Cape Breton Road (3 page)

“Work it around your other duties. It’s not a great rush,” Finlay said. “The woods isn’t going anywhere.”

“What about that priest with the old cottage?” Dan Rory said. “Alec says he’s looking for somebody to paint it up or something.”

“Father Lesperance, down by the ferry wharf. There’s a job for you, Innis, his summer place there. He’s not rich but it’d bring you a few dollars.”

“We’re not Roman Catholic,” Dan Rory said, “and neither are you, not that I’ve seen your uncle in church since I can’t remember.”

“He doesn’t go, no.” Starr had said, I told my dad when I got home from the navy I wasn’t going to church, not any day, anymore. He nearly froze me out when he saw I meant it. He could turn to stone for long spells, my dad. Quiet as a shut door for days on end. He hated that he couldn’t talk, that he didn’t have the kind of heart to do that, sit down and say, listen, this is what’s on my mind. Oh, Jesus, no. Clam up. God, we were all that way, when I think about it, the whole damn bunch of us.

“The priest is a decent fella. Am I right, Finlay?”

“He is so. Had that cottage a few years now, and he’s not the sort to convert you, I don’t think.”

“Nothing to convert,” Innis said. “If he’s got work, okay with me.”

There was an air of business having been settled and they relaxed into an apple pie Finlay had baked, tough crust and all. Why in the hell had he cut down that pine? Two or three minutes of fury just to see it fall, and here he was bound up with these guys. He felt found out, more known than he wanted: people didn’t just look at you here, they looked into you, they inquired, and if you had a family connection, some of them expected, even at first meeting, if not your family tree, then at least a hefty branch of it. The maroon teapot was trimmed in gold leaf, similar to one his mother had, one of her “old things” she’d brought with her to Watertown. She’d known what it was like to be sheltered by family, to have strangers care about you because they knew who your grandfather was, your
mother, uncle, aunt. But family could suffocate you too, want to know too much about you, and that’s what his mother had never missed in Boston: after her husband died she could disappear for an evening with another man and no one knew or cared whose daughter she was, or sister or niece, who she belonged to or how far back they went.

“Starr shown you cousins?” Dan Rory said. “No Corbetts left here in St. Aubin, but you’d have MacKinnons and Campbells in other places.”

“We haven’t got around much.” That was close to true, though Starr had taken him to see two aging sisters who shared a house in Sydney, Campbells, Netta was one and Innis couldn’t recall the other one’s name, skinny as a crane. They had talked around and over Innis as if he were a decent topic of conversation but didn’t need to be there, and they soon moved on to people they really wanted to discuss, those who’d had interesting surgery, real excavations, or awful deaths or a trajectory of decline even Starr could appreciate. And Alec who ran the store in North St. Aubin was a cousin too, friendly but distant, taciturn, not a prober or a gossip, and Innis liked him for that since he seemed to expect nothing more private from you than he was willing to give himself and that was very little. And Starr had mentioned cousins over on Southside St. Aubin and up the east coast of Cape Breton Island but didn’t seem keen to expose them to his nephew, fine with Innis since the less he saw of kin, the better chance to be taken on his own terms, the less enmeshed his fabrications, the less strain between him and his uncle who didn’t like the lies to begin with. We should be telling the truth about yourself, Starr said, that’s the way to start over, not like this. But I’m not
starting over
here
, Innis said, am I? Can’t you understand that? I’m going west when I’m ready, but I’m not ready yet. No, Starr said, ready you’re not.

Dan Rory lit his pipe and Finlay a cigarette, blowing smoke thoughtfully. “Saw your uncle Starr with a new ladyfriend yesterday,” Finlay said. “In Sydney.” But for the creases around his eyes he had the face of an old child, innocent but canny.

“She’s not real new,” Innis said. “I haven’t seen her myself.”

“Very pretty she was, yes. Arm in arm on Charlotte Street. He looked mighty pleased.”

“He was always a good dancer, Starr Corbett,” Dan Rory said.

“Liked a good fight sometimes too, at the dances.” Finlay took a deep drag. “Well, didn’t we all. Not so much of it now, even the youngsters.”

Starr had never mentioned dancing, or fighting either, but sometimes if he felt good or nicely toasted he might break into a brief stepdance on the kitchen floor while Innis watched, amused.

“I’ll drive you up home,” Finlay said. “A long walk from here.”

Innis fetched his jacket from the parlor. He noticed on the wall a framed photograph of Dan Rory in the army kilt, young, all bony knees, a feather in the badge of his cap. The snake belt was clasped around his tunic.

“What color was that feather?” Innis said, pointing at the photograph.

“Green,” Dan Rory said. “It was a green feather. The feather is the first to go.”

I
NNIS STEPPED INTO THE
attic room at the end of the hallway, into the shock of its March air and the dusty scent of dry wood. He shut the door carefully: there might be times when he would be inside here with his uncle somewhere in the house and he had to know every board that creaked, where he could crouch without announcing it, how gently he need latch the door. In the sooty darkness the door boards emitted cracks of light. He played his flashlight over the hewn rafters, the pegged beams, the trunks and boxes and pieces of furniture. The big wooden loom sat as his grandmother had left it years ago, a piece of rough grey cloth in the heddles. Her husband had built it for her, put it together right here in the attic, “over the kitchen,” and there she wove in the wintertime until arthritis crippled her. Innis had tried to imagine how she looked as she worked the loom, her feet and her hands moving, but he couldn’t, he didn’t know enough about that, not yet. He squatted beside the equipment he had collected within the loom’s frame, the old fluorescent shop fixtures he’d bought two new plant bulbs for, a simple timer, a warming tray. Start them off at maybe eighteen hours or so and see how they went. He had the pots, the soil, a small watering can, an old crock to store water in, tinfoil to drape over the length of the lamp to direct it down toward the seedlings. The loom was perfect to hang the fixture from: he could make a tent out of it with two blankets that would conceal the light and hold warmth. Even if Starr stuck his head
in the door, he wouldn’t necessarily see much. If he poked around, well, the game was up, but such was the risk of secrets, and better found out now than later. Innis had pried up a floorboard and tapped a multiple socket into the wires in the kitchen ceiling. He was proud of his set-up, practically above Starr’s dinner plate. None of it had cost much, from a secondhand store in The Mines mostly, and he was keen to get this under way. Even in June there might be killing frosts, Starr said, and Innis’s seedlings needed this jump start if they were to grow well and amount to money: a dozen plants even half the size of the ones in the marijuana book, healthy
sinsemilla
with good flowers, could bring him a grand apiece, and no middleman. Find that trucker and fire up a sample for him, there’d be no problem unloading it. And then Innis could leave North St. Aubin, he would strike out on his own.

The fluorescents flickered and balked and then hummed into a steady pinkish light. He touched the warming platter: not too hot, just warm enough to make them happy. He’d germinate the seeds in a wet cloth, start tonight. Last night he had spread them out on a sheet of paper and, like a jeweller, poised a finger above them, selecting slowly, deliberately, each promising seed he would devote his risks to. Maybe here and there sat that one just waiting to sprout in a place like Cape Breton, one that had in it the desire for a new locale, far north, a need to rise out of cool boreal clay and grow like crazy, for the sheer hell of it. He draped the blankets over the loom: it looked like some old sheepherder’s hut out on a dark moor, he liked that. He killed the flashlight and stood there shivering, daring something to lay hold of him, in the dark sometimes he could feel it, if he’d had a few tokes. The first time he shut
himself in here, things seemed to rush out of the wood, but they did not make him uneasy, not anymore. He could not say what they were, spirits maybe, but hell, he was probably related to them, it wasn’t as if they were strange. Pieces of the house’s history had been pushed into the attic. In this dark he felt most strongly what kind of house it had been. Mothholes of light appeared in the blankets, his grandmother had woven them, they were old. He had only known her when she visited them back in Boston, him a small boy at the time, but he was certain she wouldn’t want her loom sheltering a garden like his.

Innis went about the house as if nothing had changed, despite the shrouded light in the attic, his little plot set up and sown. Downstairs, back upstairs, he was tense, a bit wired. Starr would be out late, that new woman was making demands on his attention. In the hall Innis dustpanned a spill of potting soil, searched for other traces of his hidden activities. Finding none, he flipped open a sketchpad under his bedroom lamp, unable to settle into the details of anything, scribbling a rough sketch of a woman’s face, boldly pretty, her hair swirls of dark pencil. Tomorrow he’d go back to the upper woods, far up where he’d staked out that spot, a clearing nicely concealed for summer planting. Still some work to be done there. His plants would need good light without being easily noticed by browsing deer or nosy humans. Apart from Finlay scaring the shit out of him that afternoon way down the break, he’d never run into a soul in all his wanderings up there, just three hunters he’d hidden from back in the fall when the woods were as new and foreign as everything else. You’re a Boston kid, Starr had told him, you get lost up there and we’ll have to send the Mounties in after you. But he knew the woods now, the woods were his.

When he’d first driven into The Mines with Starr to give him a hand at the TV repair shop and seen it in all its dreary clutter, he’d nearly left that very day. But he had nothing to take him anywhere, no money, no friends or destinations, he was starting from scratch in a new country, it didn’t matter that he had been born here, and The Mines itself, with its rundown storefronts and air of commercial despair, offered nothing. Starr was bound that Innis should learn to repair televisions, be his cheap apprentice for awhile. It was a skill you could stay afloat with, Starr said, get you on your own no matter where because every goddamn person everywhere has a TV. Go to the backwardest spot on earth and they’ll have a TV before a toilet, even in Outer Mongolia or someplace, and sooner or later their favorite yak program will suddenly turn to snow and there’ll be no man between them and heaven they would rather see standing at the door of their hut than you with your tools because no kind of prayer can bring a TV picture back, nobody’s god deals with that. But Starr’s shop, with its blank dusty screens stunned every which way, its spill of haphazard parts and testing devices and wire, reminded Innis of a correctional school, and Starr its dead-end instructor hunched under a lamp, a man, it seemed to Innis, who’d settled for the least ambition he could get away with. A few episodes of sparks and smoke and cursing and Innis got what he preferred—staying back in North St. Aubin, picking up odd jobs with people Starr knew, cleaning yards, painting, cutting wood, doing handyman carpentry from junior high woodshop. Sometimes he was less than handy, a jackknife carpenter for sure, but he learned fast from his mistakes and faster yet how to cover them up. I don’t care, Starr had said, if
that’s what you want to do, you don’t have the knack for circuits, you handle a TV like a trash barrel. Bring in something toward your board, that’s all I ask for now, and there’s no temptations out there in North St. Aubin, at least I’m not finding many. You can settle down and keep straight. Don’t give your mother any more grief. Jesus Christ, Starr, who’s got the grief? If she’d made me a citizen, I wouldn’t be here. Starr said no, you got the sleigh before the horse, was it her that stole the cars?

He was kneeling beside the tub testing the water for a bath when he heard the Lada skid down the driveway to a halt. His uncle’s laughter, a door slamming, then Starr pounding up the stairs. What the hell was he doing home so soon? Innis turned the taps on full for the noise, sweeping his hand through the water now nicely hot. Little chance that his uncle would blunder into the attic, but Innis stumbled into his jeans and by the time he had buttoned his shirt Starr was rapping on the bathroom door.

“Hey, save me some hot water! I might need it later.”

When his pulse had calmed, Innis stood at the door to Starr’s bedroom. His legs felt too light under him as he looked in at his uncle groping into a lower drawer of the dresser, yanking out shirts.

“Back early,” Innis said.

“I’m not back, I’m just refueling. What you up to?”

“Come on, Starr, what could I be up to? A hot bath. Wild, huh?”

“Your age, I had a bath on Saturday night in a tin tub in the middle of the kitchen.”

“Okay, I’m really grateful for the hot running water.”

“If you had to heat it on a coal stove, you’d damn well be grateful.”

Starr pushed some bills into his wallet and kicked the drawer shut, stooping toward the dresser mirror. He patted his face with both hands, a tough face, darker than Innis’s, its angles squared and solid, like the men in the old photographs downstairs. A deep cleft in his chin—like a stroke Innis might make with a soft pencil—gave to his face the possibility of humor even when he set his jaw. And that’s what had saved them when they got in each other’s face, when the strain of Innis’s living there was too much for either of them, the release of a few laughs. Starr stroked a brush carefully through the tight waves of his steel-grey hair, pursed his lips at himself. “I have to piss and get out of here. There’s a woman waiting, she’s not the sort to wait for long.”