Cape Breton Road Read online

  ALSO BY D. R. MACDONALD

  Eyestone

  Copyright © 2000 by David R. MacDonald

  Anchor Canada paperback edition 2001

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher — or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency — is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  MacDonald, D. R.

  Cape Breton Road: a novel

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67437-9

  I. Title.

  PS8575.D6295C36 2001a C813′.54 C2001-902333-2

  PR9199.3.M23C36 2001a

  Published in Canada by

  Anchor Canada, a division of

  Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For Emma, with love and hope

  An cuir tobar a mach as an aon shùil

  uisge milis is searbh?

  Will a spring send forth from the same opening

  water both bitter and sweet?

  —GAELIC SAYING

  The author wishes to thank the following for their help, direct or indirect:

  Richard J. Schrader

  Mike Mullery

  Jack MacDonald

  Jessie MacDonald

  Russell Leblanc

  Dr. Mahmoud and Rae Naqvi

  the late Rev. Randolph MacLean

  June Bonner Arnold

  Gerrit Schuurkamp

  And, in ways beyond measure, Sheila

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  About the Author

  1

  THE POWER LINE CUT like a firebreak through the wooded ridge and Innis could follow it easily now, his private road, could take it a long way beyond his uncle’s boundary and cross, unseen here in the upland, other people’s woods, veering down into them when something caught his eye. The afternoon was growing colder under a lazy snowfall and he captured on his tongue the cool taste of a downy flake. He carried a bucksaw loosely in one hand, in the other his walking stick that beat snow out of boughs, showed him snow depth, ice thinness, heard but unseen water, and if he found himself without the stick, he would retrace his steps in a crouch until he saw where he had set it down, distracted by something he wanted to inspect—tracks, a bush, a hole in the snow that said an animal lives here. Back in his uncle’s woods he’d been thinning young spruce, improving a clearing well above the power line, the spot he had staked out in the fall for his own seedlings. Starr never went up in the trees anymore, would never know what went on there, one way or the other. For what Innis had in mind, summer light in that clearing would do. And it would, by fall, light his way out of here, though at the moment collas swaying in the sun were not easy to conjure.

  His tracks were filling so quickly he could barely see how he’d meandered along the break. He liked his tracks to dip into the lower trees, then out again, a snaking trail someone might follow, looking for whatever creature was at the end of it. Overhead, the power line, two widely spaced cables, sagged gracefully toward a wooden pylon visible on the next rise, then disappeared into the snowgreyed air. If he were to follow it in that direction, east for maybe an hour, he could hit the TransCanada highway and thumb down a car or a semi the way he had last October. People still hitched in this part of the world, even women. But he was not ready for it. He was not a prisoner after all, except to himself, but he knew now the ride out would have to be a long one, all westward. He hadn’t the nerve yet to go it alone in this country, though he would never admit that to Starr, not for a second. He had once wished for nothing but to be back in the streets of Watertown, of Boston better yet, but that city, that whole country down there, was closed to him now, forbidden—a hurt he woke to some days like a bruise in his chest. With some real bucks in his pocket, he kept telling himself, he would find his way maybe to Montreal or Toronto, even all the way to Vancouver, cities big enough to start over in. But last night when he’d looked at a map in Starr’s old atlas, Canada’s vastness disheartened him, diffusing him into its indefinite spaces, unmoored and anonymous, a nobody.

  Now the snow whirled down, gently blinding him in the grey light, and he was weary of this relentless season. A hatred for North St. Aubin seized him so strongly he nearly fell to his knees. That ragged skyline of thick spruce wherever he looked, one little store with a gas pump. March in Watertown could be nasty, sure, but winter wasn’t nailed down like this. Pot plants growing in these woods? A pipedream. In the deep wall of trees below him he saw a few different evergreens, a small grove, stately, fuller, and when he took a branch in his hand and shook it free of snow and felt the long needles like coarse hair, he knew it was a pine, a Scotch pine. A soft swirl of wind soughed through it, a timbre he never heard in the other needled trees. In all his trampings he had come across but a single pine, a white pine hidden in spruce, so old its crown was out of sight. Christmas presents had this smell on them when he was a kid, his mother urging him to tear them open when he tried to save the pretty paper, to hell with it, never mind, she’d say, but he’d liked the figures on the wrapping, the designs. They’d had no Christmas, he and his uncle, Starr said it was mushy, the whole sentimental business, and he spent Christmas day and night in Sydney with some woman, clear of any duties toward or expectations from his nephew boarder. Innis’s mother had always wanted Scotch pine for Christmas. So how about this fifteen-footer, Mom? I’ll ship it to you, you can save it for next year, I won’t be there to haul it up the stairs but your boyfriend can do the honors. He ducked under its branches, snow trembling down his neck as the saw ripped into bark, the blade pungent with resin, sawdust dribbling into the wooly snow like cornmeal, and when the tree fell away from him with a hiss, he drew back and inhaled the turpentine smell. Resin. Jesus, it jacked him up, like that other resin he loved to smoke. He stood panting, snow in his eyelashes, his hair. His back muscles burned, water trickled cool then warm along his spine, over the chill of sweat. The pine lay humbled against the snow. But his angry exhilaration faded with every smoky breath, the satisfaction seared through him so fast he didn’t know what made him do it, just take it down like that. When he heard the faint squeak of footsteps behind him, he thought first, it’s getting colder, the snow is noisy, and then his mind was already racing toward a lie.

  “God, if my dad wasn’t near ninety, he’d kill you.” The man stood planted like a stout child dressed up and sent out into the snow, his big mittened hands at his sides. His face was flushed beneath the brim of a green stocking cap. “He’ll have the Mounties on you, boy, and that’s the least of it.”

  Innis picked up the bucksaw he’d flung down: Starr’s name was c
arved into the handle, and Starr would be wild anyway if Mounties showed up at the door. Well I knew you’d bring them sooner or later, you have this thing with the police, eh?

  “These trees yours?” Innis hated the boyish supplication in his voice, the register it always rose to when he’d been caught. “I didn’t see any signs or anything. I figured they were just anybody’s.”

  The man swung his weight slowly about as if he wore snowshoes, not heavy galoshes. “Trees are always somebody’s,”. he said. “You can’t come into our woods with a saw in your hand. You haven’t the right, you see.”

  Don’t get in trouble like you did in Boston, Starr told him when he first set foot in the house. There’s not the chance, b’y, for one. And for another, they’ll put you away so quick you’ll think you’d never been here.

  “I only cut the one,” Innis said.

  “For what?” The man lifted the pine by its tip like a dead animal.

  “Listen, I’ll pay you, whatever you think it’s worth.”

  The man didn’t seem to hear. “Only stand of trees like this on the whole goddamn island,” he said. He touched the oozing tree stump, then sniffed his glove. “Where you from? Not from here, are you. I can tell by your talk.”

  Innis wanted to tell him I am from here, I left here a baby and my folks are from here clean back to my great-grandfathers. But he didn’t feel the truth of that, it was just what he had been told, and when you were seized in the act, it was not the time to open up a genealogical cupboard the man could rummage in. Like it or not, you’re a Corbett, Starr told him. You don’t have to care about that, I can’t make you. But I care. Your great-grandpa built this house. Don’t shame it.

  “Sydney,” he said. He’d been into Sydney twice with Starr, the big town, malls and all.

  “Who do you belong to? I know all kinds of people in Sydney.”

  “You wouldn’t know mine.”

  “But your name, what’s your name?”

  “MacAskill.” Innis knew there were no MacAskills in North St. Aubin.

  “You Englishtown MacAskills? North River?”

  “No. We haven’t lived here very long.”

  “Queer place to be cutting down a tree, if you live forty miles away. What did you mean by it?”

  “How the hell did you know I was up here?”

  “My dad,” the man said. “ ‘Finlay,’ he said to me, ‘somebody is at the trees.’ He always knows when somebody’s in the woods what don’t belong.”

  “You mean he saw me?” Innis looked into the dark trees around them, blacker now in the late afternoon light. There was no house near, he knew that. “That’s crazy.”

  “He saw you, in a way. My dad sees things the rest of us don’t. What MacAskill are you? Not Jimmy Angus’s family? No.” Snow had whitened the man’s cap, gathered on his thick mackinaw like a shawl. Innis was tensed to run, the slow whirl of flakes closing around him, his heart beating harder now. The guy couldn’t give chase, could he, chubby as he was, and if he sicced the Mounties on him they wouldn’t get here for an hour, spread as thin as they were, and they’d be looking for a car anyway, a car he didn’t have, not a young guy on foot and where would they look in the woods? Would they even give a damn, for a pine tree? But he didn’t run.

  “I want you to come with me,” the man said calmly, as if it were the natural step now.

  “I’m not going to hang around waiting for the Mounties, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not as young as I look.”

  “You come meet my dad. You come meet Dan Rory. He’s a man you should know and you just cut down a tree he likes very much.”

  Innis backed away a couple steps.

  “I can disappear pretty damn quick. I know these woods.”

  “Odd, that, for a Sydney boy. You hunt up here? Oh, you won’t disappear, it’s not that easy, is it? Run if you like. Walk away.” He turned slowly and started back. “We know who you are, me and my dad,” he said over his shoulder.

  Innis picked up his walking stick and watched him. “What do you mean?” he yelled. “I’ve never seen you before, or your old man either!” The man kept on, not hurrying, retracing his tracks down the hill until he slipped out of sight in the dark trees.

  Hunched into his parka, shivering, his toes numb, Innis let the snow gather in his hair. He did not want to get in trouble here, and so far he hadn’t. Trouble you saved up like coupons and he didn’t want to cash them in on this. A bottle of aftershave under his coat at a drugstore in The Mines, okay, and a sawbuck one afternoon from Starr’s battered till, but nothing that would bring the Mounties down on him, no hotwired cars, no joyrides. Not that it would take a hell of a lot for a deportee, the Mounties probably had a file on him. A pine, a nice full, sweet tree? Maybe, but shit, he wasn’t going to follow that guy, he wasn’t a kid anymore, and he turned angrily toward the break. He’d have a long hike back, he’d been walking longer than usual. The kitchen would be warm, if Starr was home from The Mines they’d fry up some meat and potatoes like a couple of country bachelors, and that was okay too. His uncle preferred that Innis have things going in the kitchen if he could, nothing worse in winter than coming into a cold empty house, he said, no fire or food in sight, my old dad used to call that feeling it gave you fuar-larach. They got on pretty well most of the time, except for the women issue, the ones Starr had and the one Innis didn’t. Listen, Starr said once, kidding but not quite, I was your age too, you’re a walking hard-on, but you’ve been in enough trouble for now, you’re broke anyway and nothing bores a woman faster than a broke man.

  Deer tracks, feathering over, crossed Innis’s path, heading up toward a spring, a dark wound in a white hill. Deer were in velvet now, new antlers growing. In snowy silence, there was nothing like catching an animal in the corner of your eye, a bit of intense life in that stillness of cold air. He wanted a joint but he’d have to fumble it out and get it lit and maybe what he didn’t need was a downer flash, like that first day at Starr’s kitchen table when he felt like he’d just put down in the Yukon, sleepless, wrung out, the windows lashed with cold rain while his uncle squinted at him over a cup of coffee, What in God’s name made you steal cars and get yourself booted out of the country? Even if he hadn’t been so numb, he would have had no answer to give. Innis followed the tracks to the point where the deer had blown into flight, the kicked-up snow barely settled. Something had spooked them from their drink, off into the upper woods. The spring had formed a small cave in the snowbank. Deep in its shadow, water plinked steadily. Innis knelt down and put his hand into the colder air of the opening. Then he saw the prints beside him: an animal had drunk here maybe minutes ago. Not hooves but paws, broad in the soft snow where it had rested and lapped. Innis could imagine the crisp sound of its tongue snatching water and he felt again a kind of current in the still trees and he stiffened as it passed through him. He knew there was nobody there, nothing as tangible as a man. Had this been a family’s spring, had there been a house up here once? The woods rose like a dark cliff. He had come upon such sites before, no paths to them, buried in trees, stones and fallen beams thick with moss. He had sketched such a place in his book, but his stiff fingers wouldn’t hold a pencil now. In the city, even a derelict house was seen, was passed by, there were photos of it, drawings somewhere, records. Thirsty, he knelt into the cold chamber of the spring and lapped water until his mouth pained. The coming dark was above the snow and the woods at night asked things of you he didn’t have. The knees of his jeans had soaked through. No, he did not want trouble. Not for a tree, not with his own seeds waiting for their artificial spring.

  The path the man had taken was an old one, narrow, without the faint marks of his feet Innis would have lost it quickly. A rabbit shot out of a thicket, a blur of fur and snow, and he cursed it, where the hell was this house anyway. An old barn appeared finally when the trees thinned out, much older than Starr’s, a saltbox, swaybacked, grey as driftwood, and beyond it the house stood out, its shingles the blue
of a washed-out sky. He smelled the chimney smoke merging thinly into the falling snow. The rear windows had light in them. What could he say? He had no bread, just a few bucks from odd jobs. But if things went right with his seeds and his plants, he’d have money come fall, not that he could say wait till September, fellas, my dope will be ready to sell and I’ll be flush, can I owe you awhile? It seemed outrageous, this plan of his, crazy, but other times it lifted him up.

  Who do you belong to? the man had said.

  The back step was crudely shovelled. He could hear a fiddle starting and quitting and the sound covered his knock and he knocked again. The man looked different in the open door, bulky in a red sweater, his grey hair mussed from the cap he’d pulled off. “Yes yes, come inside. Daddy, it’s the lumberjack!” he called into the house, and the fiddle music quit. Innis kicked snow from his boots. Maybe this was a mistake, but he’d made enough of them in the last year, so he’d see it through. Something simmered on the huge stove, ornate as an old car, flourishes of engraved nickel and black iron. The kitchen was stuffy with smells, the cooking, drying wool, linoleum, wood, brine. The man led him into the next room where his father sat by the window in a highbacked rocker, his huge hands cupped on the armrests, the dark varnish worn clean where he’d worked it. He was handy to his needs—pipe and tobacco pouch on a small table, magazines, binoculars. Powerful glasses, if he could see clear through the woods to the power line break. His dark eyes, stern but not unkind, sized up Innis keenly. A thick white moustache hid the expression of his mouth.

  “You look like a Corbett, not a MacAskill at all. No relation to The Giant, by the looks of you, though you’re taller than a lot of us.”

  “My mother’s people were tall, so she told me. This man here says you know who I am anyway.”

  “Starr Corbett’s family. Not his young fella, because we know Starr takes women but not wives. Alec at the store, he says there’s a young man living with Starr since fall.”