Lauchlin of the Bad Heart

by D. R. MacDonald

  “I don’t know where you get your notions, Ma.”

  “Think of the women you’ve been involved with over the years, after Morag left. Married, every one of them.”

  “You didn’t know the women I was with, Ma, the where or the when of them.”

  “It’s true, and you know it.”

  “I don’t know it, and what difference does it make? Nothing to do with Tena MacTavish, or Clement either, nothing.” But it did: he was doing for Tena what Clement could not. “Haven’t I been up to see Morag? Don’t I always when she’s home? If there’s any woman…”

  “Yes, and you see her just as you always have. Even your voice is different when you mention Tena MacTavish. I’m not a fool, and I’m not blind either.”

  “I might argue with that, but I’m going down to the store instead. Who knows, a good-looking wife might drop in.”

  “Listen. I will say this once and be done with it. Morag loves you, and she has loved you ever since she came to this house. You don’t think that is worth something? I don’t care anymore if she’s Catholic or what. That doesn’t matter to me. You think what it might be like if that girl didn’t love you, if she just quit you for good and never came back. You expect her love to be there, for the asking. I shouldn’t have to tell you it’s a privilege, with a history like yours.”

  “It’s between me and Morag, Ma.”

  “Yes. Your dad was the same way. He wouldn’t talk about anything to do with the heart.”

  “Ma, it’s not your life.”

  “No, and it never would be.”

  “I can tell you this, Morag has a man who wants to marry her.”

  “Has she now? You’ll want her more than ever.”

  “Yes, Ma, maybe I will, when I see her again.” But Tena was the here and now, wasn’t she. He wouldn’t tell his mother he dreamed about her. Every day at some odd moment he would shut his eyes and try to visit a kind of darkness that might be Tena’s though he knew it was not. His hands sometimes would close into a circle and he was holding her waist, turning her slowly toward him. What was he to do? Was he not a help to her, a set of eyes now and then, however limited, compromised, imperfect? Without him, no poetry, no picnic afternoon, no trip to Point Aconi. He had no right to want her beyond this role, but he did. What did that make him? He wanted to know her, and to hell with Johanna for all that.

  THE REST OF THE DAY he could not shake what his mother had said. He’d given Shane a couple days off to go to Halifax and stitch up his unravelling romance with Jenna Marie, futile though that surely was: she had new tastes not just in causes and music and books but in men. Lauchlin was impatient with customers, forgot their change, told them he didn’t have things that were sitting in plain sight. Then a weekender, wearing the resort attire favoured by some Cape Breton males—a muscle shirt over a proud belly, shorts exposing stark white legs enhanced by dark socks and sandals—presented himself at the counter and asked if they had lubricated condoms in stock. Lauchlin stared at him for a few seconds before he spoke.

  “You here on a dare?”

  “Can’t go into town, buddy, I’m in a hurry,” the man said. He grinned behind his sunglasses. “I might lose it.”

  “Sorry,” Lauchlin said, with exaggerated patience, “we don’t carry sexual products. We don’t have condoms in rainbow colours or family tartans or with that little rooster comb on the tip. We have no lubricating oils, unless you’re going to have sex with a sewing machine. We don’t have, at least this week, any dildos, single or double, no vibrators, with or without batteries. No dirty videos, no dirty pictures, unless a really pale middleweight in baggy trunks is your thing.”

  The customer turned to Mabel Cameron, waiting behind him. “Is he always like this?”

  “Every day of the week,” Mabel said, giving him a little smile.

  “Now somewhere,” Lauchlin said, craning his neck, “I do have an old LP of MacLean and MacLean—no relation—some raunchy stuff on there. Apart from that, no. No sexual items to be had.” The man, flexing his hairy shoulders and tattoos, gave him a dark look but left, muttering about a head butt.

  The store closed in on Lauchlin, all its niggling concerns, and he had to keep reining in his mind as it roamed back and forth over the women Johanna had conjured. Attractive women, all in their particular ways, and yes, he thought about women every single day, at any hour, moments or minutes, true, moving back and forth through his mind. They merged somehow, the earlier ones, with the feelings he’d had when his boxing and everything about it was good—the physical pride, the flush of winning, spells of intoxication with his own power. Married? Maybe they were, but all of them, as he remembered them, had wanted his attention, so why should he not have given it? True, there was both risk and safety in them, but he liked flirting with the turmoil of their lives. He had not been looking for a wife, ever. But the women he really desired he pursued carefully, slowly, never in a rush, and he got as close to them as he could before he drew back, that was part of what he had sought, a specific intimacy—to be inside the complex mix of their existence, secrets they shared only with him, to hold their trust, their confidence, their intimate intensity. It excited them to reveal themselves, he was a man they had no responsibilities to, and that excited him in some way as well, how they cared about him alone, amidst other ties, loves, even motherhood, and the risks of their clandestine meetings. The mistake he’d made when young was thinking that the way one woman was, so the next might be, should be, when in fact it was the promise of their differences that drew him—physical, emotional. He never talked about his affairs, never told a soul about any of them, any man or woman, and because they knew that about him, they were relaxed with him, and loved him more easily. A few he had lasted with for months, others a year or two, and yes, the only ones he’d cared about and liked to spend time with had been married, okay, they had husbands or were in some in-between state of splitting up or wishing they could or just wanting a man different from the one they were tethered to. But he hadn’t approached them just because they were wives, had he? He’d met them at a dance or a bar in Sydney or a party, or they were friends of friends, and sometimes, if around his age, they remembered when he’d been in the ring, or someone would bring it up, and if he was in the mood and it seemed to his advantage, he’d let that play out, that faded excitement from his past, let them take his fist in their hands, ask him dumb questions about boxing, touch the scar tissue around his eye, those first touches were always telling, that subtle current, it was either there or it wasn’t. But there were other times when he’d cut the fight talk short, he could see an amusement in their eyes, as if they’d just learned that he was a former circus clown or a sword swallower. And hadn’t they, a few of them, been glad that Lauchlin was only a diversion, that he made no claims on their lives beyond the nights or afternoons they’d wanted him or he them? Yes, there were problems. Like Ellen who fell in love with him, who got so serious she told her old man about it and Lauchlin backed away, broke it off, the man called him up and started sobbing on the phone, You son of a bitch, get out of our life, and he did. But Linda’s husband, a hard drinker, started knocking her around and Lauchlin had to step in, before he pulled away, and set him straight, men who beat up women were disgusting, just bugs, not men, and Lauchlin told him if he hit her again, he would give him a taste of it he wouldn’t forget, and Linda said later, No, he hasn’t laid a hand on me since, but I guess it’s over with, you and me, isn’t it? And there was Meg, charming and humorous, just over forty—oh, women in their forties—and a little bored, she loved her husband and her two kids but she wanted a fling, just that, and Jesus they had one, a long and good one Lauchlin still recalled with a warm yearning, every bit of her was fun, and she kept their secret and her husband as well, so where was the harm, really, to this day? He’d weathered them all, and they him. He couldn’t see that he’d hurt any of them, aware as they were that he was only passing through. And Maddy, always Maddy, glad to be with him whene
ver it was possible, affectionate, uncommonly discreet. There was his medical issue in these affairs of course, he tried never to think about it when he was with a woman, but it was always somewhere in the back of his mind: Take me now, Lord, no better time for it all to go black.

  Rooted, however, through all those years, tendrilled around his heart, was Morag, just the sound of her name set her apart, always. All this with women began with her, she was at the peak of his life, yet part of the slide of it too, as if they’d been put on a path together, attended by love and passion, but when his boxing was ruined it ruined them too, maimed them in some infuriating, stupid, impossible way. They could never move forward, never take that next step since it seemed to have been obliterated, deformed, but their mutual past still claimed them, and they fell back briefly into its arms. Or they had.

  HE HURRIED TO CLOSE UP, locking the gas pumps before another car showed. He wanted badly to drink, an urge that came on him once in a while and it was on him now. When he heard footsteps behind him, he clamped his teeth to keep from swearing. But it was only Malcolm, gimping along under the thin yellow ray of the streetlight.

  “Malkie, I’m after forgetting what night it is, boy!”

  “I thinks to meself, Lauchie’s barring the door pretty damn early for Thursday.” He sucked in a breath and bore down on his cane. Pain creased his lean face. “Goddamn gout couldn’t keep me away.”

  “Maybe you’d better skip the drink then.”

  “Red wine, that’s the worst for it, they say.”

  “No problem, Malk, we’ll steer clear of the wine cellar. And whisky?”

  “Lead the way, my son, they don’t call it uisge beagh for nothing.”

  With a glance at the empty road, Lauchlin shut off the outside light and flipped the sign to “closed.” He thought of Tena on the road that night, how single-minded, focused on her destination. How had she known that she’d reached the store? “Into the backroom, Malk, we don’t want latecomers.”

  He pulled up another chair near the desk and slid a case of noodle soup in front of it. Malcolm thanked him for the footstool and sat, cradled his knee in both hands and lifted his leg, setting his foot down gingerly on the box. Comfortable now, he rubbed his hands briskly at the sight of Lauchlin removing from a bottom drawer a bottle of whisky. He turned its label toward the desk lamp.

  “Single malt,” Lauchlin said. “Birthday present from my brother. Lord knows what it costs.”

  “A doctor can buy what he likes.”

  Frank belonged to the St. Andrew’s Society and a chapter of Clan MacLean, and he sent Lauchlin and Johanna photos of New Year’s celebrations and Robert Burns Days, with their bringing in of the haggis, a piper puff-cheeked in the background, to a long table of kilted men smoking cigars. Frank liked that sort of thing, dinners and toasts, the camaraderie, the full Highland dress-up. In his Toronto house he had photographs of such gatherings framed on the walls of his den. Lauchlin had never gone in for that, and sometimes he thought that maybe his brother was ambivalent about it himself, immersed in it but examining it at the same time. Yet suddenly he was taking a trip to Scotland alone.

  “Not always.” Lauchlin unfolded a letter from his shirt pocket, tilted it toward the light. “Anyway, this is the work he does. Frank says, A couple weeks ago a man came into the ER with his arm severed above the elbow, he tried to jump a boxcar and his timing was off just that little bit, I did it a million times, he said. Ten minutes later someone else arrived with his limb wrapped in newspaper, like a cod left behind at the fishmarket. I stopped the bleeding and put the arm on ice, and a team of surgeons did reattach it later, though he won’t be jumping anything that moves ever again. Once, I was one of those surgeons, but too often my head was fumed with whisky and your mind has to be as clear and cold as an old spring, or you hit that one time over a million.”

  “He writes with a fine pen,” Malcolm said. “No thick nibs in that man.”

  “He’s going to the Hebrides, you know, soon,” Lauchlin said, folding the letter away. “Might make a stop here.” He wouldn’t tell Malcolm that his brother had asked him to come along, or that his refusal had mostly to do with Tena, fearing as he did now that someone might step in and replace him, another man might come to her door and delight her with talk, read her books better, relieve a long afternoon and drive her to old points, keep her from the edges of cliffs, from whatever and whoever might threaten her. At the same time, he wondered if she would have missed him, or what missed about him.

  “Never been to the old country, myself,” Malcolm said. “I never felt the lack of it.”

  “You don’t know what’s over there then.”

  “I’ve heard plenty about it, bullshit and all, and read as much more.”

  “Not the same as seeing the place though, is it, as being there.”

  “All that matters to me is right here, under my feet.” He thumped his cane on the floor.

  “Frank’s on an ancestral kick. Was always keen on that stuff.”

  “Is he? We all love tales of the misty old days in the Highlands and Islands, but we wouldn’t want to live them, would we. We’d never owned a handful of dirt till we came over here, my son. I don’t think many of us would sleep well with cows in the next room, and your chief or your laird or whatever, he’d still turn you out to fight his feuds or his battles, or give you up for gambling debts, when that time came. He’d put sheep in your croft and everyone else’s, drive you away somewhere else, over on the rocky side of the island or ship you over the sea, you had no say in it. If Frank’s forebears hadn’t been turfed out by the Clearances, they’d still be landless, the most of them, maybe have a little croft if they’d hung on for another hundred years. Here you could get what, a hundred, two hundred acres from the Crown, clear two or three and work it for a year, show you had the stuff to make a life that way, and it was yours, a land grant. In Scotland you wouldn’t have had a patch. You know? So let’s not get all soft and woolly about the old Highlands. We lost some of the old things, in coming over, after a while, true enough, but we gained others we’d have never had. We came out all right, over here. We don’t owe them a goddamn thing back in Scotland, as far as I’m concerned. They could’ve kept us, if they’d wanted us, that’s the way I look at it.”

  “I bet they’re sorry they didn’t keep you. Here, try this whisky, it’s better than you’re used to, Malcolm my man, and more than you deserve.”

  Malcolm reached for the bottle and examined it through his bifocals. “Made by the Sixteen Men of Tain, says here, and there they are, by God. I had some ‘shine last week made by the One Man of Black Brook.”

  “Good was it?”

  “Not this good. Smooth or raw, same results.”

  “Slainte mhath.”

  They took the whisky quickly, its taste raced across their tongues. Malcolm conceded that maybe it was fifteen men better than what he was used to. The backroom dimmed away beyond the light of the desk lamp. It carried the smell of ripped cardboard, of potatoes and onions and the earth that had clung to them. If you sniffed, there was from some corner a whiff of kerosene, and the faint odour of the heavy bag, like wet gloves. In the rectangle of the rear window there was a bar of mountain darkness, a slightly lighter night sky above it. They didn’t talk, they just sat, settling themselves. Lauchlin poured them another one. There was no hurry. As soon as the whisky warmed him, Malcolm would turn their talk, as he always did, toward the ring, toward Lauchlin. Before Malcolm retired in Sydney and returned to St. Aubin, Lauchlin kept the boxing to himself. He did his bag in the backroom, hidden away, when the store was empty. But Malcolm had got him talking again, and the fights Malcolm had seen came back with a strange freshness, Lauchlin’s own angle, satisfying flashes of his boxing past, its world, the people who were part of it. But tonight Lauchlin wasn’t as ready as he’d hoped, a mood had hold of him and maybe whisky couldn’t drive it off.

  “Malkie, you seen anything of that Cooper fella around here, up and
down the road or wherever?” he said.

  “Not in my walks, but somebody saw his shiny pickup. He wasn’t in it.”

  “Where?”

  “Church Road, the Southside end.”

  “What the hell was he doing there?”

  “I don’t know a soul who could tell you. He’s got no roots in this place anyway. He’s just a truck and it’s usually empty.”

  “I heard he’s into surviving in the woods.”

  “We all survived in the woods in the old days, we didn’t have to work at it.”

  “I’d like to have a word with him anyway.”

  “Oh he’d love that, my son, that’s a man who wants words with somebody. You want to tell me about that?” Malcolm pointed to Lauchlin’s brow, the cut a dark scab against a patch of fading yellow skin.

  “No, I don’t. He was a just a gym boxer, I think, if he was a boxer at all.”

  “He’d get you one way or another, he wouldn’t need fists. Fists is what we used to use, eh? That’s how you showed you were a man, a better man. Now it’s weapons. Killing.”

  “Not much of that here, Malk. Big cities, sure.”

  “I mean the kid who gets a hold of a big gun, machine gun, and blasts another man to pieces out a car window, driving by. That’s manhood?”

  “In a twisted way. Have another, Malkie.”

  “I just might.”

  Two lengths of cotton tape, yellowed and stained, were draped on a coat hook. Lauchlin only used them when his hands got sore. Prepare your hands. Like a sumo tossing salt. Taping up—more than the gloves, the trunks, the high-laced shoes, the robe, it had said, you are a boxer. He remembered the white tape weaving smoothly around his knuckles, between his fingers, Hank Powicki, his second, chattering advice as he did it. His first big bout, a four-rounder. Watching the tape wind fresh and white around his fists had calmed him, that solemn ritual.

  “You know, there’s women in the ring now?” Malcolm said. He seemed to sense that more alcohol might be needed to revive that Thursday-night spirit. “Jesus, I can’t watch them pummelling each other. A few years of that and what would a woman look like? Eh? Scar tissue, monkey eyes, busted nose.”