Cape Breton Road Read Online Free Page A

around, well, the game was up, but such was the risk of secrets, and better found out now than later. Innis had pried up a floorboard and tapped a multiple socket into the wires in the kitchen ceiling. He was proud of his set-up, practically above Starr’s dinner plate. None of it had cost much, from a secondhand store in The Mines mostly, and he was keen to get this under way. Even in June there might be killing frosts, Starr said, and Innis’s seedlings needed this jump start if they were to grow well and amount to money: a dozen plants even half the size of the ones in the marijuana book, healthy
sinsemilla
with good flowers, could bring him a grand apiece, and no middleman. Find that trucker and fire up a sample for him, there’d be no problem unloading it. And then Innis could leave North St. Aubin, he would strike out on his own.
    The fluorescents flickered and balked and then hummed into a steady pinkish light. He touched the warming platter: not too hot, just warm enough to make them happy. He’d germinate the seeds in a wet cloth, start tonight. Last night he had spread them out on a sheet of paper and, like a jeweller, poised a finger above them, selecting slowly, deliberately, each promising seed he would devote his risks to. Maybe here and there sat that one just waiting to sprout in a place like Cape Breton, one that had in it the desire for a new locale, far north, a need to rise out of cool boreal clay and grow like crazy, for the sheer hell of it. He draped the blankets over the loom: it looked like some old sheepherder’s hut out on a dark moor, he liked that. He killed the flashlight and stood there shivering, daring something to lay hold of him, in the dark sometimes he could feel it, if he’d had a few tokes. The first time he shuthimself in here, things seemed to rush out of the wood, but they did not make him uneasy, not anymore. He could not say what they were, spirits maybe, but hell, he was probably related to them, it wasn’t as if they were strange. Pieces of the house’s history had been pushed into the attic. In this dark he felt most strongly what kind of house it had been. Mothholes of light appeared in the blankets, his grandmother had woven them, they were old. He had only known her when she visited them back in Boston, him a small boy at the time, but he was certain she wouldn’t want her loom sheltering a garden like his.
    Innis went about the house as if nothing had changed, despite the shrouded light in the attic, his little plot set up and sown. Downstairs, back upstairs, he was tense, a bit wired. Starr would be out late, that new woman was making demands on his attention. In the hall Innis dustpanned a spill of potting soil, searched for other traces of his hidden activities. Finding none, he flipped open a sketchpad under his bedroom lamp, unable to settle into the details of anything, scribbling a rough sketch of a woman’s face, boldly pretty, her hair swirls of dark pencil. Tomorrow he’d go back to the upper woods, far up where he’d staked out that spot, a clearing nicely concealed for summer planting. Still some work to be done there. His plants would need good light without being easily noticed by browsing deer or nosy humans. Apart from Finlay scaring the shit out of him that afternoon way down the break, he’d never run into a soul in all his wanderings up there, just three hunters he’d hidden from back in the fall when the woods were as new and foreign as everything else. You’re a Boston kid, Starr had told him, you get lost up there and we’ll have to send the Mounties in after you. But he knew the woods now, the woods were his.
    When he’d first driven into The Mines with Starr to give him a hand at the TV repair shop and seen it in all its dreary clutter, he’d nearly left that very day. But he had nothing to take him anywhere, no money, no friends or destinations, he was starting from scratch in a new country, it didn’t matter that he had been born