Cape Breton Road (8 page)

She was taller than he thought, tall as Starr anyway, her long black sweater cinched at the waist in a wide lavender belt. Innis directed her into the hall, flipping on the light so he could point out the old photographs, making up names if he couldn’t recall what Starr had told him, “But that’s my mother’s father with one of his pals, out on the town, I guess, see the bowler hat in his hand? My mother’s dad, he was a bricklayer, in the steel mill in Sydney mostly, bricking the furnaces.” “He’s handsome,” Claire said, and Innis wanted to tell her, People think I look like him. “This is the parlor,” he said, “the furniture’s old as hell, most of it. I guess my great-uncle made the tables, the beds and dressers upstairs, a good carpenter, like my grandfather. The rockers are his, the pine cupboard. People here flung a lot of stuff in the fire, Starr says, they thought it was dreary, they wanted new things, especially after the war, you know? But the folks hung on to it in this house. It’s dreary all
right, that old dark varnish.” “Not really,” she said, “they’re antiques now. They have the atmosphere of another time, that’s all. Sometimes atmosphere is everything.” She ran her finger across the mantle of the fireplace and held it up to him, smiling. “Okay, okay,” he said, “we’re behind in our dusting. The fireplace is always cold, Starr doesn’t use it. That TV is something, isn’t it? I think my grandfather built it.”

Innis let her go ahead of him up the stairs, watching her hips move under her wool skirt, her expensive leather boots allowing him just a glimpse of her leg. Too much to hope that his uncle would get held up and he’d have this woman to entertain into the evening. Maybe this Russ guy would be more than Starr bargained for, a real tussle, the Mounties would be called in.… He moved ahead of her, turning on lights. He showed her the bathroom first. “This was a little bedroom once, until the plumbing came in. Starr has lots of outhouse tales. You know, how rugged it was, the slop bucket and all that, chamberpots, cold water.” She shivered. “It is cold up here. Big quilts, I hope.” “Trunkfuls. Here’s the spare bedroom. I’ll do the bed up for you, I know where the sheets are. Unless, I mean …” He had passed Starr’s bedroom without a word even though the door was wide open, the bed neatly made. He didn’t even want to consider that she and Starr might share it, yet he felt like a hostelkeeper or somebody’s dad, steering her to the safe bedroom, next to his own. But she touched his arm to put him at ease. “This room will do fine. A big tree out the window. And wallpaper!” “I hate it,” he said, “but it’s not as bad as mine.” He pointed her to the next room. “Look.”

“Oh,” she said. “You draw.”

Innis stayed in the doorway while Claire went from sketch
to sketch, peering close, then leaning back. “Nice, you’re very good. That old man’s face, terrific. Who is he?”

“Old guy up the road. He’s about a hundred years old. I put the army cap on him, with the feather. He didn’t pose that way, I just did him from memory. Dan Rory MacRitchie.” He watched her long slender fingers drift absently over the glass shade of his lamp, his radio, the feathers in a cracked vase. A woman in his room. Too much. “Sometime I’ll draw you, since you’re going to be around.”

“I’d like that. But flatter me if you can.”

“Piece of cake.”

“Good God, are you a hunter?” She reached up to touch the deer skull. “That’s gruesome.”

“He’s like a pal now, I can’t go to sleep without him. I don’t hunt, I found him in the woods.”

At the head of the stairs she paused by a closed door. “Another bedroom?”

“God, no. The attic, full of junk. I mean, to the rafters. Just step in the door and you’re filthy.”

She stared at it until Innis felt his heart pick up. For a few moments he had the urge to tell her everything, to open it and show her there was something in there that was only his. Instead he reached out and rattled the knob. “See? Locked. Hey, you haven’t seen the little corner cellar where they used to store their food.”

“Maybe I’ll skip that, Innis, for now.”

“If you hear cracking and groaning, by the way, it’s not me, it’s the foundation. Unmortared stones.”

“I should call my old number. I don’t know what’s going on over there.”

“Don’t reveal any secrets. There’s always about six dozen locals tuning in.”

She laughed. “The same in Black Rock. I’m used to it.”

There was no answer at her old address but Starr was back just after dark, banging two suitcases through the back door, flushed, out of breath, highly pleased with himself and ready for talk. If anyone phones, he told Innis, we are not at home. He brought in sacks of groceries and sat at the table smoking cigarettes and drinking rum while Claire cooked them thick steaks and potatoes and peas on the big old stove instead of the smaller propane one, amused, Starr coaching her, You got to be a bit of a fireman, dear, to run that thing. Russ the ex-whatever had not been home after all, his car was gone, and Starr had gathered up the suitcases, one of them lying open in the yard, her underthings a scatter of color. Innis stayed out of the conversation, content with his meal, listening, cadging looks at Claire. He’d thought her eyes were dark brown but they were really an intense, inky blue.

“My dad was a crackerjack farmer, Claire, you know,” Starr said. “Maybe we could get this place going again, you and me.”

“What about Innis?” she said.

“Innis is just passing through. He’s got other fish to fry, if he can hook them.”

“Yep, I’m always on the move.” Innis tried to sound flippant but he was hurt. His uncle’s plans were fantasies anyway, so all the more reason to include him. “I need a city. A big city.”

“Yeah,” Starr said. “One without cars in it.”

Innis shot him a look but Starr, his hands working the air, had already forgotten, his scenario was expanding with each
glass of rum as he gabbed away to Claire as if they were newlyweds. He would sell the old farm and move to British Columbia, good work and wages there, or he’d re-enlist in the navy, they had such good pensions now he could put in ten more years and be sitting pretty. He could get his license on the Great Lakes, the lakeboats needed men with his background, engineer types. Good money, but maybe he shouldn’t be away from home that long. No, he wanted to be here, he was sure they could make something of this land again. Hell, at the very least he would turn his woodlands over to silviculture, the government would kick in the money for that and he’d have an income steady as trees. Full circle, he was back on the farm, even ready to pull Innis into it.

“My father ran this place almost alone. Him and his brother, Uncle Malcolm, they could make damn well anything they needed, iron or wood, b’y, they had their own forge. We could get into the swing of it, sure, we’ll bring the old orchard back, we’ll plow a few acres, get us a few cows, pigs, some laying hens, we have great water here. Sheep I don’t care for, though I know people who do. We could farm this, me and you. Eh, Innis? Couple strong lads like us? Claire behind us?” Their eyes met and for an instant Innis wanted to believe him, believe in some wild idea of work, of family, brown furrows trailing behind them, the clash of machinery, grain running through their fingers, their hungry talk in a hot kitchen at noon, hollyhocks under the window like he’d seen in a photo in the hall, someone calling them home, a woman like Claire in the house. “What would we grow?” Innis said, and Starr’s grin brought them back to earth. “You’d want to raise opium poppies or something along that line, eh?” and Innis, his
mouth suddenly dry, smiled stupidly. Were his precious seeds waking, right over their heads?

“Not me,” he said, turning away. “How about potatoes?”

Innis rinsed dishes slowly in the sink. He did not want to leave Claire to his uncle, she looked wiped out, chin in her hand, smiling now and then by way of reply while Starr pulled his horizons back to the borders of his own land. “B.C.? It’s full of hippies. There’s not a speck of farmer in me or Innis either. Leave here? God, I joined the navy to get away from it. Then home I come and my dad dies sudden, before I figured anything out.” He laughed, there was a scrape of a match as he lit another Export. “Jesus, Claire, can you see me out there haying? You bringing me out a jar of spring water sweetened with oatmeal?”

“Perhaps,” she said. “I wouldn’t know unless I tried it.”

Surely she knew by now, after weeks of seeing him, how wound up Starr could get when the rum was in him, and of course her very presence fueled his main weakness: even on the work days of his life there was always just under the surface an urge to celebrate if there was a promise of a woman’s company. Innis had seen it before: a phone call, a coded conversation to thwart the eavesdroppers and Innis as well, and soon he was dressed and gone. But now she was here, at home, in his own place.

“What about that silviculture you mentioned, Starr?” she said calmly. “All those acres of trees, and Innis to help you.”

“I’m not growing wood for the goddamn government, them and their chemicals. Leave the trees like they are. They don’t need poisons. Right, Innis? He’s a wood rat. He knows. Been up above lately? Check the
fuaran
when you’re up there, the water’s a little slow.”

Innis could have told him, No wonder the spring is low, all the baths you’re taking lately, but he didn’t because he wanted Claire to feel she could bathe whenever she liked.

“I’ll have a look tomorrow, Starr. There’s a bed for Claire made up. Two quilts and another folded if she needs it.”

“You’re right on top of things,” Starr said. “We’ll ring if we need you.”

“Thank you, Innis,” Claire said. “I’m going to need that bed pretty soon.”

He left them talking and wandered outside. The wind had turned damp, he tasted fog in the air. Through the steam-streaked window he could see his uncle leaning across the table, taking Claire’s hand. She said something to him, smiled, stood up. Then she stretched, arching her back slowly, and Innis ached watching her bend toward Starr and kiss him.

In the toolshed, the lightbulb above him smudged from his dirty hands, Innis pushed tools around, lifted them, dropped them noisily. He honed the big axe with a whetstone, brightening the blade-edge. There was a smell of old grease and metal and rust. He’d started on those goddamn woods of Dan Rory and Finlay’s, busting his ass for nothing, not a penny. He slipped off his belt and buffed the brass snake with a bit of steel wool, rubbed an oily cloth over the leather. Wind gusted in the door and he looked out at the house: a light in Starr’s room, and the bathroom. They were going to bed. He’d wait for awhile after the lights were out.

The cold air of the attic surprised him and he feared for his seeds. Surely they were getting heat from the kitchen ceiling, this had been Granny’s weaving room, it couldn’t have been too cold for her. He had not looked under the loom for
three days or so and the seeds were overdue to pop up. He lifted the tinfoil curtain a few slow inches, prepared to scuttle his vision of five-lobed leaves swaying in a hot breeze. But God, there they were, all of them, sprouts curling out of the soil in odd little postures, lifting their seed heads out of sleep, their jackets open and still clinging, duller than when he’d peered at them in his palm. He held them one by one, puffed motes of dry soil from their heads and stalks. Underneath the small peat pots tiny white roots were already probing and soon he’d have to put them in bigger pots. He dipped each one in the water crock to soak the peat and set them back on their bed of gravel, the fine stone warm to the touch. Good. Cold water was fine to taste but not for growing. He could not stop smiling, he wanted to squat there and watch them ease their heads toward the light, be there when the first leaves appeared. But he was already shivering, as much from nerves as from the early April air. He had followed the book like a catechism. The author, a portly young man in a bushy black beard and a T-shirt that said
FLOWER POWER
, wrote in a chummy tone Innis had liked immediately: they were both engaged in a conspiracy against authoritarian forces devoted to coming between them and good weed. This enterprise involved high risk and a measure of love. The book was more like talk than a text, like maybe the way Innis’s grandfather had instructed Starr about farming, in a commonsense but feeling way, even if the crops were different, to be sure, and Starr had come to enjoy reminiscing about that hard work, not performing it, whereas for Innis the pleasures and rewards had just begun. Soil? the author said. Just dirt, pardner, and if it ain’t good dirt, you don’t get good weed. Innis had studied the illustrations of
cartoon pot plants: over-fertilized, their mouths rounded in alarm; water-starved, they hung withered and mournful. Chemical stuff is poison, pardner, if you don’t use it right, so go easy. But water is life. Innis knew that the ten-foot marijuana stalk the man stood next to on the last page of the book had not grown anywhere near Nova Scotia, not in Cape Breton for sure. The guy didn’t know the conditions on this island, the short summers and killing frosts in June. So Innis was writing a chapter of his own. Make them happy any way you can, the author said, they have to be happy to thrive. That made sense. Innis could not say he was happy himself, but he was harder and wiser than he had been, and that was good enough for now. He lowered the moth-shot blankets over the loom, preserving his corner of early summer.

I
NNIS’S AXE SOUNDED SHARPLY
through the trees as he notched a tall spruce, dead from top to root and ready to fall with the next storm, its crown lost in mist. A fine dry rain of needles flickered into his hair. He had worked up a good sweat and sore hands, coming up here early in the morning out of a restless sleep, certain he had heard Claire’s dreamy murmurs through the wall of the next bedroom. But maybe he’d been dreaming, though when he woke he remembered only feelings, a tender, unfocussed desire that had everything to do with her. Sure, he had a boner but he had that every morning: sex or death, that flag would fly. He drove the axe bit in so deep he
had to rest before he levered it out. Jesus, he’d listened at his bedroom wall a good many times until his mother realized that he was growing up on the other side. He’d been just her little boy in the next room who was supposed to have other things on his mind than putting his ear to the plaster. She couldn’t guess how he was deciphering what he heard, that his imagination made up in power what it lacked in accuracy. But Claire, well. Claire.