Cape Breton Road Read online

  “No, no. I just got dropped off a little way back.”

  The turn toward St. Anne’s came up quickly, then they were off the TransCanada, passing a lobster restaurant.

  “You hungry?” he said.

  “Not for that place. I’ve got fruit. You want an apple?”

  “Maybe later. I’m more thirsty than anything.” He had no time to pull in there anyway, stare over coffee at the water of South Gut, a shivering smoothness after the squall, and just chat with her, talk of no consequence. She poked around in her pack and brought out a pop bottle, held it out to him uncapped.

  “Water,” she said. “Here.”

  His face went hot, he didn’t look at her. “I’m okay,” he said. She was talking to him but he only heard her voice. His breath was coming fast. They passed the Gaelic College, the road wound along the bay, down and up. The spring, their spring, his.

  “Some bus you have here.” She ran her fingers along the dash.

  “It’s not my car.”

  She laughed. “What’s a cah? Are you Boston? Maine?”

  “Boston. Visiting.”

  “You don’t look like a tourist. Nova Scotia plates.”

  “You’re not with the Mounties, are you?”

  “Am I bugging you? Sorry.”

  “It’s … my Uncle Angus’s. He can barely drive anymore, his eyes are bad.”

  “Angus who? Where from?”

  “Oh Jesus, no family trees, okay? Please? A MacNab, that’s all.”

  “Sure, fine.” She muttered at her window, “Never heard of any Angus MacNab around here. Look at that pony in the rain! Poor little devil.” On a hillside field a small shaggy Shetland, head bowed, its rump to the wind. An herbal smell seemed to rise from her clothing, and of damp leather. Was Starr up? Hungover, he’d be thirsty too, gulping water at the sink. Jesus. But it wouldn’t have arrived yet, couldn’t, not down that long hill.

  “Going to see someone?” she said.

  “Just driving.”

  “My mother, she’s home with my aunt, and no men anymore, either of them. It’s nice when you haven’t been home for a while. It’s all easy for a day or two, smiles and love and treats of meals I like. But then she takes a long look at me, with her eye cocked just so, stitching a tear in my skirt, say, a skirt she doesn’t like on me anyway. She can’t help it. She has it in her mind I’m a hippie and won’t let go. I love it there, above the sea. I just can’t stay home anymore, not for long.”

  “I want to get away too.” Acts of moral turpitude, the immigration judge had said, a hardnosed Irishman, as an alien you get only one, Mr. Corbett, two at most, and then we send you home.

  “From Boston? Live up here you mean?”

  “Somewhere west, a long way from here. A real city.”

  “Boston not city enough? I loved it for a while, around Cambridge there, around the university. Down there most of a summer. Great music. Awful hot some days.”

  He braked for a sharp turn where the road went round a cove, his mind was drifting. He wanted to put mile after mile behind him as if nothing had happened, away so far he would never hear what turned out, not even in a newspaper. But his tongue lay bitter in his mouth. A car resembling a Mountie’s flashed past in the other direction, he hadn’t noticed it coming. He picked it up in the mirror and watched it disappear in the blowing rain.

  “There was a bar there we liked,” he said suddenly, “my buddy and me, it had a submarine torpedo game, you aimed torpedos at passing ships, slow ones to fast ones. All hand/eye coordination, and we racked up scores, Ned and me, we were damn good at it. But a college kid came in one day and showed us how to beat the machine. He just held the trigger down and swung the sight from one side to the other real fast, he didn’t even aim it. Free game after free game, he ruined it. It’s easy, he said, don’t let them rip you off. But he didn’t get it. We played for the skill.” He was just yammering, filling the air that sometimes felt too thin to breathe.

  “College guys,” she said. “There’s plenty they don’t know, but they don’t know that either.”

  When they came out of a long valley and reached the east coast highway, Innis hesitated at the intersection. The Atlantic lay behind trees across the road. He wanted to inhale that rainy ocean light.

  “When you’re past Wreck Cove,” she said, “there’s a little cemetery. Could we stop? I wouldn’t be long.”

  “That’s a good bit north.”

  “Not as far as Ingonish.”

  “I’m in kind of a hurry. What’s your name?”

  “Jessie.” She studied his face. “You’re awful pale. You okay?”

  Feeling a car behind him, he turned north with a squeal of rubber. “Me, I can do without cemeteries. What’s there, relatives?”

  “My dad’s there but they had to wedge him in. Sure, it’s relatives. Yourself must have a few around here, under stone.”

  The old spring was ringed with stones, he’d knelt against them. “Jessie, I have to be somewhere else, I don’t have time for this place.”

  “Cape Breton you mean?”

  “I mean here, now.”

  “What about your uncle?”

  “What?”

  “Angus, his car.”

  “What’s the time, Jessie? How far do you live?”

  “Not far.”

  A white church, he couldn’t catch the name, see what saint was on the sign against the white shingles, sometimes it wasn’t a saint but he preferred them, St. Margaret’s, St. Joachim’s, St. David’s. The sea was distant through trees, then moved near the highway, a sudden broad grey, bringing gulls, throwing itself white over the rocks, reaching, falling back. It wasn’t as if Starr was lying on the kitchen floor with a knife in his heart. One glass of water wouldn’t harm him, he’d have to drink more than one. Wouldn’t he? Gallons and gallons of water in that long waterline to the house, a dollop of hemlock couldn’t be lethal, not diluted like that. Could it? And the toilet flush, and wash water, all that would go down the drain, he might never put it to his lips.

  “Piece of orange?” Jessie held a section out to him on the point of a jackknife. She had quartered the orange in her lap, flicking seeds into the ashtray.

  He took it in his mouth, the tart sweetness, his mouth was dry. He thought for a moment he would weep, that it might well out of him and be over, but that passed, he wasn’t even stoned. When they finished the orange, Jessie shared an apple with him, slicing it carefully and placing each piece in his mouth as he drove. He let her find music on the radio, she liked CBC classical in the morning, but today it was organ music so doleful even she agreed it was a downer, like a rainy day in church. They passed an enormous concrete structure set into a steep hillside, gated and fenced, and beside it a road ran up into the high trees. “Wreck Cove Hydro Project, that’s the power plant there,” she said. “Looks like science fiction, doesn’t it?” “Yeah, sort of.” She mentioned a general store, they could get a bite there, a drink, but when he saw it was right on the highway, he told her he’d wait. He listened to her talk about Boston, about swimming in Waiden Pond Reservation with a boyfriend, and Innis remembered swimming there too, he and Ned Mohney, but there’d been too many people that day, even in the woods. Jessie said she liked The Garage on Boylston Street, the shops with folk art, far-out clothes, but when she came home she didn’t wear outrageous things. Innis asked her did she know the New England Aquarium, he and Mohney would get stoned and watch scuba divers feeding ocean fish in a huge tank, a real trip, more than weird to see them swim behind that glass. Jessie was quiet for a stretch and he could feel her brown eyes on him. No need for panic. Still lots of water between Starr Corbett and the spring. Small amounts moving down that line. One glass here, one glass there. A kettle. A basin. What if he took a bath?

  “Jessie, could I make a call from your house? Your phone’s in the kitchen, isn’t it. Never mind. Everybody listens in.”

  “Not everybody. Innis, you’re sweating.”

  T
he little cemetery was just above the sea, on a strip bare of trees, but the narrow dirt road to it sloped downward and, parked, the car was mostly out of sight. Innis showed her the roach he’d been saving for later, and she said sure, and after they exchanged a couple hits, she took his hand and led him down to the older stones, some with Gaelic inscriptions, the dead had been born on the Isle of Harris, of Lewis, early 1800S. Her father had a new headstone of white granite, he was the last one, the place was full, some of the original stones no more than grassy hillocks.

  “In the early days,” she said, “they’d just pick a stone from the beach, one they liked, and put it over the grave.”

  “I bet the sea could climb right up here sometimes.”

  “High tide and wind and you’d get waves up here sure, a lot of the bank washed away over the years.”

  “But nobody here is feeling the water, they don’t care,” Innis said.

  “We don’t entirely know, do we, Innis.”

  He pulled the telescope from his back pocket and offered it to her. She laughed.

  “I’ll look for a white whale, will I?” She found a freighter, hull down in metallic glare.

  “That’s where I’d like to be,” he said. “Out there, farther than any spyglass could find me.”

  Huddling in the misty rain, they put an arm around each other and watched the ocean breaking loud and white beneath them. In a sandy stretch a plover on its clockwork legs buzzed back and forth, always at the heels of the shore wash. Innis turned them back toward the Caddy where he warmed her hands in his.

  “Jessie, I have to split now, head back south.”

  “You want to come meet my mother first? It’s only her and my auntie. They cook one hell of a meal.”

  “Jesus, I would, you know. I just can’t. Can’t. Not this time.”

  “What makes you think there’ll be another time?”

  Innis rested his forehead on the steering wheel. “Nothing. Nothing makes me think that.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Come anyway, when you’re ready. See you when I see you, then. Okay? Safe home.”

  He thought of getting directions to her house, but there was no point. She assured him she’d get a ride easily, she wasn’t that far from home, but when he left her at the roadside and waved to her out the window as he turned south, he felt desolate and alone. He would have loved to go with her, he could imagine the warm kitchen, the strong tea with milk and sugar, there’d be bannock, maybe with raisins, his favorite, butter and jam, he’d just be a guest, laid back, he wouldn’t have to come up with a lot of lies, a few harmless ones would do, Jessie wouldn’t care, she wasn’t suspicious, her mother and her aunt might even like him. He overtook two cars before he calmed down, cursing softly, tears in his eyes, come on, this is stupid. So here he was driving fast for St. Aubin back toward the spring. The sun hurt, flaring off wet pavement, he’d had sunglasses somewhere. Then two things caught his eye almost simultaneously: a Mountie car with its dome light flashing, pulled onto the shoulder up ahead, and, coming up fast on his right, the looming structure of the Hydro Plant. Innis braked just enough to swerve onto the road running into the highlands, it seemed perfectly logical that he avoid that police car no matter what.

  As he climbed the steep road he was aware that it followed a deep brook hidden in big maples and birches, the asphalt looked fresh, and it was easy to believe he was being hotly pursued or soon would be, that he was climbing into the Everlasting Barrens with a Mountie on his tail and he’d have to put the Caddy to the test, do some real driving, there were other roads in and out of the Barrens, he could slip that patrol car and find his way back, but that urgency faded the higher he went: he could see wind in the foliage but an odd stillness descended over everything and he slowed down. The area felt recently abandoned, like a military site. Unearthed rock still lay about, huge pieces blown out of the landscape, but the road crossed over dams built of neatly piled rocks, in places bare earth looked newly healed. There was no person anywhere, but a little building off behind a cyclone fence, and further along on the other side of a small lake, a solitary trailer, accessible only by a causeway with a locked cyclone gate. A day’s workclothes beat like drab flags on a line strung from the trailer to a pole. Shirt, trousers, socks. Something forlorn in all that, fluttering out flat in a cold wind, the guy shut away inside the trailer by himself, his lonely stuff hanging outside, his underwear.

  Innis drove on, more slowly, the asphalt gave over to graded dirt. Had Claire taken a plane off the Island, or was she driving too, on a road somewhere west? He would never find her now. He shut off the radio, no more than a murmuring hiss. Rocks had been no obstacle here, or woods. Dynamite, dust, an immense plowing. But all that was over. A strange calm, still settling. Like after a one-sided battle, everything had been buried, piled up, reconstructed. The engineers call it a flowage, Dan Rory had told him, from the old waters that were up here they had to, they said, correct the mistakes of nature. Imagine that. The way they looked at it, the engineers, there was all this water up there going to waste, running down little rivers and streams into the sea, such a waste of water, eh? So they made these new lakes and poured concrete canals and made spillways and sluices, stepped the water down faster and harder, into Wreck Cove Tunnel, into the great turbines there. And so the power went out over the land. Not to us. Over us. That’s where it always goes. Amen.

  In the distance a single windmill, the wind was blowing hard but the blades were not turning. He was thirsty, he should’ve stopped at that general store like she’d wanted, got gas.

  Had Starr already opened that cupboard over the sink, taken his time selecting a tumbler, raising it first to the ceiling to see if his nephew had wiped the glass clean? He would open the tap, he would not fill the glass right away but run his fingers under the water, feeling almost immediately that surprising cold. No reason for Starr to hesitate. Free of silt. Nothing swirling there, nothing to the eye.

  On the upper side of the dam Innis was approaching lay a cold nervous lake, its surface darkly blue, charged with small, rapid waves. He turned down a short road to the windward shore hoping for a drink. The wind was immediately cold and steady when he got out of the car. The sun seemed to have no heat, though the air was bright. Deep behind the beach driftwood had banked up high, white and dry as bones against a concrete wall. Hundreds of pieces must have been driven there by storms, jammed into a long windrow of bleached wood. Newer wood not yet dry was scattered along the shoreline. Innis ran his hand over a piece like huge misshapen antlers, its grain a satiny silver, polished and damp. Tree stumps, most of that driftwood, and the lake was still giving them up, working them loose like teeth from the flooded, cut-over woods. He couldn’t see any wood floating, maybe they were still submerged in that dark water, like seabeasts, each one different, malformed, rising from the depths. Sunlight sank only a short way into the clear water, at first faintly yellow, then a rusty tinge deepening into a red darkness. Iron oxide. The lake’s surface seemed jittery in the wind, excited somehow, hurried, its choppy waves striking the shore in quick succession. You’ll still find trout up there, he’d heard. Hard to believe down in that bloodred darkness there’d be fish.

  Surely it was fresh enough to drink, only the rock colored it, and Innis cupped out a few cold mouthfuls tasting faintly of metal. Maybe Starr had deserved a touch of poison. But just who deserved what, and why, was still a mystery.

  The squalls seemed to have passed, shreds of cloud cooling across the sun. Could this be a thin place like the priest had mentioned? He picked up a piece of wood whose whorl of knots caught light like wet stone. There were interesting rocks lying about, fractured in attractive ways. He patted his pocket for a sketchpad but he’d forgotten where he put it, in his bag maybe back in the car. But how would he draw this anyway, this strange lake where all the blood had run? An army had been through here and what remained was the blown rock, the ruined trees, the concrete channels, the dams, the stilled windmill. There was no
room in this wind for drawing, the wind was growing colder, it cut into him and he was glad to shut himself away in the car, every time that engine shot into life, he was comforted.

  But signs for a road out, where were they? He drove carefully across a damn of earth and stone, a deep lake on one side, on the other a mean plunge to a thin afterthought of a brook, its water tracing off into a valley, a mere leak beneath the dam. From this maze of roads, any exit at all, he didn’t care right now where it would land him as long as he could continue south.

  Scrub spruce and alders stretched away and away, and there was the bright wet grass of bogs, a stunted terrain to which had been brought dams, and deserted roads to get lost in fast, they would suddenly merge with the ground as if they had turned into the earth. There’d been a big fire across the Barrens back in the sixties, Finlay said, roared right over it, and the trees were stunted anyway, always small up here where the rocky soil is thin. A scrabble of dense little trees no bigger than they would ever get in this windy space, branches curled and huddled, roots twisted into the soil. When he deadended in a muddy clearing, he turned the car around, spinning clay, and retraced, he was certain, the same road, but once again other roads opened into it enticingly, they looked the same, and he bounced down one side road, then another, ending like the one before in a pile of bulldozed stones and he had to turn the mudsplashed Caddy again. He’d bottomed it already too many times, the muffler had a low rumble when he gunned the engine, a sound that in high school he would have thought cool but now it was a flaw, a worry, in this fine automobile. A highway car. That thought amused him at first, so sure of this car, no way you could keep it off the highway for long, but its shocks were intended for good pavement, not ruts and gravel and rainholes. Main road, mean road, little difference here.

  He fingered out the roach stub from his breast pocket and lit it, sucked its smoke in deep. There was poisoned water everywhere, wasn’t there, diluted versions of it, people drank it every day, Starr was not putting hemlock in his mouth right now, the plant was a long long way from him, its stalk, its stems, even its deadly juice. Maybe. Wind jostled the car. Jesus, there was not a road sign anywhere, who was all this designed for, God? He took a turn where a road looked wider, better graded. Was that a human being, had he spotted a man, dark, solemn, maybe an Indian, fishing below the road half-hidden in the thick bushes, casting high into a brook? Innis was not sure. Of course the man would see the car and ask him questions, like what in the hell did you bring a Cadillac up to the Barrens for? He didn’t want to leave the car anymore, he felt safer moving, any temptation to stop quickly vanished. Conversation? For what? Who are you, where you from? Co leis thu? He was in the high Barrens now, had to be, best for berries, they said, maybe he could find some. He could see a long way, the windbeaten trees as low as bushes, some road just a tan scar in the distance. He stopped to pan his telescope across the land, but there was nothing it could pull close enough to matter. He went on until the road he was following quit in a small cleared turnaround and he sat there idling. With the window cracked, the wind whistled over the car, it was still August, for Christ sake, wasn’t there a touch of summer left to lift him up a little? In his mouth an aftertaste of the lake, a tinge of iron. He scooped out the contents of the glove compartment and found half a roll of stale mints. He popped them all in his mouth, cut the engine. Wintergreen. The Captain’s breath. How much gas would it take to get him back to the highway, if he could find it? Encirclement was creeping into him and he would have to beat it back, worse than being lost in the woods last fall: these were roads and roads took you places, they didn’t lock you in, they didn’t dazzle you, make you stupid. He folded his jacket into a pillow across the steering wheel. Just a few winks, he was hungry but resting his head, his eyes, seemed to matter more, clearing his mind. He could manage only a dozing, fitful parade of his unease, sleep would not let him arrive, anywhere. He slid down sideways to the seat, his mouth agape with weariness, eyelids trembling. Starr’s white shirts flew on a clothesline, three of them, sleeves snapping, pins could not keep them, they writhed away in the wind one by one.