Cape Breton Road Read Free Page B

work, not money. There’s work here needs doing.”
    “Trees that need cutting,” Finlay said, setting down his spoon. “There’s budwormed spruce in the lower woods dead to their roots. And a mess of windfalls. We’d like a path cleaned through that thrash to the road and I’m old for that.”
    “The old path to the brook,” Dan Rory said. “I want to walk to that water without breaking my neck.”
    “Not a chainsaw,” Finlay said. “We don’t like the racket. We got a double-bit axe sharp as a razor, and a good crosscut can make short work of a tree, eh? It’s not easy work, but we’ll call it square when you’re done.”
    Innis sipped the last of his tea, cooled by a stream of canned milk Finlay had added without asking, and set the cup carefully on its saucer. “Look, I don’t want my uncle to know. All right? And the other thing is, what money I make is from odd jobs around, so I can’t spend all my time at it. I owe Starr for board as it is.”
    “Work it around your other duties. It’s not a great rush,” Finlay said. “The woods isn’t going anywhere.”
    “What about that priest with the old cottage?” Dan Rory said. “Alec says he’s looking for somebody to paint it up or something.”
    “Father Lesperance, down by the ferry wharf. There’s a job for you, Innis, his summer place there. He’s not rich but it’d bring you a few dollars.”
    “We’re not Roman Catholic,” Dan Rory said, “and neither are you, not that I’ve seen your uncle in church since I can’t remember.”
    “He doesn’t go, no.” Starr had said, I told my dad when I got home from the navy I wasn’t going to church, not any day, anymore. He nearly froze me out when he saw I meant it. He could turn to stone for long spells, my dad. Quiet as a shut door for days on end. He hated that he couldn’t talk, that he didn’t have the kind of heart to do that, sit down and say, listen, this is what’s on my mind. Oh, Jesus, no. Clam up. God, we were all that way, when I think about it, the whole damn bunch of us.
    “The priest is a decent fella. Am I right, Finlay?”
    “He is so. Had that cottage a few years now, and he’s not the sort to convert you, I don’t think.”
    “Nothing to convert,” Innis said. “If he’s got work, okay with me.”
    There was an air of business having been settled and they relaxed into an apple pie Finlay had baked, tough crust and all. Why in the hell had he cut down that pine? Two or three minutes of fury just to see it fall, and here he was bound up with these guys. He felt found out, more known than he wanted: people didn’t just look at you here, they looked into you, they inquired, and if you had a family connection, some of them expected, even at first meeting, if not your family tree, then at least a hefty branch of it. The maroon teapot was trimmed in gold leaf, similar to one his mother had, one of her “old things” she’d brought with her to Watertown. She’d known what it was like to be sheltered by family, to have strangers care about you because they knew who your grandfather was, yourmother, uncle, aunt. But family could suffocate you too, want to know too much about you, and that’s what his mother had never missed in Boston: after her husband died she could disappear for an evening with another man and no one knew or cared whose daughter she was, or sister or niece, who she belonged to or how far back they went.
    “Starr shown you cousins?” Dan Rory said. “No Corbetts left here in St. Aubin, but you’d have MacKinnons and Campbells in other places.”
    “We haven’t got around much.” That was close to true, though Starr had taken him to see two aging sisters who shared a house in Sydney, Campbells, Netta was one and Innis couldn’t recall the other one’s name, skinny as a crane. They had talked around and over Innis as if he were a decent topic of conversation but didn’t need to be there, and they soon moved on to people they really