’s sake, why are we still without water in the house? And he’d grabbed a mattock and a shovel and started digging, right here in the field, he still had his uniform on, and it didn’t take longer than this shallow bowl in the soil for the rum to burn up the energy he had left in him after a long ride on a train, civilian freedom driving him again and again to put that bottle to his mouth, to pass it around, to sing, to lean over the seat of a pretty woman coming home to Cape Breton too and tell her all the bullshit things he was going to do, and then finally he’d stood up there at the mailbox, here he was, home, and everything looked the same down to every detail just as it had the day he left. I would’ve dug that well to China that afternoon, he’d told Innis, just desperate to get away and I don’t even know why. It had me again, home, I wouldn’t leave, couldn’t leave, I knew that. But how? Innis had said, troubled that there might be something in this place that could short-circuit your own will. How? Starr said. I can’t explain it, it’s just there. But Innis didn’t believe that anymore, he could feel his departure gathering inside him, not clear and exact, not day, means, destination, not written down and paid for, but there.

  On his way back to the house he stumbled and pitched forward into the grass. Jesus, the scythe Starr had used weeks ago, just cast it down here and left it, the blade rusting away, an ugly cut waiting for someone. To hell with it, let it stay here, let Starr search it out when he’s in his haying time again.

  19

  “YOU THINK THEY’D LET me in this college, Starr?” Innis said.

  “Not if I was running it.” They stood in a hot sun on the grounds of the Gaelic College waiting for Claire to come out of the gift shop. The mown green was flanked by neat log structures local men had built before the War. Bagpipes wailed in and out of song, down a hill, out of sight, but a girl in Highland dress seemed to be tuning up in the center of the green. “It’s not a real college anyway. Some minister’s notion, back in the thirties. He figured we weren’t keeping our heritage alive so he got this going. Oh he was Scotch all right, from the old country, but he couldn’t even say pass the bread in Gaelic. This is all it came to after a while. Summertime classes, piping and dancing, kids mostly, some Gaelic tossed in. Good Scotch fiddling here now and then, our music, I’ll show up for that.”

  “That fiddler at the dance we went to, he ever play over here?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I went to his wake. If it wasn’t him, it was somebody who damn well looked like him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You? Now what would I tell you for?

  “I was there, I saw him at the dance.”

  “That night’s cut into your memory, has it? But it wasn’t the fiddler, was it. It’s not his tunes you’re calling up.”

  Innis tightened his jaw and concentrated on the girl piper who was fixing her lips primly on the chanter. She pumped the bag full and wailed and Innis had to smile at the martial shrill of her pipes, her frilled blouse, her earnest slender fingers, the way the pleats fell neatly along the curve of her butt. Tourists who’d emerged from a bus milled around her briefly and moved on. Innis watched her foot, tapping time, too soft to hear, not like those shoes at the Gaelic church service, beating time under the pews to something he could feel and remember but not explain. She sounded a little rough around the edges and he guessed you couldn’t get away with a lot of that on the pipes, not without somebody killing you. Maybe the tourist geeks made her nervous. Pretty knees, what he could see of them between the stockings and the hem of her kilt, her fingers doing a slow dance on the chanter, hugging air under her arm. A long braid down her back, and those fine pleats. He’d draw her if he had his pad. He’d done a sketch of the fiddler too, from memory, but he wouldn’t tell Starr that, not now, not anymore.

  “Maybe I should move out,” he said suddenly.

  “Sooner the better.”

  Innis didn’t want to answer, his heart was in his tongue, it had just popped out of him, he wanted to tell Starr, Listen, I’ll be out of this place sooner than you think, I got buds coming in up on the hill, they’ll be big as your fingers in a while, sweet as roses. He could see his uncle drawing hard on his cigarette, the cords in his neck flexing. There seemed no way for them to talk anymore without it whirling down to that night, that beach, and they always seemed to pull back just before crashing. Dangerous swimming in the Great Bras D’Eau at night, currents there can sweep you out to sea, Starr would say out of nowhere, a walking hard-on is one thing, but a swimming hard-on, now that’s a danger to navigation. The weeks had only inflamed his suspicions, far from fading them out: what he hadn’t seen was more powerful than what he had. In those early months with his uncle, Innis had joked with him, shared humor with him, it had made things bearable, they’d listened to Dr. Bandolo’s Pandemonium Medicine Show on the CBC, though Innis found the skits funnier than Starr did. If you knew what a man laughed at, you knew something about him. It troubled Innis more that things had gone sour between them than if they’d had a solemn relationship from the beginning: the bitterness felt deeper, even dangerous. To become so serious and unpredictable, to fear something you can’t kid about anymore, that hurt, that put you on edge. Just talking made them feint like boxers.

  “Maybe I was kidding,” Innis said.

  “Maybe you weren’t.”

  He did not want Starr to kick him out. He did not want to be ordered away from the house. Stronger than the memory of the fiddler who’d died so fast, he remembered the immigration officer who had escorted him into the plane at Logan Airport: they had to board first, with cripples in wheelchairs, the man took him straight to his seat and watched him as he fumbled with the seat belt, stood there until he was settled into that seat and staring out a misty porthole at the ground crew manhandling luggage, and then the agent waited beside the stewardess at the forward door while she greeted passengers, his eyes never leaving Innis, as if Innis might, before takeoff, burst out the emergency door and flee into the back streets of Boston, miles away. The guy had told him while they were waiting in the airport lounge, Innis’s face stuck in a magazine, that Innis would have had an Immigration officer on either side of him if he were dangerous, a dangerous criminal. There’d be two of us, one for each arm, he’d said. And we’d take you all the way into Halifax, the airline wouldn’t accept you otherwise, we’d all fly together. Innis had said, turning a page, Sorry I spoiled it for you guys, a free trip to Halifax, gee. The man looked at him sideways. The Mounties already know about you over there. They know about you at Immigration Canada. There’ll be a lookout posted when you land, he’ll watch for you. When you get to where you’re going, the Mounties will have a little talk with you probably. You’re on a list at the border crossings, every one. Cross at the Yukon, won’t matter. You’re a known man, Mr. Corbett, but I wouldn�
��t be proud of it. The officer did not leave his post until they were ready to close the door, he stepped out of the plane at the last minute, a final, sealing glance at Innis. The stewardess was polite, gave Innis her smile, but she and the others had him in their eyes, he knew that, and he’d wished just then he was dangerous as hell, manacled, all suppressed fury, wedged between two burly INS. Barrier for life, the man had reminded him while they were killing time. I hope you like it up there, he said, don’t expect it to be Boston, they don’t even have a baseball team. At Halifax an official had plucked him out of the line and he had to prove himself a citizen of Canada, the birth certificate his mother had dug out, registered Sydney, Nova Scotia. Then they let him go. He could’ve gone west just as well as east, all of Canada was out there, rolling away, endless, and nowhere in that direction would he be a known man.

  “There’s Claire,” Innis said. His peripheral vision had caught her immediately, those white shorts and long brown legs, her red sandals. Her hair wonderfully black, a lush flower. “We should let her enjoy herself.”

  Starr flicked his cigarette into the grass. “Who’s stopping her, me?”

  “Not yet. We only just got here.”

  Starr said nothing but reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a wad of paper. He opened his hand long enough to show Innis, then slowly stuffed it away as Claire came up to them smiling. She pulled out of a bag a doll in Highland dress, bonnet to brogues. “For my little neice in Toronto. Cute, eh?”

  “Is it male or female?” Starr said. “Hard to tell from here.”

  “A little man, I think,” she said. “It won’t matter to her and it doesn’t to me.”

  “It would matter to our Innis here. He likes those things correct, in the drawing of them, I mean. Not so, Innis? Well, good fiddling this afternoon, they tell me, and there’s a man who would appreciate it.” Starr moved off through the tour bus crowd fanning out over the grounds.

  “He’s strung pretty tight today,” Claire said, watching him shake hands with a man who seemed to be breezily observing the fresh visitors.

  “Rum,” Innis said. “Under the car seat.” He thought about the wad of white paper in his uncle’s hand. “He say anything to you?”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. Me and you.”

  “Nothing we haven’t heard before. He has an imagination, your uncle does, and it’s on overtime. Most of it he keeps to himself.”

  “Good. I guess.”

  “I have other things to do, so I’m seeing him less.” She shaded her eyes: Starr and his friend were heading toward the trees. “Less and less.”

  Innis felt the sun and Claire beside him and he wanted to put his arm around her waist, naturally, easily, pull her close to him and walk off with her, nuzzle her face if he felt like it, kiss her discreetly so as not to rile anyone with public display, his lips sliding lightly across her ear, her neck. There was an ache in him to have her in his arms.

  “That sounds rather grand,” Claire said, pointing to The Great Hall of the Clans. “Let’s have a look. Starr seems to have disappeared.”

  Inside the new log building, in the dusky lighting of the corridor, Claire strolled from one exhibit to the next, peering through the glass, scanning the commentary beneath them. Innis hung back, caught up in the charts and the histories, his eyes roaming over the maps and along the arrows of a long wall display that flowed from Ireland up into the west of Scotland, the Hebrides and the coast. Dalriadic Scots. “I didn’t know they came from Ireland,” he said out loud, but Claire was too far down the hallway. He moved along the major clans and their histories, stopping to study the Campbells, liking, for the moment, the idea of being linked to their powerful lineage, to a name famous in the Highlands, if not always nobly. There was a chief, kilt blown against his thighs, his face to the wind. Innis wanted a couple tokes to get into it, the spirit of it, but no chance here. A museum, people shuffling along the hall, talking low. He came upon a Highland male in a glass case. The dummy was done up in kilt and sporran and buccaneer shirt, bonnet, wool hose, a knife in one cuff, a sgian dubh, the plaque said. The pane was smeared with fingerprints but Innis kept his distance and gave it a hard study. Maybe a secondhand mannequin did not make the best Highlander, its arms arrested in a half-wit pose neither menace nor alarm, a senseless gesture where nothing terrible had occurred, no howling enemies had rushed him with murderous eyes. On one awkward arm had been affixed a targe, a round leather shield, but towels or neckties could have hung there just as easily, the other arm holding a sword aloft like a tennis racquet, the warrior gazing blandly from beneath his feathered bonnet: if there had ever been a fierceness in this dress, it was lost in the stunned, khaki eyes of the dummy. Might be better if they just hung the clothes in there, forget about the mannequin.

  “Lift that kilt, you wouldn’t see much,” someone behind him said. “All smooth there, like a doll.”

  Innis laughed. It was an old guy, a local by his accent, still in his church necktie, his dark coat slung over his arm, his silver hair carefully parted and slicked down.

  “The kilt doesn’t quite hang right on him, does it?” Innis said, stepping back, tilting his head.

  “He’s got no arse, that’s why. And too much knee there, for a laddie. You ever wear one of those?”

  “Me? No. You?

  “I don’t play in a pipe band and I wasn’t in the army. My dad got Gaelic from his mother’s milk, but you wouldn’t get him in a rig like that.”

  “I saw older people in kilts out on the grounds there. Not students, are they?” Innis said.

  “Och, no. They’re for this Gathering of the Clans thing, they’re mostly from away, you know. They travel around and get dressed up from one do to another, you can see the stickers on their cars. It’s them that got those booths set up out there with the names of clans on them. You find your clan and they have brochures and bits of paraphernalia. I’m a MacLachlan myself. ‘These Are Your People,’ the sign says on the MacLachlan booth. No, they’re not, I says to myself. Never set eyes on them. My people were in church with me this morning. They don’t care about castles.”

  They drifted along together toward a portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Innis read that this was the Stuart Pretender who had rallied his supporters toward the disasterous battle on Culloden Moor, the deathknell of the clan system.

  “Some think him a hero but he’s no hero of mine,” the man said. “A lot of romantic foolishness fixed to that name. At Culloden he was worthless. He was half-Polish besides.”

  “Says here he inspired a lot of songs and stuff.”

  “Songs are fine, but they’re not history. People don’t want the facts. He came from France and he went back to France. That’s where he grew up.” He nodded at the effigy of the Highland Woman. “I think I’ve seen enough. I’m getting cranky in my old age anyway, so my wife tells me. Good day to you, sir.”

  “See you around.”

  The Highland Woman was arrayed in a long tartan skirt and white blouse with a sash of matching tartan—the correct garb, the text pointed out, not the short kilt, the philibeag, the kind the men wore. Claire should be down at the beach, this kind of afternoon, lying in the warm sand, and he with her. Then it came slowly into his mind, his face flared, his heart swelled as he stared at the painted flesh behind the glass: that ball of paper, he knew what it was, he had not a moment’s doubt but it was the drawing he had done of Claire, in the grove of fine old hemlocks, their trunks like columns, under their warm open shade he’d said, Could I draw you, would you let me draw you nude here? Now? He’d liked the sound of “nude,” it had a ring to it. You already did, Innis. Weeks ago. But from memory, Innis said, I made you up, it’s not the same. Nevertheless, Claire said, it looked convincing. Innis already had his sketchpad on his knee. One sketch. For my eyes only, he said. She was darker by that part of summer, her skin was like creamy coffee where her swimsuit had covered her on the beach. Posing her, Innis touched her should
er lightly as if he had never touched her before. His head had felt light and threatened to start him trembling, but the soft scratch of his pencil calmed him: he would, though he’d never been to art school where women modelled naked every day, draw this woman coolly, capture that something about her more desirable than any woman he wanted to imagine. That slight smile, her graceful limbs against the hemlock bark, it was more than sexual, he knew that and felt that, he couldn’t say what it was, but it had kept him drawing until the breeze died and he watched Claire pull her clothes on quickly, shooing mosquitoes from her face. And now that study of her, of her in that afternoon—and him, every line and shading of it was himself too—was crushed into a ball in Starr’s pocket.

  He located Claire circling a tall wooden figure of Angus MacAskill, the Cape Breton Giant. “Look at the pictures of him,” she said. “He’s handsome, but this is a cartoon.”

  Innis smiled and shrugged. He couldn’t think, he felt hollowed out. He stared at The Giant’s belongings, the enormous boots, the waistcoat that could envelope two men, the walking stick as tall as a staff. Starr must have gone through his things, he’d hidden his bigger sketchpad underneath the mattress. Starr had no right to do that, none.

  “Innis?”

  “You almost done with this place? It’s stuffy.”

  “You go ahead, I’ll meet you.”

  “Where?”

  “Oh … in that tea shop at the entrance. Will that do?”

  “For what?”

  She touched his face. “For now.”

  Outside, the sun struck him, dazed him, but he sat on the warm dry grass of the green. His plants would thrive on this heat, there had to be buds by now. He had to go up in the higher woods and see, he’d hung around down below lately whenever he could, nearer Claire when she was around, the water. Jesus, he had to get up there. Soon.

  He felt a shadow over him and squinted up at his uncle. They regarded each other as if there were no one else around. Innis got up slowly so he, half a head taller, could look Starr in the face.