Lauchlin of the Bad Heart

by D. R. MacDonald

  Tena rested her hand on his, then she turned away and rolled her window down slowly, admitting a draft of salty air.

  “A boyfriend used to bring me here. He only liked it when the weather was rough, the sea had to be pounding over the rocks. We went to the edge, we felt the spray on our faces. I never knew a young man died down there.”

  “It was long ago, Tena.”

  “Could we walk up past the light?”

  “If that’s what you want. The footing looks okay, it’s dry.”

  “Let me walk ahead of you a little. You just tell me if I’m off the path.”

  “You left your cane at home.”

  “I hate that cane. I need it, yes, my antennae. Sometimes I feel like a clumsy insect.”

  The land narrowed toward the point as they passed the unmanned lighthouse, a white tower rising above a small white house that had about it an odd, shuttered, vaguely mysterious air, locked tight, no windows except a little one high in its seaward gable, behind the pane the staring eye of some device. Ripe timothy grass swished stiffly in the wind, a patch of daisies were defiantly bright and Lauchlin mentioned them.

  “Oh, I remember!” she said, bending down to pick one. She touched it to her lips.

  Somewhere out in the hazy, eerie sea a groaner buoy rocked. Far up the coast Cape Smokey. The Black Rock cliffs were dark like cake.

  “Careful, Tena. We’re getting close to the very point.”

  She laughed. “Your points, my points. Which are better?”

  She stopped, facing the sea. “We’re high, aren’t we? Quite a drop, I remember. And there’s that long formation of rocks out there ahead. See it, that little island?”

  “Yes, Tena.”

  “Like a stone submarine, half-sunk? Let’s go on to the end.” She took small steps and he held her lightly by the shoulders.

  Dusk spread over the water, the horizon was gone in a pale haze of violet, long thin swells brushed over slabs of rock below, soft spills of sound. He was tense, but he would take her to the prow of this headland if that was her wish, he had hold of her, no idea what was in her mind, this was all feeling and touch. The precipices on either side of them drew closer, the cliff falling cleanly to the clear dark water, submerged rocks rose, shimmered, subsided. He stopped her gently.

  “Tena? You wouldn’t want to go further than this.”

  “We’re where it’s just wide enough for two feet, aren’t we?”

  “Right at the bow. I never went this far, we never got much beyond the lighthouse.”

  “You were a temperate young man, you had discipline.”

  “I don’t know about the temperance. We’re only a few steps from the edge, Tena.”

  A gust of wind rocked them sideways and she drew her breath in sharply as Lauchlin steadied her in his arms. “I’ll hold you,” he said. “Lord, if you slipped, I’d have to go with you, girl. I couldn’t face Clement or anyone else.”

  “I want to stay here, right here, for a bit.” She let her head rest back against his face, he tasted her hair. “It runs through my nerves, it tightens them, and they get stronger. Like muscle would. Does that make any sense?”

  “I think so. Each time I fought in the ring it seemed like I could take more, I could handle whatever was new. Or so I thought.”

  “Yes. I’ve had a lot of new. I’d like more, but of my own choosing. You know where I’d like to go?”

  “Where?”

  “To the Fairy Hole.”

  “Way out Cape Dauphin there? That’s a good hike through woods, Tena.”

  “I could do it, if you helped me. I was there once a long time ago but we didn’t get into the cave, the surf was too high.”

  “I suppose if we planned it ahead, checked the tides. Took our time maybe, why not?”

  The wind picked up and pushed at them and he tightened his arms around her. “If I were out there at sea,” she said, “I’d want to know the lighthouse was manned, that someone was inside it.”

  “Campbells kept it when I was young, cousins, on my Granny’s side.” He was just talking, taking in sensations, and he didn’t know where to go with them, their strange mix—Tena relaxing in his arms, tensing in the gusts, the salt wind, sea noises rising in the rocks below, and somewhere far in the back of this the faint thrumming of the mine’s air. He found himself saying something he didn’t want to say, “We should get on our way, Tena. It’ll be dark soon. Clement will be worried if he beats us home.”

  “A couple more minutes, please. I want to take some daisies.” They stood as they were. The wind was shifting to the east and cooling. From a distance, one could have taken them for lovers, and Lauchlin felt such eyes at his back though no one was there that he could see. She was blind. He was holding her so she would not fall.

  He guided her down the slope, her arm in his, a clutch of daisies in her hand.

  HE WAS TIRED WHEN HE GOT HOME that night, restless. He sat on the edge of the bed in his undershorts as Johanna passed by his closed door. He knew what was coming next and he cocked his ear for it: through the wall, suddenly out of silence, the winding of her alarm clock before bed. A ritual woven into his childhood, his dad had done it too, it didn’t matter how sick he felt or worn out, he had to reanimate that clock, the sound of that mainspring tightening assured another day. Lauchlin could feel it in his hand, its latent, unwinding energy, and the metallic teeter-totter of its escapement was such a part of his parents’ sleep they would surely have tossed awake without it, but for Lauchlin that sound meant the next day had already begun, its alarm was set, and too soon the dark winter morning would scatter his dreams, school called, chores to be done before breakfast. When he was older and home again, he had bought his mother for Christmas a good quartz clock whose battery would run, he told her, for several years and whose alarm was gentle matins bells, not the prison-break clangour of the old one. She thanked him but no thanks, hers was fine, she didn’t like hands that slipped silently from one second to the next, she preferred her time demarcated, she wanted to hear its portions meted out, and she even mailed the old alarm clock away when the spring broke and it came back cleaned and ready for her. That new spring will take me further than I am likely to go, she said.

  When the clock winding ceased, Lauchlin got up and began to shadowbox in the rippled, muted glass of his dresser mirror. Slow moves, all he wanted was to mime that old movement, even if the face he was jabbing at, bing bing, in the dim bedroom light, was his own, older, not cocksure and set anymore but tentative, tense, wary, the bruise in full, sickly bloom, the cut still taped, should’ve got a couple stitches. He’d savoured it there in the stinging rain, the hurt, he had to admit it, he knew he could take Cooper any time, rain or shine, if he did it quickly. But now that jaundiced cheekbone, the telltale tape he wanted only to disappear, fast—nobody knew the truth but Malkie, it was killing them how he got it, something to do with a woman, some said, half-right. He shook out his arms, shrugged his shoulders, stretched his neck side to side, come on, loosen up. Who was that woman way back, the night he fought up in Port Hawkesbury? She’d waited for him outside and he was pleased to see her because he’d won, his third fight with Tommy Flanagan, he had him figured out, knocked him silly in the third round. He had to shake Johnny and Hank first, tell them he was staying over with his aunt and he’d catch the train to Sydney in the morning, and then the woman took him to a dance up west, Port Hood maybe, she wore fishnet hose, he would never forget that. So ungodly sexy, wonderful to feel under your fingers. Was it that the mesh patterned so minutely the smooth skin, that subtlest of textures, there and not there, coolness and warmth? Of course there was the dance hall about them, fishnet legs, no way around it, soft shadows, curves. He ducked, dipped, slid right, left, feinted a jab and came across with a right-hand lead, then a hook, his bare feet whispering on the rug, his gut was still tight, he clenched it, remembering the blows that had hurt there. Maddy had run her fingers over his ribs, his familiar, ruddied flesh. Not the way Ten
a had touched his face—trying to see him, know him.

  When had he ever been afraid of desire?

  He lay on the bed, breathing hard, hands behind his head, smelling his sweat. Clement trusted him. This evening he’d been, yes, a bit put out, but Lauchlin let Tena do the talking, she calmed the man down, convinced him that going to the point was something she had to do, then, this day, it made her happy, and she’d dragooned Lauchlin into taking her there. She did not tell him that they had stood in a hug high above the sea, not two steps from the cliff edge. He and Clement had drunk together in other days, had talked and laughed. They had shown an interest in each other’s lives. Was that not friendship? Not close, not deep, true. But still. Who clocked you? Clement said to him at the door, peering at his eye, and Lauchlin said, Whisky and the stairway, and Clement said, Were you going up or coming down, boy? Maybe it was a mistake to have put his arms around his wife. When he and Tena were alone again together, something new would be there and he wasn’t sure where it would go. Yet, she had welcomed the feel of him. Hadn’t she? She had been at ease in his arms. He would have to go carefully, he would have to touch his way along in the dark.

  TEN

  “WHERE did he get swordfish? None of it around here anymore.”

  “I didn’t ask him,” Johanna said. “He knew I wanted some and so he found it, I don’t know where.”

  “West coast. Must’ve been frozen,” Lauchlin said.

  “It’s fresh.”

  “Tastes fine but I don’t know how it could be fresh.”

  “I’m just eating it and enjoying it, I’m not inquiring.”

  The sound of their cutlery against the plates irritated Lauchlin. Why the mystery? This was only fish after all, regardless of its origins. But his mother had a stubborn set to her face, it wasn’t worth pursuing. Yet the fish was Clement’s, he had brought it to the house.

  “You’ve been spending time with his wife,” she said finally, when her swordfish was gone and she had a cup of tea in her hands.

  “Tena? You sound like I’m sleeping with her.”

  “People notice when she’s in your car and her husband isn’t. Somebody saw the two of you walking hand in hand, up Point Aconi.”

  “They must’ve been hiding in the bushes then, there wasn’t a soul around but us.” Lauchlin, a slow eater, cut his fish without looking up. “There are people who notice too damn much around here, by half, especially what’s not their business. A dash of gossip spices a meal, Ma. Slow wits and swift deductions. She wanted to go to Point Aconi for a little while, she likes it there. If you’re blind, sometimes a hand is welcome, isn’t it? Clement knows I visit, every time I’m at his house he knows about it. If it wasn’t a help to him and Tena, I wouldn’t do it. He hasn’t said it bothers him any.”

  “He wonders about it some. It wasn’t a complaint exactly, but I know it’s on his mind.”

  “What are you, Ma, his shrink? It was his idea I find her tapes, read to her, not mine.”

  “I give him a sympathetic ear, that’s all. He can’t tell Tena everything. He has no men he’s close to.”

  “He wouldn’t tell another man much anyway, and that makes him no different than most men around here. But I think he’d tell me if that sort of thing was troubling him. Might take a couple whiskys.”

  “He hasn’t told Tena that Cooper’s been following him in his truck sometimes, when he’s making the fish rounds.” Clement always gave Johanna a honk when his van passed in the morning, and she never missed a thing on that road she didn’t want to miss.

  Lauchlin put down his fork. “He told you that?”

  “He keeps a distance, Cooper does. Clement spotted him up a logging road somewhere you’d never expect it, like he had business there, but he didn’t of course, nobody knows him there. One afternoon up back of Baddeck, not a soul on the road and Clement sees that green pickup of his in the mirror. Clement stops right there to wait for him but Cooper turns off a side road. He went after him one day but by the time he got his truck turned around, the man had disappeared.”

  “It’s odd, Ma, but it’s not illegal. You make him sound like a shape-shifter. We’ll have to get the Mi’kmaqs after him.”

  “Talk sense. Didn’t he follow him partway up the New Pabbay road last week?”

  “The Slios, you mean? He knows those back roads. He does jobs for summer people.”

  “Clement thought he’d try that summer house way up there high, the old MacKinnon place beyond John Alec Morrison’s, Americans own it now. But he could tell they hadn’t been down in a while, they live in Connecticut, I think. He’s off down the road a way when he notices in his mirror a truck pull out of the driveway, you know what a goat run that is, and isn’t it that Cooper fella’s? I told Clement, Put the Mounties on him.”

  “For what? He hasn’t done anything, Ma.”

  “Trespassing?”

  “By whose complaint? It’s not posted, and he’s done work for them anyway, I think. Okay, it’s a little strange. He’s irksome, he’s not dangerous. ” Lauchlin didn’t want to screw his head around with suspicion, there wasn’t much to go on. But Tena’s little episodes—what about them? She had a rich imagination of course, she admitted that, powerful, too vivid sometimes to share.

  His mother left the table and he could tell she was at the window in the parlour, putting some distance between them. She often talked to him from there, raising her voice a little if he was in another room, her eyes on the mountain where she’d had her young life. It seemed to give her strength.

  “I hardly know who’s on the mountain anymore,” she said. “It’s come back to itself, say what you like.”

  “I’d be the last to deny it, Ma. But somewhere down the road they’ll find a way to mess it up.” He left the table and stood behind her. “They’re planning a huge quarry up above Cape Dauphin, going to blast it and dig it out for forty years, ship the gravel to the States.” They’ll never do that up this way. The ghosts of the old people would rise up, so help me. Gordon Stewart, Sam MacLeod, Annie Munro, the Gunns, my father and mother.”

  “I remember the winter Sam died. December. No smoke in his chimney for two days. Dad noticed and sent someone up there.” He died in the course of nature, was the way Granny would have put it, an expression that seemed to fit the deaths of the old.

  “Noticed, yes. We looked out for each other. One of the last, Sam was, he and Mrs. Munro and poor Johnny Gunn. Johnny got strange there at the last. He’d stand in the middle of that old road up there and tell you his horse ran off, that he was waiting for it to return, If you see the creature, he’d say, shoo her the hell home, would you? He had no horse, not by then, poor soul.”

  Johanna returned to the kitchen and began to clear the table while Lauchlin finished his tea. “She won’t run off from him, will she, not like his first wife did,” she said, at the doorway with a plate in her hand. “Not blind she won’t.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Clement’s first wife, she got a bit cracked with religion, that’s how come she went back west.”

  “I didn’t know he had a first wife.”

  “He lived in New Waterford for a while when they first arrived. The wife was with him then.”

  Lauchlin’s cooling tea seemed to have no taste. “Tena isn’t running anywhere. She has none of that in her.” Why was he angry that Clement confided in her this way? Christ, he’d always withheld himself from his mother, as she from him, what they let each other know were more like glimpses through the crack of a door, and here was Clement baring himself, and she consoling him or whatever it was she said. Was it the intimacy that bothered him? That it was unmanly? He heard her running the tap hard over the dishes, clattering them onto the drainboard. No fault of Clement’s really, that’s how he was put together: like Lauchlin, he moved in his own ways.

  Returning to the doorway, his mother said, “You’re attracted to adultery, is what you are.”

  “What did you say, M
a?”

  “It’s the married ones you liked best, always.”

  “Morag was married? Come on, Ma.”

  “Name some more if you can. Later Morag was too, gone to Boston a good while before you took up with her again. She had a husband then, the summers she came home.”

  “If you could call him that. A flat-out alcoholic. He was like a big handsome kid, and a hypochondriac to boot. He could barely wipe his arse without her. She was the only good thing in his miserable life.”

  “He was a good-looking man, J.J. Black. Always well-dressed, nicely groomed.”

  “Lying in the street he didn’t look too spiffy. Ask Morag.”

  “But married, she was supposed to be safe, wasn’t she, then?”

  “Safe from what? Me? Jesus.”

  “You took to her again, more than ever.”