THE BLACK ROOF SHINGLES had soaked up the day’s heat and Innis tossed in his bed, tormented by a mosquito’s needling, looping drone. A moth flittered across his cheek, startling him. In the lamplight, blots like brown ink on its creamy wings. He dozed again in the dark but a bat woke him, veering near and away, a flutter of warm air, and he made no move to drive it off. Was she scared of bats? He lay with his arms flung back, waiting for window light, thinking of Claire, angry he couldn’t keep her out of his mind. Amazing. One kiss, weeks and weeks ago, but the taste of that ran all through him when he had nothing to do but lie here and remember. The house was too quiet. No snoring down the hall, no stirrings on the other side of the plaster. If he held his breath he could just make out that distant rustling of the tide, the sound of broad water moving on a still night. Starr had finally persuaded Claire to quit her job in Sydney, she wasn’t that keen on it anyway, I’m too old to smile when I don’t feel like it, she said, and Starr said Amen, and forget about money, we’re fine. Innis didn’t see how that could be true, but off they’d gone for Isle Madame, Starr hadn’t much business anyway, people were outdoors, it was an uncommonly warm summer so far, more sun than Starr had seen in years, fine as long as the spring didn’t go dry. He told Claire if she liked beaches so much she’d love the sand of Ingonish up north, softer than sugar, and on the west coast the water was warm from the Northumberland Strait. She was dark as a Greek now. A summer person, she bloomed. What would she want with a winter man like Innis? He’d been a small diversion once, on a foggy afternoon.
A muggy morning shower arrived, over by the time he got out the door. He tramped into the upper woods, there was his little plantation to attend to, thank God. Starr had told him again to check the level of the spring, the water seemed cloudy. But Innis knew what silted it: the bucket he drew through it a dozen times one afternoon. Steam rose faintly from the rocks and rough clay ditches and he was sweating under the backpack that held a small shovel, a bottle of fish fertilizer, a baloney sandwich and two apples. The grade was steep until he reached the power line. He rested on his walking stick by a shallow puddle where tadpoles, saved by the rain, squirmed and skittered. Innis flicked a pebble into the water, scattering them, but they soon clustered black again, nibbling for air. That little round ditch was their very life and a few sweeps of his boot could fill it with dirt. But that wouldn’t give him a kick anymore. Anything alive here now he’d rather watch than kill or scare, except blackflies, deerflies and mosquitoes. He looked back down the overgrown road he’d come up through: trees framed a short section of the highway at the bottom of the hill, and the old hay fields and the house deep at the rear of them, small and distant, and the flat, calm strait burnished after the rain, and the mountain, the sky, the watery strokes of cloud—everything lulled and hushed, as fixed as a photo. Not far from the barn he could make out a meandering path of mown hay Starr had cut with the scythe, charged up that day with some crazy urge, and maybe Claire had cured it.
Cut brush and slash flung every which way told Innis that the power company workers were afoot. Their half-track vehicle had dug deeply across a patch of soft rushes but at least they weren’t spraying chemicals. Bullet holes splattered the DO NOT SPRAY sign his uncle had nailed to a line post. There’s springs all along that hill up there, Starr had said, and we don’t want weed killer in our water. A chainsaw rattled into life: in the east, where the corridor crossed the next property, three men were wading into alders that had sprung up in the break. Innis moved on before they could spot him. If things ever got hot up here, they would allow him an alibi: why wouldn’t they, just fellas like himself, be tempted to bootleg a patch of marijuana where nobody but hunters showed up, and easy ways to disguise it? Those hunters from town in their camouflage outfits probably wouldn’t know a pot plant from a raspberry bush, and Innis would be long gone by deer season anyway. He had seen them last fall when he was new to the woods, prowling and crouching through the trees like movie commandos. Stay out of those woods for a while, Starr told him, unless you’ve got a neon sign on your back, sneeze and they’ll plug you. Higher up the slope, west of the deer trail his comings and goings had now widened, Innis caught sight of his clearing through scrawny maples and moosewood, a small oasis of light among the shadows. He pushed through the last of the ferns, ferns helped, they hid the path.
He tended each plant, rubbing its leaves gently in his fingers. Spend time with your green things, pardner, the man in the book said. Talk to ’em. They like to know you care, and they like company too sometimes. Give ’em a little chuck under the chin, sing ’em a little song. Good vibrations are everything, happy plants make happy weed. Sure, okay, that guy had been smoking too much of his own stuff, and it had to be a lot stronger than what Innis was looking at. Though green and growing, free of their little tents and high as his knees, they were coming along more slowly than Innis had imagined. The weather had been dry, sure, but he’d hauled water like a donkey, brought up hay from the barn and packed it around the bare circles of dirt to hold moisture. Water was the magic now, and surely that and a few more weeks of decent sun would shoot them up. They could grow very fast. They were weeds, right? Fragrant collas by September, flower tops, that’s where the money was. But the summer was dragging. He was trying to be patient. That was part of it, wasn’t it, of leaving Boston behind? He knew what he had to wait for and what he could get right now. Not Claire. He didn’t even know how he wanted her or how he could have her. Much older than him. Yes. But at ease with herself, not like girls his age, edgy, too aware of how they looked and what you were making of it, not sure, some of them, what kind of woman they wanted to be one day to the next, and they all had marriage in their eyes if not on their lips.
Work. Keep moving. He fetched the plastic pail from under the low, winglike branches of a hemlock fir. Starr had worked the farm when he was young, and now, except for a fit of pointless scything, he had Innis mow the grass out front the house and made sarcastic comments about Claire’s little garden. Yet he must have learned a lot of things from his own dad, Innis’s grandfather. Fathers pass that on. But in that cramped apartment in Boston, what had Innis learned from his while he was alive? His dad worked night shift, his face puffy and numb at the supper table, not much to say. Never a talker, your dad, Starr said, I made up for it I guess, your dad was a good fella, but he was a bit soft in the heart, and your mother, she worked it in her hands, she could stroke it or wring it, and she did both. Then he was gone for good, took that flight above a city street where, in Innis’s memory, he remained suspended. Torn up, his mother drank at home quietly for a while, later with a woman friend who said, Listen, girl, you’re young, you can’t bring him back, the two of them started going out, and going out some more. His mother brought home a man Innis had never seen before, hungover and clumsy in the kitchen, nothing for Innis but pats on the head and bar tricks that didn’t amuse him. His mother sometimes let him roam outside in the evening if a man came by, and he fell in with other boys who liked streets and had time on their hands. But he knew very early that he would want to do it alone, that he would find the cars he wanted and do his own thing inside them.
Coming on the weathered wood covering the spring, hidden in alders and grass, always gave Innis a flush of pleasure. Something about that little house sheltering the water of his own life, and it had come out of that rock ledge year after year in a steady, unfailing trickle, for him, for his uncle, for all of his family who had lived here. The warped grey boards were warm to the touch as he unlatched the low door and ran a stick around the dark opening. He couldn’t blame the spiders, it was such a lovely cool cave out of the wind, but he hated the cloying webs. He dipped the pail through the small pool. Silt rose like ink. Innis, why is this water murky? Starr would say. The spring is low, I guess, Innis would tell him. Starr would threaten to go see for himself but he never did because in a day or so after Innis had watered his plants the clay particles had once again settled on the bottom of the shallow reservoir. His uncle would take a tumblerful from the sink tap and hold it to the window while the spring water swirled with tiny bubbles. A bit better, he would mumble, and then he’d drink, declaring, without fail, this was the best water in the world, a goddamned tonic.
Purple fringed orchids had poked up here and there in the grass. They were not luxuriant like their name, their blossoms tiny, but they were pretty and he plucked a few as he walked. They didn’t grow down below, they’d be new to Claire. Rasping chainsaws were not far away. That power line crew, they made him nervous. He took up the pail and the flowers and got himself out of sight.
By noon he had soaked a dark ring around each plant, a pail as full as he could make it and a dollop of fertilizer dissolved in each. Tired and sweating, he ate sitting on a stone where the clearing caught a breeze. The baloney sandwich tasted wonderful, washed down with spring water in an empty soda bottle. He chewed slowly, satisfied that his labor would show results. Wasn’t that what kept a farmer going, day by day?
Partway through his first apple a wild thumping approached the woods and seemed to percuss the whole area. For a few seconds he could believe it was a diesel gypsum freighter chugging up the strait, but the sound grew louder too fast and he was running through a hail of vibration, the helicopter beating the air above his head. A tempest smeared through the grass and weeds and saplings and he caught a glimpse of the pilot, his dark visor, before he fell to his belly in the ferns. He thought he might pass out, he was hyperventilating, but he didn’t move and the chunk-chunk-chunk faded off toward north over the strait. Christ. They weren’t police, he knew that, knew it was probably the forestry patrol or a spray plane but God. From the air what could they see but trees and brush? He didn’t even have a plot here, just a few staggered plants, it was pathetic, nothing, not worth a bust even. Why did the bastard come in so low? Power lines maybe. Somebody lost. His hands trembled for a thin joint deep in his shirt pocket. Come on, Innis, you’re not a hick in the boonies, you know what choppers sound like, and sirens, the noises of alarm and pursuit. But it had been awhile, been awhile since he’d heard them.
He let the smoke sit in his lungs until he could hold it no longer, then the breeze pulled it slowly from his mouth. Spring water might be a great tonic but some things it couldn’t cure. Later that day after the three of them had returned from the beach, Starr had cornered him alone in the toolshed: I’ll put it to you plump and plain, he said, you have the hots for Claire, don’t you? Well I’m telling you to forget it, there’s no room in this house for that. This time Innis did not protest or deny, he just smiled and said, Sure, Uncle Starr, whatever you say, and Starr said, Stop calling me Uncle Starr or I’m going to pop you one.
Wind came through the clearing in soft, calming sweeps through grass and ferns. The leaves of his cannabis shivered, turned like feathers and flashed the paler green beneath. The hardy young spruce, the fir, the dead pines barely moved. A woosh as faint as a whisper ran through the maples behind him. Where was the lynx? Cowering? Never. It was a master of its territory, of concealment, of stealth.