Lauchlin of the Bad Heart

by D. R. MacDonald

  But the set-to with Cooper still bothered him, coming as it did after Tena. Worse than a ring loss. He fumbled underneath the seat for a pint he had stashed there. He needed a buzz for where he’d been, and where he was going.

  Beyond Inverness he took the old coast road, where the sea, wide below him, was arriving in long unhurried waves, the slatch lazing between them. The dirt road of the settlers, following the sea cliffs, climbing, descending where open land to the west intervened. The farmhouse Morag, orphaned as an infant, had been raised in, gothically gabled, its shingles chalky white, lay far back, a line of sea behind it, amid broad and level fields of browned grasses, flecked with pink thickets of dog rose. All that remained of a farm was a grey saltbox barn, its steep metal roof rusted to a startling red, the Atlantic showing deep blue in its ravaged openings, and two scattered outbuildings, likewise weathered and shedlike, splaying slowly into the grass. The long driveway was a corridor of Queen Anne’s lace and graceful spikes of sweet clover. Morag’s new silver car was parked in fresh-mown grass and he pulled in next to it. Years ago she used to be waiting for him when he came, all the way from the road he could see her leaning against a white porch post or sitting on the steps, watching him.

  He closed his eyes: wind soft in the big maples, summery, warm, remembered. He could have walked inside but instead he rapped on the wobbly screen door. From some room Morag called, Come in. The house smelled of old shut-away furniture and he could feel windows flung open everywhere. He found her on the parlour sofa, her pretty knees pressed together under a thick album. Morag glanced at him over the rims of reading glasses. She could still look fine with nothing but lipstick. Her hair was short now, curly, becoming, he had to admit.

  “It’s you, Lauchlin,” she said. She didn’t get up.

  “You were expecting someone else? A gentleman caller?”

  “I thought you might be Jimmy down the road.”

  “Jimmy-Down-the-Road never gives up.”

  “Oh, he’s just helping me with things, Jimmy is. A house this old gathers so much and I have to be back in Boston soon. I suppose I’ll have a yard sale sometime. Auntie Nell, she threw away nothing, and left no will either.”

  “She never expected to die, I think. You’re looking fine, Morag. You need the cheaters though.”

  She pulled the glasses off, folded them. “Middle age, eh?” She cocked her head, gave him a little smile. “You’re not so bad yourself, for an older fella. Hair’s a little sparse.”

  He slid his hand across his scalp. “Should I get a rug?”

  “Only for your floor. Lauch, come look at this.” The scrapbook of heavy black pages lay open on her lap like a Bible, the faux leather cover warped from damp. She patted the cushion beside her and he sat down. He made no effort to kiss her or put his arm around her, nor did she him, but the old velveteen sofa sank them close together and he felt the warmth of her against him. A wonderful uncomplicated desire for her ran lovely along his nerves, charged with deep affection. It always amazed him that he could feel this way again after all they had said to each other the last time. Yet the absences had seemed to heal them, they could still draw blindly close so quickly. Everything but the old, raw love he’d felt for her receded.

  The album page was pasted with snapshots of Morag. A squinting girl in a white communion dress. Older and taller between her Aunt Nell and Uncle Roddy, an unhitched sleigh behind them. Then one from high school down in Sydney around the time he’d met her. And several of her and Lauchlin together, she still in school or just out of it, he maybe twenty-one when he’d turned pro and was working at the steel mill, on his own, St. Aubin and the family store behind him, so he’d thought.

  “You seemed happy there, a lot of the time. Weren’t you?” he said.

  Morag looked at him. “I was. But not all the time.” She turned a page. “Look at you,” she said. There he was in the Venetian Gardens gym, posing at the speed bag, gloves raised, Blair Richardson looking on in street clothes, handsome, unmarked. A clipping from the Post: Canadian middleweight champ checks out Cape Breton prospect Lauchlin MacLean.

  “Blair showed up for a workout that day,” Lauchlin said. “Home from college in Boston. Had a fight for the British Empire title in the works. I sparred a bit with him, but I was nervous as hell, I was in awe of him. Jesus, he had a right hand. Thirty-five knock-outs.”

  “Aunt Nell cut these out of the Post, every one of your fights.”

  “God bless her. The first time you brought me here she said, Oh we always liked the boxing matches in this house. A gang in the kitchen, packed around an old battery radio listening to Joe Louis fight Max Schmeling the second time. When Louis won, they went nuts, she said.”

  “I read your write-ups to you. Remember? I’d bring the Post around. If there was a photo, I’d save it. I lost them in my moves, I guess.” Morag tapped another page. “Look at this. Big test fight for MacLean.”

  “You didn’t have to go far for a test fight in those days. Harold Donovan. God, look at him. Glace Bay Forum. I could never get set for a good combination, I might catch him with a jab, two jabs, but he’d slip my cross. I knocked him down later, he got up at nine. You can just see my legs there. Took a decision off him. I was green, I should have knocked him out. I…” He smiled, shook his head. “Should have. Sorry. That’s my middle name.”

  He stared out the side window where fog far out at sea was advancing, white with sun. Morag touched his cheek, withdrew her hand. “Do you want to talk, or what?”

  Lauchlin closed the album. “I start to feel faded like that old newsprint.” He looked at her face, his hands in his lap. “Do you still have that boxing robe I gave you, by any chance?” He wanted her to have kept it, foolish though that sentiment was.

  “The green one, with your name on the back.”

  “My ring name, dear.”

  “It’s not the sort of thing I would throw away. A long time ago I put it on a few times when I was alone, bloodstains and all. Crazy, eh? Did you want it back?”

  “No, no, God, no. I might be tempted to make a fool of myself. Just curious. It cost me a few bucks and I wasn’t earning much. I had that chance to go down to Minneapolis-St. Paul, a good fight town in those days, maybe get started in the States.”

  For that prospect, the satin robe. Irish green, with yellow cuffs and lapels and tie, on the back a bolt of yellow splitting his name, “Lightning Lauchlin.” Draped on the hanger it had embarrassed him, something out of a bad movie, but when he shouldered into it the first time, he felt an unexpected pride—he was not Lauchlin in grey gym sweats or a dowdy terry cloth robe, this was identity, colour, the performer he had to become for a raucous crowd three minutes at a time, a fighter, a name. It hadn’t been his idea, the name, he didn’t want it, it was corny, but they said, Listen, you got to have a gimmick, and a promoter from Minneapolis said over the phone, You come down here and we’ll bill you as the Irish Thunderbolt, but Lauchlin said I’m not Irish, everyone knows I’m as Scotch as you get. Doesn’t mean a thing in the States, the promoter said, down here you got to be Irish or Italian, a Scotchman won’t cut it, won’t draw a crowd, and you don’t look like a dago. How about McLaverty? Lauchlin McLaverty, the Irish Thunderbolt. No? How about we just change the spelling, make it like McLane? Lauchlin said okay, maybe, when you get me a bout. In Minneapolis they’d changed Gordie MacDougall’s name to McDugan. But Lauchlin didn’t get that fight anyway as it turned out, he wore his new robe right here at home but he lost a decision to Benny Mowbry from Saint John, a bout he should have taken, in his prime as he was, a step up for him. But that night his heart gave him problems not even he could slough off, tightness in his chest, pain, and his wind went on him, the best shape of his life and his stamina gave out by the fifth round, he didn’t understand what was happening to him, his mouth gaping for breath, he had to clinch, he had to hang on, Johnny urging him from the apron, Your nose, breathe through your nose! Lauchlin thinking, The way I feel, two noses wouldn’
t do it. He lost every round after the third, after starting out sharp, in command, getting off well, the fight going just as he and Johnny knew it should, and then it wasn’t. The green robe, trying it out that night, wearing it as he’d climbed through the ropes, draped over his shoulders as he left the ring, feeling its absurdity. He’d given it to Morag after the Mowbry fight, he wouldn’t wear it again. Later that night he was lying on his bed, still hurting, sore. Morag was with him and he wanted her to take the robe and burn it, but she said, Take it I will but I’ll never burn it. Let my mother wash it then, he said, there’s more blood than there should be in that gorgeous satin. No, she said, Auntie Nell will do that. He let her have the robe because he loved her and its sweat and promise still meant something. When it graced her body, he forgot how it had looked on him, he had shucked it like a skin. Morag was as tall as he was, her long legs he’d admired since the first time he saw her. That night when they were alone in his room in Sydney, she came back from the bathroom wearing the green robe. He undid the tie and she slipped it off at the edge of the bed, naked, lovely, the robe at her feet, he didn’t know what in hell was the matter with him, crying when she hugged him, nothing like that had ever come over him in his whole life.

  “Too bad you didn’t get to Minnesota,” Morag said.

  “It didn’t turn out all that well for Gordie, did it? Fine for a while, travelled around the States with that Flanagan stable. Then he did a stint on skid row, filtering antifreeze through loaves of bread.”

  “Gordie came back from that, he kicked it. He saw some of the world too.”

  “Ah, the world, the world.” Morag had travelled eagerly as soon as she’d had the means, and the further she’d gone, the more Lauchlin had dug in his heels at home. He was uneasy anyway among the welltravelled, defensive, cynical, early on it had caused friction between him and Morag who loved to fly off somewhere new, and Frank had pestered him to take trips. You have to get off the Island, he’d say, if you want to get anywhere. “Nell never went anywhere, didn’t hurt her.”

  “Listen, Auntie Nell wanted to but she had no chance, taking care of the old woman for so long when she was young, way down north there. She told me, Morag, you get off and away when you’re ready to go. Don’t stay here. I’d have gone to Boston if I could, she said, I was over twenty before I ever earned a dollar of my own. You go to Boston, Morag. Make your way there.”

  “Well, so you did,” Lauchlin said. He got up and moved about the room, touching things on the mantel, a clapperless bell from an old shipwreck, a brass artillery shell Roddy brought home from the Great War, as he always called it. Lauchlin had liked Nell’s little eccentricities, her fondness for ghost stories, her solitary walks in the snow, the glittery rope necklaces she loved and jangly bracelets. She was gone but the house spoke her everywhere. He picked up a framed photograph propped against the clock. “I’ve never seen this.”

  “The English kids on the ship? Look at them, all lined up for their picture. In their best clothes, not a clue about what awaits them. The little girls in their felt hats and white collars, squinting, grinning in the sun. Can you find Nell? She was just ten, for God’s sake. That broad smile, you can’t miss her.”

  “That’s got to be her there, eh?”

  “Imagine, shipping her all the way from England to the back end of Cape Breton, 1930. She arrived at that house by horse and wagon, a smart little girl who’d lived in Liverpool. Hadn’t the slightest idea where she was going. I’m sure she fared better than most of those poor kids, she had pluck. They were sent here to work, that’s all. Cheap labour.” The children were posed in Sunday clothing, as if for bright futures, and their chaperones, three respectable men in suits and fedoras and two matronly women in large hats, stood behind them. Two older boys were peering through a life preserver stencilled with the ship’s name.

  “God knows where they ended up,” Lauchlin said.

  “Working for farmers out west, a lot of them, like little slaves. No one thought anything was wrong with that? Sending foster kids to Canada because their parents were too poor to get them out of the government home? Nell was shipped here to look after an invalid woman, Mary MacLeod, Mary and her brothers trained her in the house, and she did it until the old woman died. Oh, she was homesick, sitting there wondering what kind of people she’d come to live with, speaking Gaelic all around her, neighbours dropping in to look her over, she said, talking about her no doubt, and what gibberish is this? she was thinking. There was a lot of hard work into it, she told me, but they were good to her, the old woman and her bachelor brothers. But isolated, Lord, yes. She grew up fast. She had no childhood, she never knew what childhood was. Everyone around her was over fifty, no kids at all except at school. No wonder she took me in so gladly as a baby, and gave me love. She knew. Here, I felt old, she said, not a young child like I did in Liverpool. I cried when she told me that story about herself. She never went on about England, just that one night when I found her photos in the attic, her mother, her brothers. She didn’t mean to but she passed that fear on to me, Lauchlin. I came to feel it—that your feet can be swept out from under you and you can be carried off, God knows where. And it happened to me. I didn’t expect it would be you who’d do the sweeping, and I was God knows where for a long time.”

  “Old pictures can be a curse, Morag. We shouldn’t dwell on them.”

  “Go ‘way, and you with photos all over your walls. Blair’s up there I bet. You wanted to be as good.”

  “That was a mistake. I thought I could be.”

  “So did we all, Lauchlin.”

  “A man could want worse,” he said. “He was champion, more ways than one.”

  “Yes, and he had a lovely wife and a child on the way, and dead at thirty of a brain tumour. Here you are, still breathing.”

  “Oh, I do have that, Morag, Peg of Boston. My breathing is reliable.”

  “I never asked you to call me Peg, if it bothers you.”

  “It’s another you, that’s all. Peg’s a person I don’t know so well.”

  “You could have, you could have come to Boston where she lives and works and spent too much time waiting for you.”

  “Boston would’ve killed me.”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic, Lauchlin. It never killed lesser Cape Breton men, and Boston is full of them.”

  He watched her go to the seaward window, closing her arms about her.

  “Nell’s favourite view,” she said. “God rest her soul. She took over this place when Grandma passed away, the two of them here for so long with no men until Roddy came home for good. In this house most of her life with the sea out the window, nobody left but her after Roddy died. Now it’s mine, Lauchlin. I’m glad it’s mine, but I’m afraid of that too. It takes hold of me sometimes when I’m alone here, it scares me a little. I loved my Auntie Nell, but I don’t want to live out my days like she did. A woman who should have had children, but Roddy was so much older than her. He was the last one along in a big family. Always one or two who stayed at home, there wasn’t enough marriage to go around, I guess, none left for them.”

  “You’re not going to end up like that, Morag, dear. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “You wouldn’t, no. You never have. Anyway, Nell left you this.” She opened a battered case propped in a chair and lifted out a fiddle.

  “Roddy’s violin? Well, Jesus, it’s a lovely old instrument, but I don’t even play the air fiddle.”

  “She told me, last time I saw her, I want Lauchlin to have this. We walked through the house and she’d say so-and-so gets this, someone wanted that, and I wrote it down. She knew you didn’t play.”

  Lauchlin held it in his palms as if she’d just handed him a baby. “It should go to a player, don’t you think? A lot of good young fiddlers around now.”

  “She always liked you. Always asking after you. To her, you were a player, in a way.”

  He plucked the strings softly. “A broken string there.”

  �
��Easy to find a new one.”

  “Remember the night Roddy took it out and played just for the two of us? We danced right there in the kitchen.”

  “Didn’t he say he’d play at our wedding? That brought you up short, boy, scared you to death. I had to convince you later I never mentioned a wedding to Roddy or anybody else. He just saw we were happy…”

  “He was a great old fella. There’s a lot of music inside this box.” Lauchlin drew the bow slowly, lightly over the strings, then set fiddle and bow back in the chair. “I’m not the man to call it up.”

  “As a dancer you were more than fair.”

  “My footwork has suffered some, Peg Morag.” He faced her, smiling. “I could dance with you right enough.”

  “Let’s walk. I’ve been indoors so much and there’s a breeze now.”

  HE LET HER LEAD THE WAY. “Nell’s last little journey, this, they found her over there, face down,” Morag said, but she kept on toward the shore. “She was soaked with rain, but she had wildflowers in her fist. I liked that.” The path meandered through the level meadow toward the sea, a horizon wide and blue. Lauchlin’s brother Frank said this coast reminded him of Ireland, but for the groves of conifers in the hills. The Northumberland Strait was struck with afternoon sun as the path descended steeply to the shore. Not a swimming beach, it lacked the sand some further stretches had, here all rocks and stones. On summer nights in their early years he and Morag had come down here anyway, built a small fire, sat on boulders kissing fiercely until the surf hissed over the coals and grabbed coldly at their legs. Or they stayed above in the grass, near the cliff edge, there was no one and nothing to bother them, they loved all weathers then, they huddled in rain, laughing, they didn’t need sun, they were powerful with each other, immune to wind or cold. Now and then Nell might call for them from the house but she never sought them out. Morag had been a good Catholic girl, and Lauchlin, being older anyway, had respected that for a while. She’d been rehearsed in all the rote responses to a man’s desires and he had no quick argument against them, not at those moments he most needed to, when they had tasted so much of each other there was nowhere else to go, too much warm skin under their hands, their lips, that new delirium, almost enough but not quite. Flushed and fit after a workout, Lauchlin loved to be with her, his body seemed invincible then, his mind sharp, he gave off some special heat, a kind of glow. Then one night in a gathering blizzard they had stopped in St. Aubin on their way north from Sydney, where Morag was boarding with cousins her last year of high school, and Lauchlin’s mother had said, leery of Catholics though she was, There is no way you can take this girl all the way to Inverness, you’ll stop right here, I see little enough of you now as it is, you away in Sydney, and that blessèd boxing. After his mother was asleep, Lauchlin slipped across cold floors into Morag’s bedroom that had been his brother’s before he left for university, she was awake too, and he slid under her quilts, Just to get warm, he said, rubbing his icy feet against hers, then I’ll jump back in my own. They chattered in whispers about the cold, the snow rising on the window ledge, and soon their underwear was off, jammed into the foot of the bed. Naked in a room where they could see their breath, they flung back the covers, legs entwined. Laughing quietly, they offered their heat to the winter air, cooling off on purpose so that their next embrace, unimaginably tight, would be delicious in its warmth, rich, ultimate, fusing, nothing in the world as contained, as private. In spells they slept, they woke, turning into each other, slept again. Lauchlin woke alone, startled by window light, and then Morag’s heat against his back, her arm lightly across his chest, her breath peaceful, or so it sounded to him, he could think of nothing else he wanted more than this, and he allowed himself this gladness for a few seconds before he swung out into the cold room, glancing quickly at the laden trees, the windblown drifts in the field, his mother would be up soon. He left his door ajar and leapt under cold sheets, shivering, smiling. Morag. Jesus.