Cape Breton Road Read online

  That had happened before the Porsche, before he stole for someone else. They made him pay for that one: he was over eighteen.

  Thirsty from the grass, Innis ran the sink tap in the kitchen, the water instantly cold. He took a glass from the cupboard: on its rim was the perfect impress of a woman’s lips, translucent, pink. When did Starr have a ladyfriend in here, the bastard? Could’ve washed the glass at least. Innis filled it. He tasted the lipstick, its faint scent, and then the water, sweet and cold. Far up in the woods, under its rickety wooden shelter, the old spring trickled out of rock.

  3

  THE SNOW HAD TURNED wet under a bright sun and Innis left off splitting stove wood to pack a snowball. He shaped it hard and baseballed it into the side of the woodshed with a satisfying thump. He peppered a few more, then quit. In Watertown at night he and Ned Mohney used to whump cars as they passed, fleeing when brakelights lit up. Kid stuff. Harmless excitements. He didn’t hear from Mohney, just the note in the M&Ms. The prick, where was he now? Down at Danny’s place? Cruising around? Innis tossed another snowball far into the back field, sending two ravens lumbering into the air, their deep scolding croaks fading into the lower woods. The sun felt great but that chill east wind was still blowing across the drift ice. With the sea so close the weather could turn quickly. He could see white floes in the channel water beyond the woods, and above that the long mountain ridge showed nothing but winter, grey swatches of hardwood and the darker evergreens touched with snow. Sometimes it didn’t feel that he was on an island, from the house the strait looked more like a wide river, in many shades and moods, taking on the skies, the shadows from the mountain. Now over the trees it was afternoon blue, bits of pan ice ebbing brightly in the tide. He should call that Father Lesperance but he wasn’t in the mood today. Maybe he’d get away to the shore for a while, he hadn’t spent much time in the lower woods, they ended at the beach and you’d have to be pretty dim to get lost in them since all you had to do was go downhill or uphill and you were in the clear.

  Innis glanced up at the snow-streaked roof. His seeds hadn’t popped yet and that worried him, but what could he do? He split a few more logs, then embedded the maul in the chopping block and headed down the back field, past the carrion ravens had been picking at, gobs of rabbit fur and blood, and as he reached the border of the trees he heard the Lada’s rattling diesel and looked back to see it rolling slowly down the long driveway through the front field. He ducked behind a spruce. Starr wouldn’t like a cold kitchen but tough luck, what was he doing home so early? The man seemed to have no hours lately, going to the shop when he felt like it, closing up at odd hours in the afternoon. Innis had seen him printing out a cardboard sign on the kitchen table, If the vertical’s no good, try the horizontal. Closed till tomorrow. Someone with him now, another face behind the windshield. At the back door his uncle got out, left the engine running while he dashed inside, returning immediately shaking his head, at his nephew, no doubt, and opened the passenger door. A woman emerging? The hat with the big brim, holding it in her hand while she did a slow turn, taking things in. Too far to see her clearly, black hair, dark coat with a colorful belt. Starr kissed her on the mouth and they stood there in an embrace, talking. Innis watched, resenting Starr in a way he could not have predicted, he didn’t know who the hell this woman was but just that closeness to her he could feel right now, her breath warm in this cold wind, the perfume of her. He was in no mood to go up there now, let them start their own fire, upstairs too if they wanted. Try the horizontal, it’s all vertical for me.

  On the old shore path Innis patted his pockets for that roach he’d saved for later but needed now. He sheltered in alders long enough to toke up, annoyed that he had to ration his weed. Hiding there alone, he was soon flirting with self-pity, with blame, but no, he wouldn’t let that eat him up, lashing out at his mother. No, he’d done this to himself. Those fall days drifted back to him, roaming the woods up above, further and further beyond the power line break to where the land flattened out, not giving a damn if he got lost or not. Until it happened. He had whispered the word over and over, lost, lost, like a dare. Then in those woods he thought by then he knew like a city block, he lost his way, on that overcast November afternoon, as confused as any city boy could be. You’re too fucking cocky, Starr had told him only the day before, tramping way back up in the trees like that, you don’t know the lay of things, you’ll disappear, there’s no taxis up there, b’y, no street signs, it’s not Watertown, and it sure isn’t Boston. And Innis flared at him, it doesn’t take a genius, I’ve been up there and back a hundred times. True, he’d known nothing about forest when he came to Cape Breton, not even what trees were called, or how you made your way safely through a few miles of them. But they were a place to hide himself, and they absorbed him in their indifference. Slowly he’d begun to see that the qualities of leaves meant something, that bark was not just a commonplace word but a mark, a signal, here smooth and grey, there ridged and deeply brown, and that trunk and branch grew in different contours, and that when stricken by worms and blight and lightning, when light-starved and scarred and ripped by windfalls, they kept unmistakable features, and you could use those features to braid an invisible tether and that would lead you back where you wanted to return. He’d extended himself deeper and deeper, testing what he learned, what he observed. He’d felt that something lay back there deep, if he kept going. At first he’d just sketched it in his small notepad whenever a shape struck him. He’d come to hate asking Starr anything about the woods, he wanted to learn them on his own, but he had asked him the name of a tree here and there, and after he bought the paperback book on trees, he saw that his uncle was sometimes wrong (You called this one silver maple but it’s not maple at all, look at this leaf, poplar, silver poplar, and Starr said, That’s what we always called them here so that’s what I’ll call them, does the fella who wrote that book live here?), and when Innis knew the trees he walked through, had detailed them in pencil, he felt he’d mapped the woods in his own way, that they were not blinding and trackless anymore but navigable, subject to his wits, not like streets back in Boston but like an almost private sanctuary where he was the only man. Yet, there he was, lost. The sun he’d kept on his left shoulder had gone, absorbed into a sky cold as milk, and the wind that he’d remembered as east, east on his face, had dodged somehow around, leaping at him in different directions, confusing him in showers of dry leaves. Small clearings of light in deep spruce and fir and stripped hardwoods mocked him as he plunged first toward one, then another. The deadfalls he had taken bearings on, noting the angles they had fallen at, the peculiar ways they’d crashed and split or snagged strangely on the way down, seemed to have vanished in the vague sunless shadows. The spiny green monotony of the spruce would bring night down thoroughly and fast, and that frightened him—everything he had learned would dissolve in darkness. He tried to will the woods around him into a pattern he could recognize, an arrangement of foliage and branch and light that had to be there. But in the wind the dead and half-dead trees, swooning in the branches of the living ones, rubbed and sawed, a conversation of sounds he would not want to hear at night. Where was that head-high stump he could not fail to see, it would fairly shout at you, its ragged neckhole, its oxblood core torn open in the high winds of two weeks ago? Where was the ant-brown bole of that old white birch? Without sun to give a slant of light, any deer trail looked convincing, luring him a few paces until another one appeared to draw him innocently away, and then, with a quick breath of panic, he sensed how deeply wrong his steps were, and the woods deepened and turned in on him, became the dark abstraction he once had of them. City boy without a city. He walked harder as if the sheer gravity of his step would guide him out, bringing his feet down harshly in the leafy duff. He swore, he gnawed his lips, he did not want to feel like a kid who had to be found, he was nineteen, but that feeling was taking hold in him. Jesus, Starr would be home from work by now, he might be knocking some supper togethe
r, muttering where in the hell is Innis. I’m here, damn you, in somebody’s woods spread all over creation, acres of it, left to itself. He rested on a trunk so long on the ground brilliant blades of fungus grew from its bare, mossed flanks. How long would it be before an alarm was sent out? Surely not until it was well dark, before Starr would make a phone call or two and then drive the Ferry Road, squinting through the windshield. Or would he think his nephew had taken off again, maybe even in someone’s automobile like the car thief he’d been, I never expected Innis to stay in Cape Breton anyway, it’s not Boston, it’s not enough that he was born here, this is not his place. Innis was afraid he’d end up like the woman up the road, a city person like himself, just visiting her brother, and she went into the woods above his house to hunt mushrooms and got lost so sure and solid she might have been in South America. Innis knew now how it happened, how she must have seen a mushroom she wanted off the trail, an appealing yellow cluster more satisfying than flowers, and she’d stepped a ways here, then there, and then she stood up suddenly and felt something like what Innis was feeling now—tricked, and small. The Mounties came and wouldn’t let anyone local go up here looking for her because a tracking dog had been called in and they didn’t want the scent disturbed by searchers, and before the dog showed up a helicopter came all the way up from Shubenacadie around dusk and swept over the trees ineffectually for a while and then landed in a yard, useless. The tracking dog did it, a German shepherd, meticulously circling along the woman’s frightened and spiraling trail, tracing almost minute by minute the time it took the hook of her fright to set deeply, that pathetic, aimless tramping through tangled brush and wild, relentless trees, praying for luck. The dog found her near a bog about midnight standing in the middle of berries she was too scared to eat, swollen with fly and mosquito bites, scratched, but pale and okay in the harsh beams of flashlights. But Innis did not want the attention of Mounties, or to be taken out of here by a dog and kindly rescuers, he did not want to see his uncle’s sarcastic smile, he did not want to be written up in the paper or be on the news, they would all know what had brought him back here. He had closed his eyes. This was a big step backward, territory lost. So he’d just listened. In the rush and noise of the trees a sound was there for a second and it made him shiver—footfalls so soft in the leaves, so new his ears seized it from other noises, even the surge of his heartbeat. He stood up quickly, sensed rather than saw a flick of fur behind a heap of greying spruce. But that was all. Movement, unhurried flight. Not a deer but something quiet and lower to the ground. Soundless, just eyes. The chill of it held him for a few moments, then he calmed down. Jesus, how many times had he flushed an animal, a bird up here, a rabbit? Why fear it now? He set off again deliberately, ignoring direction, ignoring the wind. There was a brook, and the brook should slope down toward the road somewhere, that he knew. He followed it until its meagre water went dry underground and it became just a slick mat of leaves. He stopped: the sky took on an odd brightness for a moment and the trees seemed to turn suddenly, like those trick cards whose images change when light hits them a certain way, and he spotted a high straight pine, this one as familiar as a house, and when he circled it, there was the blaze mark he’d made in its dark trunk a month ago, dirty with the bleed of sap, it was like seeing his name carved there.

  Innis heard the Lada horn, that irritating hoot, what a lame automobile, any woman worth your time wouldn’t be seen in it. Starr must have noticed his tracks leading away from the woodpile. He hurried the rest of the way through the lower woods, stumbling once nearly to his knees, whoops, that roach had a wallop. He leaped from the shorebank to the beach and tramped through its mix of snow and ice, feeling the bite of the wind. The mountain seemed higher across the strait, the wooded hills of St. Aubin at his back. In January it had been all still ice, clear across to the other side. But now the dark cold water was moving, waves eating tangled floes from shore rocks and ragged driftwood. The storms had driven in a huge tree trunk, its amputated roots already sea-worn, tipped with claws of ice. He hauled on yellow rope snaked under the snow and drew out a lobster buoy, a gay red and white, and he twirled it around and around his head and away into the water. The waves would wash it in again, or would the eddy get it and bob it out with the tide, down there beyond the big bridge, out to sea? A thick hemp towline was woven among the beach debris like a weathered python. Starr had played here as a kid, swum here. Hard to imagine it ever warm enough. A tree stump, so often soaked and dried out it had opened out like a book, long laminations of wooden pages.

  For an island, Starr had told him when Innis first came, St. Aubin’s as much land as sea, land being close on three sides of us, we’re a long loaf of an island tucked into Cape Breton Island, and the water to the west and south is the heart of us, the big lake, saltwater, the tides run in the strait you see toward the mountain there, but we got the ocean on the northeast end, can’t see it from here unless you’re way high, the sea isn’t far, she’s out there bright and wide. So you could be worse places, it’s not like you’re on St. Kilda. Innis had thought he’d prefer an island clean and isolated, where you couldn’t see anything but ocean, but that was the early days after his arrival when he didn’t care much what happened to him. It didn’t help when Starr told him, I’ve lived by myself a long time and if I had a choice it’d be a woman bedding down in here, not a nephew who’s made a hash of his life. Sure, Uncle. Who could blame you for that? Though the tide was twisting through its dark surface, the strait had been frozen across to the mountain shore for over a month, and he had walked out on it once with Starr who warned him that you had to know how to read the ice or it can take you into a quick black hole, the current trapping you under and sweeping you away In the days before paved roads people travelled the ice all over, when solid it was a good highway, you could hit another shore just about anywhere that mattered. Only patches of ice were travelling today, gliding seaward.

  He poked along the beach, kicking ice, his eyes tearing in the wind. Objects had more than common interest when he was high, even a rum bottle, its colorful Jamaican label half peeled away. Jamaica sun, wow. And ganja. His hands were cold already but he brushed snow off the big log and sat. He took out his pad, sketching not the shore—it was too new to him and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it, the water unnerved him a little this close, level with it—but the spring up in the woods where the animal had drunk and he had drunk just after it, it had to be a cat, that shy stealth, so quiet, crouched at the lip of the spring, nothing else moving but the lap and flicker of its tongue and the last, light snow, and the fringe of its fur in the wind. Innis used a black ballpoint to get the feeling of the woods, the feathery, spiraling snow, the stark silence in simple lines, black against white, and the dark mouth of the spring, that little pattering cave, the faint pawprints. The cat, whatever it was, would have to wait until it revealed itself, or he might invent it, he wanted to imagine a snow leopard. Who would stop him? He could draw what he liked. The penpoint began to skip, he put the sketchpad in his pocket and wandered further, into the cove where he investigated a long hump set back beyond the highwater line, covered with a blue tarpaulin, its edges held down with stones. He knocked on it. Wood. Anyone home? Kneeling, he lifted the tarp like a skirt: a boat, dull white paint. The blade of an oar was visible. There were the remnants of a nest in the rocky sand. He stood up and looked out at the water leaping with waves and sun, tips whitened with wind. Jesus, who would dare row in that? It stirred and excited him, as much because he was safe on the shore as the prospect itself. Maybe you wouldn’t even have to row, maybe the currents would take you all the way to the bridge and beyond, cold spray in your face. One warm spring morning in Boston he was on the bank of the Charles River, lying on the grass, mellowed out, glad to be alone, traffic a distant noise, when he heard the synchronized grunts of a rowing crew, college boys, Harvard in their crimson shirts, and he sat up to watch their shell cut sleekly past, the oars as efficient as wings, the rowers bl
ind to anything but their task, and he longed to have his heart pounding like theirs, to share their exhaustion, their camaraderie, their kind of learning he would never know. Starr said, your grandmother lived over there on the other side and my father rowed across to see her, in some mean weather too, he wanted to see her that bad.

  Innis shaded his eyes but the mountain trees ran ridge to shore, holding within them the life that was left there. He could glimpse but a house or two embedded in the trees like white chips of wood but he could not tell if they were old enough to have held a grandmother. Colder now, grass always made him cold, a clear memory flew into his mind, he was four years old and his mother took him with her into the ladies section of a department store, and he let go her hand to push through the racks of dresses, eager for the smell, the feel of women’s cloth against his face, and, taken with a slender mannequin, he’d gotten on his knees to peer underneath her skirt, and above him the women laughed, his mother too, he could hear her laughter now. There was no telling what weed would call up, what taste of memory.