Lauchlin of the Bad Heart

by D. R. MacDonald

  “No, come in, boy, come inside,” Clement said. “I got something to tell you.”

  Tena stopped her needle as soon as he entered the room, gathering the shirt in front of her.

  “Lauchlin, is it? How are you?”

  “I can’t complain, Tena. Yourself?”

  “Sewing a button.” She kissed her finger. “If I draw blood one more time, that’s it.”

  “I told her I can sew me own buttons,” Clement said. “She’s stubborn that way. Sit down. Listen, Lauchie. I got me a solicitor, Dave Campbell, to bring suit against Cooper, like you said. He says I got a case, it shouldn’t be that difficult to get the money Cooper owes. If he has any.”

  “That should get him out of his corner. Does he know?”

  “I told him, I won’t work another day with you, you can stay home. We got things to settle up, equipment, and like that. Look, when I heard he went at you over at the store, I thought, that’s it. I don’t want him around.”

  “You can keep away from him now,” Tena said quietly, spreading the shirt out, fingering a button. “You’d have ended up fighting, the two of you.”

  “He wouldn’t take me on, he knows better. I got thirty pounds on him.”

  “He must’ve been a little snarky about it,” Lauchlin said.

  “Cursed me good, sure. I just ignored him, but I didn’t turn my back to him. Oh, he’s a little man. Have a drink with me, Lauchlin.”

  “I will.”

  Tena rose from her chair, the shirt in her hands.

  “Don’t let me chase you from your own kitchen, Tena,” he said.

  “I’m not going far.” She turned around carefully from the table, making her way into the parlour, one hand reaching ahead of her. He watched her ease into a stuffed chair. The lamp beside her was unlit and he was about to get up and turn it on for her before he caught himself.

  Clement poured them each a rye, relating eagerly the details of the legal steps he had undertaken, pleased with this new course of action and the retribution it promised. “Thanks for putting me onto that,” he said, “it’ll hit the bastard like a fist. He’s proud in a kind of crazy way, you never know just what’ll set him off. I wouldn’t have thought of the legal thing myself. Matters like this usually got settled with a fight, you know, where I come from, and that was the end of it.”

  “I couldn’t say it’s rare around here either, that kind of settling. But what are you left with?”

  “You know who has to shut up at least, ease off. Cooper, he plays with your head.” Lauchlin let him talk, glancing now and then into the next room where Tena had resumed her sewing, the needle moving slowly through her fingers. What else did she do, could she do, with her evenings? So many things only sight would allow, or so it seemed. He knew that Clement turned in early, but did she? He regretted he hadn’t come in the afternoon. Now that she had the new tapes, he’d lost an excuse to return, and the mood of reading the poems to her was gone. Clement offered another drink. “Just one,” Lauchlin said. The tapes lay on the table. Clement picked one up, squinted at the label. “Poetry, eh? She likes it, I know.”

  “She might not like that one. I’ll bring her something different if she doesn’t.”

  “We’ll check. Tena? Come in here, girl, talk to us a little.”

  Tena appeared in the doorway. She held up by its shoulders the broad expanse of Clement’s shirt. “The button? How does it look?”

  The white button was off-centre and Clement shot Lauchlin a quick smile. “It looks great, Tena, fine, dear. Lauchlin wants to know if you like his tape selection. Look, I’ll put one on your cassette here. Okay? Poems.”

  “Here, Tena, sit down.” Lauchlin pulled a chair out for her. She touched him, holding onto his arm until she was seated, a self-conscious movement but graceful, practised. Clement downed another whisky, and the rich, hammy voice of Dylan Thomas filled the kitchen, turning all of them quiet.

  Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound

  In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat

  On the silent sea we have heard the sound

  That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.

  Under the mile off moon we trembled…

  “He lays it on a bit, doesn’t he?” Clement said, lowering the volume.

  “He’s a Welsh bard,” Lauchlin said. “They’re allowed to do that.”

  “And bed’s allowed for me, I’m up at four,” he said. “Not like the storekeeper here. Eh, Lauch?”

  “Not like the old days, no, when I was training.”

  “Training for what?” Tena said. Lauchlin didn’t reply and Clement, cheerful with whisky, stepped in.

  “This man was a boxer in his heyday, girl. A damn good one, they tell me. Say, Tena, maybe we should start up a store after I get clear of this milling mess. Eh? We could work in it together.” Lauchlin recalled that this very kind of sudden enthusiasm had led to the milling project.

  “Where?” Tena said. “I think Lauchlin has it all locked up, on this road.”

  “No, no, please,” Lauchlin said. “Free enterprise, competitive markets. I’m a great believer, Tena, in all that. Backbone of the nation. To tell you the truth, if the store was mine, I’d sell it to you in a second, every box and bottle. But my mother, she’d never part with it. We’re going to seal her up in an old flour barrel when she goes.”

  “I like your mother,” Clement said, standing behind Tena, his large hands lightly on her shoulders. “She’s a right smart lady.”

  “She is, Clement. She’s all of that.”

  “Don’t rush away, now, Lauchie. Listen to the tape, you and Tena. Makes me sleepy, I’m afraid, that kind of talk.” He laughed, kissed Tena’s cheek. “Goodnight and goodnight.”

  Thomas’s sonorous verse wove quietly around Clement’s heavy tread up the stairway.

  “He has a wonderful voice, whatever else about him,” Tena said. “I’ve heard him on the CBC.”

  “Hell of a boozer though,” Lauchlin said. “Boozed his brains out.” He’d as soon his boxing career had not come up, she hardly knew him. She’d imagine him with a mashed nose, cauliflower ears, a simian brow of scar tissue. The toilet flushed upstairs. Boots hit the floor. Tena moved a spoon slowly through her fingers. She turned the tape lower.

  “He’s been riding high all day,” she said. “This court business.”

  “It’ll get him his money.”

  “Maybe. You don’t know what Cooper is like.”

  “Do you know him, Tena?”

  “He’d make a bad enemy. That’s the feeling I have about him. I couldn’t say I know him. I’ve never seen him of course.”

  “He’ll drift away, once you’re clear of him.”

  “It couldn’t be soon enough for me. He came here one afternoon. Clement was on the fish truck and I heard a knock at the back door. I called out, then I came to the kitchen and listened because sometimes my hearing is too keen, you know? He must have been standing there looking me over, just inside the kitchen door. I could feel someone there, I can do that, I don’t have to see them. He spoke and I jumped out of my skin. Sorry I scared you, he said, but he wasn’t sorry at all. I told him to go, I didn’t care if he was Clement’s partner or what he was, I said, You knew Clement wasn’t here. But you know, he stood where he was for a good minute or so. I could hear his breathing. Please leave, I said, and he did. Everything about him seemed insolent somehow.”

  “He enjoyed your discomfort by the sounds of it.”

  “Who knows what he brought with him from Saskatchewan? A suitcase of resentments, Clement says, anger.”

  “Maybe he’ll pack them up again and move on.”

  “Listen!” she said. “Can you hear it?”

  Through the frantic moths on the screen door an owl cooed faintly.

  “That’s a barred owl, Tena. Way down in the woods. I wouldn’t have picked it up but for you.”

  She smiled. “It’s my brain, it magnifies everything. I he
ard a noise downstairs one afternoon, nothing loud, and I thought it stupid to be nervous over that, I was always trying at that time not to get overwrought. So I felt my way down calmly toward the kitchen, my hand out in front of me but relaxed, it wasn’t expecting anything, but I turned the corner and suddenly it pressed against a man’s chest and I nearly fainted. My voice went, all I could say was Oh! Oh! Then I heard Alan Matheson apologizing, he must have seen the look of horror on my face. He’d just walked in the kitchen door as usual, he’d come to see how I was, and I wasn’t too good there for a couple minutes. I’m warier now, I expect surprises, so I’m on my guard. I’d rather not be like that, if I had the choice. I don’t think I am anymore.” She slipped off the ribbon tying her ponytail and her blonde hair fell straight and thick, she dipped her head, swept it softly back. There was a conscious patience in her gestures. Maybe that’s what blindness did to you.

  “I should go, Tena. You must be tired.”

  “Oh, I won’t go upstairs this early. You haven’t told me about boxing yet.” She turned her hazel eyes on him. “You don’t seem like a boxer.”

  “You mean what, punchy? Like Cauliflower McPugg? ‘Answer da phone, will ya? A flock flew over dat time’?”

  She laughed. “No, no. I mean I can’t see you beating up on people.”

  “You thought, here’s this fella with a lousy heart, all pale and shot, how could he be a boxer, right?”

  “No, Lauchlin. I don’t see a man like that either.”

  He was curious just what man she did see, but he didn’t ask. Did she eye him, nose him, hair him, give him what kind of a face? “Boxers, Tena, well. People have all kinds of notions about them. I knew all the local fighters from the newspaper and radio when I was a kid, boxing was big around here and I wanted in on it. I wasn’t going around looking to flatten somebody. I wouldn’t let you step on me either, and I’d take a fight if it came my way, even when I was small. Win or lose I’d go at it, you wanted respect, I guess. You have to have that in you somewhere, but it’s not boxing. I liked the training, hardening up, I took to it, you see. I loved it. Johnny Cechetto picked me out, he trained young boxers at the Police Club, got me in top shape and I won my first bout, four rounds. I could run like a marathon man in those days, miles. Strongest time of my life. I knew guys who’d load twenty tons of coal in the pit and then come in and train. To be on top of it, physically, nothing like that, nothing.” He glanced at her, surprised by his vehemence after all this time, as if he’d just come from the gym. “There’s no telling just what kind of man will take to it, Tena,” he said quietly. “He can surprise you. In the ring, a tiger. Out, mild as you please.”

  “Were you like that?”

  “I guess. Blair Richardson, British Empire middleweight champ, was polite and quiet, a shy man. He didn’t need some cute ring name either. You know, Kayo or Killer or something.”

  “And you?”

  “Oh, Jesus, don’t ask.”

  “Come on now, you must tell me.”

  “I’d rather tell you my middle name is Mary.”

  “Is it?”

  “Okay, all right. Lightning Lauchlin. How’s that?”

  She clapped her hands. “Lovely! I like it.”

  “Believe me, I didn’t come up with it. Yes, lightning in a bottle, that’s me. Sorry, I was gabbing away over your tape. I think I detect Parson Eliot reading from ‘The Waste Land.’”

  “I’ll listen to them again. Thank you for bringing them.”

  Lauchlin stood up to leave. “Don’t worry about Cooper. He’ll be out of the picture soon.” He protested when she rose to follow him to the door.

  “Oh, I just stand at the door sometimes, listening,” she said. “Clement clattering around in the barn. Sounds in the fields, the woods. I can hear the water at times, Mathesons’ dog, Alan’s tractor, crows squabbling, wind in the poplar leaves. I hear a car go by and I want to be driving again. I used to drive all over the Island, everywhere. I did social work, I went to homes with problems. I saw a lot I didn’t want to see, but I’d be grateful for it now, ugly or not. It makes you so domestic, this blindness, you’re bound to house and yard, and the convenience of others. If you think life is predictable with sight, it’s ten times more without it, Lauchlin.”

  “Tena,” he said, turning back toward her after he’d stepped outside. “I’d be glad to take you anywhere.” He wasn’t sure just what he meant or how it sounded. “Drive you, I mean. If no one else is available and…”

  “Would you? That’s so very kind I want to say yes immediately, Lightning Lauchlin. I would love to go to the shore. It doesn’t have to be far. I haven’t been near the water in so long.”

  Lauchlin glanced up at their bedroom window, dark now.

  “And Clement? Would he mind?”

  “He’d like it if I got out more. What he doesn’t like is me walking the road.”

  “I can’t blame him for that. Listen, I could take you to Munro Point then, if that would suit you. I used to go down there the odd time, when I was younger. We’d have to hike to the shore though. I mean, you can’t drive close…”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow? After dinner?”

  “I’ll bring us a lunch.”

  “Tomorrow it is.”

  It had come to him without thought, he hadn’t been down to Munro Point in ages. He’d tell Johanna he had to go to Sydney. The walk would not be an easy one, not either way for Tena, and for him coming up the hill. No one would be down there of course, maybe it was as simple as that, they wouldn’t be seen. Should he care much? He wasn’t sure how he would be with her, what sort of awkwardness might come their way. At times he was unsure in the face of her blindness, as if he had to remind himself in mid-sentence, in mid-gesture, that she required something from him that other women had not.

  SEVEN

  THE day was hotter than Lauchlin had expected and the noon sun was sultry. He hated hot weather, when just walking you’d work up a sweat. He drove up through the newer cemetery, itself bare of trees though enclosed by woods, its tombstones far apart and solitary in all the waiting space, one fresh grave of raw clay marked with a lonely wreath.

  “Where’s your family then?” Tena said when he mentioned that none of his relations were buried here.

  “On Man o’War Point, some over in New Pabbay, a few at Black Rock, St. David’s. They’re all over.”

  He parked the truck where the service road ended, not far from a high pylon of latticed girders that received the powerlines swooping down the mountain and across the strait. Something high in its metal gave off a deranged sound overhead, a metallic flapping, like a broken windmill.

  “What a miserable noise for the dead,” Tena said as he helped her down from the cab.

  “It’s the wind in that pylon above us. We’ll be out of earshot pretty soon.”

  The puddled ruts of the roadway narrowed to a path and Lauchlin held her hand behind him. She wanted to walk normally, if they could, she’d said on the way, I can manage, but she yielded to him on this unfamiliar ground. They emerged on the slope of a broad hill, its maturing hay rich and dark, running down to a small woods near the road, and beyond that another hill rising, dark with forest but for the Drummond church, high and white in a neat clearing. “This was all Munro land once, he had a lot of it. I heard someone from away has bought it but I don’t know who. It’s a handsome field anyway.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “Like a broad green breath, you’d want to take it in with your arms wide open.”

  She spread her arms. He couldn’t see her eyes behind her chic sunglasses.

  “Can you feel it?” Lauchlin said, studying her face under the wide brim of a straw sun hat, the way she pursed her lips and concentrated.

  “Tremendously. Yes.”

  He took her hand again and she let him guide her as he looked for an opening. “It’s grown in since I was here,” he said. The last time, he had wondered if he would make it bac
k up the hill, if his heart might clap suddenly like a cracked bell and send him face-first into the black mud of the bog. But he felt stronger now. On the north side of the ridge, the hill was thick with brush and scrub trees but there was a path, a narrow worn tread. He could see the shore trees where he wanted to go and the water beyond it, but there was the bog to avoid, if he could remember where it lay. “Here,” he said, “this looks promising. The footing’s not too bad. Put your hand on my shoulder and we should be fine.”

  “We will,” she said, “I’m sure.” He made his way carefully, telling her to mind the tree roots or a dip in the turf. But they were in a grove mostly of thin birches, well-ferned underneath, a lovely light moving through them in the wind. He skirted an anthill, a neat khaki mound over which ants darted, tidying up bits of duff in their manic way. Ravens were fussing in the treetops, rawking to each other, always at a safe remove, surveilling. A short stretch of black-mud bog was bridged by spruce logs and she put both hands on his shoulders as he smallstepped them across. The path ended near the shorebank, and when he saw the big limestones half-buried in the moss, he suggested a breather. He told her about the man the point was named for, Alexander Munro, who’d emigrated here with his wife from Scotland in the early 1800s to open a school.

  “It’s a great spot, I’d have loved to be schooled here by the water. I don’t know what drew him here but he knew how to pick a site,” Lauchlin said. “Frontier hardships, primitive conditions, Jesus, that didn’t daunt him or his wife, educated Glasgow people, they just pushed ahead, set it all up from scratch, did it. A crude log house the first year, later a proper house they taught in, then a schoolhouse down here. Most of these kids were terrible poor, they’d walk miles to get here, their parents had to build them little shelters to sleep in, out of small trees and brush. Boarding school, St. Aubin style. It was like the Middle Ages, Tena. They brought their own food with them, oats mostly, and weekends they’d walk home. But they wanted to learn so damn bad they’d put up with all that, and felt lucky for the privilege. No mean education either, Munro taught mathematics, Latin, navigation. Yes, it was an academy, really, in every sense of the word. His wife taught the girls to sew and things, domestic arts, I guess we’d call it.”