Lauchlin of the Bad Heart Read online

  “I didn’t recognize your truck,” she said. “It’s not an engine I know, or the squeaks.”

  “I could use a new one but it gets me around, Tena. How does your garden grow?”

  “It’s fair, considering. We had that killing frost in early June, so things are late, but look, my basil plant is doing well.” She held up a small stalk and he sniffed the leaves. “Smell.”

  “Lemon?”

  “There’s licorice basil too, and other herbs. It’s tough to weed though, I have to be careful what I’m yanking out. I know we have heritage plants here. Old irises and hollyhocks under the window.”

  “You’ve got some old monkshood there, I’d say, by the blooms.”

  “It’s so poisonous. I remember what flowers look like, now I have to know what they feel like, their leaves and buds, stalks, even their smell. If I’m not sure, I wait until they’re high enough to tell. When they blossom I’m still happy though. I think I can feel a colour in my fingers, but maybe I can’t. I don’t want to ask anyone—is this a purple iris or a yellow one? The roses of course I can smell, and the lilacs, oh God, they were as dreamy as ever this year. It’s their scent anyway that makes them so beautiful. They stay with you that way. Clement’s never sure of any flower until he sees a bloom. It’s been a grand day, hasn’t it?”

  “It has, Tena.”

  “The sun comes and goes but it felt so good. How’s the mountain looking?”

  “It’s mottled with shadows. Patches of lighter green where the sun is, moving over the dark.” He realized he was pointing and lowered his arm. “Whitish-grey clouds. The water’s grey, no blue to it now.”

  “I’ve been feeding the birds.” She waved toward a tottering apple tree where a feeder hung from a drooping branch. “I listen to them call and scrap with each other. I know the goldfinches. There’s one now, isn’t there?”

  “Two. Male and female.”

  “You know, sometimes if I’m back there at the edge of the woods, I hear this lovely birdsong. Early in the evening, a rich sound, flute-like.”

  “That’s a hermit thrush, Tena. Thrushes see better in dusk and shade than other birds.”

  “Really?”

  “Some say it’s our nightingale. Old Charles G. D. Roberts thought so. ‘Over the tops of the trees, And over the shallow stream, The Shepherd of sunset frees The amber phantoms of dream…’”

  “That’s lovely.”

  “‘O hermit of evening! thine hour Is the sacrament of desire, When love hath a heavenlier flower, And passion a holier fire!’…That’s all I can remember. Only the good lines stuck with me.”

  “I wish I could remember any lines at all. You’d think I’d be better at that now, wouldn’t you? It’s not lines and words that stay with me, more the images. It’s like they sidestep the old sight, and my new sight has to give them things to do.”

  “I have some new words for you anyway, I guess.” He told her that he had an audiotape, a selection of Canadian stories for her to listen to, but of course he could get her something else if she preferred. She listened, her head to one side.

  “That’s kind of you, Lauchlin. I enjoy fiction, or I did. Anything’s fine with me. Come in.” Clement had put a new railing on the steps and she mounted them easily into the kitchen. “I was listening to the radio, and then I just had to come outside. I have to concentrate on every little thing sometimes and it wears me out. Tell me what’s new at the store.”

  “Nothing is new there, ever. A house burned down. Americans, the Hawkinses’, just down the road there. Arson, looks like.”

  “How mean. I’m afraid of fire. I can smell a burnt match a mile away.”

  “I think it was more insurance than meanness, Tena. The Hawkinses wanted to sell, couldn’t get a buyer. It was the old MacNeil place. Every stick of furniture had been moved out beforehand, there wasn’t a thing of value left in it. It amazes me sometimes what you can get away with in this country.”

  “You sound like Clement.”

  “I do? Sorry.” But he was only sorry that he seemed in any way like Clement. “He has good reasons to sound off.”

  “He does, and he does.”

  “The first story on the cassette I haven’t read, Tena, but it’s by Tessie Gillis, she lived on a farm up north and wrote these stories pretty much on her own, no literary schooling or anything like that. She was from away, Montana, married a Gillis there from Cape Breton and came back here with him. She had a useful perspective, I think—the outsider’s. That allowed her an honesty of a certain kind, mixed in with her love. A little sentimental sometimes but a real eye for the hard life up there back in the forties and fifties.”

  “Let’s listen to it,” Tena said. He set the cassette in her palm and she inserted it into the player she kept on the counter near the sink. “Do you like tea?”

  “If it’s strong.”

  She laughed. “Have you ever seen a weak cup of tea around here?”

  Lauchlin sat down and watched her, fascinated by how she moved in this space. She plugged in the kettle, took down a teapot, a tin of tea. She reached for each object with a sure and rehearsed movement, she didn’t grope or fumble, not in this room. When had Clement stopped reaching out to guide her or keep her from falling?

  The skilled voice of the audio reader entered the room and Lauchlin felt obliged to listen, though he didn’t catch all the beginning, he was watching Tena, her long slender hands. Afternoon light flooded the kitchen suddenly and brightened her hair. She grasped the high handle of the steaming kettle and filled the teapot, pouring slowly and listening, stopping when the tone said full.

  She set out cups and squares of brown-sugar spice cake and joined him at the table. “I like mine weak. Go ahead when it’s steeped to your liking,” she whispered. “I’ll pour my own,” which she did, deftly.

  The story on tape seemed to involve a country woman enduring a harsh Cape Breton winter, one of the old winters so commonly laden with snow. She was ill and confined to her bed and had to watch her husband and children getting by without her. Tena listened carefully, her eyes toward the window. Lauchlin felt awkward, joining her this way without talk, he had thought she would play the tape later. The voice went on and he did not want to disturb her by filling his teacup. The bedridden woman had turned in on herself, losing touch with her children, her husband, her waking life slipping away. Suddenly Tena half rose from her chair and switched off the cassette.

  “I didn’t know what kind of story it was,” Lauchlin said quietly.

  “It’s not that. Sorry. I’m all right. I just drifted off some place I shouldn’t have gone. I wanted children myself, once. You haven’t taken your tea. Here.”

  He let her reach for his cup and watched as she poured tea into it and set it back down.

  “You do very well with that, with everything,” he said.

  “Oh, my.” She took slow sips of her tea. He was disconcerted by the dirt streak on her face but he didn’t want to tell her about it. “When you’ve had sight all your life, facing forty is hard enough,” she said. “But I had to shift my sight into my fingers, my ears. How can you be ready for that? So long seeing and loving sight, you just can’t one morning be tapping the walls one room to the next, not in a house you’ve walked through, danced through when you felt like it, even in the dark. You can’t be happy about that. Every step’s a cliff, isn’t it. Patting for wall switches, lamps, chairs, embarrassed at meals. For a while I wouldn’t eat until Clement finished and left the table. Try lifting a fork to your mouth sometime in the dark. Play pin the tail on your dinner plate, stretch your mouth for food that isn’t there. The spills. Water glass, houseplant, you know the dirt’s there on the floor, you can feel it with your foot but you can’t dust it all up. You’re mislaying so much sometimes you stand there and cry. I never cried when he was home, I was too glad to have him there. I picked up flowers and pressed them to my face, I was desperate to feel them, smell them. Days when something has been moved—not a
lot, maybe a few inches—but you miss it completely, your fingers playing over every spot but the right one. You try to dress by material, this must be that red cotton blouse, but maybe it’s not. You don’t want to look foolish. Did you make a nice mouth with your lipstick, or something hideous? Is your hair wild? The phone rings and you can’t get to it in time because you’re always hitting something that hurts, bruises on your shins, your thighs. You fall. You get shy in ways you’d never imagine. It calms down after a while. And Clement was there. Easy, Tena, he’d say, that’s not a problem, never mind. But it is a problem, and how can he know how much? Blind from birth, you wouldn’t know anything but that, it’s the way the world would feel to you, there’d be nothing else. Me, I’ll always be afraid of what I can’t see, I’ll always want to see. That’s what hurts. It doesn’t matter if I can make tea without spills or breaking china. Sorry, I’m talking so much. I don’t usually.”

  “That’s okay, fine, I’m listening.” He liked this from a woman, when she let him know what was inside her. “Talk as much as you like, Tena.”

  She smiled, shook her head. “I can’t read faces anymore. But I can read voices. There’s a lot in a voice if you listen, even a quiet one like yours. Something as simple as a smile. You’d think nothing of it, you smile when you feel like it, when you’re with someone. But a smile asks for a reaction. Doesn’t it? I could feel myself smiling, I was so conscious of it. It was like I had to do it, reach out that way. But you don’t smile at someone who isn’t likely to smile back, do you? I began to feel a little simple, that half-smile hanging on my face, like schoolgirls draw on notes and letters. I quit doing that. I listened hard. I know now if there’s a smile in a voice or not, and I wait to hear it. Would you read something to me? Clement’s tried but he gets flustered, and he doesn’t have the time anymore. But what am I saying? Neither do you, you have a store to run. I’m sorry.”

  “Shane’ll hold the fort. Anyway, I’d like to make the store selfserve, you just grab what you need and leave the money on the counter. No, I’ll read to you, Tena, of course I will. I used to read to my students. I got the lazy ones to remember something, maybe, or at least I kept them awake.”

  She took a book from a counter drawer and held it out to him. He leafed through it, an anthology of poems, well-thumbed. “You have favourites here, I see,” he said, opening at a bookmark.

  “Is it Anne Wilkinson’s? Clement left the mark in there. It’s for a day like this.”

  Lauchlin read slowly. He hadn’t in years and he was tentative, shy under the intentness of her listening, so focused upon him, and he wanted to do it well. He let his voice find its way for a few lines until the rhythm of the language took over,

  In June and gentle oven

  Summer kingdoms simmer

  As they come

  And flower and leaf and love

  Release

  Their sweetest juice,

  he gave it some force and volume and the domestic atmosphere of the kitchen seemed to recede,

  Then two in one the lovers lie

  And peel the skin of summer

  With their teeth

  And suck its marrow from a kiss

  So charged with grace

  The tongue, all knowing

  Holds the sap of June

  Aloof from seasons, flowing.

  The lines came home to him as he finished and he felt himself blush foolishly. She seemed to be looking past him, somewhere else. He noticed the refrigerator’s hum, the scree of a hawk high outside.

  “That’s lovely, thank you,” she said. “Some lines I can remember but I could never hold a whole poem in my head. I didn’t need to, once.”

  “What about Braille?” he said. “I don’t know anything about it, of course, only a man in Sydney who could read it like a demon.”

  “I couldn’t go through all that, learning it. If I were young I might. I wouldn’t have the patience now, I couldn’t sit down for it. It’s not what I want. It’s so…blind. That must sound silly.” She took up her teacup, turned it in her fingers. “It’s nice to have your company.”

  “Do you ever mind being here alone, Tena? I suppose you did at first,” Lauchlin said.

  “I was fearful for a time. But I got over that. I don’t mind. In the day, at least. Lorna Matheson over the way visits, and Alan her husband looks in on me sometimes. Good for gossip, they are. But I wouldn’t have them at the poetry. You can be alone anyway, even with people, when you’re blind, or so it seems at times. Just me, among voices. Oh, I have visitors, women from town. But some of them pity me, they don’t know it, but they do. They think me helpless. I used to knit, Clement has two sweaters I did for him. My dad made me my first needles out of sucker sticks when I was little. Later I could work the needles fast without even looking at them, but when I lost my sight, I couldn’t knit at all. Funny, isn’t it? Why should that be?” She turned her head suddenly toward the window where the first blooms of black hollyhocks swayed in the wind, a little crazy in their floral lushness. “That’s Clement’s pickup. I thought he’d be milling until dark.”

  Lauchlin hadn’t heard the truck but he did now, its door opening and slamming. “Shall I put the book away?” he said. He didn’t want Clement to see he’d been reading poetry to Tena, as if it were unmanly somehow, or too intimate, and it disgusted him to think like that. But he placed the book in her outstretched hand and she set it aside.

  “Lauchlin, how’re you now?” Clement looked tired, his dark-green work clothes patched with sweat stains, mud on his shoes and the knees of his pants.

  “I brought Tena a tape to try out,” Lauchlin said. “I was just leaving.”

  “How is it, Tena? You like it?” Clement kissed her forehead. “You got a bit of garden on your face,” he said, wiping off the smudge of dirt with his thumb. He opened the refrigerator and plucked out two bottles of beer.

  “I’m sure I’ll like it, when I get the chance to listen,” she said, touching her cheek. “You’re done in the woods already, are you?”

  “Damn it, no. We broke another blade. Cooper forced a log through it. We were supposed to have a spare in his truck, but there isn’t, of course, he probably sold it, that’d be like him, or never bought it in the first place, and here I am driving all the way home to get one. Lauch, have a beer with me, it’s hot, we need it. Tena, dear, I have to get back soon. Everything all right? You need me to bring you anything? I’ll be home for supper but a little late.”

  “I’ll fry you a steak when I hear your truck. Bye, Lauchlin. Thanks for the tape and everything.”

  “I can get you others,” he called back to her from the doorway.

  “Could you? That would be fine.”

  Clement led them across the yard which contained all the activity now, there was nothing of a farm about it. Clement used the old outbuildings for storage, equipment pressed against the dirty, broken windows, odd bits of lumber. Years back, structures that would have been visited daily—the milk house, the wagon shed, the little pig barn or chicken house—but now they sat isolated, untended, thick weedy grass crowding and rotting their sills. Without animals, without crops, the hay was useless and Clement ignored the fields, laced with scrub trees, with bullthistle and goldenrod, raspberry canes, entwined with vetch and ever more tangles of wild roses.

  They stood just inside the shade of the stable door, the humid gloom behind them, warm smells of sawdust and spent oil, rubber, gasoline. “You know,” Clement said, after a long swig of beer, “I want to tell you something. I trust you, Lauch, but it’s just between us. Nobody else, not Tena for sure.”

  “For sure,” Lauchlin said. “Nobody.”

  “That partner of mine…” He rubbed his face briskly with his hand, a habit that reminded Lauchlin of a schoolboy when the answers wouldn’t come. “I could hammer him good if I wanted, if it comes to that. I’m too damn big for him and he knows it. But there’s something underneath him, eating away. He’s a man of resentments, they go way bac
k, long before me, but I guess I dredge them up some way. I don’t know just what to expect from him anymore.” Clement looked toward the house where Tena could be seen in the window, her blonde head bowed over the sink, framed by blue curtains. “Sometimes I wish I could just wave to her,” he said, almost whispering, “when I see her like that.

  “Anyway. I told Cooper this morning he wouldn’t get a cut from this job. He owes me too much. We eat our lunch and he doesn’t talk. That’s the way he is, he don’t talk, he simmers. Then later he flings an axe, not right at me but in my direction, just flung it, and me with my back to him. I mean it just wheels through the air, it’s not like he fired it expertly or anything, but Jesus, a double-bitted axe, could have opened me up like a chicken, and us miles from a hospital. I yanked that axe out of the ground, I couldn’t believe it, the head was a good three inches into the sod. Are you nuts or what? I said to him. It got away from me, he says, staring at me like he hadn’t done nothing. You ever see his eyes? There’s a queer chill to them. And what in Jesus’ name were you doing, I says, practising for the hammer throw? You aiming for the Olympics? He wouldn’t say a word more, went back to work, if you could call it working. I was shaking, believe me, I could hardly talk.”

  “You’re right about the eyes,” Lauchlin said.

  Clement drained his beer and tossed the bottle behind him into the old hay. “I’m thinking I should trim his sails but I told him to go home, get the hell out of my sight. There’s something deeper about him, inside him. Busting his nose wouldn’t do it. I’d have to kill him. He thinks that I can’t, that I won’t.”

  “Of course you won’t, but break it off with him,” Lauchlin said. “How could he be worth all this?”