Cape Breton Road (12 page)

“Claire,” Innis said at the window, “take a look at the sun in that ice. Look.”

She stood beside him, puffy-eyed and pale, and he held her up with his arm. “It’s lovely,” she whispered. “Like blown glass, everywhere.”

Neither of them had heard the Lada arrive, and just as his footsteps distracted them, Starr was at the bedroom door.

“What’s this?” Unshaven, he looked haggard and older. “The house so cold you got to warm each other up?”

“I’ve got flu, Starr.” Claire said, sitting on the bed, pulling the robe over her knees. He touched her face. “I can see that. But what’s his excuse?” He yanked open Innis’s blanket and Innis yanked it back. “Hanging around in his underwear.”

“I looked in on her, that’s all, I fell asleep in the chair.”

“He was a help, Starr, he was. I had a fever, I was out of my head. Let him alone.”

“He’s got a fever too, I think. You going to help him with that?”

“Oh, Starr, please shut up.”

Innis turned away but his uncle caught him in the hall and wheeled him around to face him. Innis gripped the blanket tightly in his fists, he would hit Starr if he touched him again.

“Stay out of her room. Anytime, day or night.”

“She was burning up, Starr. She looked real sick, you weren’t here, the phones were out. Don’t come tearing in here like I did something awful.”

“Go get some goddamn clothes on.”

“You want me to move out?”

Starr grunted, looked him up and down. “I told your mother I’d see you through the year.”

“You don’t need to see me through anything, nothing.”

They were a few hot words away from blows, Innis saw that suddenly and clearly and he backed away because the look in his uncle’s eyes was poisonous. They were both tired, frayed. And he did not want to move out, not now. “Fuck it,” Innis said. “Go see to Claire. You’re the doctor.”

As he dressed he listened to Starr in the next room, fussing over her, telling her he’d been trapped in The Mines, the damned silver thaw had made the roads murder, so he’d done a little work in the shop, napped until the salt truck was out, did she want some breakfast.

Innis drank a cup of coffee quickly and left the kitchen’s warmth for the upper woods, shaky, disgusted. The sun was painful, glaring in the thawing ice. An apple tree was beginning to drip, its wild branches flickering with sunlight. Meltwater everywhere, shedding the bowed trees slowly of
their burdens. Brush and dead grass were turning wet, the butt end of winter once again. If this kept up there’d be mud, sure as hell. His plants would have to wait. He’d see how tough they were when he got a chance, but right now he wanted to put some distance between himself and that house.

The footing was bad and he went sprawling on his back, knocking the wind out of him, he lay in the driveway gasping. His hip was sore by the time he limped to the road, past the Lada Starr had left on the shoulder, no wonder they hadn’t heard him coming. Up the right-of-way road to the power line it was already slick, the bare clay still hard but taking his boot print faintly where the filmy ice was gone. He passed a birch that had lost branches, then others, maples too, leaning, limbs torn. The crystal show was over. The more flexible fir and spruce had fared better, ice still glistened deep in the shade of their needles. He combed ice bits out of a bushy branch and watched them melt in his hand. He could have touched her any way he wanted. He could have done the worst of what Starr might be thinking, but he didn’t. Yes, he could feel his blood in his face right now, how could he not think of her, lying there hardly aware of him, but his desire was mixed up with something else, something he and Ned Mohney would never have discussed, never have known about.

How long would it take a car to get clean off the island, not just St. Aubin but the whole of Cape Breton Island around them, a good car, not a truck grinding up the grades?

Innis crossed the break to check the spring, Starr found the water cloudy last week and he wasn’t keen to make his way up here anymore, too long a climb, he said. Innis was winded himself when he leaned into the damp air of the little shed that
sheltered the water. There seemed to be an almost invisible layer of ice on the surface and he tapped his fingers through: the water struck like an electric current it was so cold. He stirred it quickly. No, nothing there, no silt or anything that he could see. Starr was always holding a tumbler of it up to the light like a chemist. Best water in the world, he’d say. But it was open to things that might wander into it up here, this very water that ran from their taps. Later in the morning, if she felt better, Claire might bathe in it, it might rush into a glass she held. Innis touched his tongue to it, drew it back numb. He latched the door. There was a pawprint frozen in the clay mud of the entrance, the same one he’d seen in the snow by that other spring way up the power line. The big cat? But it hadn’t drunk here, not since a while ago when someone left the door unlatched.

He was ragged out. He’d slip and slide back to the road and try to hitch to the old wharf, walk if he had to. Father Lesperance’s place seemed highly appealing, peaceful, almost his own. Starr had crossed a line, he’d never been this uptight before about anything. But there was sun in the sky, warm on Innis’s face when the wind let up. All around him the sheathes of ice were thinning, brightly transparent, trickling away.

HE RAISED THE
front room window of the cottage and leaned out, inhaling the air. He had napped on the couch for a little and now he studied the Captain’s house across the road. Captain John MacQueen. Grew up in North St. Aubin. Lived in Florida until summer was well-arrived, then came back for three months, to that house. Snowbird. Snow goose. Who looked after it while he was gone? Nobody within sight, even on a clear day rising out of an ice storm.

No, it wouldn’t be a break-in. He wouldn’t break a thing.

Innis squinted into the crawl space: room enough. Cold pipes. The grey tufts of old spider nests. Stored lumber toward one corner said there must be a hatch nearby, and there it was not far from the water pump. He pushed up through a throw rug in the bedroom and did not move: fear and thrill of a strange house, of surprise, of alarm. Someone home, or not? The furniture was draped with plastic and old sheets, but he barely took a breath as he crept tensely through all five rooms, everything at rest and unused. He picked the receiver off the wooden wall phone, startled to hear a voice: the phone was still connected. Feeling as if his own breath might give him away, he started to hang up but caught a few words the woman was saying in her gentle, unhurried brogue: “…  no, she’s just living there with him and the young fella, hhyes, well, you know what he’s like,” and the woman at the other end said, laughing, “Don’t I ever!” He wanted to hear more but was afraid to stand there with a receiver in his hand.

It had never occurred to him they were local topics, Starr and Claire and himself. Things got around fast here, true or untrue. Had Starr even thought he could put it over that she was only a boarder? He had never seemed to care much what people thought when it came to him and women, but suddenly Innis didn’t want Claire seen as some kind of tart, Starr’s mistress or live-in girlfriend or whatever. Some other woman, it might not have mattered. But now they were other people’s business, both of them, and “the young fella.” Even so, they knew nothing about Innis, what he’d grown up with in Watertown, the gusts of merriment that at times had swept through his mother’s apartment, when he was taken up and
joshed, fed Saturday night snacks men and their girlfriends brought in brown bags. Or once in awhile when their noise was not like celebration but deranged almost, craziness, everyone shouting in different voices at once, the clumsy, mean jokes, roaring, bawling, the night wearing into the shocking sound of glass—tumblers clattering, busting on the floor, bottles colliding, the sharp hiss of beer caps, an ice tray splintering open like wood. And the sudden turns that sometimes happened against his bedroom wall, a jarring crash. Then the murmured sounds of cleaning up. Someone, maybe his mother, remembering he was in the next room, You want him to see the police here, is that it? And one time they did come. Their dark uniforms, which made them seem enormous to him, changed the tone of everything and Innis was afraid they had come for him. He could hear the buzz of the light over the kitchen sink, nobody talking now but the cops, sometimes polite, sometimes bullying and irritable, but regardless they were bad news, nothing good ever came in the door with them, not when he was a small boy and not later. Innis would see them again and again, the police, not because of a brawling kitchen party but to ask if Innis Corbett lived there and was he at home, they wanted to talk to him, and he might be lying in that same bed just off the kitchen, his door closed, waiting for his mother to lie or not lie, depending on her mood or how he stood with her that day, to send the cops packing or step aside. But these were things the women on the phone need never know, or Starr either.

In the stone fireplace, its mouth smeared with soot, the chimney whispered as chimneys did. He thought he heard dripping but it was the movement of a quartz clock in the
shape of a square-rigger. On the wall at eye level was a brass barometer. He tapped the glass as he’d seen Starr do. The needle rose a notch, into “change.” Good. No, he would not rip it off. He would steal nothing in this house.

He opened doors as he found them, looking for signs of the Captain, of his captainness and his MacQueenness. Another bachelor. Everything stowed seaman-neat, boxed, wrapped in plastic, bound with cord and expert knots. In a hall closet two navy blue uniforms hung, gold braid visible through the grey garment bags. Innis pulled out a coat and tried it on in the door mirror, the man must be shorter and stouter than himself, but who couldn’t look good in this getup, all bulk and braid, anything could be an order, a demand, a dressing down with this on your back. Innis buttoned it up. Along a wall was a framed print of a Nova Scotia schooner, sails huge with wind, a river of sea over her lee rails. Underneath it two more framed ships, Great Lakes freighters, dignified in black and white iron, their blunt bows pushing into the sea, trailing grey reliable smoke. Innis had cousins who’d worked the lakeboats, they’d come through Watertown on their way to spring fit-out and after lay up in late fall, stopping for a night or two, travelling that Cape Breton road, part of the kitchen crowd. Lots of Cape Bretoners down on the Lakes, Starr said, good place for you, good pay, if you could get on with the Canadians, the American outfits couldn’t hire you of course, not now. Of course.

A sink tap emitted a gasp when he turned it. Dry. His uncle’s face lingered in his mind, something had sparked in his eyes Innis hadn’t seen before.

Another door. It opened into dark, but he smelled it: a clay
floor, pungent with old oil. Touches of sheen, of polished metal, and he stepped almost reverently down into the garage. White winter light flared along the edges of the locked doors and his eyes adjusted to it and picked out the car slowly. He ran his hands along its cold smooth lines. Christ, it was a Cadillac; just about brand-new and beautifully kept, black, had to be black with the chrome standing out like that. The man had waxed it before he put it away. Innis bounced the bumper: yes, that ride, smooth and heavy, a dream. He put his nose to the slightly lowered window, smelled the cool leather inside, the carpeting that would absorb the hush of his own breathing. Who would have guessed a Caddy lurked in this old shed of a garage stinking of spilled gasoline, suited more to a beat-up truck or tractor? In the dusk the white sidewalls glowed, and Innis could hear the crunch of gravel, big tires just beginning to roll, backing, then the pause, the pulse of the engine as you pulled away, sweet and deep. Then you were gone.

He blew on his fingers as he frisked the fenders and panels. No. A guy like old MacQueen wouldn’t keep a key here. But Innis couldn’t stop touching the car: he wanted that wheel in his hands, just to sit there, light up and let it take him somewhere, the radio on low. In ten minutes that Caddy would be warm as a bed. Crazy to think about it. Fed up hanging around the house like a grounded kid, he’d find the key, he’d be back.

He returned the uniform coat to the closet, spread the rug neatly over the floor hatch, just like MacQueen would, a man who shared his taste in automobiles, then he slipped out the back door, setting the lock behind him. Piece of cake.

A miner on his day off picked him up, driving back to
The Mines with his family after a spin around St. Aubin Island. The ice was pretty, one of two girls said from the back seat, bouncing up to her father’s ear, lowering her voice. “Wasn’t it, Daddy?” “It is,” he said, turning to Innis. “It’s the silver thaw we came out for, but damned if it isn’t melting fast.” The dad had forearms so white and bare they seemed too large for him, he steered with cramped movements as if there were fog and not a damp cold glitter everywhere, a blood-slow thaw, clear as glass. His wife spoke sharply to the two little girls sharing the seat with Innis but he said, “They don’t bother me, I like kids,” which was a lie, all kids were a pain in the ass, they just kept you back, curtailed you, nailed you to the floor, like he’d done to his mother. At the mailbox the girls yelled goodbye to him a dozen times.

I
NNIS KEPT CLEAR OF
the house as much as he could. Starr stayed home while Claire got back on her feet, tending to her until she grew irritable, impatient with sickness. Starr took to staring hard out windows, a cigarette burning in his hand. Innis preferred his uncle talking, he missed the easy focus it gave. Silences, then a few words Starr refused to spin into conversation, and Innis thought, fine, let it die. It wasn’t for him to string small talk along. Starr was the man, it was his house. Another Friday loomed, a day Innis hated: it just dumped him into the weekend. Not even any fun in the kitchen now, Claire and his uncle strained and housebound.

Returning from the woods, he crossed the drab sod hard as stone underfoot, the day closing into cold again. He wanted to smoke, so he turned toward the barn. The culvert ditch had a membrane of ice, slivered with wan afternoon light. Earlier the sun, now a dim glare along the mountain ridge, had softened the dead grasses, glinting hillocks of old hay. Innis grabbed at brittle bush canes and snapped them as he passed. Snow, receding into the shadowy edges of woods, looked like the stranded foam of waves. He pulled down a chokecherry branch: not a bud. Saplings in the fields were no more than switches. A low shrub grey as lace, he would learn its name when summer arrived. That is, if he was still here, instead of sticking what he had in a suitcase and getting lost in a city on the mainland. Ways of getting lost. He’d be an expert, the way things were going. What about Halifax? St. John in New Brunswick? He’d have to find out about those towns.