The Middle Rear Road sits halfway between the picturesque village of Loch Bhreagh — a quaint little tourist trap on the other side of Ceilidh Mountain — and Town. Town is what us hicks from the sticks call the Northside and The Mines, and it is actually the amalgamation of a couple of OxyContin-ridden, call-centre-infested, coal-stripped craters that erupted in the armpit of the Island’s industrial end. It’s where both my parents were born and raised and most of their people still live. My doctor’s appointment is a good shot deeper into the heart of Industrial Cape Breton, which is out in Town, Town. When you say it twice, everybody knows you’re referring to our only half-assed crack at a city. A thirty thousand–person sputtering economic engine, with the beautiful BayFlower Mall, more cheap chain coffee shops than you can shake a stick at, and of course, the Regional Hospital. The Mines, the Northside, and the city itself all used to be boomtowns in their own right, back in the days of coal and steel. Nothing but busted now.

Mama curses under her breath every time Bessie’s tires plunk through another pothole on the crumbling kilometres of the Middle Rear Road, but she still laughs about the time she filled those holes with clumps of forget-me-nots that she dug up from the ditch at the bottom of our driveway. This was her way of protesting the negligence of the powers-that-be on the Mainland, who forget that rural Cape Breton even exists when it comes time to spend taxpayers’ dollars. When she was done, every hole had thick clusters of delicate, tenacious blue flowers filling the dangerous gaps in the collapsing pavement. A lovely way to make a point. Then old Mary Jessie MacRitchie ditched her truck swerving to avoid a pile of forget-me-nots, which she mistook for a dog. Mama doesn’t laugh at that part of the story.

“Mary Jessie was damn near ninety,” Mama snorts. “Shouldn’t have been driving in the first place.”

She cranks up whatever whiny old country singer she’s got jammed in the cassette deck as we turn onto the highway that will eventually lead to some semblance of civilization, and I close my eyes in a vain attempt to curtail a fresh round of pounding head and screwy vision. I can’t stomach the world as it rushes by the car window now, even if it is only swaths of stifled trees and clearings dotted with the derelict remnants of the Island’s assorted failures. A shuttered gas station here. A rundown Pott’s Coffee Shop there. The sad scrap of land that sits at the turnoff to the Halfway Road in The Mines, where Mama’s family’s shack once stood.

My uncle Gord sold the land when Black Bernie died. Everyone in the family was too broke to chip in on the burial, so Gord used most of the money from the property sale to pay for Black Bernie’s velveteen-lined casket, a grand Catholic wake and funeral, and a gleaming headstone engraved with the words “Beloved Father.” Mama was wild. Said they should have just pitched the old bastard’s corpse in the ocean and let the eels and sharks dispose of him for free. Gord sold the land to my father’s family, the Spensers, who planned to develop it as a gravel pit. The Spensers got the land for a song because nobody else in Town would dare buy it. Not after all that had happened there. Not with the earth still scarred from the night my great-grandmother Black Agnes went mad and burned her house and most of her family to the ground on the orders of a secret message she read in a tree’s bark. Not with the whispers of how Black Agnes and all her descendants were cursed by the evil eye of some Lebanese gypsies from up Ferris Hill because she was stealing their tea leaf–reading business.