Cape Breton Road (17 page)

“His books?” Innis laughed. “Some books. A mess when I saw them.”

“Do you know how complicated it is?” she said, her voice low.

“What is?”

“The three of us, here. This is his house, you know.”

“I didn’t know that?”

“Listen for a minute. I left Russ because somehow I’d come to stand for his disappointments, and there he was right there in Starr’s shop, all ruffed up and giving us both the bad
mouth. He’s bigger than Starr, you know, he’s a big man. But Starr took him by the throat and choked him until he couldn’t spit out another rotten word and then he threw him out the door, he said he’d kill him if he came back.”

“Starr couldn’t kill anybody,” Innis said.

“Russ doesn’t know that.”

“Sergeant Corbett of The Royal Mounted. So now you love him, is that it?”

“Oh, I don’t know if it’s love, Innis, no. Do you know what that is? I don’t think you do.”

“I might surprise you, girl.”

“You might surprise yourself, boy.”

She exchanged a smile with him, tearing open another seed packet with her teeth. She chewed the bit of paper slowly, rolled it on her tongue and spat it at him. Innis smiled sadly, shook his head.

“Claire, do you think I’m a stick of wood or what?” He stomped the last furrow flat. “Am I supposed to forget that afternoon?”

“Forget it for now,” she said. “Please.” She touched her finger to his mouth, left the grit of clay on his lips. But, feeling his uncle behind him, he turned to see Starr making his way into the grass of the lower field, a scythe raised high by the throat like a weapon. He brought it down and then stood finishing a cigarette. Then slowly, almost thoughtfully, he swung into motion, sweeping the blade side to side, its fresh edge flashing.

“Look at Father Time over there,” Innis said.

Claire punched his shoulder. “Innis, I wouldn’t let him hear you. He’s not in the mood.”

“Oh, to hell with him, Claire. I’ve got a garden to get in myself.”

“Not today?”

“It’s a secret. I hope.”

“So do I, dear.”

Innis glanced up at a contrail, a slow chalky stroke in the blue afternoon sky. The plane was tiny, higher than the prop plane that had brought him here from Halifax.

“At least I’m growing something on this land. Starr’s waltzing with a scythe.”

T
HREE DAYS LATER
I
NNIS
was gathering his gear from the attic, setting plants, their soil dry and light, in an old fruit basket he’d found in the toolshed loft, a few more arranged already in a backpack, when he heard the Lada in the sideyard. Starr, and Claire. Damn it. He shut the attic door behind him and edged up to the hall window. They were still in the driveway, playing around, laughing, goofy in a hot sun and a west wind. Starr chased her like a schoolboy, grabbing for her, and she ripped a handful of grass from the ground and tossed it at him, strands blowing back in her hair. Starr stripped off his shirt, his lean torso so white he seemed to Innis shockingly naked, on his shoulders blurry blue tattoos Innis had never seen: frolicking like this, he looked, for a moment, wild, a little crazy. Claire yanked the tails of her red blouse loose and tied them up under her breasts. Innis winced, that bare tummy,
that sweet spot he had tasted. Starr, twirling his shirt like a flag, bounded after her, caught her at the waist and she didn’t resist when he kissed her. Disgusted, Innis stepped back. Unhinged by the weather, both of them, nuts. By the end of summer he’d be gone and they could kiss and screw till they were dizzy, any room in the house, he didn’t care, the woods, the fields, the barn. As he released the curtain, Claire glanced up. She froze for a long moment, Starr with his back to her now buttoning up his shirt: like she was in a play, lost in it, and Innis, in the balcony, had brought her up short. Performance over. She frowned, brushing grass from her hair, but gave Innis a furtive wave that might have scolded him for spying, he couldn’t tell.

He stayed in his room, the door shut, until Claire tapped on it and told him they were going out for supper, she and Starr, up to Baddeck and might not be back until tomorrow.

“Why tell me?” Innis said. “I’m not afraid of the dark.” He lay on his bed staring at water stains in the ceiling, tea-colored phantoms, day by day he’d given them dozens of shapes. He had a hard-on that hurt and he wanted to say come on in, please, Miss Claire, that warm breeze, it’s something, isn’t it? Sorry about my big stick here. But he didn’t.

And Claire didn’t answer. He heard her on the stairs, and then they were gone, Starr giving him a cheery goose on the horn, the bastard, that miserable little beep a rabbit wouldn’t run from. Imagination, and caution, and doubt. There were three things to keep a man occupied. Who needed sex?

He had to catch what was left of the afternoon and he headed quickly up the old logging road, anxious to reach the upper woods, looking back when he rested to see who might
be on the highway. Someone might drive by and spot him and tell Starr, I saw your nephew ducking into the woods with a big basket on his arm, and a mattock on his shoulder. Now what would he be doing in the trees with that? And Innis would have to come up with a nice lie. I was up there at my pine trees, thinning them a bit, Starr, you want a nice Christmas tree, don’t you? Small stuff, penny lies.

The woods had leafed out, were growing rich again with light and shadow, and the further in he got, the safer he felt, people just didn’t go up here. He nosed the fading blossoms on a tree he didn’t know, white and spicy against the thick dark spruce. Was this the Indian pear Starr had mentioned? Blossoms now, fruit later, so he’d have to watch. He moved on, Claire in his mind for a few strides until he could push her away again. How often in a day did she kiss Starr like that, drawing his face into her hands? Innis had once thought he’d lead her up here by the hand when summer came: he knew places that fairly begged you to lie down in them, thick beds of soft, dry moss. Another fantasy shot to hell. He heard nothing through the wall at night but Claire, her stirrings. Whatever she did with Starr now it was in his room, not hers. But stay cool, take the long view. That’s what the window told you, all you had to do in this place was look outdoors and your sight took wing, the long mountain went as wide as your vision and the water of the strait could ebb you out anywhere east. But west it was for Innis, not seaward but into the vast green ocean of Canada, into mapspace.

He knew these upper woods better than his uncle ever had, he was sure of that now. Apart from trips to the spring, Starr hadn’t walked up this far since the old fields had grown
in years back. Was all cleared up there once, he said in one of his moods of recollection when the farming he had hated took on a soft, rum-colored glow, we pastured right the way up that hill. Starr didn’t care to beat his way through thickets anymore, over the budwormed deadfalls, spiked with sharp branches. Leave it to the holiday hunters, Starr said, those damn fools from town. But Innis had found lots of paths, a network of narrow trails deer had cut, their hoof marks in the sod, the moss, the mud. Not that they had the same journeys in mind that he did, the same ends, and he’d picked out his planting spot partly because he had never seen deer near it, no tracks or scat. He pushed on, winded but excited now, over the boggy ground beneath the power lines, catching a whiff of the thawed mackerel in his backpack that Starr had tossed in the garbage thinking they were on the turn.

Through a stand of spindly maples Innis beheld his clearing. Well above the power line break, he had never seen hunters this far up last fall. It was conspicuous in no particular way, at least on this afternoon whose sky had gone from blue to dank white, the sun’s heat strong but the light diffused. Birch and maple ringed it, and a few spruce stark and brittle, ashen, as if an incredible frost had blasted them, but in fact just tiny worms, a plague that had passed. Young spruce were straying into the clearing and that was good. There in the new grass were the pine seedlings he’d brought here months ago, stuck in the ground like sticks, not a needle on any of them, rusty as old metal. Christmas pines? More like grave markers. A forlorn time anyway when he’d planted them, desperate to put anything down in this place, to say
mine
. And the clearings were always attracting him then, in the fall, he’d turn toward one
and then another because he expected something living to be there, he didn’t know what.

He set to work with a pleasure no other task had matched, spacing the pots zigzag so they would look natural, like weeds, if someone did happen by, seduced, like him, by the light of a clearing. He chopped through mats of sod and stubborn roots, worked the soil clean of stones. Tougher than Claire’s little plot, but oh what flowers would be blooming here! When the reddish clay was as fine as he could make it with a trowel, he prodded each plant free of its pot, nesting carefully the white net of roots into its hole where half a mackerel waited, tail, or head with its foggy eyes. He shaped a small basin around each one to hold the water he’d have to carry to get them started, and keep carrying if the summer was dry. A few pails from the spring. A good hike but still closer than any of the brooks. That spring only dried up once, Starr said, in the worst summer for rain we ever had, when I came home from the navy. The guy in the pot book said, Those roots got a trauma, pardner, if you know what I mean, and they need a nice deep drink of water to ease their pain. Innis whittled small branches from a willow, poked them into the ground and made plastic tents for each plant out of five-pound potato sacks. They’d keep off a late frost, and maybe deer too if they were nosing around. Would they even eat marijuana? Wouldn’t hurt them to try it, might tune their ears even finer, sniff out a hunter downwind. The book writer didn’t mention deer, but how could he know? He never thought about north, he didn’t know these boreal woods, so removed from a pot-loving sun.

Innis stood back admiring the snug protection of his tiny greenhouses, hardly visible in the low brush. Suddenly he
sensed something behind him and whirled, raising the mattock like a club: nothing. But it got his heart going, he was edgy anyway, Christ. Some animal. Maybe the cat? He made a wailing, mewing sound, friendly, not fearful, and listened again, he didn’t know just what sound this cat would make. But there was only the mute trees, the misty green light of new leaf. A tall gaunt spruce, grey with lichen, creaked against a windfall it had captured in its branches. The plastic tents fluttered and breathed. Nothing but what was always here when the wind capered through woods, the subtle sounds of branch and needles and leaves. Innis drove the pickhead hard into the ragged brown bore of a stump and left it standing. No one could ruin this, not after the weeks of nursing those seedlings, whispering to them, holding his breath every time Starr walked along the upstairs hall, or was curious as to why the ceiling light in the kitchen dimmed sometimes, but he never bothered to investigate it. Well, the plants were safely hidden now, and who could prove Innis owned them anyway? Deep in trees nobody cared about, a dozen plants whose leaves and buds people liked to light up and inhale, harming no one. The whole operation here could be over by early September, maybe sooner if the weather was right, Innis gone and the pot too, not a soul this side of the island tainted by anything Innis had done. Over and out.

Innis hid the basket in a clump of young fir. He’d have to fetch a few pails of sweet water from the spring, and the seedlings, so dry from their pots, would draw it up like blood.

But first, the skinny joint he’d saved, once hoping to share it with Claire in this very clearing, to give his seedlings a lucky send-off with her lovely touch, then watch her kiss a toke, and
when she passed it back to him, he would inhale a taste of her. Instead, it was just him, loading his lungs for a good buzz. The wind was cooler, the sun seemed underwater. He felt real affection for his plants, arranged there, free of Starr’s house, on their own, their roots already beginning tender investigations of this new, deep ground. You live a little differently when you have room, Starr said once of the country, though he didn’t say just how. Innis laughed. Love. Damn it, this was the only love he was likely to get, the hot and roving fancies of good weed, and there were lots worse things to put your lips to. He got up and wandered about the clearing, pressing his footprints down into the soft sod. He pissed against the scarred bark of a birch tree. How’s this, Mr. Cat? Raise your tail here tonight if you want. The pick stuck up from the stump like a stroke of Chinese writing, black against the greening woods. He pressed his palms together: Lord, give the deer everything they love, leaves and buds and wild apples, but let them pass my
cannabis sativa
by.

From far down on the road, the faint buzz of a car with a bad muffler, soon gone. Here, out in the sticks, you’d have to be careful and clever: a stolen car could stand out like a firetruck. Be a challenge, though. He’d never stolen the cars for money—with one exception—not for anyone but himself and his own escape, a particular high. People often left the keys dangling there, asking to be turned. Richer the better, the careless ones accustomed to money, dropping things casually in their wake. All you had to do was open the door, and later a guy would come out of a bar and could not believe his luxurious set of wheels had vanished, he would rush all over the lot, up and down the street thinking he’d done something wrong,
forgotten where he parked it, embarrassed. Innis was well away by then, taking the crazy back streets of Boston, laid out for horses a long time ago. Staying off the roads the cops cruised, didn’t he always leave it on a side street before daylight, clean as when he’d driven it away, maybe smells in the seats and leather that weren’t there before? All except that one, that Porsche he’d stolen for money because he’d been drinking then and was cocky and stupid when the hard guys asked him to steal it, Just park it a certain place and there’s a grand in it for you, Innis. There wasn’t, there wasn’t anything in it but grief, and what was he to do about it? Go after them with a gun?