Cape Breton Road Read Free

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.”
    “He’s just my uncle.”
    “Yiss. You’d be Munro’s boy, I see him in your face. But your mother, her it was had the red hair, eh?”
    “Pretty grey now.”
    “Did you put the grey in it?”
    “Some. But that’s between me and my mother.”
    “Sally Ann. Sally Ann Lamont, from down Middle River. A tall girl herself, but so was her dad, wasn’t he, Finlay?”
    “He was so, Daddy. At least.”
    “You know everybody around here?” Innis said.
    “All that’s is and been,” Finlay said behind him.
    “Your dad and your mother came to this house, more than once, before they went off to Boston. You’d be Boston too then.”
    “Watertown, west of it. But Boston, yeah.”
    “Your grandpa and me were great friends. A better farmer he was, God, yiss, I never cared for the farming a damn bit but I had to do it. And here we are, me and Finlay, the last of thenine of us. All we grow is potatoes and trees. The spruce are put in by the devil, but the pines we put in ourselves. That pine, now, the one you brought down. What made you?”
    “I don’t know, hard to explain. It just happened. Before I knew it, it was down. I’ll pay you for it.”
    “Don’t think of it like money. There’s too much of that. But yiss, hard to explain. Well. You’ll be staying in North St. Aubin, working and such?”
    “Not long. I’ll be going out west, by fall anyway.” It was good to declare that to them: a sure thing. Nothing to prevent it, even if in September he was still a broke man. What else did the old guy know about him? Starr had said, I won’t tell anybody that immigration men escorted you to your airplane seat, we’ll keep that to ourselves, that’s what you want and that’s what I want. “Not much work around here anyway.”
    “Hard to come by. But you got to find work where there is work. Cape Bretoners been going off since my own dad’s days. He did it, carpentering all the way to Montana. Myself, I did threshing trains to Alberta after the war. But he came back and so did I. So I guess you’re coming back. Work that pays money always been short in this place. Work to be done though. Och, lots of that. Now, that pine, that was a special tree. A son of mine was killed and I planted it, up there.”
    “I didn’t know. I mean, it’s not like there was a plaque on it.”
    “It’s plaques he needs, Finlay. Better get up there and nail some on for this fella.”
    “Tomorrow, Daddy, first thing.”
    “How the hell did you know I was up there?” Innis said. He still couldn’t believe he’d been caught like that, surprised in that territory he thought of as his.
    The old man reached for his pipe and slowly tamped tobacco into the bowl. “You were at the spring too. My dad’s brother, John Allan, built him a little stone house up there. Lived up there alone, 1860 something. He went down to The States and we lost track. North Carolina, someplace there where they had the Gaelic.” He struck a wooden match under the chair and sucked flame into his pipe.
    Finlay said, “He has the
taibhsearachd
, you know, the Second Sight. He’s seen you before. But you don’t need to know about that now.”
    “Why shouldn’t I?” Innis felt hot, lightheaded. A sweet tobacco smell, like cooked apples, seemed to come out of the dark wainscoating. He unzipped his jacket. He was suddenly uneasy about his planned set-up in the attic corner, it had seemed so clever a little while ago. “My uncle’ll be getting home soon, for supper. He expects me there.”
    “Och, you’ll have some supper with us,” the old man said firmly. “We didn’t expect you either. We’ll talk a little. Set a plate for the young man, Finlay.” He reached for a stout cane and raised himself out of the rocker, collecting his strength. Despite a stoop