Cape Breton Road (27 page)

Amid the shufflings and stirrings that followed, people rising into talk, Innis slipped out a side door, he didn’t want to repeat that agonizing processional, him the mute relative lost in others’ reminiscences. The rain had lightened to a blustery mist and he clutched his collar shut, wandering into the churchyard. Jesus, be a shame if he ruined this coat and tie, in Boston they’d arrest you in a getup like this. He hunched under a birch tree, looking out over the gravestones, granite, a few newer with polished red faces, older ones white or grey, their lettering abraded, obscured by lichen. Beyond, the strait, its grey water snarled with white, widened toward the ocean. Last night they were in the dark, after all, he and Claire, it was all touch and breath and tongues in the darkness. He wished he knew what was in her head. She was older, she had other things in her life, other men. The girls Innis had known, they had all been new to it just as he was, just as clumsy, uncertain, blindly excited, no other intimacies in their past, or so he’d thought. Starr, on the ride home, had said not a word, his steering a bit unsteady but good enough to stay on the road, Claire staring out the passenger window humming quietly, inside herself, Innis in the back seat again like the kid after a family outing, strapped for any line of conversation that would draw in the three of them. He hadn’t wanted to talk
anyway, only to reach out and touch Claire, lay his hand on her shoulder to remind her, listen, we have been somewhere tonight, for a little while we left everybody in the world behind. It drove him crazy that he could not be alone with her now, that Starr was there, worse in his silence than in his gab.

Innis wandered among the headstones, reading names and inscriptions. So many died young, years and years ago, young and sometimes close together. Sickness probably. Two MacLeods, brothers, drowned at sea 1886, one Innis’s age. Well, if you had to die young, that wasn’t a bad way, was it, sink in a storm? Would have been a sailboat of some kind, that. So man lieth down, and riseth not. The truth of that was all around him. But it only sharpened his sense of luck, that he was wet and breathing and could smell fresh roses on the next grave. Maybe he could get work on a fishing boat. That was suddenly appealing, rain streaming down his face, there was something about this weather that thrilled him. But he remembered that on the way here they’d passed through Big Bras D’Eau where most of the fishermen moored, selling their lobster at the government wharf, but the season was over, the boats were hauled out.

I
T DID NOT SURPRISE
him that Claire went cool on him. Not that she wasn’t friendly or wouldn’t talk with him, she just wouldn’t talk about them, her and Innis. She would hug him hello and goodbye in the kitchen, Starr looking on, she’d even
kiss him, a loud cousin kiss, self-conscious, almost comical, though Innis didn’t laugh. Only once, when they met at the top of the stairs, she gave him a quick, fierce kiss as if it were a hit and he’d have to take whatever high it gave him. He went along, maybe he was colluding with her to douse whatever Starr remembered or thought he remembered about the night of the dance. The man had nothing but suspicion to go on, and instincts, which were, in this case, too sharp to take lightly. All right, Claire blurted out at supper one day, tired of his barbs, flinging her knife on her plate, we went for a swim, it was hot, so what, for Christ’s sake, leave it alone. A swim? Starr said, turning to Innis, and what is it you’re good at, breast-stroke? Backstroke? Of course you had your suits on under your clothes, eh? His uncle’s sarcasms went on until Claire blew up, told him she would leave if he didn’t quit. So he let the subject fade when she was around, but prodded Innis with it like a sharp finger in his back. You sneaked off, you little bastard, he said to him when they were alone, the two of you, don’t ever do that to me.

By himself at the shore, leaning against the old skiff, Innis called up Claire with a fine-tipped ballpoint, in detail meticulous as an engraving. Can you do this, Starr? There were the faintest of lines at her eyes, the almost invisible beginnings of middle age, but her eyes, gorgeously large, were what the drawing noticed. He gave her body little quirks and flaws, but they only enhanced what he loved about it. He was watching her differently now. He was sure that it would happen again, that mood and day and circumstance would come together, but it was nothing he could demand. When he finished, he flipped back through the pad, pausing at certain pages. A tiny flower
with twin, nodding blooms. A truck abandoned in the woods whose rusty blue patina had caught his eye, an intricate orb web in its windshield. An osprey’s hefty nest on a powerline pylon, all twigs and branches in the crossbeam. A dead bat lying in grass like a discarded glove. Claire at the dance, her face hidden in swirls of hair. A bouquet of marijuana collas, the way he hoped to see them up above. A crow on the clothesline plucking a button off one of Starr’s shirts. The hemlock plant—he’d forgotten it, his plan to harvest it for Ned. He went off down the beach to see if it was still there. Yes, taller now, its tiny flowers fully formed in radiating clusters. Was it getting stronger, did it mature like pot? He would get back to it soon, it wasn’t going anywhere.

He worked hard on the wooden boat, sanding flaky spots and painting the hull. It was sound enough, Starr said, but the seams would leak for a spell, and so they had while Innis rowed back and forth in the cove on calm days, teaching himself to work the oars, to take the boat on a straight course. Turning was too damned easy, the oars yanked him this way and that the first week, so he was often one-oaring it, re-sighting the bow at a shore mark again and again until he could put the boat directly there with both oars pulling. Water sloshed at his feet until he got nervous and dragged the boat up on the sand, bailing it out with a cut-down bleach bottle. The wood soon swelled and closed the leaks and it was just the hollow clack and swivel of the oarlocks as he ventured further out on a slack tide, but even then there were subtle eddies, and when he had to row against them, when he could feel the boat respond almost eagerly to a current he couldn’t even see, he pulled hard for the cove, his heart pounding, tasting sweat. It never looked
like a mile across to the mountain shore until he was out in the water a ways and that’s when he lost his nerve, afraid the tide would turn on him. And that was all it was really, nerve, he’d get it, he had to.

He hiked into the upper woods, glad to see the power line crew was gone, though their slash was tossed wherever. They’d cleared out not just alders but every mature tree in a gulley that traversed the break, birches, maples, not one of them a threat to the power lines above. You could see a long way now in both directions, the crests of the break as they climbed into the distance. He approached his little clearing as he always had, on a slim, curving path through trees and ferns, you would have to look for it, and even then it could be a deer path, the woods were laced with them. But as he came into the open he stopped dead: his plants were waist high and sturdy in the breeze, their fan leaves fluttering, but he felt that someone had been there, and not an animal. So palpable was it that he walked the perimeter of the clearing, spreading bushes aside, peering into the trees behind. He knelt in places where maybe the grass had been disarranged by a foot, a patch of moss pressed flat. But maybe not. He was not an Indian, not a backwoodsman yet, he couldn’t read broken stalks of soft rushes as anything more than that, he couldn’t say what bent them. Like Starr, he only had suspicions. But the feeling was strong, and sometimes you had to listen to that. Once assured that he was really alone, he went from plant to plant, rubbing their stalks in his thumb and finger, then sniffing his skin: yes! resin! not turpentiney like conifers, but with a sweet component, a tingle in the nostrils, designed for inhaling, it would never thin paint, not this. Three were showing male flowers but he couldn’t bring
himself to pull them out, to hell with it. So the females would not be
sinsemilla
after all, he would still get good money, even males were okay smoke and more than good enough, who’d know the difference here, weed was weed. Nobody could have been here, could they? Too far up, no action up here but the trampings of animals, their night forays, sheltered in darkness. After all nothing was really disturbed, not a leaf was missing or nibbled. He could hardly stand guard up here anyway. The plants were getting serious, another few weeks. There’d been decent rain, so he wouldn’t have to haul from the spring. More damn sun would help. A day of lowering sky, threatening rain, but the clouds were wan and thin, marbled grey and unmoving. He circled the edge of the clearing several times, he would lay down his scent, like the lynx, this territory is mine, enemies take notice. He stood at the head of the path, watching his plants as if they were his flock, straining to detect any sign that a wolf had been through.

But hell, what more could he do here this afternoon? He had a job painting an old barn up the road, Mrs. MacKenzie’s, she wanted it red the way it had been years ago, and its dry shingles were sucking up gallons of stain. Today, on the highest rungs of a long ladder, he would reach the first high gable. And then, in what was left of the afternoon, he would go down to the boat.

His garden was still on his mind as he rowed from one side of the cove to the other, rocking in the gentle waves, thinking. Of all the spots in those woods he might have chosen, had he picked a dangerous one? To lose those plants seemed more terrible than any prospect of arrest. But there was no real evidence of anyone’s having been there, or was he
just failing to decipher it? Lulled by the splashcut of the bow, he shipped the oars for a rest, letting the boat slowly revolve. And there she was on the beach. White blouse, a gay striped towel over her shoulder. Innis took a deep breath, waiting for Starr to appear out of the trees, but he didn’t. Claire saw Innis and waved, but he pretended he hadn’t seen her and with one oar pulled the boat around until the bow was shoreward and he was looking out at the strait. If Starr was on his way, if he was due to show up, then Innis would take the boat further off, up the shoreline, out of hailing. He did not want to be on that sand with her and his uncle, he wouldn’t listen to his talk, not today, no one could make him. But he heard her voice, she was calling to him. He rowed as slowly as he could, his back to her, not looking over his shoulder until the keel scratched gravel and she waded a few steps in and grabbed the bow.

“Dreaming out there, were you?” she said, helping him haul the skiff clear.

“Not really. Starr coming?”

“He went to a funeral, in Sydney. An old cousin.” She cocked her head at him. “He was looking for you to go with him.”

“He’ll have a long look, if it’s the cousin I’m thinking of. You should’ve gone. Can’t beat a good funeral.”

“I’m not in the mood for a funeral, thanks. Innis, you’re getting tanned. That winter pallor is gone.”

“Is it?” He set about scooping water from under the stern thwart. “I wouldn’t think you’d notice, Claire. You notice anything about my uncle?”

“Some things you do, I suppose, and some things you don’t.” She reached for his collar and tugged it straight.
“Youth is fine, even beautiful, in someone like you, but it isn’t everything, kiddo.”

“Tell me, Claire, do you think I don’t know much?”

“You just need a few more years under that beltbuckle there.”

“You like it? It’s World War I. I’d like the army cap that went with it, with the cocky green feather.”

“You’re cocky anyway.”

“My mother used to say that. I don’t think it’s true anymore.”

“Was she pretty, your mother?”

“Still is, I guess. Was yours?”

“She still got looks at fifty, my mother. But that mattered to her too much, getting whistles, winks from the butcher. I thought, God, I don’t want to be that way, wanting looks. I know it has to end. But if you want to give me a look, Innis, I won’t complain.”

“You got your suit on under those jeans? I think Starr requires that now. It’s a regulation.”

“Oh yes, I’m observing the law.” She smiled. “I didn’t know you were a boatman, Innis.”

“Better day for it than swimming.” The light wind had vanished. There were no waves in the cove and the water sat against the shore as if it had been poured. In the clear green shallows a purple jellyfish bloomed and closed, bloomed and closed, others just helpless blobs in the sand. “I’ll take you out, if you like.”

She wrapped the towel around her like a shawl, looked at the sky, its dark, still clouds. “All right, Innis. Be my boatman.”

His shoes were wet anyway, so he pushed the boat off and
stepped in, Claire in the stern seat. She sat comfortably, her hands clasped between her knees as he poled out of the shallows. He set the oars in the locks and fell into the rhythm that was becoming familiar to him, Claire looking past him out into the strait where he pointed the bow. If he rowed hard he could make the other shore on this slack tide and what happened after that he didn’t care. He was in good shape, he could pull this boat all day if he had to, his wake was good, straight as a road. The cove slowly receded into shorebank backed with woods. Ah, the ever-present woods. Innis felt liberated from them, there was no sound but clatter of oarlocks, the synchronized splash of the blades.

“Everything looks different out here,” Claire said. “You can see so far down the strait.”

“Only a few miles to the sea. Beyond the big bridge you can just make out the narrows there. After that, hey, it’s the ocean, Claire.”

“Some other day, all right?”

“I never get other days with you, Claire. That’s the trouble.”

“Let’s enjoy this one, captain. Look up there!” She pointed above the cove where Starr’s house appeared on the hill, black-roofed and white-sided, and soon, further east, the grey barn, the wild fields.

“I like it better from here,” Innis said, picking up his pace, leaning deep into his strokes.

The rain was at first so light it turned the smooth grey surface to sandstone. They both laughed at its touch, raising their faces, opening their mouths. A cormorant, up from a long dive, took fright, its wings skipping water until it was barely airborne, propelling its long black neck seaward. Even the currents
seemed just tones, the texture of fossil. Save for the whisper of rain, the stillness extended deep and wide and they were suspended in it: that was what brought Innis up short—the sensation of not moving anywhere in spite of his muscular rowing. He glanced behind him over the bow: this was farther than he had ever rowed and, Jesus, they weren’t but a quarter way across, the mountain hardly nearer. His wake was meandering.