Lauchlin of the Bad Heart

by D. R. MacDonald

  “No math, no navigating for the girls?”

  “That was the times, Tena. But they got schooling, the girls, they could read and write when most of their parents couldn’t, not even in Gaelic. There’s a cenotaph in the old cemetery dedicated to Munro, from pupils of his who went away and did well in the world, as far as New Zealand. I used to wonder what it was like to arrive from Glasgow in this remote place, no roads, no house set up to receive you, facing what the pioneers faced. Nobody asked him to come, he had no guarantees about anything. That’s what always amazed me, his character and drive. I became a teacher but I never had a calling for it, not that sense of sacrifice. A singular man.”

  “With a singular woman.”

  “No doubt about it, Tena. She had to make do in unimaginable ways. Run a pioneer house, for God’s sake, and teach.”

  “That hard life impresses you. You might have thrived in a time like that, Lauchlin.”

  “Me? Not even if the school had been built and waiting for me, Tena, with a well-appointed house next to it, whisky in the pantry. No illusions on that. I mean, the Munros were teachers. I kind of fell into it, by default. I don’t know just where I thought boxing would take me, but it didn’t anyway. Illusions there all right. I tried to make the best of teaching but there were days when I wanted to do just about anything but walk in the door of a classroom and force knowledge on them I couldn’t make them see the need for. I wasn’t any damn good at that part of it. I wanted to impart to my students truth they couldn’t get without me, but the longer I taught, the less I believed I had that truth. Never a problem for my mother, in that one-roomer over at North River. All grades, all basics, this is the map of the world. Teaching kids now, you can barely raise your voice to them, let alone your hand. Respect was a given in my mother’s day, but that was fading when I left. If they wanted to learn, I could teach them something, but I hadn’t any gift for prying open a stubborn mind. These days it’s called charisma, I think. The ring sapped it out of me, whatever of it I had. I didn’t have enough left to take me anywhere else.”

  “You’re hard on yourself.”

  He laughed. “It’s you, Tena. You’ve got me talking and I can’t shut up.” He was never one to talk up his own history, but here he was—as if the fact that she could not see him made him want to open up.

  “You gave your students some good things, I know you did.”

  “They learned some of their own history maybe, of what’s around them. I made them read Mi’kmaq tales—a different way of looking at the world. How many of them knew the captain in Jack London’s The Sea Wolf is based on Alexander MacLean from East Bay? No relation to me, but he went out to the west coast with his brother Daniel and became a notorious sealing captain—stealing furs, smuggling guns and liquor, piracy. What grabs them is the now. I used to tell them the now makes no sense without the then.” Lauchlin looked at his hands. “I never had in me Munro’s sense of purpose, not for students. I did as much for them as I could but I didn’t make them my life. I’d wanted to be a boxer, if you’re asking me what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a British Empire champion, like Blair Richardson.”

  “You did?”

  “Really did. I never looked beyond that, when I was young. The Empire was a big place then, the Commonwealth. Awful good fighters from those parts of the world.” He could see her working up some image of him, of boxing, what he’d told her of it, he had no idea what that was but he pressed on. “I won some decent fights, nobody could take me for granted. I was young and fit as a lion and I never laid down for anybody. If hard work could make a champion, I’d have had a title sooner or later, anyone who knew me could tell you that. I was plenty strong, that was no problem. Yet I knew strong fellas who had nothing special in a punch, and skinny guys, lanky, they could ring your bell.” Where had this come from, spilling out of him? He never went on like this, not with a woman he hardly knew. “You have to be tough in a cold way too, in the ring. Not tough like Munro and his wife—every waking morning, every hour of the day—but in the ring, yes.”

  “You still have a passion for it, don’t you?” Tena said.

  “I don’t want to live in the past like that, but sometimes I can’t stay out of it. It beats ringing up a box of macaroni.”

  “I slip into the past too much myself. It’s little help to me, but so much of me is there. Where else can I see it?”

  “Of course, Tena. What’s wrong with that anyway?”

  “It can distract you from other things, it—is that a bird?”

  “A kingfisher. Blue and white, big head, long sharp beak.” They listened to its rattling call as it plunged from a bare tree limb. “If that fella goes for a fish, it’s done for.”

  “Did he get one?”

  “It’s in his beak. Shall we go on?”

  Further along the shorebank, off in the shade of thin pole trees, deadfalls, spiky-branched and grey, lay broken in the sunken space of a cellar, its bottom dark with wet leaves. They came into a clearing, scattered with poplar saplings, young willows, and grey stumps from long-ago logging, brown cores in their cracks.

  “We’re near the point now,” Lauchlin said. “The water’s shallow out for a ways, you can see the sandy colour, gravel and sand, then she gets dark abruptly, falls off deep there.”

  Tena lifted her face. “It’s so lovely and warm.” She slipped off her sunglasses. “The sun is bright, I can feel it. I don’t suppose I need these, do I?”

  “Don’t hide your eyes anyway, they’re pretty.” Sometimes blind eyes were not.

  “What good is that? Better they were ugly and sighted. The mountain feels nearer here, Lauchlin. Is it?”

  “You’re as close here as you’ll get to it, maybe half a mile across the water. Rises steeply on the other side. I don’t suppose that mountainside looked much different in Munro’s day than it does now, forest thick as fur. Except for that powerline pylon up there on the ridge. There was no road along the mountain then of course. A path the Indians made probably, and the settlers took it up later. The ones who pioneered up high near the ridge, I don’t know how they survived on that soil, it’s like the skin on a backbone.” He ran his eye from east to west where the ridge tapered down toward Little Harbour. Very difficult to pick out that old road if you weren’t aware of it, and even then it didn’t easily give itself away, maybe subtle shadow lines where hardwood turned to spruce, all but invisible here, you’d have to study it, and who would bother? When he was young he had flirted with a plan to hike the Slios clear up to the ridge there, in the heights where it had never been cleared, virgin trees, and its steepnesses intrigued him, the wooded ravines you would notice only when light hit the slope a certain way. Start from Granny’s house. Another fantasy, though was it not more powerful for that? He might have been disappointed had he done it and found no magic up there. Morag went to the big city to look for hers.

  “My Uncle Ranny walked the Slios more than once when he was a young man, looking for a house with a dance in it. He swore to me he stumbled over a ghost one night on the path home, a white form that up and ran away. I’d say it was a sheep, I told him, and that got him hot. He wanted his ghosts, and he expected me to be serious about them, like the old people were. Ranny said if you didn’t believe in the second sight, taiseacht, you’d never get it, not even the drift of it.”

  “I believe in it,” Tena said. “I do. Do I need to know Gaelic?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so, Tena. A taisear sees disturbing things sometimes.”

  “Indeed, yes.”

  “Premonitions of death.”

  “Their own and others’.”

  “You don’t hear much about it anymore, the old-timers are passing away. Will I spread our blanket here? You can sit and have a rest if you like.”

  “I don’t need to rest, I can rest at home.” She stepped toward the bank and stopped, raising her hands to the light breeze, then pulled off her straw hat. Lauchlin dropped his shoulder bag and laid out an old blanket
his grandmother had woven, a dark grey rectangle of wool on the dry grass. With a woman with sight, he would simply say, Let’s take a walk, I’ll show you what’s here, but now he wasn’t sure. She tended to turn into herself anyway, tilting her head thoughtfully, absorbing what was around her in ways he could only guess. Jesus, he had brought her here for what, to sit on a blanket and eat lunch? What had been in his mind? He didn’t always know anymore. The blanket lay there like a signal of distress.

  “Could we go down to the water?” she said.

  “Of course, Tena. It’s a nice bit of beach.”

  Near the water she brightened, holding onto him she pulled off her shoes and tossed them aside with her hat. Lauchlin retrieved them from a rope of dry eelgrass and followed her as, barefoot, she waded in cautiously, ankle-deep. She stooped and sieved the water through her hands. “It felt so cold at first but it’s warm now,” she said. When she strayed deeper, she felt it on her legs and stopped, stepping sideways toward shore. Lauchlin, oddly pleased, wondering at her, moved along above her like her ward, plucking a whitened stick from the sand and wielding it like a cane. There seemed no need to talk, she was enjoying herself. She scooped up handfuls of gravelly sand as she went, letting it rain slowly through her fingers until she’d sifted out a mussel shell, a razor clam, an empty oyster, a stone she gripped hard before discarding it. But she paused when she found a small crab in her palm, dead white but intact, feather-light like the ones scattered along the shore, eviscerated by ravens or gulls. “That’s a green crab you have there,” Lauchlin said, “they’re mean and tough, they’re not native. Arrived in ballast probably and they’re raising hell with other shellfish.”

  Tena was tracing its shape slowly with her fingertip, her eyes closed. She said suddenly, “I read once about a marine biologist who was blind. He did his research in tropical waters somewhere, I forget, feeling around in the shallows for shellfish, his specialty. There were poisonous creatures in that water, you know, he could easily have died from, been stung. His fingers were so sensitive, they were better than eyes really, for that. He could feel the tiniest details by touch, all the complicated little differences. He discovered a new species, if I remember. I thought he was amazing then, but now…I’d like to have met him though. What courage, my God. And sometimes I’ve been afraid to reach into an old cupboard, because of webs and spiders.”

  “He must have been blind since he was born,” Lauchlin said.

  “I’m sure he was. Hard to think of that as a good thing, but…”

  They reached a turn in the beach, the tone of the water darkened only a few feet from the shore. A new cottage appeared up on the bank, an aluminum outboard beached below it. A portly man and a woman were lounging on the deck under baseball caps and sunglasses, exposing more pale skin than was wise. They stared in that accusing way dark glasses have before they waved and Lauchlin waved back though he didn’t know them.

  “I think we’re in someone’s summer paradise,” Lauchlin said. “Maybe we should go back.”

  He brought the blanket down to the sand and they laid out the lunch she had packed, the sun warm on them. Tena said she wished she’d brought a towel to dry her feet, the wet sand was gritty.

  “Here, this will do. Allow me.” He cupped her heel in his hand and gently brushed the sand away with a corner of the blanket, she flexed her toes back and forth, smiling, amused. “Between the toes too, if you please, sir,” she said. Her feet were slender, warm, the bones delicate.

  “As you wish, ma’am.” He puffed at sand grains, his pursed lips as close to her skin as he dared. “There.”

  “You have a nice touch,” she said. “For a boxer.”

  “Ex-boxer.”

  Tena handed him a sandwich and he noted the neat layers of tomato and ham and lettuce. There were hard-boiled eggs, pickles, a container of cole slaw. “What a fine lunch, Tena.”

  “Thank you for bringing me here.” She had taken several bites of sandwich when she suddenly stopped and set the rest of it back on the wax paper. “When I was a girl I saw a black-and-white movie about being blind.” She chewed slowly and seemed to swallow with difficulty until she took a mouthful of water.

  “There was a scene in a cafeteria where a blind girl was at a table eating, all by herself. About fifteen or so she’d be, that age when anyway you’re so open to hurt. She was blind born, but even so she was aware of the other people eating, the sound of silverware and talk around her, and so there was an awful self-consciousness in her, painful to watch. She was not working her fork and her knife in a normal way, and she knew that. There was no grace to her, her hands playing over the food until her fingers were soiled with it. She would crane her neck carefully toward a piece of meat, her mouth wide and her lips trembling. At home of course she could take her food as crudely as she wished, but here she was surrounded by strangers. Her eyes jumped around in her head, a terrible nervousness, I thought. I didn’t know that your eyes do that if you’ve never had sight, they have nothing to fix on, they just roam helplessly. She broke my heart. But she ate, God love her, she finished that food. And she had never seen in her whole life. Think of it. Everything she knew came from touch and noise. She was good at it, at making do without sight. She got around on her own, even in that cafeteria. She had a reference to things I’ll never get because I know what it’s like to have eyes. I’m always yearning to see again, reaching out for something familiar that I can see. That girl tuned into everything with her hands and her ears. Me, I was in between somewhere. What I had left didn’t seem like much, not enough, except for Clement. I told him, listen, go, leave, I’m going blind, I’m going useless. But he stayed. He didn’t leave me.”

  Lauchlin was quiet. The tide was turning, beginning to curl past the point. “You’re anything but useless,” he said.

  “I can make a lunch.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  She tugged from her blouse pocket three small stones and dropped them on the blanket. “I liked the feel of these. Don’t ask me why. I don’t have the fingers to tell if they’re pretty or plain.”

  “Let’s see, that oval one is sort of a drab green, Tena, polished as it is. But this other one has a tiny fossil in it. A shell, it looks like.”

  “Really? I do have sensitive fingers after all. So I’ll keep that one. I might take up geology, Lauchlin, who knows. No poisonous fish, at least.”

  “You could start here, Tena. Cape Breton Island was high as the Himalayas once, millions of years ago, part of a vast range that ran clear over to Scotland. It split apart later and the Atlantic Ocean opened up, and we’ve been receding from Scotland ever since, ten centimetres a year. Won’t raise our airfares much, will it? The geology is similar, the stones, the fossils, here and over there. The Highlanders sort of linked it up again, I guess. Now we’ve just got the long mountain over there, not very high, waiting for the next ice age to grind it down.”

  “It’s not coming soon, I hope. I’m not wild about ice. I took a fall last winter on the back steps. A bruise on my hip big as a dinner plate. I got to feeling like an old lady, taking little baby steps outside.”

  “Fifty thousand years or so until the ice age, Tena.”

  “Oh, good, I’ll be much better at all of this by then. And Clement should be done with his milling, I guess, so he can hold me up anyway.”

  “You’d like him to be done now, I guess.”

  “I want him to get out of the woods and free of that man. I feel strange about him, just the mention of him.”

  “Cooper’s not a man to partner with, but Clement didn’t know that of course. People aren’t always what they seem.”

  “We could’ve done without the money, if there’s any out of it at all. He was going to save up for a boat, try fishing. There’s talk now the fish plant is in trouble. Same old story here, isn’t it? Some business starts up, riding high on government money, people get a few jobs for a while, then it’s gone. I couldn’t blame him for wanting something of his o
wn.” Tena turned her face toward the water. “Is it deep out there?”

  “In this stretch it is. Much deeper on the southside. That could hold a Loch Ness monster.”

  “Any place can hold a monster, Lauchlin. I can feel water that’s deep, I knew it was deep. I don’t even have to set foot in it.”

  The wind died away, the sun grew quickly hot. They drank cold spring water from a Thermos. “There’s an eagle up there, Tena, soaring away.”

  “Did you know they can see eight times better than us? Three thousand feet in the air an eagle can spot a mouse in the grass. I don’t know how they found that out, but I’d be happy seeing two steps in front of me.”

  THEY STARTED UP THE HILL, Lauchlin taking a different route than the shady path they’d come down on. It was steeper, but the terrain more open, the footing more predictable. The air turned still and muggy. The sun was hot on his nape as he climbed ahead of her and the heat seemed to fatigue him. He didn’t want to rest so soon, but the grass was brittle and dry and sometimes his shoes slipped on it. He was conscious of the sweat on his face, you’d think he’d been running, not walking slow easy steps up this slope because a blind woman had her hand on his shoulder. He paused by a big grey stump, its wood checked and gapped with age. Surely she heard his hard breathing and felt the sweat in his shirt. He’d been too aware of his heart the first months after it went haywire, its trips and lurches frightened him, the sudden pain, like some struggling thing was trapped in his chest. But later he came to wait calmly, the tantrums of the heart would pass.

  “Here’s a tree stump, Tena. It’s a fair seat. Sit down, take a break.”

  “Lauchlin, you’re forever after me to sit down. Are you all right yourself?”