Lauchlin of the Bad Heart Read online

  “There are men like that. Are you a bird expert?”

  “I was a teacher once. In a classroom, expertise on anything is useful.”

  “You didn’t stay with it, the teaching?”

  “I’d had enough.” That wasn’t really true, even though at times he’d been an indifferent teacher, days when just dealing with himself would have been plenty, he didn’t need the attentive inattention of students. It was his body that had had enough. He’d had to quit, every blessed day something or someone stressed his heart, and keeping his cool, which he was proud of and had served him well in the ring, stressed it more than fighting had. He had thanked God that when the heart attack hit he was here in the front field, not in a boxing bout or in class, dropping to his knees, clawing his chest as if he’d been shot. Only Johanna saw him fall and knew instantly because of the way his body curled into pain, like his father’s had. The ambulance took a long time to arrive from The Mines, the damage was already done, the scarring, he just lay there in the high grass waiting, shading his eyes from the sun, hoping it wouldn’t strike him again before he got to the hospital. For months afterward, when he walked up the hill to the house any twinge or skipped beat made him freeze and wait, he didn’t want to crumple there again. He stopped that after a while, being afraid of his own body, of its desertion. He had his father’s heart. What could you do? His mother’s beat clean as a clock. “You can identify birds more readily, you know, through their songs than their feathers. You don’t need to see them.”

  She didn’t reply at first and he was afraid he’d offended her.

  “I’d like to learn about that sometime,” she said. “I do listen for them, their different songs. I hear jays and crows, them I know. I heard a hummingbird yesterday right outside the window, its hum seemed to sparkle, I could see it hovering, iridescent green. It was vivid, you know? There in my mind, at that moment.”

  FOUR

  LAUCHLIN was searching the shelves for any overlooked packet of brown sugar, wondering what Tena was baking, how she mixed the right ingredients, when his mother came into the store, yanking a scarf dramatically from her white hair. “Morag called,” she said. “She’s home.”

  “Is she? Well.”

  When his mother declared Morag home, as she had for many summers, he had to take it in slowly because it carried so much history in his life, and his mother never intended it as just a statement of fact but as an announcement, a challenge, a prologue, a grievance. Morag’s home—but don’t you get excited about it, we’ve been through this before. Morag’s home—but somehow shouldn’t be home, she’s really a Boston woman now, and not the woman for you, and the first thing you’re going to do is be gone with her overnight, aren’t you. And don’t get any ideas about marrying her, she’s just as Catholic as she always was. You’re bored and you want something to happen.

  But none of these things she said to him anymore, and he had long ago made it clear that his marriage, to anyone, was a closed subject. She seemed to concede that Morag had been a woman as close to a wife as he was ever likely to have, and that he had loved her, and so Johanna wouldn’t interfere with what they had with each other, which was beyond her understanding in any case. But just hearing Morag’s name sent his mind off in her direction. She, her very self, was not far away.

  “Peg she goes by now,” Lauchlin reminded her. He stroked his cheek absently. Stubble, getting careless. Morag liked a smooth chin.

  “Peg, yes. Ashamed of her given name, was she?”

  “I’d guess it’s more complicated than that, Ma. You knew Nell MacSween died, her auntie?”

  “Nell Roderick Angus? No, but I don’t see people from up there often anymore. Did she? Poor soul. She knew you well enough, the nights you spent there. And you didn’t know yourself she was gone?”

  Lauchlin opened the till, slammed it shut. “It happens I didn’t.”

  “Morag or Peg or whatever her name is now should have let you know, I don’t think much of that.”

  “She has a busy life in Boston, she works hard. We haven’t been in touch anyway.” His mother used to talk Morag down if he let her, but in this case she was right. “I passed a good many nights up there, Ma, it’s true. She liked having me visit, Auntie Nell did. Sometimes she let Morag and me sleep in the same bed. Maybe she even liked the idea of us up there nice and cozy, I don’t know.”

  He had never told his mother this, these were details he had spared her years ago. But she was complacent about him now, about his fixed place in her life. Why should she think he would never leave? He did not want photos of him stuck in a drawer somewhere, like those of his Uncle Ranny and the woman he went with for so many years and never married. Over at Granny’s place, years of Sunday visits and then suddenly it’s a snapshot just of Ranny alone with his mother under a big tree by the brook, in a baggy suit, his long, handsome unsmiling face, the woman finally gone, fed up with waiting for what she knew would never come.

  “What’s the matter with you lately? She wasn’t Morag’s mother anyway. A mother wouldn’t let that go by in her own house.”

  “If Morag was happy, so was her auntie,” he said.

  His mother turned toward a plant in the window, plucked away its dried leaves. “She wants you to call her. I suppose you’ll be running off to see her, leaving your supper cold.”

  “I don’t know as I’m running off anywhere. My supper I’ll eat.”

  “Haddock up there and potatoes.” She slipped into the white apron she always wore at the store, tied it behind her. “I got the fish from Clement MacTavish.”

  “He must’ve been up there half an hour. He sell you a barrel?”

  “He likes to talk, we talked a while. He gets things off his chest with me he wouldn’t with others, I think.”

  “About his wife? About Tena?”

  “Well now, I wouldn’t tell you, would I? He’s having trouble with that partner of his, I’ll tell you that.”

  “No secret there. He’s not a charmer, Ged Cooper. Shane sold him some bad gas before we knew. He was the only one to come back about it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I can’t say I sent him off happy. We might see him again.”

  “Be sure you’re back in the morning. I don’t want to deal with angry men.”

  “Don’t worry yourself about the mornings.” All the damn mornings he’d woken and knew that’s all he had to go to, not even light yet and he no merchant of any kind, yes, the dark early mornings he’d hated most, facing the store. When he was boxing, he had come to love the early hours, trotting along the road before dawn, just the engine of his breathing, any kind of air was good, cold or foggy or hit with sun, even saffron with steel-mill fumes when he lived in Sydney, rain never bothered him, slush or snow.

  “When Morag’s home, you get unpredictable,” his mother said, moving past him behind the counter.

  “Do I? Good.”

  “Now go on, I’ve got things to tend to here.”

  “We’re out of brown sugar, Ma. Any up at the house?”

  NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES Morag and Lauchlin had mutally agreed, at the end of her summer stays, they wouldn’t see each other anymore, pointless to keep this up, foolish to kill chances they might have with other men or women, she still would call when she came back, later than sooner now, she’d hold out for two or three days, long enough for the word to trickle back to him from Inverness, waiting for him to make the move he never made, and finally she’d be on the phone, cool and indifferent, as if they hadn’t seen each other for a decade, were nearly strangers anyway, and Lauchlin would hide behind courteous inquiries, distant but polite. But at the end of all their feigned casualness she would suggest, as if it had just occurred to her, that they meet sometime and he of course said sure, okay, why not. They had an intense attraction to each other that had never, despite everything, dimmed, and it could, after a long absence, brighten suddenly and blind them for a while to what had caused them to break off many times bef
ore. And what an indulgence, how he had come to expect that renewal every summer, to draw close to her again as if nothing bitter had ever passed between them.

  But last summer there had been no call, and no exchange of letters since the year before. So he took his time with his supper, the haddock was good and he was hungry, he twirled his potato in the butter he was supposed to avoid, savoured the fresh greens. Yet after he’d finished his black tea, his wheat bread and blueberry jam, still missing pies and cakes the way a smoker misses a cigarette, the evening lay empty before him. He didn’t want to get caught up in Morag tonight, too angry with her, cutting him off from Nell’s death—was that a door closing, intentional? He looked at his dirty plate, at the table set for him and him alone, at the big country stove his mother kept as a backup, and he had to admit there were days when this familiar house comforted him, he knew it so well, by now there wasn’t anything in it that had not been arranged to his or his mother’s liking, and some of it to his dad’s still remained. His mother of course had her tastes and quirks but they were just the texture of their lives here, her threads and his, warp and woof. He’d never thought he would in his fifties be waking in the same bed he was weaned in, his mother moving about the house in the morning as she always had. When he opened his eyes it was always to hear her first, and there were mornings when he thought, Maybe I wasn’t meant to get much beyond this, my own house, my own mother. When your heart goes, maybe you need such a house, its quiet and familiar rhythms, you steer clear of surprises round the corner, out that door. He and Johanna had their rituals of openings and closings, beginnings and endings every day, and bits of gossip from the store, who was ill or mending or in need of something, physical, spiritual, good or bad. They observed the weather over the water, the mountain, the shadings of the Slios. She was born over there on the other side, on a farm near the shore, gone now to a gravel pit. She never liked that name, the Slios, the sound of it. I never heard it called that, she would say, in my life, it’s New Pabbay, look at the road sign on the highway, look at a map, New Pabbay is what it says. But that’s not what they called it in the old days, Lauchlin would remind her, they were all speaking Gaelic then, Ma. Speaking it when I was girl too, my mother and father, but after all wasn’t it my grandfather that gave it the name in the first place, being from Pabbay as he was, there in the Hebrides? He had the little post office there in his house, so that’s what he called it. She had little Gaelic herself anymore and so she got into the old tongue differently than she might have when she was young. He kidded her about the old days, bits of gossip about the past he’d picked up or made up, but the truth was he had a soft spot for the old days, he liked hearing about them, in part because he didn’t have to live in them, but it was pleasant to imagine them, what it might have been like to be there, the hardships and the joys. But he himself was moving into that zone of his life when he had his own old days that he’d lived, and the further they receded, the stronger they seemed to grow in his mind, like those he had spent with Morag.

  He wanted to see Morag now but the ritual was fixed. To break it might raise up too soon the old difficulties, and this time she owed him a call, did she not?

  He located a package of brown sugar and conveyed it to the store where Lorna Matheson was at the counter and offered to drop it by the MacTavishes. Lauchlin, enduring a sarcastic comment from his mother about the lengths he would go for a customer if she was good-looking enough, stopped short of insisting he do it himself, it was too obvious. It’s not what you think at all, Ma, he said on the way out, it’s the storekeeper in me.

  He took a shower and shaved carefully. But he stopped his razor halfway down his throat and glanced out the bathroom window at the road where Tena had tapped her way along the shoulder that night, where she would have emerged from under the big tree just before the store, that canopy of maple leaves. She had probably had her fill of testing the road at night. He tried to imagine what it might be like, feeling the gravel of the shoulder under your feet, hearing a car approach, feeling its backwash as it rushed past you. In the mirror, he ran his fingers above one eye, over the hard ridge of scar tissue, he’d had his cuts but only once badly (What fight was that? Kenny Kupchak with that hook quick as a snake? Malkie would remember), he’d never been a bleeder. What conception of him did Tena have with nothing but his voice to go on and what little he’d told her of himself? How would she feel him, sense him? His hands, his lips, would they feel different than if she could see them too? Could she hear the expression on his face? He closed his eyes and moved his hands in the space around him. Odd that she made him more conscious of himself, not less.

  He sat on his bed in his undershorts, shaking his head at what the room had accumulated. Books, some fiction and poetry he had liked or liked to teach when he could, stories of Conrad, Lawrence, Hemingway, Morley Callaghan (he’d usually include the side-story of Callaghan and Hemingway, pals, putting on the gloves once in Paris and Callaghan, smaller and lighter, knocking Hemingway down), Hugh MacLennan, Alice Munro, she knew the provincial life, though her truth was sometimes beyond his students. A few books on boxing, John L. Sullivan’s ghostwritten memoir, a volume on the bare-knuckle era. A cassette player and tapes, most of them Irish and Scottish groups now, Planxty, the Bothy Boys, Silly Wizard and the like he’d had for a good while, and the young Cape Bretoners getting good names, the Rankin Family, the Barra MacNeils, Ashley MacIsaac, just a kid yet, and Natalie MacMaster, music to get toasted with, to boost a mood. The boxing gloves from his last fight hung by their laces on a dresser mirror post—he’d never pulled them on again. When you lived so long in the same house, life telescoped and the old and familiar could seem just-arrived. He liked old things, their particularity, imbued with a past, an era. They defined themselves, stood out against the sameness of the new. His bedside lamp, a converted oil lamp with a cobalt base. A small desk of his great-grandfather MacLeod’s, brought over from Scotland. An oak chair Uncle Lion had made. An oval picture frame with convex glass—grandfather and grandmother MacLean in their twenties, unsmiling and proud. Too many things on his walls, they needed a culling, an artistic rearranging. Morag had an eye for that, but she hadn’t been in this room in years. You need walls twenty feet high, Lauchie, she’d said once. He had hung something when the spirit moved him, then something else above it, below it, off to the side, a stab at asymmetry. He would wake up and, depending on how he felt, his eyes would snag on a photo or an object and he’d lie there while its memories seeped into him. An 1811 print from England Morag had bought him in Boston, a bare-fisted match between Tom Crib and the black American Tom Molineaux, the white fighter‘s eyes disfigured even though he won, Molineaux’s endurance wasted from drinking in pubs. A portrait print, same era, of James Figg with his shaved head, the father of English boxing who’d taught gentlemen the fine art of pugilism in his London club. Photos Lauchlin had taken in Cape Breton, some with women, some not, that he sometimes examined, peering at what remained of those places, of that self that might still be useful to him.

  And the postcard he’d long ago tacked above the little desk because he liked the woman on it, not for mailing but for himself. Silent Waters, a bromide print, England late forties, it had that postwar feeling about it, a peaceful sensuality possible once again. A nude woman, her hands touching lightly the gunnel of a rowboat as if it is the edge of a bed, stands in a placid, misty pond, her feet immersed in its mirrored shallows. She is turned slightly away from the camera, just the profile of her face, the simple lines of her lovely body inclined toward the boat in the grey, misted light as if she might gently push it aside and step deeper into the water: in those soft black-and-white shades she looks quietly desirable in some way he could not explain, and he never tired of her, imagining the rustle of cloth as she’d removed her dress, the way her garments lay out of sight on the grass.

  He put on a clean shirt and jeans and sat in the chair by the parlour window. Many times he had driven over the mountain on a night li
ke this, up the west coast where Morag lived. Yet he felt that he had dressed for Tena MacTavish somehow, absurd though that was—no way would he encounter her tonight. Maybe it was just the two quick whiskys that primed him for her company. Good for the heart anyway, old Dr. Fraser had told him, whisky in moderation. Lauchlin avoided younger doctors and their contemporary advice—Fraser had seen him fight, he understood the limits of medical solutions. So Lauchlin nursed a third glass, turning it in his hand as the set sun became a slow, red river of ingot along the ridge, the mountain’s green darkening down to the strait, the water a faintly shivering black.

  At the store below, Clement’s truck pulled up and he dashed inside with the engine running. What would he and Tena talk about when he came home? Ordinary things, or would she tell him something that only her blind eyes could see? A day different from those of other wives, even the way she baked, feeling velvety flour in her fingers, the sweet grit of brown sugar. After Clement drove away, Johanna doused the store lights, flipped the Open sign to Closed. She’d stay down there a while, checking stock, pencilling a list of goods for him to pick up in North Sydney tomorrow. The livid red sky ebbed into gauzy pinks, died to cool aquas, and then the first shade of night.

  “YES?” MORAG SAID, a little out of breath. The phone there was back in the kitchen and she had probably run down the stairs.

  “It’s Lauchlin, Morag.”

  “Hello, Lauchlin.”

  Their voices struck the familiar notes, it would not have mattered what words they used, how dull or ordinary, it was all voice at first, feints and dodges, an old tune of reunion and evasion. When had she come down? How were things with him? How did she find being home again, alone in the house?