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window, losing him in a numbness, no one demanding to know who he was, where from, why he was here. He had felt like the convict in that movie set in Siberia, a man staggering through a stark waste of conifers and snowfields that went on and on like a dream further than anyone could see, escaped from a prison into the endless trees (It’s crazy, ordering you out of the goddamn country, Mohney had said, you’re American like me, you’re from here, and Innis said no, I wasborn up there and I have to go back to it, for good). Whatever had watched him in those trees, it wasn’t a person. Deer, sure, from a safe distance, poised for flight, but they had no opinions about him. Birds he couldn’t name then, a script of tracks looping delicately through fresh snow, and their wings crisp as scissors when they flew. A rabbit would bolt from its cowering place, whips of fur and feet, its little pink brain unwinding through the brush like a top. But he liked to be near the road when dark came down, maybe where a streetlamp shone through the trees, not deep in the woods.
    He stepped back into the mudroom, into the smell of the big salt cod a friend of Starr’s had brought, holding it up by the tail like an animal pelt. It hung from a nail in the entryway giving off a rich odor, like salty cheese, and was there weeks later untouched until Innis wondered if maybe it was a trophy and not to be eaten at all. Starr would give its hard skin a stroke whenever he passed, Jesus, you don’t find that size much anymore, and one time you’d haul them in and need two arms to carry them. Finally he began to break off pieces and soak them overnight and they ate boiled cod and potatoes and Innis got a taste for it. He tore off a shred and chewed it to sate the munchies, then stuffed himself with crackers and cheese in the warm kitchen. A rush of optimism made him smile at the ceiling light, right up there it was in the attic, in operation, things were moving at last. Outside, each flake spun lazily past the window, he could feel snow now even when his back was turned, even before he opened his eyes in the morning, it gave a tone to the air.
    In the hallway, he studied the old photographs framed haphazardly on the wall, Granny hung them there, Starr said, Ijust left them the way they were. Innis liked to get right inside them, smell them, feel them. On some the glass was smoky, their corners held pinches of dust. These are people you came from, Starr told him, some of them. They seemed to Innis distant, removed, trapped in sepia shades and the blurry edges of box camera snapshots. Nothing candid in their poses, no fooling around. When Granny Corbett had stayed with them that time in Watertown when he was little, she was grey and heavy and ancient, wincing from room to room on bad feet, talking quietly to his dad in a language neither Innis nor his mother knew, saying things she didn’t want them to hear and his mother got angry and slammed doors. Granny mailed him knitted socks at Christmas that itched and brown wool mittens he never wore when he was out of sight because he wanted gloves. But she never came back, and here she was in a chair on a porch, her hair darker, her folded hands big and capable in her lap, a woman he did not know, in some summer of her life where roses curled from a trellis, and there was Starr’s brother, Munro, Innis’s dad, on a haywagon at the reins of a big dark horse, the horse turning its head as the shutter clicked, smudging its face, his dad squinting in a bright sun, solemn, uncertain. How old was he there? Younger than Innis? A Cape Breton farm boy who would, like so many others, head for Boston or beyond, and who would be struck by a car near Scollay Square years later. Worst drivers in the world, his dad was always saying, they’re right crazy, I wouldn’t own a car in Boston if I had the money to buy one. Me too, Innis had said, only nine, and he never did own one. Leaving a bar he liked on a Friday,