Cape Breton Road (23 page)

A muggy morning shower arrived, over by the time he got out the door. He tramped into the upper woods, there was his little plantation to attend to, thank God. Starr had told him again to check the level of the spring, the water seemed cloudy. But Innis knew what silted it: the bucket he drew through it a dozen times one afternoon. Steam rose faintly from the rocks and rough clay ditches and he was sweating under the backpack that held a small shovel, a bottle of fish fertilizer, a baloney sandwich and two apples. The grade was steep until he reached the power line. He rested on his walking stick by a shallow puddle where tadpoles, saved by the rain, squirmed and skittered. Innis flicked a pebble into the water, scattering them, but they soon clustered black again, nibbling for air. That little round ditch was their very life and a few sweeps of his boot could fill it with dirt. But that wouldn’t give him a kick anymore. Anything alive here now he’d rather watch than kill or scare, except blackflies, deerflies and mosquitoes. He looked back down the overgrown road he’d come up through:
trees framed a short section of the highway at the bottom of the hill, and the old hay fields and the house deep at the rear of them, small and distant, and the flat, calm strait burnished after the rain, and the mountain, the sky, the watery strokes of cloud—everything lulled and hushed, as fixed as a photo. Not far from the barn he could make out a meandering path of mown hay Starr had cut with the scythe, charged up that day with some crazy urge, and maybe Claire had cured it.

Cut brush and slash flung every which way told Innis that the power company workers were afoot. Their half-track vehicle had dug deeply across a patch of soft rushes but at least they weren’t spraying chemicals. Bullet holes splattered the
DO NOT SPRAY
sign his uncle had nailed to a line post. There’s springs all along that hill up there, Starr had said, and we don’t want weed killer in our water. A chainsaw rattled into life: in the east, where the corridor crossed the next property, three men were wading into alders that had sprung up in the break. Innis moved on before they could spot him. If things ever got hot up here, they would allow him an alibi: why wouldn’t they, just fellas like himself, be tempted to bootleg a patch of marijuana where nobody but hunters showed up, and easy ways to disguise it? Those hunters from town in their camouflage outfits probably wouldn’t know a pot plant from a raspberry bush, and Innis would be long gone by deer season anyway. He had seen them last fall when he was new to the woods, prowling and crouching through the trees like movie commandos. Stay out of those woods for a while, Starr told him, unless you’ve got a neon sign on your back, sneeze and they’ll plug you. Higher up the slope, west of the deer trail his comings and goings had now widened, Innis caught
sight of his clearing through scrawny maples and moosewood, a small oasis of light among the shadows. He pushed through the last of the ferns, ferns helped, they hid the path.

He tended each plant, rubbing its leaves gently in his fingers. Spend time with your green things, pardner, the man in the book said. Talk to ’em. They like to know you care, and they like company too sometimes. Give ’em a little chuck under the chin, sing ’em a little song. Good vibrations are everything, happy plants make happy weed. Sure, okay, that guy had been smoking too much of his own stuff, and it had to be a lot stronger than what Innis was looking at. Though green and growing, free of their little tents and high as his knees, they were coming along more slowly than Innis had imagined. The weather had been dry, sure, but he’d hauled water like a donkey, brought up hay from the barn and packed it around the bare circles of dirt to hold moisture. Water was the magic now, and surely that and a few more weeks of decent sun would shoot them up. They could grow very fast. They were weeds, right? Fragrant collas by September, flower tops, that’s where the money was. But the summer was dragging. He was trying to be patient. That was part of it, wasn’t it, of leaving Boston behind? He knew what he had to wait for and what he could get right now. Not Claire. He didn’t even know how he wanted her or how he could have her. Much older than him. Yes. But at ease with herself, not like girls his age, edgy, too aware of how they looked and what you were making of it, not sure, some of them, what kind of woman they wanted to be one day to the next, and they all had marriage in their eyes if not on their lips.

Work. Keep moving. He fetched the plastic pail from
under the low, winglike branches of a hemlock fir. Starr had worked the farm when he was young, and now, except for a fit of pointless scything, he had Innis mow the grass out front the house and made sarcastic comments about Claire’s little garden. Yet he must have learned a lot of things from his own dad, Innis’s grandfather. Fathers pass that on. But in that cramped apartment in Boston, what had Innis learned from his while he was alive? His dad worked night shift, his face puffy and numb at the supper table, not much to say. Never a talker, your dad, Starr said, I made up for it I guess, your dad was a good fella, but he was a bit soft in the heart, and your mother, she worked it in her hands, she could stroke it or wring it, and she did both. Then he was gone for good, took that flight above a city street where, in Innis’s memory, he remained suspended. Torn up, his mother drank at home quietly for a while, later with a woman friend who said, Listen, girl, you’re young, you can’t bring him back, the two of them started going out, and going out some more. His mother brought home a man Innis had never seen before, hungover and clumsy in the kitchen, nothing for Innis but pats on the head and bar tricks that didn’t amuse him. His mother sometimes let him roam outside in the evening if a man came by, and he fell in with other boys who liked streets and had time on their hands. But he knew very early that he would want to do it alone, that he would find the cars he wanted and do his own thing inside them.

Coming on the weathered wood covering the spring, hidden in alders and grass, always gave Innis a flush of pleasure. Something about that little house sheltering the water of his own life, and it had come out of that rock ledge year
after year in a steady, unfailing trickle, for him, for his uncle, for all of his family who had lived here. The warped grey boards were warm to the touch as he unlatched the low door and ran a stick around the dark opening. He couldn’t blame the spiders, it was such a lovely cool cave out of the wind, but he hated the cloying webs. He dipped the pail through the small pool. Silt rose like ink. Innis, why is this water murky? Starr would say. The spring is low, I guess, Innis would tell him. Starr would threaten to go see for himself but he never did because in a day or so after Innis had watered his plants the clay particles had once again settled on the bottom of the shallow reservoir. His uncle would take a tumblerful from the sink tap and hold it to the window while the spring water swirled with tiny bubbles. A bit better, he would mumble, and then he’d drink, declaring, without fail, this was the best water in the world, a goddamned tonic.

Purple fringed orchids had poked up here and there in the grass. They were not luxuriant like their name, their blossoms tiny, but they were pretty and he plucked a few as he walked. They didn’t grow down below, they’d be new to Claire. Rasping chainsaws were not far away. That power line crew, they made him nervous. He took up the pail and the flowers and got himself out of sight.

By noon he had soaked a dark ring around each plant, a pail as full as he could make it and a dollop of fertilizer dissolved in each. Tired and sweating, he ate sitting on a stone where the clearing caught a breeze. The baloney sandwich tasted wonderful, washed down with spring water in an empty soda bottle. He chewed slowly, satisfied that his labor would show results. Wasn’t that what kept a farmer going, day by day?

Partway through his first apple a wild thumping approached the woods and seemed to percuss the whole area. For a few seconds he could believe it was a diesel gypsum freighter chugging up the strait, but the sound grew louder too fast and he was running through a hail of vibration, the helicopter beating the air above his head. A tempest smeared through the grass and weeds and saplings and he caught a glimpse of the pilot, his dark visor, before he fell to his belly in the ferns. He thought he might pass out, he was hyperventilating, but he didn’t move and the
chunk-chunk-chunk
faded off toward north over the strait. Christ. They weren’t police, he knew that, knew it was probably the forestry patrol or a spray plane but God. From the air what could they see but trees and brush? He didn’t even have a plot here, just a few staggered plants, it was pathetic, nothing, not worth a bust even. Why did the bastard come in so low? Power lines maybe. Somebody lost. His hands trembled for a thin joint deep in his shirt pocket. Come on, Innis, you’re not a hick in the boonies, you know what choppers sound like, and sirens, the noises of alarm and pursuit. But it had been awhile, been awhile since he’d heard them.

He let the smoke sit in his lungs until he could hold it no longer, then the breeze pulled it slowly from his mouth. Spring water might be a great tonic but some things it couldn’t cure. Later that day after the three of them had returned from the beach, Starr had cornered him alone in the toolshed: I’ll put it to you plump and plain, he said, you have the hots for Claire, don’t you? Well I’m telling you to forget it, there’s no room in this house for that. This time Innis did not protest or deny, he just smiled and said, Sure, Uncle Starr, whatever you say, and
Starr said, Stop calling me Uncle Starr or I’m going to pop you one.

Wind came through the clearing in soft, calming sweeps through grass and ferns. The leaves of his cannabis shivered, turned like feathers and flashed the paler green beneath. The hardy young spruce, the fir, the dead pines barely moved. A woosh as faint as a whisper ran through the maples behind him. Where was the lynx? Cowering? Never. It was a master of its territory, of concealment, of stealth.

I
T HAD BEEN AN
afternoon of blue calm, a bluish cast to the air, trees, the mountain, and by early evening the sky was pearled with blues and creams. Everything clear, quiet, the water a brilliant matte, a flatter shade of the sky, so calm Innis could pick out voices from the other side, their tones almost intimate though a mile away. A dog’s bark echoed across the water, solitary, sharp. Saturday night, people getting cranked up for the weekend over there on the other shore. Innis sat in the skiff he had uncovered and turned on its keel. He was sure he could row it when the surface of the strait was like this, the tide slack, no wind stirring it up. The oars needed varnish by the looks of them but they were functional. He might try his hand at them here in the cove, but he hadn’t quite the nerve yet. He had seen those swirling eddies, this wasn’t a pond and it could shift in a hurry into yelping whitecaps, a dark surface of mad white hounds. No,
he’d sit on the thwart for now, work the oars in the oarlocks, get the feel of it. He watched a powerboat cut through the silence until it was beyond the next point, its wake opening in a graceful V, a smooth wave that touched the shore. A motor could take you someplace on a night like this. Innis slung the tarp over the skiff and left.

Before he reached the house he could hear Claire’s raised voice, and he stopped shy of the screen door. Starr had a letter in his hand and she tried to grab it but he held her off.

“You have no business opening my mail, Starr, any of it. You knew it was from Russ. Now give it to me.”

“And what’s he need to talk to you for? Eh? Wants you to meet him in Sydney.”

“Starr, for Christ’s sake, we had a long relationship. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, but I can tell you it has a few loose ends. None of them have to do with love. We shared property and money.”

“And what’s this he’s saying about me?” Starr turned the letter toward the light. “If you want to hitch up with that two-bit TV repairman, suit yourself” Is that all I am? Maybe so, maybe so. It’s not a sexy business, it’s just a living, and barely that.”

“The letter has his name on it, Starr, not mine. I didn’t ask him to write it, those are his words. And I didn’t ask you to read it either.”

“I don’t want to see anything of that son of a bitch in here, I don’t even want to see his handwriting in the mailbox.”

“You’re being ridiculous, Starr. I won’t even talk to you about this, it’s none of your affair.”

Innis clomped noisily up the back steps and they both
went quiet as he opened the door, slapping the salt cod, now little more than a tailfin. “Good evening to you too,” he said, passing between them on his way upstairs. From his room he could hear only the heated murmur of their voices, then Starr going outside, his feet on the gravel. Innis saw him out the hall window smoking at the toolshed door, staring into the field. The house was quiet for a while, then Claire went out to him and they talked there at the door. She came back to the house and called up the stairs to Innis.

“There’s a dance over at the community hall. Let’s dance.” She looked up at him, her foot on the bottom step. She had the letter in her hand. Innis, who’d grown up in apartments, had come to believe two storeys were clearly superior: upstairs gave you another perspective on those you lived with.

“What’s that got to do with me?” That was not how he wanted to reply, he wanted to say, Hey, Miss Claire, let’s go, let’s do it, but Starr was around. There seemed to be nothing in this house he could seize for himself. Whatever he had was on hold.

“Oh come on, Innis,” Claire said. The hall light caught the skin of her throat, the silver hoops in her ears, the lustre of her dark hair he’d heard her washing in the tub before supper, pitcherfuls of water cascading through it. “Come with us.”

“That’s the trouble, Claire.”

“What is?”

“With us.” He leaned on the railing and spoke lower. “I’d go with you in a second. Anyway, I can’t dance.” He had danced in high school, but mostly stoned flailing to the blare of rock music, or slowstepping in that sweaty hug you hoped would lead to sex. “Not the way they do it here.”