There’s a tiny store down the village road, just the front room of a house, its name pulled me close to peer in the front window, “The We May Have It” said the sign, though chances looked quite good that they may not, a wonderful name anyway, suggest it to Momma for the store, or a motto for our little clan?
A little girl in a red knit cap is passing by on a bicycle, red balloon tires, wavering and wobbling down the rough road. I am struck by the sight of her, a joy. Dead village? Nah. Dead MacLean? Half, maybe, but waking…
I saw a dead sheep by the shore, seen others. A plague of rabbits Calum says, they ate so much grass this year the sheep were starved. Marsail says the bunnies’ll be gassed in their burrows pretty soon. I don’t like the sound of that. The sheep have to live, they say. Aye.
More pages remained, taking him where he could not go. But Shane was calling him to the phone. He folded the letter away reluctantly and went inside. Because the place and the people in the letter were still with him, Tena’s voice registered before her words and sent a charge of intimacy through him, unexpected, as if the call had to do with Lauchlin and her and where they’d left off.
“I said, I heard Clement leaving this morning, Lauchlin. Now I get a call from the fishery, he hasn’t shown up for work. Have you seen him?”
The feeling she had aroused vanished. “Johanna might have,” he said, collecting himself against the worry he was hearing. “From the house, she usually does. He takes back roads sometimes, Tena, he could have broken down.” His assurances sounded rote to him, hollow.
“They wanted to know what was up, was he sick or what. Well, I don’t know what is up with him, do I? They weren’t happy. I’m not either, not now.”
“He can’t be far.”
“Far where? He’d have called, Lauchlin. It’s almost noon, isn’t it?”
“Do the Mounties know?”
“I didn’t want to get frightened about it.”
“Call them. Are you alone there?”
“Lorna’s here. I’ll be fine, I’m okay. He told me last night he was worried about his mill, up there off MacQuarrie’s Cross. Maybe he looked in on it on his way to work? Got a flat there or something? But it’s so
late,
Lauchlin. I was doing things in the house, ordinary things, then I realized I was waiting to hear from him.”
“I’ll go up to the mill first, then I’ll do the roads he takes, as soon as I can get out of here. We’ll find him, Tena. You heard him leave, he’s out there.”
After he hung up, Lauchlin calmly took gas money from Shane, slid it into the cash drawer, gave him change. There was no good reason
for alarm, not yet. But his unease crept beyond Clement’s failure to show up for work: some great shift of attention seemed to have begun. He did not understand why he felt it or what it meant, only that somehow it was turning, turning.
U
P
into the backland Lauchlin drove, but without heart, urging himself along. Something small and dark, far in the back of his mind, was working its way grimly forward. Clement was not up here, he was sure of that, but he wanted to come anyway, up into woods, away. The wind was up and the morning’s fog was only wisps high in the trees.
He’d done his road work along here, this crossroad all the way to the Southside, that good summer before it all came undone. Home, helping Johanna in the store, that was fine, temporary, he was fighting well and he was on his way up, everyone said so. A bout with Henry Hinkley was in the cards, maybe in September, Hinkley was a banger but he knew he could beat him, that year or any year, even if Morag was away trying her luck in Boston, so young, the first break between them. Up this steep hill, really chugging that first morning, just donkey work, plugging along, the clay dust deadened with dew, sleepy, grumpy at having been shocked awake by Johanna’s alarm clock he’d borrowed, it would have been wiser to have turned down that fifth beer at the dance, and the long swig of rum from the pint
the girl offered him, huddled the both of them in the backseat of her car, working methodically into each other’s underwear, murmuring encouragments, when the passenger door flew open and a man piled into the front seat, oblivious to them, drunk, he slammed the door shut and muttered away, his head lolled back on the seat, then he passed out with his mouth open, and Lauchlin and the girl he’d just met lost their chemistry along with their privacy, and he’d come home with sore nuts and the glum prospect of an early rising. But after a mile or two he’d risen up, he didn’t feel heavy anymore or slow and stupid, his lungs and his legs were working together on the grades, up, down, and the flats were sweet. He jumped puddles, kicked a stone ahead of him like a ball. Joey MacNeil’s bull gave him the red eye and looked to charge the rail fence, Whoa, Big Red, he’d shouted at him, I got a good right hand here, it’ll stop you in your tracks, and he would do a pirouette as he ran, jog backwards working his fists in the air, jab-right-hook,
bambambam,
and resume his stride, laughing at this dance, it was all his own, he was horse, he was eagle, he was the air. Etta MacFarlane, an old widow then, would wait for the sight of him, she would stand up on her porch in the old farmhouse she shared with a sister and wave, ask him if he’d like a glass of fresh milk, and he’d tell her, Thanks, Etta, I can’t right now, and she would yell, What else is there but right now, boy? And he’d give her a thumbs up, he was, yes, in the now of his life, he had seized it, he had power in his fists. But there were other mornings too, when he moved through a chilly mist, opening to admit him and closing behind, the landmarks dim, Etta’s house off away like a faded pattern in a quilt, and it seemed like the mist had shut him away, it was harder to cheer himself with possibilities, trapped as he was in that shifting space around him, a little world that began and ended with every stride.
But if he’d gone to Harris with Frank…
I’ve seen the same sea birds here we see at home, puffins, guillemots, razorbills, shags. One dizzying gorge gave off into a cave hard to pick out under the sun’s angle, but the surge pushed into it with a
profound, delayed thud. Sounds like the Fairy Hole would in a high sea. We didn’t stick around to experience that, did we, Lauch? Next time. And here it’s just me anyway, talking to myself. Feeling this great geologic distance is what I need. Distance. I ask questions, and who else to answer them but me? Maybe that’s good, maybe that’s what I had to come here for, alone. I turn a corner and there’s another mirror and in it I’m the only face. This is what comes, Brother. Get ready.
Lauchlin passed a pickup listing at the roadside ditch, beyond it the hunched forms of berry pickers out in a wild field, his eyes flicking across a blue-jeaned rump, the woman raising her head to glance at him, her black curls coiled tightly by a mizzly rain. The wet clay road was muddied, he wallowed through potholes, their melancholy splash, and the truck rocked up what had once been a road to an old house, no more than stones mossed under ferns, lost to fire years ago. The trees glistened with wet. Tree-drip pattered along the cab roof when he shut off the engine.
Silence is different in trees, Lauch, in all that vertical denseness that troubled the Cape Breton settlers, coming from open landscapes like Harris and Lewis. Our bards wrote about the tyrannous forest, coille ghabhaidh, the black forest, coille dhubh, cleared and burned into coille loisgte, and the brutal winters, the midsummer heat, words etched in our Granny’s whispers.
Lauchlin walked the rest of the way to where he could see the clearing Clement had cut. If the man had lived in Harris, there would have been no timber to harvest or mill, but he’d never have had a Cooper to contend with either, skulking around, doing his mysterious man act. If you cast your eye across the gentle hills and moors of Harris, you could probably see just about anything moving on the terrain. Was it harder to commit a furtive deed there, or hide from its consequences? A man like Cooper might turn up anywhere of course, but maybe the open hills of Harris, the open sea, would not feed a temperament like his, secretive, stalking, like an animal just beyond the light of a campfire, in a flash gone into trees. The vast Cape Breton woods always reminded you just how far back your history did not go, and there was nature, breathing down your neck.
Here the tree was still king, these boreal woods were not the woods of Scotland.
Clement had been up here only yesterday working, he’d stopped at the store for pop again. Why then did it seem so shut down, closed? There was his mill, a tarp cover blown partially back by the wind. A pile of sawdust, darkening and congealing in the rain. A pungent yet satisfying odour of fresh industry, interrupted, on hold. Spruce pitch, hemlock, and, faintly, gasoline. He peered into a garbage bag: the gnarled fingers of leather gloves, a set of ear muffs, safety goggles misty with scratches, a half-finished quart of Coca-Cola. Under clear plastic sheeting rough boards of birch were stacked, and planks of spruce and hemlock for framing. A pile of slabs to be cut up for stovewood. Lauchlin tramped among stumps, skirting heaps of slash, of limbs, discarded sections of trees, mushrooms as bright as egg yolks. Clement had been close to finishing here, he hadn’t cleaned things up yet, but he wouldn’t leave a site this way, he would come back in winter and burn the slash piles. Some didn’t, they left it as it lay. Lauchlin snatched up an empty oil bottle and tossed it on a rubbish pile. The surrounding woods were quiet. They went in deep up here in the high part of St. Aubin, you could get lost, people had. He kept moving toward the trees, a mixed woods of maple and birch, hemlock, spruce, even a few mature beech, you hardly saw them anymore, that all-purpose tree the settlers had favoured, wood to build with, make implements with, to love its yellow leaves in fall, to burn for winter. Lauchlin hadn’t been much in woods since he was young, they were always there, near and around, but no occasion to them anymore, except that walk with Tena to the point, a walk he would like to know again. Possible? Right now, in the confusion of his heart, something said it would not be.
He jerked a limbing axe out of a stump where a strong arm had embedded it. Woodcutting, in the winter. He was boxing then. A great workout, cutting firewood, pit props for the mines. Axe, bucksaw.
Lauchlin swung the axe side to side, over his head, limbering up like a hammer thrower. Hector Fraser had told him he was good at wood, Hector, a prime axeman, proud as an athlete. Not a big man but with long arms, natural skill, he’d been put together for felling trees, at chopping frolics where lumbermen competed he’d excelled. He could limb a felled spruce as fast as he could walk down that tree, switching his axe, sharp enough to shave with, smoothly from one hand to the other as he moved down, chopping limbs away clean with one stroke maybe two, it was all there, timing, stamina, the unfailing hand and eye. In an era of blade warfare, he’d have swung a claymore, fought some chieftain’s battles, slashing with deadly force, but all he subdued here were trees, he sawed them to the ground, whipping his body into them again and again, awing onlookers and the men he worked with. Hector would weigh an axe like a baseball bat, twisting the shaft in his hands, taking short swings, warming up. Some are good at wood and some not worth a damn, Hector told him, they don’t have it. But you’re good, boy, you’re picking it up. Lauchlin had liked how the axe worked the shoulders, the back, the feel of it hitting home, you could pivot into it like a punch, two precise whacks and the trunk was notched. He’d stand back, breathing hard when the tree cracked and fell, sweating in the cold sun, his breath frosted, sharp, like doing road work on a cold morning, in that slow excruciating light, his breath steaming, boots clomping. He longed for winter, he wanted it right now.
Lauchlin drove the axe back hard into the stump. The wet woods muffled the soft dripping in the trees. Woods were different when wind and sun were in them, in that drama of swaying limbs and moving light, your eye missed things.
On his way back, the tarp was flapping like a wet sail and he secured it with a rope tie. At his feet lay sawdust he’d kicked open, its blond core dry as an anthill. Clement had not been here today. There was no feel of him anywhere.
ON FERRY ROAD
, a helicopter cut back and forth overhead, criss-crossing Lauchlin’s path, behind him, then ahead, not high in the air, peeling away at times over woods, slowing, hovering. There was an urgency to its pattern that Lauchlin wanted to ignore. It hung for a few seconds above a logging road, thrashing the trees wildly, before it wheeled away toward the Calabash. He could have told the pilot, I’ve been up the Calabash already, try another one. The chopper came within hearing again, then faded off south. At the roadside not far from the store, Malcolm was leaning into his cane, watching the sky from under his big felt hat as if there might have been an air attack. Lauchlin was surprised to see him there, but something in the intentness of his focus, the angle of his head, threw a chill into him. Lauchlin preferred to believe the chopper was on some routine patrol even though the pattern of its search said that was unlikely. He slowed as if to give Malcolm a lift but Malcolm waved him by, pointing in the other direction toward home.
Johanna was at the pumps as he pulled in, talking, hugging her arms as she often did, she and George Morrison and Effie Smith and Slide MacIvor, their cars parked at odd angles as if they’d leapt from them.
“A helicopter Mountie flew over!” Effie yelled when Lauchlin stepped out of his truck.
“I saw it, Effie.”
“I don’t think it was a Mountie at the controls,” Slide said. He smoked cigars continually and he carried a heavy belly above his belt, but there was still something about him, in his black, thin, slickedback hair and the way he stood, casually balanced, that made you think you could fire a baseball at him without warning and his hands would flash up and devour it.
Johanna stared at Lauchlin and he expected her to ask where he’d been, leaving the store to Shane. But she said, “It’s to do with Clement MacTavish.”
A dry taste came into his mouth. “I know,” Lauchlin said.
“The Mounties drove by a bit ago,” his mother said. “George knows more than I do. I’m going up.” Frowning, she turned away toward the house.
George was squinting at the sky. “Had an accident, I bet you,” he said.
“Well, he didn’t have it up there,” Slide said.
“Nobody knows just yet. Can’t find him,” Effie said.
“You know, he’s a great one for shortcuts,” Slide said, drawing on his cigar. “A truck could slip out of sight easy, down a back road.”
“Down a gulley, you know, sure. Under the trees,” George said.
“Wouldn’t see him from the air anyway,” Effie said. “You see anything on the road, Lauchlin?”
“Nothing, Effie.”
“Lots of places they wouldn’t find him for a week,” Slide said. “Little back bridges all over the county.” True, there were many places a man could run off the road and be lost to the eye, like Starr Corbett had twenty years ago, asleep or drunk at the wheel, his car sailing over a bank late on a rainy night, found dead two days later down in the trees.
“Malkie was here, Lauch,” Effie said, “but his foot hurt so bad, he had to go home.”
“He won’t miss much. I’m going up above for a minute. Tell Shane I’ll be back.”
His mother was not in the kitchen. He did not expect the dinner dishes to remain where Johanna and her friend had ended their conversation, a cigarette stubbed out in a small ashtray, the unusual scent of smoke still in the air as if she had left in a hurry. His mother was looking out the parlour window. The fog had risen to the mountain where it levelled the ridge in white mist. Lauchlin watched her from the doorway, waiting before he spoke. He had kidded her sometimes, trying to get her goat, It’s terrible grown over, isn’t it, Ma, the
Slios?
“Maybe Clement took off with the money,” he said, to lighten the air a little, and for a second he wanted to believe it.
“Don’t be so foolish!” his mother said. “How far would he get with fish money? He wouldn’t make it to the Strait of Canso, and anyway Clement is no thief, of any kind.”
“I was joking, Ma.”
“Why are you talking that way? The man is missing for no good reason. His wife must be out of her mind. But I guess you’d know more about that than I do. He’s had an accident, it has to be.”
“I think so,” Lauchlin said. On the window chair lay Frank’s postcard to her. He wouldn’t share the letter, it wasn’t intended for her, certain allusions would not make sense and she’d want them explained, she’d be worried by them. Had he gone with Frank, would this be unfolding in his absence, whatever it was? “But somebody had to see him, you can’t miss that van.”
“I saw him go by this morning, from this very window,” Johanna said, shading her eyes. “He always gives me a little toot but he just went on by…” her hand sweeping across the pane as if following his track.