Lauchlin of the Bad Heart

by D. R. MacDonald

  Yet they knew each other’s ways, they could slip and slide through one day after another, sit civilly in the same room, conversation was not always required, on some days they let talk go. And that made their occasional anger more bearable because it never came out in shouting but in frost, in definite and calculated silences. That was in Lauchlin’s blood anyway, his dad could go for a week with scarcely a murmur, there was no grudge or meanness in it, some people needed talk like lungs needed air and some didn’t. Lauchlin and his mother knew the whole play by now, what atmospheres to be wary of, what each would tolerate, admire, laugh at, dismiss. If asked separately, they would have said, yes, there isn’t a thing we don’t know about each other. But that of course was not true, and if it were, Lauchlin would have left long ago. He still remembered the time he’d passed his mother’s bedroom, seen her brilliant hair unloosed down her back, long and silvery against a blue nightgown, like a woman in an old tale, sitting on the edge of her bed in the light from her bedside lamp, her hands folded before the window that faced the road, her husband recently dead, and Lauchlin, struck by this, had stopped still in the hall and watched her as long as he dared, this woman who had sides to her he hardly knew.

  He heard her come in the back door, shove a chair aside in the kitchen.

  “What’s Slide burning in that car?” Lauchlin called to her over his shoulder. “Charcoal?”

  “The Irving man delivered our diesel this morning?” she said, washing her hands.

  “He did.”

  “Yes, and into the wrong tank. We’ve got a dozen cars on the road by now burning diesel instead of gasoline.”

  “Lord. Slide, poor devil, he’s not the only one who’s baffled I bet. Keeps that Buick tuned like a fiddle and suddenly she’s driving like a Model A. It’s Irving Oil’s mistake.”

  “And you can bet we’ll pay for it, not them. You better go down, Shane shouldn’t deal with it alone. Malcolm’s there on his throne, of course. He spends so much time in that chair we should charge him rent.”

  “Or hire him.” With Malcolm in the chair, the afternoon would pass quicker.

  “Oh, he wouldn’t want that, the old fool,” Johanna said.

  “You’re hard on him, Ma.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be? I’m hard on myself. There’s a letter there from Frank. He’s flying into Halifax soon. I don’t know when I’ll be seeing those grandsons of mine. What is it, three years since they were here last with their father?”

  “They’re busy boys now. And their mother likes new horizons, I think.”

  “She seemed to like our horizon well enough at one time. I don’t understand why Frank doesn’t bring all of them out here like he used to.”

  Lauchlin could have said, Well, Elaine and me maybe, and one particular summer, but he didn’t know how true that was anyway. Elaine likely had no interest in the Hebrides, not anymore, though she’d once claimed a specific interest in Scotsmen, late one night at the kitchen table, fuelled with Frank’s single malt and heavy doses of old country sentiment, the ancient islands of their great-grandfathers they had never seen, Harris, Mull, and the coast of Wester Ross, she was keen to go there then, a restless girl anyway, she had that about her from the first. Lauchlin’s own restlessness now had nothing to do with going or not going to the Hebrides, he didn’t know what it had to do with exactly, maybe a sense of time that seemed, at certain moments, to drain the very blood from him. But he could not tell his brother that. Or that Tena MacTavish had stirred his attention. He regretted now his candour about his heart, telling her that. What’s the matter with you, Lauch, you’re not an invalid, you’re not an old man, Frank would say when Lauchlin projected himself into old age, so adept at this game now that his older self, a scarred and infirm figure he never expected to merge with, had become a separate person, someone he could still regard from a distance with sadness and pity.

  Hadn’t he kept his body as best he could into his fifties, fighting the paunch with sit-ups, though not like when he’d boxed and his stomach was flat as a table? He could still do a fast fifty, slower toward a hundred. Dr. Fraser was forever after him to eat slimmer, lose a few pounds, and he’d say sure, but Johanna’s cooking was such a familiar pleasure he never asked her to alter it for Dr. Fraser. His hair had thinned away like his dad’s and he had the same habit, as he talked or thought something over, of running his palm slowly across his pate as if he’d just discovered the hair was missing, not that he cared. Never mind, you have a nice head, Morag had told him more than once, dear Morag, and he’d taken ribbing about it so well no one mentioned it anymore. If once in a while he felt that clutching in his chest, that pinching pain, he fished out a nitroglycerine pill, but not often. He would check his blood pressure with his own cuff because he hated the doctor’s office, the uneasy wait among the ill and sniffling, the soft woosh woosh woosh of the inflating cuff, the needle trembling angrily as the doctor sombrely read the dial, and always it was high. Dr. Fraser told him, Lauchlin, you’ve got the white coat syndrome, boy, that or you haven’t been taking your medicine. Oh I have, but it’s true, Alistair, he said, I just hear the word “doctor” and up it jumps, popping a few more capillaries, eh? At home Lauchlin would pump up the cuff again and again until he got a decent reading, then stash it in a drawer for weeks. He was not fearful, in the main. He did not avoid risks just because they might tax his heart, he wished he had mentioned that to Tena while he was at it. Avoid the joys of women for that? Might as well take the count and be done with it.

  In the front field he grabbed a stalk of timothy to chew. An afternoon of bright wind, clear of flies, a day for outdoors, cool, he’d like to walk past the store, keep on going out back and find the old path down to the shore, he and Frank as boys had raced down it and, after swimming, back up. But now the return would be slow, a climb of cautionary rests. Overgrown now, hardly used since the last of the old-timers, Hector Stewart and Johnny Gunn, would row over in their skiffs from New Pabbay and climb it to fill their gunnysacks with supplies. Lauchlin had last done the path several years ago with Morag, slower than Hector or Neil, but with a nice layover in dry moss. Dear Morag. Her name still delighted and troubled him. She hadn’t come to Cape Breton last summer for her usual visit home, and he missed that, missed the sight of her, the sheer physical delight of her, despite their long and difficult affair. Maybe she had tired of him at last and was spending her vacation in some exotic place, he couldn’t blame her for that. He was hardly the man she had loved at twenty-two, strong and fit, afraid of nothing, nobody. He’d had a strong heart then, maybe a future in the ring. If he’d achieved that, if he had become a ranked fighter, any sort of champion, then, he had convinced himself, he might have moved on clearly, fluidly with his life, it would have lifted him up and over something that was still lying there in his way, and maybe he and Morag would have stayed together. In their own strange, fragmented way, they had—she went away to Boston, married a Cape Breton man there, then lost him to drink, but she kept coming back at odd times of her life, and they always saw each other sooner or later, joined up again as only they could do, touched that unassailable kernel of passion, and by summer’s end they had split apart. Morag was a pattern. He wanted her when she was not around, and when she was, he gorged himself on her and then drew back, and she returned to Boston determined to stay away from him forever. Now maybe she had.

  An elderly woman in a red Rabbit was waiting for gas, Effie Smith who lived up at the Head, her old black Newfie Brute panting in the backseat. Shane, the teenager who worked in the store, came out to pump it but Lauchlin told him to wait and leaned to the driver’s window.

  “This car is a diesel, right Effie?”

  “You hear that clatter under the hood? I wish it wasn’t.”

  “Shane’ll fill it up for you then. Nice day.”

  “What a summer for rain, eh?”

  Lauchlin put out his hand for a slobbery lick from Brute, but he didn’t mention the bad gas, it would get around
soon enough and he didn’t want an exaggerated account to spread quickly one end of the road to the other, as everything did. Well, did you know up at the store they mixed diesel gas with the regular kind? Could ruin your engine, yes, it could.

  “Did you see the blind woman on the road?” Effie said.

  “Tena MacTavish you mean?”

  “Is that who it was? I gave her a wide berth.”

  “Today?”

  “She was tapping along in a big white hat.”

  Lauchlin looked west down the straight stretch of road where trees ran right to the ditch. The asphalt, rubbled with frost humps and tar ribbons, was empty.

  “Keep an eye out for her, Effie.”

  Malcolm was indeed seated in the press-back chair, the destination he’d set out for that morning, but favouring his gouty foot on a low stool Lauchlin had provided for him, near the wall chimney of painted red brick and the round Warm Morning stove—a great spot in winter. He waved hello, wincing. He’d been a railroad man in Sydney but retired to the old family house in St. Aubin. He had seen most of the Cape Breton champions in action, and many of the good fighters during the golden years of the fifties and sixties, including young Lauchlin MacLean. We’re born bachelors, boy, Malcolm told him, the two of us, and we love the ring—assertions Lauchlin saw no need to question. He had come to anticipate their Thursday evenings when Malcolm liked to call up the highlights of old matches, mull over the fates of the fighters themselves. If anyone around here remembered that Lauchlin MacLean had been a promising welterweight when Cape Breton had gyms full of boxers and a few national champions as well, they remembered nothing else about it. Malcolm had the details, he could take you there.

  “The gout’s on you today, is it, Malkie?” Lauchlin said, moving behind the counter, distracted by the thought of Tena’s face shadowed under the brim of a big white hat.

  “If it was bad, I’d be in bed, my son. Gout’s a penance for living badly, and if I’d known this was coming, I’d have lived badder than I did.”

  “I’d been wondering about you. That chair was empty for a few days, until Clement’s wife gave it a try.”

  “You know, I ran into Tena MacTavish on my way. Just about locked canes with her, she coming along bold as you please. A strong girl, taking to the road like that.”

  “Where was she going, toward home?”

  “She was.”

  Lauchlin had hoped to see her come through that door again before she forgot whatever of him she remembered, his voice or his hand, helping her into the car. If he weren’t trapped behind the counter, he’d see if she were still on the road.

  “She’s trying to get above that blindness,” he said. “She walked all the way down here last week, at night yet.”

  “Clement can’t be wild about that.”

  “I don’t think that would stop her.”

  “Nice-looking woman. Pity she lost her sight.”

  “She is, but pity is the last thing she wants.” Lauchlin didn’t care to discuss her with Malcolm—she was his to muse over. “I guess you’re not driving with your sore foot, Malk?”

  “You can have the lend of my car anytime you like.”

  “For a date, you mean? Thanks, Dad.”

  “And it doesn’t need any gas either, by the way.”

  “Keep that to yourself for now, if you would. We’ve got one of those public relations problems here.”

  “People are terrible particular about what goes into their automobiles.”

  “More than they are about what comes out the other end.” Lauchlin glanced at the cockeyed clock out of habit. “That damn diesel is mixed in with the gas dregs, we can’t pump it out separately.”

  “Aw, it’ll give the diesel a little kick. You see those heavyweights on TV last weekend? Forget it. Waltzed around like a couple of walruses. Big lugs can’t box worth a shit, the most of them.”

  “I don’t watch much TV,” Lauchlin said absently, staring out at the road. “We listened to fights on an old battery radio, me and my Uncle Lion when he lived up above us. I liked that, watching them in my mind. We rooted for Walcott when he fought Joe Louis the first time. Lion thought he won.”

  “Best to agree with Fraser Lion, if I’m remembering him right. He was prickly.”

  “Not much with me he wasn’t.” Lauchlin’s first boxing lessons had been under the crouching figure of Uncle Lion, a lanky, angular man, a gruesome marionette if he’d been drinking, every limb seemed to come into play, but Lauchlin had never feared him.

  He watched Shane swirl a paper towel over Effie’s windshield while she pointed out the bug splats. Shane wasn’t tall but he had a good middleweight build and Lauchlin had heard he could handle himself. Some men were just good with their fists, it was in them, reflexes, instincts, leverage, and they didn’t have to be big men either. Standing out in a dance brawl, however, was no test for the ring. He’d known more than one kid with a wild temper who’d thought it was. He’d told Shane that fist fighting wasn’t boxing, but if you were good at that, you might be good at boxing too—if you had the patience and discipline it demanded. When Lauchlin was in grade school, Uncle Lion had taken him to a match in the Sydney Forum and he’d seen live for the first time what he’d heard on the radio, in the thick of a profane crowd shouting enthusiastically, colourful opinions, advice, admonishment, disgust, reproach, encouragement. For the first time he heard the true sound of blows, gloves thudding into flesh, bone, grunts, the heavy breathing, the yelling, grousing cornermen, and he wanted to be up there, the focus of all this raw energy. “It’s hard to get a kid near a ring now,” he said. “They don’t want that hard road anymore. Not the interest there was in my day. Succeeding in the ring meant something here, just to be a good fighter, even a dance fighter. You tell people now that you fought for twelve bucks a fight and they laugh. We all had full-time jobs. Blair Richardson got some good purses for the times, peanuts today. Nobody here was in it for money.”

  “There’s money out there, Lauchlin, millions. Get on TV, go to the States.”

  “Nobody good enough anymore.”

  “Who was the last? Art Hafey, but he was from up the mainland. We had lots of fighters right here and bouts every damn week, but there wasn’t any money. For the love of the sport, eh?”

  “Something like that. Some free equipment from the merchants. That kind of thing.” Lauchlin turned away from the window. “The last fight they promoted here, they had to throw in some wrestlers to get a gate.”

  What kids remembered the glory days when Cape Breton was called the Cradle of Canadian Boxing, let alone wanted to talk about them? The young fellas didn’t know or care how many good boxers the Island had turned out, all the way back to Jack Munroe in the early 1900s who’d beaten world heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries in an exhibition in Montana, and Munroe had grown up on the Head here just a few miles away. But Lauchlin might as well talk up the Battle of Killiecrankie. Their heads were full of TV athletes, hockey and baseball stars, and spectacular money. The boys of Lauchlin’s era wanted to box, Cape Breton was fight country, it mattered. Did anybody now care to slave away in the rank space of a boxing gym pounding leather, striving to get in prime condition so he could get hit and shoved and elbowed around a ring, grind his face into another man’s skull, taste blood, his or his opponent’s, get his nose pulped, his ears red and ringing? Lauchlin had been in the best shape of his life then, but still he ached after a hard match, after the high of fighting somebody good and winning he was down and sore, he had to ease sideways out of bed, the ribs and kidneys, sleeping with his sore mouth wide open he’d wake up with blood in his throat or creeping out a nostril. Kids didn’t buy that punishment anymore. Why endure that tough apprenticeship with no guarantee of attention or money or fame? Its solitary discipline made no sense to them, the diet, temperance, rising at four in the morning for road work, then in the gym in the evening after a day job, working the bags, some hard sparring. And yet Lauchlin would have boxed on, just to be
ranked would have made it all worthwhile, Maritime champ maybe, God. Anything above that would have been gravy. Canadian title, British Empire, like Blair. How could he explain this to anyone? Why try? Its context was gone, its atmosphere. Even though she had backed him without complaint, not even Morag had understood what drove him in those years, and shadowed him afterward.

  “There goes Clement now,” Malcolm said.