Cape Breton Road (2 page)

Hunched into his parka, shivering, his toes numb, Innis let
the snow gather in his hair. He did not want to get in trouble here, and so far he hadn’t. Trouble you saved up like coupons and he didn’t want to cash them in on this. A bottle of aftershave under his coat at a drugstore in The Mines, okay, and a sawbuck one afternoon from Starr’s battered till, but nothing that would bring the Mounties down on him, no hotwired cars, no joyrides. Not that it would take a hell of a lot for a deportee, the Mounties probably had a file on him. A pine, a nice full, sweet tree? Maybe, but shit, he wasn’t going to follow that guy, he wasn’t a kid anymore, and he turned angrily toward the break. He’d have a long hike back, he’d been walking longer than usual. The kitchen would be warm, if Starr was home from The Mines they’d fry up some meat and potatoes like a couple of country bachelors, and that was okay too. His uncle preferred that Innis have things going in the kitchen if he could, nothing worse in winter than coming into a cold empty house, he said, no fire or food in sight, my old dad used to call that feeling it gave you
fuar-larach
. They got on pretty well most of the time, except for the women issue, the ones Starr had and the one Innis didn’t. Listen, Starr said once, kidding but not quite, I was your age too, you’re a walking hard-on, but you’ve been in enough trouble for now, you’re broke anyway and nothing bores a woman faster than a broke man.

Deer tracks, feathering over, crossed Innis’s path, heading up toward a spring, a dark wound in a white hill. Deer were in velvet now, new antlers growing. In snowy silence, there was nothing like catching an animal in the corner of your eye, a bit of intense life in that stillness of cold air. He wanted a joint but he’d have to fumble it out and get it lit and maybe what he didn’t need was a downer flash, like that first day at Starr’s
kitchen table when he felt like he’d just put down in the Yukon, sleepless, wrung out, the windows lashed with cold rain while his uncle squinted at him over a cup of coffee, What in God’s name made you steal cars and get yourself booted out of the country? Even if he hadn’t been so numb, he would have had no answer to give. Innis followed the tracks to the point where the deer had blown into flight, the kicked-up snow barely settled. Something had spooked them from their drink, off into the upper woods. The spring had formed a small cave in the snowbank. Deep in its shadow, water plinked steadily. Innis knelt down and put his hand into the colder air of the opening. Then he saw the prints beside him: an animal had drunk here maybe minutes ago. Not hooves but paws, broad in the soft snow where it had rested and lapped. Innis could imagine the crisp sound of its tongue snatching water and he felt again a kind of current in the still trees and he stiffened as it passed through him. He knew there was nobody there, nothing as tangible as a man. Had this been a family’s spring, had there been a house up here once? The woods rose like a dark cliff. He had come upon such sites before, no paths to them, buried in trees, stones and fallen beams thick with moss. He had sketched such a place in his book, but his stiff fingers wouldn’t hold a pencil now. In the city, even a derelict house was seen, was passed by, there were photos of it, drawings somewhere, records. Thirsty, he knelt into the cold chamber of the spring and lapped water until his mouth pained. The coming dark was above the snow and the woods at night asked things of you he didn’t have. The knees of his jeans had soaked through. No, he did not want trouble. Not for a tree, not with his own seeds waiting for their artificial spring.

The path the man had taken was an old one, narrow, without the faint marks of his feet Innis would have lost it quickly. A rabbit shot out of a thicket, a blur of fur and snow, and he cursed it, where the hell was this house anyway. An old barn appeared finally when the trees thinned out, much older than Starr’s, a saltbox, swaybacked, grey as driftwood, and beyond it the house stood out, its shingles the blue of a washed-out sky. He smelled the chimney smoke merging thinly into the falling snow. The rear windows had light in them. What could he say? He had no bread, just a few bucks from odd jobs. But if things went right with his seeds and his plants, he’d have money come fall, not that he could say wait till September, fellas, my dope will be ready to sell and I’ll be flush, can I owe you awhile? It seemed outrageous, this plan of his, crazy, but other times it lifted him up.

Who do you belong to? the man had said.

The back step was crudely shovelled. He could hear a fiddle starting and quitting and the sound covered his knock and he knocked again. The man looked different in the open door, bulky in a red sweater, his grey hair mussed from the cap he’d pulled off. “Yes yes, come inside. Daddy, it’s the lumberjack!” he called into the house, and the fiddle music quit. Innis kicked snow from his boots. Maybe this was a mistake, but he’d made enough of them in the last year, so he’d see it through. Something simmered on the huge stove, ornate as an old car, flourishes of engraved nickel and black iron. The kitchen was stuffy with smells, the cooking, drying wool, linoleum, wood, brine. The man led him into the next room where his father sat by the window in a highbacked rocker, his huge hands cupped on the armrests, the dark varnish worn clean where he’d worked
it. He was handy to his needs—pipe and tobacco pouch on a small table, magazines, binoculars. Powerful glasses, if he could see clear through the woods to the power line break. His dark eyes, stern but not unkind, sized up Innis keenly. A thick white moustache hid the expression of his mouth.

“You look like a Corbett, not a MacAskill at all. No relation to The Giant, by the looks of you, though you’re taller than a lot of us.”

“My mother’s people were tall, so she told me. This man here says you know who I am anyway.”

“Starr Corbett’s family. Not his young fella, because we know Starr takes women but not wives. Alec at the store, he says there’s a young man living with Starr since fall.”

“He’s just my uncle.”

“Yiss. You’d be Munro’s boy, I see him in your face. But your mother, her it was had the red hair, eh?”

“Pretty grey now.”

“Did you put the grey in it?”

“Some. But that’s between me and my mother.”

“Sally Ann. Sally Ann Lamont, from down Middle River. A tall girl herself, but so was her dad, wasn’t he, Finlay?”

“He was so, Daddy. At least.”

“You know everybody around here?” Innis said.

“All that’s is and been,” Finlay said behind him.

“Your dad and your mother came to this house, more than once, before they went off to Boston. You’d be Boston too then.”

“Watertown, west of it. But Boston, yeah.”

“Your grandpa and me were great friends. A better farmer he was, God, yiss, I never cared for the farming a damn bit but I had to do it. And here we are, me and Finlay, the last of the
nine of us. All we grow is potatoes and trees. The spruce are put in by the devil, but the pines we put in ourselves. That pine, now, the one you brought down. What made you?”

“I don’t know, hard to explain. It just happened. Before I knew it, it was down. I’ll pay you for it.”

“Don’t think of it like money. There’s too much of that. But yiss, hard to explain. Well. You’ll be staying in North St. Aubin, working and such?”

“Not long. I’ll be going out west, by fall anyway.” It was good to declare that to them: a sure thing. Nothing to prevent it, even if in September he was still a broke man. What else did the old guy know about him? Starr had said, I won’t tell anybody that immigration men escorted you to your airplane seat, we’ll keep that to ourselves, that’s what you want and that’s what I want. “Not much work around here anyway.”

“Hard to come by. But you got to find work where there is work. Cape Bretoners been going off since my own dad’s days. He did it, carpentering all the way to Montana. Myself, I did threshing trains to Alberta after the war. But he came back and so did I. So I guess you’re coming back. Work that pays money always been short in this place. Work to be done though. Och, lots of that. Now, that pine, that was a special tree. A son of mine was killed and I planted it, up there.”

“I didn’t know. I mean, it’s not like there was a plaque on it.”

“It’s plaques he needs, Finlay. Better get up there and nail some on for this fella.”

“Tomorrow, Daddy, first thing.”

“How the hell did you know I was up there?” Innis said. He still couldn’t believe he’d been caught like that, surprised in that territory he thought of as his.

The old man reached for his pipe and slowly tamped tobacco into the bowl. “You were at the spring too. My dad’s brother, John Allan, built him a little stone house up there. Lived up there alone, 1860 something. He went down to The States and we lost track. North Carolina, someplace there where they had the Gaelic.” He struck a wooden match under the chair and sucked flame into his pipe.

Finlay said, “He has the
taibhsearachd
, you know, the Second Sight. He’s seen you before. But you don’t need to know about that now.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” Innis felt hot, lightheaded. A sweet tobacco smell, like cooked apples, seemed to come out of the dark wainscoating. He unzipped his jacket. He was suddenly uneasy about his planned set-up in the attic corner, it had seemed so clever a little while ago. “My uncle’ll be getting home soon, for supper. He expects me there.”

“Och, you’ll have some supper with us,” the old man said firmly. “We didn’t expect you either. We’ll talk a little. Set a plate for the young man, Finlay.” He reached for a stout cane and raised himself out of the rocker, collecting his strength. Despite a stoop he was taller than Innis. “Dan Rory is who I am. Come along, Innis. I want to show you something. Not the fiddle there, I used to play it but my hands went slow on me, they won’t follow my head. Only thing worse than a bad fiddler is a poor piper.”

He led him into a small cluttered room off the parlor, most of its space taken up with a cot whose sag suggested the long body of the old man himself. A blind hung halfway down the window where light snow fluttered past. Maybe his mother had fled a house like this, this light in winter, where she’d
felt as Innis did, trapped and drowsy, inert, living like these men, back up here alone with white fields and woods and a drab sun in the curtains. From the crammed closet Dan Rory pulled out a khaki uniform, laying it out carefully on the cot as if it were alive. The dull brass badges on the shoulders said “Canada” and on the sleeves were sergeant’s stripes.

“The Great War,” the old man said. “I learned about death. You know about death?”

“Not that way. Not war.”

“What way then?”

“My dad was killed by a car. I’ve been to a funeral or two. The way most people know it.”

“A good fella, your dad. Sad, he was young.” The old man smiled. “I can see him in the kitchen there, naked as the day he was born, hands clapped over his
clachan
, doing a little dance in front of the stove, and the women, well, drying him off, terrible for teasing him. He fell through the ice in our old pond, must’ve been six or seven.”

“What was he doing on the pond?” Innis said, anxious to capture this memory of his father.

“He was looking for fish.”

“Fish?”

Dan Rory poked open the tunic with the tip of his cane and exposed the dark tartan of the kilt, lifted its hem. Light shone in a tiny mothhole. “Blood and mud washed out of her now. When they formed up the Highland Brigade, the 185th, I said right, I’m ready, that’s for me. Wear the kilt, I’ll look so grand in it. I was older, see. Should have known better.”

They both stared at the uniform. “You were wounded?” Innis said.

“Twice. Gas is the worst. Awful. Mustard gas goes where you sweat. We had to give up the kilt in battle.” He shifted his cane-tip to the belt buckle, s-shaped bits of brass.

“That’s a snake buckle. We liked those.
Mheall an nathair Eubh
. You know the Gaelic?”

“Not a word.”

“Starr should give you some then. You can call a man down to the lowest of the low in Gaelic, or praise him to the highest. The Language of The Garden.”

“What garden?”

Dan Rory raised his eyebrows. “Eden, of course. Eden. Your uncle should’ve told you that.”

“He throws out bits of it but not so I’d learn. It’s for things he doesn’t want me to know. What would I do with it anyway?”

“There’s things said in Gaelic you can’t say any other way, or hear any other way. But no, that wouldn’t matter to you, not in Boston. I see you’ve got no belt on your trousers.” The old man pulled the leather belt from the tunic. “Here, run it through your loops.”

“I couldn’t take this.”

“Och, I was skinny as you then. Buckle it up. How old are you?”

“I’ll be twenty. This is part of your old uniform.”

“They’re not going to bury me in it. You want to keep your trousers up. Starr has trouble with that, always did.”

Finlay called them into the kitchen and they sat solemnly at the wooden table while Dan Rory said grace. “Lord, we thank thee for this bountiful food, and for bringing this young man Innis to our table, may he benefit like we have from the blessing and nourishment of God, The Father, Amen.” They quietly
passed around the bowls of chowder and the plate of bread and Innis felt the ritual more than the meal, a ceremony, but he ate hungrily, buttering the bread thickly and savoring the white fish.

“Now, the pine,” Dan Rory said after a few sips of tea that had simmered on the stove until it was black. “We’ll take work, not money. There’s work here needs doing.”

“Trees that need cutting,” Finlay said, setting down his spoon. “There’s budwormed spruce in the lower woods dead to their roots. And a mess of windfalls. We’d like a path cleaned through that thrash to the road and I’m old for that.”

“The old path to the brook,” Dan Rory said. “I want to walk to that water without breaking my neck.”

“Not a chainsaw,” Finlay said. “We don’t like the racket. We got a double-bit axe sharp as a razor, and a good crosscut can make short work of a tree, eh? It’s not easy work, but we’ll call it square when you’re done.”

Innis sipped the last of his tea, cooled by a stream of canned milk Finlay had added without asking, and set the cup carefully on its saucer. “Look, I don’t want my uncle to know. All right? And the other thing is, what money I make is from odd jobs around, so I can’t spend all my time at it. I owe Starr for board as it is.”