Cape Breton Road (30 page)

“Not hungry.” His axe was in the vise and he gave the blade a few listless rasps with a file. “Starr will be, though.”

“We have to get on with each other, all of us, Innis.”

“I get on with you. Isn’t that good enough?” He smiled.

“Don’t be saucy. Listen, I’d like to go over to the Gaelic Mod. I’ve never been, and Starr hasn’t been for years he said. It’s a lovely afternoon. We can all go together.”

“No, you guys go.”

She stepped inside and pulled his face close to hers. “It’s Sunday. Together. That means you too.”

“I have a present for you.”

“What’s the occasion? It’s not my birthday, it’s not anything.”

When she saw him take the earrings from under a newspaper, she frowned, but she stood still as he hooked them into her pierced lobes, delicately, as if he were threading a needle. He stepped back.

“Innis, they’re lovely but I can’t take them. Jewellery like this is expensive. Please.”

“Turn your head a little, slowly. Far out. They had your name on them, Claire.”

“You need your money, Innis. Please don’t spend it on me.”

“You have to take them, Claire. They’re a gift.”

“I have no choice. Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“I’ll wear them until Starr shows up. Better that he doesn’t see them.”

“I don’t care if he does.”

She kissed him. “It wouldn’t be worth the aggravation, now would it? Let’s keep things calm until …”

“Until what?”

“I don’t know yet, Innis. Do you?”

He didn’t want to answer and so they walked out into the lower field, in the strong sun the silver earrings flashed against her hair, her skin, the turquoise like flowers, and he thought she had never looked more beautiful, the goldenrod higher than the hay, it was like pausing in a river with her, in currents of windswept grass, the trees thrashed with sound, flowing and subsiding. The strait was deep blue between woods and the dark mountain, waves on the water like quick strokes of chalk. He was about to ask her to walk to the shore with him when he heard the Lada grinding down the driveway. Claire said nothing, but before she turned she slipped the earrings off and pushed them into the pocket of her jeans.

“I’ll ask him about the Mod,” she said.

Innis squinted past her at his uncle climbing out of the car, looking over at them, cupping a cigarette to his mouth.

“That grove of old hemlocks, in the lower woods. I was hoping we’d go back there.”

“You want to draw me in those trees again? This wouldn’t be the day for it.”

“Is there going to be a day?”

He watched her make her way back through the field, combing the heads of goldenrod as she went. They were both watching her, he and Starr, but each other too as she moved between them, and Innis would have to give her up to him for another afternoon, another day, another night. He remembered that first afternoon when she meant nothing to him but
a woman in a wide-brimmed hat, kissing his uncle, but she did not kiss him now, she did not linger in his embrace, and after talking briefly they went into the house, Claire waving to Innis, motioning him home.

Innis moved deeper into the field, skirting that grassy depression in the ground marking the only time the spring had gone dry, the well Starr dug drunk, angry, coming home from the navy, they had to lug pails up from the brook, and he told his father, Dig a decent well, for Christ’s sake, why are we still without water in the house? And he’d grabbed a mattock and a shovel and started digging, right here in the field, he still had his uniform on, and it didn’t take longer than this shallow bowl in the soil for the rum to burn up the energy he had left in him after a long ride on a train, civilian freedom driving him again and again to put that bottle to his mouth, to pass it around, to sing, to lean over the seat of a pretty woman coming home to Cape Breton too and tell her all the bullshit things he was going to do, and then finally he’d stood up there at the mailbox, here he was, home, and everything looked the same down to every detail just as it had the day he left. I would’ve dug that well to China that afternoon, he’d told Innis, just desperate to get away and I don’t even know why. It had me again, home, I wouldn’t leave, couldn’t leave, I knew that. But how? Innis had said, troubled that there might be something in this place that could short-circuit your own will. How? Starr said. I can’t explain it, it’s just there. But Innis didn’t believe that anymore, he could feel his departure gathering inside him, not clear and exact, not day, means, destination, not written down and paid for, but there.

On his way back to the house he stumbled and pitched forward into the grass. Jesus, the scythe Starr had used weeks ago, just cast it down here and left it, the blade rusting away, an ugly cut waiting for someone. To hell with it, let it stay here, let Starr search it out when he’s in his haying time again.

“Y
OU THINK THEY’D LET
me in this college, Starr?” Innis said.

“Not if I was running it.” They stood in a hot sun on the grounds of the Gaelic College waiting for Claire to come out of the gift shop. The mown green was flanked by neat log structures local men had built before the War. Bagpipes wailed in and out of song, down a hill, out of sight, but a girl in Highland dress seemed to be tuning up in the center of the green. “It’s not a real college anyway. Some minister’s notion, back in the thirties. He figured we weren’t keeping our heritage alive so he got this going. Oh he was Scotch all right, from the old country, but he couldn’t even say pass the bread in Gaelic. This is all it came to after a while. Summertime classes, piping and dancing, kids mostly, some Gaelic tossed in. Good Scotch fiddling here now and then, our music, I’ll show up for that.”

“That fiddler at the dance we went to, he ever play over here?”

“He’s dead.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I went to his wake. If it wasn’t him, it was somebody who damn well looked like him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You? Now what would I tell you for?

“I was there, I saw him at the dance.”

“That night’s cut into your memory, has it? But it wasn’t the fiddler, was it. It’s not his tunes you’re calling up.”

Innis tightened his jaw and concentrated on the girl piper who was fixing her lips primly on the chanter. She pumped the bag full and wailed and Innis had to smile at the martial shrill of her pipes, her frilled blouse, her earnest slender fingers, the way the pleats fell neatly along the curve of her butt. Tourists who’d emerged from a bus milled around her briefly and moved on. Innis watched her foot, tapping time, too soft to hear, not like those shoes at the Gaelic church service, beating time under the pews to something he could feel and remember but not explain. She sounded a little rough around the edges and he guessed you couldn’t get away with a lot of that on the pipes, not without somebody killing you. Maybe the tourist geeks made her nervous. Pretty knees, what he could see of them between the stockings and the hem of her kilt, her fingers doing a slow dance on the chanter, hugging air under her arm. A long braid down her back, and those fine pleats. He’d draw her if he had his pad. He’d done a sketch of the fiddler too, from memory, but he wouldn’t tell Starr that, not now, not anymore.

“Maybe I should move out,” he said suddenly.

“Sooner the better.”

Innis didn’t want to answer, his heart was in his tongue, it had just popped out of him, he wanted to tell Starr, Listen, I’ll be out of this place sooner than you think, I got buds coming in up on the hill, they’ll be big as your fingers in a while,
sweet as roses. He could see his uncle drawing hard on his cigarette, the cords in his neck flexing. There seemed no way for them to talk anymore without it whirling down to that night, that beach, and they always seemed to pull back just before crashing. Dangerous swimming in the Great Bras D’Eau at night, currents there can sweep you out to sea, Starr would say out of nowhere, a walking hard-on is one thing, but a swimming hard-on, now that’s a danger to navigation. The weeks had only inflamed his suspicions, far from fading them out: what he hadn’t seen was more powerful than what he had. In those early months with his uncle, Innis had joked with him, shared humor with him, it had made things bearable, they’d listened to
Dr. Bandolo’s Pandemonium Medicine Show
on the CBC, though Innis found the skits funnier than Starr did. If you knew what a man laughed at, you knew something about him. It troubled Innis more that things had gone sour between them than if they’d had a solemn relationship from the beginning: the bitterness felt deeper, even dangerous. To become so serious and unpredictable, to fear something you can’t kid about anymore, that hurt, that put you on edge. Just talking made them feint like boxers.

“Maybe I was kidding,” Innis said.

“Maybe you weren’t.”

He did not want Starr to kick him out. He did not want to be ordered away from the house. Stronger than the memory of the fiddler who’d died so fast, he remembered the immigration officer who had escorted him into the plane at Logan Airport: they had to board first, with cripples in wheelchairs, the man took him straight to his seat and watched him as he fumbled with the seat belt, stood there until he was settled
into that seat and staring out a misty porthole at the ground crew manhandling luggage, and then the agent waited beside the stewardess at the forward door while she greeted passengers, his eyes never leaving Innis, as if Innis might, before takeoff, burst out the emergency door and flee into the back streets of Boston, miles away. The guy had told him while they were waiting in the airport lounge, Innis’s face stuck in a magazine, that Innis would have had an Immigration officer on either side of him if he were dangerous, a dangerous criminal. There’d be two of us, one for each arm, he’d said. And we’d take you all the way into Halifax, the airline wouldn’t accept you otherwise, we’d all fly together. Innis had said, turning a page, Sorry I spoiled it for you guys, a free trip to Halifax, gee. The man looked at him sideways. The Mounties already know about you over there. They know about you at Immigration Canada. There’ll be a lookout posted when you land, he’ll watch for you. When you get to where you’re going, the Mounties will have a little talk with you probably. You’re on a list at the border crossings, every one. Cross at the Yukon, won’t matter. You’re a known man, Mr. Corbett, but I wouldn’t be proud of it. The officer did not leave his post until they were ready to close the door, he stepped out of the plane at the last minute, a final, sealing glance at Innis. The stewardess was polite, gave Innis her smile, but she and the others had him in their eyes, he knew that, and he’d wished just then he was dangerous as hell, manacled, all suppressed fury, wedged between two burly INS. Barrier for life, the man had reminded him while they were killing time. I hope you like it up there, he said, don’t expect it to be Boston, they don’t even have a baseball team. At Halifax an official had plucked him out of the line and
he had to prove himself a citizen of Canada, the birth certificate his mother had dug out, registered Sydney, Nova Scotia. Then they let him go. He could’ve gone west just as well as east, all of Canada was out there, rolling away, endless, and nowhere in that direction would he be a known man.

“There’s Claire,” Innis said. His peripheral vision had caught her immediately, those white shorts and long brown legs, her red sandals. Her hair wonderfully black, a lush flower. “We should let her enjoy herself.”

Starr flicked his cigarette into the grass. “Who’s stopping her, me?”

“Not yet. We only just got here.”

Starr said nothing but reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a wad of paper. He opened his hand long enough to show Innis, then slowly stuffed it away as Claire came up to them smiling. She pulled out of a bag a doll in Highland dress, bonnet to brogues. “For my little neice in Toronto. Cute, eh?”

“Is it male or female?” Starr said. “Hard to tell from here.”

“A little man, I think,” she said. “It won’t matter to her and it doesn’t to me.”

“It would matter to our Innis here. He likes those things correct, in the drawing of them, I mean. Not so, Innis? Well, good fiddling this afternoon, they tell me, and there’s a man who would appreciate it.” Starr moved off through the tour bus crowd fanning out over the grounds.

“He’s strung pretty tight today,” Claire said, watching him shake hands with a man who seemed to be breezily observing the fresh visitors.

“Rum,” Innis said. “Under the car seat.” He thought
about the wad of white paper in his uncle’s hand. “He say anything to you?”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. Me and you.”

“Nothing we haven’t heard before. He has an imagination, your uncle does, and it’s on overtime. Most of it he keeps to himself.”

“Good. I guess.”

“I have other things to do, so I’m seeing him less.” She shaded her eyes: Starr and his friend were heading toward the trees. “Less and less.”

Innis felt the sun and Claire beside him and he wanted to put his arm around her waist, naturally, easily, pull her close to him and walk off with her, nuzzle her face if he felt like it, kiss her discreetly so as not to rile anyone with public display, his lips sliding lightly across her ear, her neck. There was an ache in him to have her in his arms.

“That sounds rather grand,” Claire said, pointing to The Great Hall of the Clans. “Let’s have a look. Starr seems to have disappeared.”

Inside the new log building, in the dusky lighting of the corridor, Claire strolled from one exhibit to the next, peering through the glass, scanning the commentary beneath them. Innis hung back, caught up in the charts and the histories, his eyes roaming over the maps and along the arrows of a long wall display that flowed from Ireland up into the west of Scotland, the Hebrides and the coast. Dalriadic Scots. “I didn’t know they came from Ireland,” he said out loud, but Claire was too far down the hallway. He moved along the major clans and their histories, stopping to study the Campbells,
liking, for the moment, the idea of being linked to their powerful lineage, to a name famous in the Highlands, if not always nobly. There was a chief, kilt blown against his thighs, his face to the wind. Innis wanted a couple tokes to get into it, the spirit of it, but no chance here. A museum, people shuffling along the hall, talking low. He came upon a Highland male in a glass case. The dummy was done up in kilt and sporran and buccaneer shirt, bonnet, wool hose, a knife in one cuff, a
sgian dubh
, the plaque said. The pane was smeared with fingerprints but Innis kept his distance and gave it a hard study. Maybe a secondhand mannequin did not make the best Highlander, its arms arrested in a half-wit pose neither menace nor alarm, a senseless gesture where nothing terrible had occurred, no howling enemies had rushed him with murderous eyes. On one awkward arm had been affixed a targe, a round leather shield, but towels or neckties could have hung there just as easily, the other arm holding a sword aloft like a tennis racquet, the warrior gazing blandly from beneath his feathered bonnet: if there had ever been a fierceness in this dress, it was lost in the stunned, khaki eyes of the dummy. Might be better if they just hung the clothes in there, forget about the mannequin.