Cape Breton Road Read Free Page A

he was taller than Innis. “Dan Rory is who I am. Come along, Innis. I want to show you something. Not the fiddle there, I used to play it but my hands went slow on me, they won’t follow my head. Only thing worse than a bad fiddler is a poor piper.”
    He led him into a small cluttered room off the parlor, most of its space taken up with a cot whose sag suggested the long body of the old man himself. A blind hung halfway down the window where light snow fluttered past. Maybe his mother had fled a house like this, this light in winter, where she’dfelt as Innis did, trapped and drowsy, inert, living like these men, back up here alone with white fields and woods and a drab sun in the curtains. From the crammed closet Dan Rory pulled out a khaki uniform, laying it out carefully on the cot as if it were alive. The dull brass badges on the shoulders said “Canada” and on the sleeves were sergeant’s stripes.
    “The Great War,” the old man said. “I learned about death. You know about death?”
    “Not that way. Not war.”
    “What way then?”
    “My dad was killed by a car. I’ve been to a funeral or two. The way most people know it.”
    “A good fella, your dad. Sad, he was young.” The old man smiled. “I can see him in the kitchen there, naked as the day he was born, hands clapped over his
clachan
, doing a little dance in front of the stove, and the women, well, drying him off, terrible for teasing him. He fell through the ice in our old pond, must’ve been six or seven.”
    “What was he doing on the pond?” Innis said, anxious to capture this memory of his father.
    “He was looking for fish.”
    “Fish?”
    Dan Rory poked open the tunic with the tip of his cane and exposed the dark tartan of the kilt, lifted its hem. Light shone in a tiny mothhole. “Blood and mud washed out of her now. When they formed up the Highland Brigade, the 185th, I said right, I’m ready, that’s for me. Wear the kilt, I’ll look so grand in it. I was older, see. Should have known better.”
    They both stared at the uniform. “You were wounded?” Innis said.
    “Twice. Gas is the worst. Awful. Mustard gas goes where you sweat. We had to give up the kilt in battle.” He shifted his cane-tip to the belt buckle, s-shaped bits of brass.
    “That’s a snake buckle. We liked those.
Mheall an nathair Eubh
. You know the Gaelic?”
    “Not a word.”
    “Starr should give you some then. You can call a man down to the lowest of the low in Gaelic, or praise him to the highest. The Language of The Garden.”
    “What garden?”
    Dan Rory raised his eyebrows. “Eden, of course. Eden. Your uncle should’ve told you that.”
    “He throws out bits of it but not so I’d learn. It’s for things he doesn’t want me to know. What would I do with it anyway?”
    “There’s things said in Gaelic you can’t say any other way, or hear any other way. But no, that wouldn’t matter to you, not in Boston. I see you’ve got no belt on your trousers.” The old man pulled the leather belt from the tunic. “Here, run it through your loops.”
    “I couldn’t take this.”
    “Och, I was skinny as you then. Buckle it up. How old are you?”
    “I’ll be twenty. This is part of your old uniform.”
    “They’re not going to bury me in it. You want to keep your trousers up. Starr has trouble with that, always did.”
    Finlay called them into the kitchen and they sat solemnly at the wooden table while Dan Rory said grace. “Lord, we thank thee for this bountiful food, and for bringing this young man Innis to our table, may he benefit like we have from the blessing and nourishment of God, The Father, Amen.” They quietlypassed around the bowls of chowder and the plate of bread and Innis felt the ritual more than the meal, a ceremony, but he ate hungrily, buttering the bread thickly and savoring the white fish.
    “Now, the pine,” Dan Rory said after a few sips of tea that had simmered on the stove until it was black. “We’ll take