Cape Breton Road (13 page)

But there was a woman in the house.

The old barn, isolated, no tracks to it, man, animal, vehicle, nothing connecting it anymore to the house or little pig barn where old lumber and junk were stored or the milk house where Starr stacked firewood or the toolshed. Innis had inspected its gloom through a stall window but had never entered, since nothing they used was kept there. It sat as he had sketched it in the fall, grey against the lower woods, waiting to be overtaken like the pasture behind it, ruined with advancing trees. One of the tall threshing doors stood ajar, sagging on its pins. Innis slipped the rope latch and heaved it just wide enough to step inside. Small low windows cast a dusty light through the stalls. The animal reek had long faded into a dry smell Innis could taste in his throat. In the lofts was dishevelled
hay the color of the winter fields. Something fluttered, stirred. Mice, a rat maybe. Not a cat. Starr had drowned the last ones he found here, so he said. Shitty thing to do, dump them in a sack with stones and toss it in a brook. That was the farm way, no room for the sentimental. Yet no one, when he was in a certain mood, could be more sentimental than Starr.

Innis climbed up into the loft and settled himself in a grotto of broken bales, making a seat in one whose binding still held. A fine, musty dust hung like frost. Here and there the hay was rank with mildew. Leaks. From the CBC he’d learned about hay, its different grasses, the danger of wet bales spontaneously combusting. He was picking up things from the radio now and then, what caught his attention he remembered, just the way it had been in school. A program called
Quirks and Quarks
put him off at first, posing gee-whiz questions, What do dinosaurs taste like? or, Does the Sasquatch really exist, and if he does, should we shoot him? or, Could there be water on the moon? Innis’s first reaction was, Who gives a shit? But some of it stuck in his mind, like how birds navigate over long distances, or the intelligence of a virus, or the mating calls of frogs, Brazilian tree frogs and Argentinian desert frogs and Canadian grey frogs. He fished out a thin joint, he was rolling them thinner, and lit it. The gable window was cracked and bird-soiled. The metal roof, a grey cavern pinholed with pitchfork light, shuddered in the wind and the whole barn responded, beams straining like ship timbers. A cold touch of air from some opening he couldn’t see, and he hunched deeper into the hay. Would this stuff burn? Jesus, all that old dried wood. He held up a match in front of his eyes: a horny kid, am I, Starr? Dangerous in my underwear?

But after two deep hits of weed, he lay back and any wish for fiery destruction fled, revenge, anger. Friday night. He’d like to spontaneously combust. He and Ned might get stoned and cruise the glare of the Combat Zone, feel the energy of all the sexual hustling, check out a topless bar with their fake I.D.s, Ned always passed for twenty-one anyway, but Innis preferred Harvard Square, tripping with the street musicians and the girls in their funky clothes and Hari Krishnas jingling around, the guys looking more like convicts than spiritual messengers with five o’clock shadows on their shaved heads.… But Mohney was seven hundred miles away, out on the town for sure, maybe at The Groggery where live rock music could crack your skull, but lots of bodies packed in its freaky atmosphere, he liked bars more than Innis did. Was he dealing weed with a new partner? Yet Innis was only reminiscing, he did not yearn for those times exactly, they were past, used up, he didn’t fit into them anymore, there was a childishness about that urge to find entertainment all the time, day and night. What would his mother be up to? For a while, she might’ve missed her absent son, but she was pissed at him too. I love you, Innis, that’s the last thing she’d said when he left, it all got reduced to that. Was she still with that last guy she was stuck on, a jerk, an amiable bullshit artist? Funny, but now he could see his mother’s situation more clearly. Alone, her husband dead, a kid on her hands. She could have gone out and enjoyed herself but there he was. What do you do with him? She didn’t drag him along at least, you had to hand it to her for that. Innis had the flavor now of confined evenings, having to stay home, and they had no taste to them. Just the phrase “staying home” was a downer. He could speak to that.
And his mother had had them too, those nights when the only world worth your energy, your spirit, is out on the streets, in the lights. Of course even here he could go out, but he couldn’t get anywhere, not at night. Fifteen miles to The Mines, the nearest town, and cars were not plentiful until you got out to the main highway. Could be a damn cold wait, never sure if they would take you all the way, maybe let you off at Little Bras D’Eau and you’d have to hunker at the roadside awhile longer, spirits diving. What would he find when he got there anyway? One bar, that he knew of, a serious drinking hole where he doubted he’d be welcome once he opened his mouth, regular brawls there on weekends, Starr said. He couldn’t just walk around Commercial Street looking for an invitation from a sweet girl. More hitching would take him further south, North Sydney, and Sydney was where the action was, an actual city. For his mother, at least her fun was never far away.

Spoiled hay, great seat for a Friday night. It would be in his jeans before long, the dead barn smell. Wind tremored in the walls. The heavy breath of cows and horses. Innis staggered about on the lumpy hay, beating up its tired dust. The floor of the loft, exposed in places, was laid of spruce poles, unshaved, their bark dry and curling. A ladder of small boards nailed into the wall studs led up to the gable hatch. He gripped the crude flat rungs and climbed with that deliberateness grass always gave him, a microscopic attention to the physical, and to physical consequences. A crack of light outlined the hatch where they used to swing in hay bales on the hayfork, the tackle dangling as if someone had just released it. Innis flipped the rusty hatch hook loose and the small door yawned outward and suddenly his height from the field below
seized him and he hugged the rung. Cape Breton from the air, that plane flight in: the thick nappy green of the forests, tiny inhabited spaces here and there as if shaved out with a razor. And the water, always water somewhere, spills of lakes, streams and bays, ponds flaring like mirrors, and the ocean or some reach of it never far, and the houses specks in the vast green, so few of them it scared him, that he would be sequestered in that. Pulp roads lay like discarded rope. Woods a bristly carpet, worn in spots, frayed. And he was living now on one of those roads maybe he’d seen from the air, pressing his face to a wooden rung, in an old barn. The weakness passed, leaving him trembling, breathless. He opened his eyes slowly to the fading light: there was the house he lived in, smoke in its chimney, set down near woods a million miles from where he wanted to be. Someone was at the back door, the glass panes, a dash of color. It was her, she moved out from behind the door and stood on the steps. She pulled a yellow scarf from her head. A regular flower, that girl.

Then she was stepping gingerly along the field. Afraid of cow turds? Snakes? A flash of resentment brought tears to his eyes: she had broken the simple arrangement of his life, he and his uncle getting on, making his way slowly and carefully and without much trouble toward September, yet it thrilled him to see her appear on this landscape. To the west the water of the strait lay slick as metal. He thought he could smell it, the salt, and the resin of the evergreens thick on the mountain among the grey leafless hardwood. Exile, you’re going into exile, pal, Ned had told him when he first heard, loving the word, grinning like it was something from the movies, or a joke. Ned didn’t know it was like being turned out of your own house in the
middle of the night, like somebody ripping the covers off you in January and ordering you into the snow, but big-time, way up there in pain. He eased himself down the ladder, conscious of the drop at his back that even old hay might not save him from.

He hardly breathed when she came into the threshing floor below him, but he watched her poke about, brushing imaginary webs from her face. The light was poor but her hair, black as the crows Innis fed bread to in the snow, caught touches of it. He watched her tap the hard leather of a horse collar, shake a dull tinkling from harness chains hanging from nails. She was moving through a museum. Innis was sure that she, like him, had secrets. It excited him that she didn’t know he was there above her. He could frighten her, but he heard her laugh softly at something on the wall.

“What’s so funny?” Innis said.

She started as if a door had slammed but she didn’t cry out. She raised her face to him calmly. He could see the slow light of a smile.

“A photo of the royal family, nailed to the wall here. The queen and her sister, they’re just little girls.”

“My grandmother’s, I bet. She loved the royals, Starr says, but as far as he’s concerned, they can kiss his arse, it belongs in the barn. What brought you out here?”

“I like barns.”

“They’re quiet.”

“It’s not like the house is noisy.”

“Could use a little racket, couldn’t it? Laugh a minute.”

“I was out of sorts for a while. I’m sorry. I need to get back to work.”

“No big deal. What’s Starr’s excuse?”

“He thought there was some little thing between you and me, I don’t know what. I set him straight. He likes to talk, Starr does, but he doesn’t say much about himself, what’s inside of him.”

“He won’t like us in here then, will he, all by ourselves?”

“Oh, he’s having a bath. Taking me to Sydney for dinner. I wouldn’t worry about it, dear. I’m not.”

“I might move out to the barn, the way things are going. Hey, you don’t have a coat on. You’ve been sick.”

“Indeed. I lost six pounds. That’s enough of that.”

“I wouldn’t say you had to lose an ounce. Why don’t you come up here? It’s warmer.”

“Is it?” She regarded him, her head to one side. “Help me up then.”

He took her warm hand and pulled her up into the hayloft. She was wearing a purple sweater with a high collar and black bell-bottom jeans.

“Nicer up here,” she said, stepping into the bales. “Like being a kid, in the hay. A long time since I’ve been on a farm.”

“A dead farm, this one.”

“There’s life here yet.”

“You could have fooled me, but I’m new to it, I guess.”

“Yes, you didn’t get that accent in St. Aubin.”

“I didn’t get much of anything in St. Aubin.”

“You got born, didn’t you? You go a long way back here, Starr says, your family.”

“That isn’t much good to me now, is it? I’m not going forward, that’s the point.”

She let herself fall back into the nest he had made. “I remember my uncle’s farm when I was a girl. Fun, that warm fresh hay.”

“This hay isn’t fresh.” Innis grabbed a handful. “Been here for years. Starr’s dad took it in before he died.”

“Your grandpa?”

“I never knew him. My mother didn’t like him much anyway. Too religious. He wouldn’t let you take his picture on the Sabbath. He got very sorrowful in his later years, she said. He would sit like a wooden man for hours on a Sunday.”

“Starr doesn’t have any of that, does he.”

“It’s under there. Scratch him deep enough.”

She tested a strand of hay in her teeth. “So it’s no good even for horses, but it’s fine for us.” Her voice was warm and easy and he let himself believe they might have planned to meet, in this very space, so close they could whisper. When she turned her head, her pendant earrings caught a dangle of gable light, a glint of silver.

“Look at this,” Innis said. He huffed a breath toward her. “We’ve got some winter left.”

“Oh, I’d kill for a summer day, just one. I want to bake in the sun somewhere. I want it to be hot and sticky and all those summer things we can’t stand in July. It’s a wonderful cure.”

“For what?”

“Winter. We need thawing out.” She stood up, unsteady in the soft footing. “The winter here gets to me. It got to the man I was living with too.”

“There’s bits of hay all down the back of you,” Innis said.

“I can’t see them.”

“Should I brush them off or what?”

“If it’s messy.”

“Starr would wonder where you’ve been.”

“Let him.”

Innis plucked the bits as gently as he could, as high as he could reach without standing. His legs felt shaky. The weed, and the curve of her jeans. “I’m in a hurry for summer myself,” he said, almost whispering.

“Are you?” She looked down at him, amused. “Well, you’re young. Summer is your time, isn’t it.”

“Fall, more like.”

Innis got to his feet slowly, braced himself against a post. He wanted to tell her, to draw her into it.

“I need to put plants in the ground,” he said. “But I’ll probably have to cool it till the last frost is gone, in June.”

“I didn’t know you were into plants, Innis. Starr never mentioned that.”

“The less Starr mentions, the better, as far as I’m concerned.” Innis opened his hand and peeled back a layer of tinfoil, exposing the seeds he had saved. Claire held his hand steady. She sniffed, raised her eyebrows. He saw the word come soundless on her lips: Marijuana?

“This is what you’re planning to grow? Lord, Innis. Not in this country.”

“Why not?” He looked into her face.

“Well …” She laughed. “The Mounties could come down on you, for one thing. We wouldn’t like to see that. For another, that’s not a plant that thrives here, I think.”

“They grow in every corner of the States, Claire. They’ll do fine here too. There’s ways to encourage them, if you know what you’re doing.”

“Oh, I’d give them all the encouragement I could, if that’s all it takes.”

“It takes other things” He packed the seeds into a ball and jammed them in his jeans. “I’ve read up on it. This stuff grows everywhere now. Even Alaska. I’m not kidding. I’ll have good buds by late August, September and I’ll bag them and sell them.”

“That could bring you trouble, Innis. Prison.”

“It’s hidden. Nobody goes where I go, way up above. I know of a trucker who’ll take it all off my hands. One transaction. As soon as I get that money, I’m off, I’m splitting. I’ll take up somewhere else, out west.” Watching her face, her faint, skeptical smile, he wanted to kiss her mouth, hard.