Lauchlin of the Bad Heart

by D. R. MacDonald

  “He was a divinity student in Boston then, Lauch, wasn’t he? Beats me why they got him a fight with Logart anyway.”

  “Tune-up, I guess. ‘I lost my viciousness.’ That’s what Blair said when he quit. I’d seen it go out of him. Between one fight and the next.” Lauchlin shoved the heavy bag hard with the flat of his hand, watched it revolve lazily. “It cost me too, you know, when he quit. He was not out there anymore, up ahead. I measured myself against him. I didn’t realize how much until he wasn’t there. I came up way short, Malk.”

  “What do you mean? You were on your way then, Lauch, you were gaining every fight.”

  “I’d never be better than I was then, that night, sitting there watching Blair get booed and bloodied. The heart cut me down fast, sure, but the truth was coming anyway. I didn’t have the gifts. If he’d beaten Brennan in the first fight, he’d have had a shot at Joey Giardello, world middleweight title. Madison Square Garden.”

  “Don’t talk foolish now. What’s got into you? I know you in the ring. You’re just feeling down about something. Is it that woman? Let’s not get muddled here. I know your history, that’s—”

  “I don’t want to talk about my fights anymore, Malk. Not mine, not me.”

  “Ah, that’s whisky talk. You’ll get over it.”

  “Over what? Blair was about to be ordained when he died.” Lauchlin sat down, watching the bag pendulum to a rest. “A small tumour made Tena blind,” he said.

  “Yes, and where the hell does it come from?” Malcolm said. “They don’t even know. People never been hit in their lives, all the sudden there it is in the brain.” He squinted at Lauchlin. “You like that girl.”

  “Others like her too, if they know her. It’s not that hard.”

  “See that it stays that way. That’s the trick.”

  “You should be on the radio. A call-in show. Ask Malkie.”

  “What’s the topic, my son? Matters of the heart?”

  “Matters of the arteries, in your case.”

  “My arteries are as clean as a flute.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Listen, I’m only telling you what the doctor said. He plugs that stethoscope in my ribs and he says, Malcolm, hearts with half your mileage don’t beat like this.”

  “Dr. Forbes, is it? He’d tell you anything just to get you out the door.”

  “That’s just the way I was put together, boy. I had no say in it.”

  “I got my dad’s heart, it seems. Sometimes I think he knew that. He never wanted me in the ring. He burned my boxing gloves when I was a kid, tossed them on the burn pile while I was in school. Uncle Lion bought me a new pair. I don’t know what my Dad really wanted of me. Maybe Frank took care of his expectations. I had my own. I didn’t reach them.”

  Was it right, wise, even defensible, to miss so much something he had never attained, to still want the interrupted journey enough that he examined its episodes for anything he might have done better or differently? But yet, it had been such an intense part of his life, the weeks and weeks of training that all came down to twelve or eighteen or thirty concentrated minutes in a ring, springing, at the strike of a bell, off that little corner stool, a man right there in your face, mirroring your stance, your intentions, your will, eager to hurt you, put you down, knock you out, make himself look good at your expense, you thinking, Will I be, have I been, fooled, maybe I’m not as sharp as I seemed in training, I haven’t the promise my trainer said I did? But quickly such things don’t matter, a ritual takes over, every boxing skill you have learned, repeated, absorbed, takes you up, becomes instinctive, the body moves, your head, your hands, your legs, feet stepping, sliding along the canvas, his eyes as fierce as yours, as fearful, not of blows but of the chance—huge, primeval, always there—that you might look bad, clumsy, inept, inferior, and end up on your back. Until the satisfaction of connecting, your fist coming home sharp, solid, scoring, and if you can put two, three good punches together, knockdown. Maybe winner by knockout. KO. The golden letters.

  “There wasn’t anything that man wouldn’t do for you, your dad,” Malcolm was saying. “He carried people in hard times, let them run a bill. You’ve got that side of him, Lauch, you’re a generous man.”

  Lauchlin leaned toward Malcolm. “Why is it some cranky worthless son of a bitch lives to be eighty and a good man dies at thirty of a brain tumour?”

  “If you can figure that out, start a religion. It must be late. Is it?”

  “It matters not. The store is closed, shut, but the backroom is open for business.”

  “I don’t want Johanna coming down on us in a great fit of temperance.”

  “She’s long in bed.”

  “Your mother put the iron in you, didn’t she? What hardness you’ve got is hers.”

  “Depends. What hardness?”

  “What you needed to fight. God bless her, I say.”

  “You’ve said that a lot, Malk. You still trying to get on her good side?”

  “I’ve been on her good side. I didn’t expect to be on it forever. Say, pass that over, would you? Next Thursday you’ll be feeling better, Lauch.”

  “I’m feeling better right now, but not better enough.”

  They had run the whisky low. Malcolm lifted the bottle to the light, swirling a honey-coloured film. Finish it, Lauchlin said, the last nail is yours. Their conversation embered down, it was getting harder to stir the coals, a little flare here or there, heartfelt but inarticulate. Malcolm struggled out of his chair, stood with wavering dignity, then marched carefully into the small bathroom where in the dark he took a long and muttering piss. Lauchlin insisted on driving him home, You can’t do that walk on a bad foot, and Malcolm said, I’m feeling no pain, I’d rather not end up in the ditch anyway, last time you drove me you clipped my fence, thank you anyway, boy, I want to reach eighty, worthless son-of-a-bitch that I am, and Lauchlin said, You will, you stubborn bastard.

  Lauchlin waited out at the road in a damp breeze watching Malcolm limp surprisingly fast through the yellowy rays of the streetlight. There was the faint scuff of his shoes, a trailing, garbled talk-to-you-later, and he was gone.

  The climb to the house felt steeper now. Lauchlin found himself staggering upward, then halting abruptly so he could steady himself, drink up the stars, calm his breathing. Christ, that Milky Way, you could swim in it, and maybe he had. He touched the black nick above his eye, the paling cheekbone. As a boy he’d run this hill, to the road, to the shore and back up, always running. A good skater, good swimmer, there in the strait where the title was strong you had to be. A car hissed past behind him, its headlights swept vaguely across his back like a gust of wind and set him swaying, but he pushed ahead cautiously until he reached the house. He turned and looked back down the hill. The store was just a window, a flickering fluorescence behind it, a dim blue. Country silence: a moon waxing through poplar leaves. The white calmness of stars was in the wild roses, a dim sheen over the field. Everything was in wait, tensed, leaves and grasses still. Pale yellow rose petals lay scattered by recent rain, the ravaged blossoms suspended above them.

  In the kitchen he blinked rapidly at the ceiling light before he switched it off, then the parlour lamp that Johanna had left burning. Darkness. He shut his eyes tight and when he’d oriented himself and got his balance, he started for the stairway, eyes still closed, his hands stirring the air ahead of him. Something struck his shin and he cursed but he did not open his eyes as he groped along the spokes of the railing and found the first step, hugging the newel post long enough to remember that his Uncle Lion had turned it on a treadle lathe. He started up the stairs. He was doing well, sliding his hand along the banister. This was possible, wasn’t it? But a few steps up he stumbled hard. He lay there gasping, gripping a rung, dizzied by flashes of light in his eyelids. His head throbbed. Didn’t he too know what it was like to fall, to be humbled, his legs gone out from under him? But he kept his eyes blind as he pulled himself up, he made it to the land
ing, then, his hand whispering along the wallpaper, into his room. Johanna was surely awake but silent down the hall, she’d heard him clatter up the stairs before. After he shut his door quietly, he fumbled out of his clothing, flinging each article away, a shirt button popped against the mirror. Naked, he lay spread-eagled on the bed. Images swam in his closed eyes. Hands taped in brilliant white, striking dark air. Morag in the room, in this bed, no, someone else, and Clement talking but incoherent in a sawmill roar, Cooper off in the brush, someone like him anyway, an enormous plank in his hands, fresh from the blade, stripped, a lush vanilla colour. Tena tight in his arms but facing him, they were standing not above the sea but somewhere on the Slios road, every detail he knew of that road said so, there was the clarity of day, then night and absurd hazards, horses rushed out of roadside trees, an enormous fury of hooves and their great heads, like loosed boulders, and rain so thick he knew someone was beside him only when he felt a bare arm tense against his, and just as he noticed a man staring from the other side of the road, all went totally dark, and when in a moment a moon came on like a lightbulb, zoom, the man was an inch from his face, his terrible eyes woke him, Lauchlin groaned, not because the face was ugly but because in the darkness it had come to him supernaturally fast, and there was a horror in that, dream-horror. Shape-shifter.

  He let the room creep back, embrace him, assert its familiarity slowly, dimly, the walls and their objects he needed no light to see. Roddy’s fiddle, hung upright, bow at the side. The photo of him and Morag on the old ferry wharf, windblown, her hand pinning down the hem of a short dark skirt, back in some summer of the seventies. Even in the darkened room Lauchlin’s eyes touched these images easily, he would never lose them, nothing could blind him from them. He lay awake, oddly sober, too aware of his body, its dense weight. His brother might still be up, late though it was, night shift in the ER, medical emergencies, life and death.

  Lauchlin woke in the first light, his mouth wide and dry and his head pulsing. He drank two glasses of water before he realized the phone had rung. It was Frank. He was flying into Halifax and he’d be heading for St. Aubin as soon as he rented a car.

  “Why drive up?” Lauchlin said. “All that time. Fly in fifty minutes.”

  “I’ve got things on my mind. And I like the old landscape. I’ll stay a couple days, then I’m off to the Hebrides. And you won’t come with me?”

  “Not this time. Why didn’t you take Ranald and Iain? They’re old enough for the old country.”

  “Not with their old man, not at their age. Maybe by themselves, or with girlfriends, more likely. The don’t think of travel the way I do. Their old dad just wants to drink good whisky and smell the heather, take some notes. They’re into music and girls, smoking pot probably. Remember what that was like, Lauch? Some good days, eh? I don’t smoke anything, you never did, and so what? I see people every day with bad arterial plumbing and they never smoked a shred. Anyway, I want to get the lay of the land, way up there where our MacLeods came from. Next time it’s Mull and the MacLeans. But we have things to talk about. It’s been a while.”

  “Be good to see you.” He could hear Johanna coming down the hall.

  “I hope so. Tell Momma I’m on my way.”

  ELEVEN

  FRANK had not arrived when Lauchlin finished his dinner, and so he wandered up the back hill to where Uncle Lion had lived, now no more than an ill-shaped mound covered in raspberry canes, bull thistle and spikes of spent fireweed. A charcoaled bit of roof gable glistened like a crow wing in the high sun. Under the gnarled arms of a well-lichened maple Lauchlin cooled off from his climb. This was a place he sometimes got away to, it calmed him, he couldn’t explain just why.

  Maybe he could never quite shake the notion that Uncle Lion was a sort of hero, even though others had disliked his bullying rudeness and seen his fierce independence as mere meanness, a cold indifference to any feelings but his own. He had a reputation for crankiness and a short fuse, he sometimes shut himself off from his own kin for weeks at a time and would not appear at door or window if you took the trouble to climb this long hill to his house, two ancient maples standing sentinel, no truly level ground anywhere around it, and holler his name. He was unpredictable when drinking and had stabbed a man in the leg in a Little Bras D’Eau tavern which got him a short stretch in Dorchester.

  But that had been well before Lauchlin’s time, and he liked Uncle Lion anyway, there was something between them, unspoken. Attuned to signs of storm, he would wait at the door of Lion’s workshop for a hint of mellowing. He loved the cool interior hung with chisels and saws and planes and tools without names, suffused with the scents of liberated wood, shavings and sawdust, of varnish and turpentine and oiled steel. Sooner or later, depending on his mood, Lion would notice him, and if he didn’t say, Go on home, go on now, he might say, Don’t bother me, you can hang around if you don’t. He might, if Lauchlin didn’t ask, toss him a scrap of information about the Great War, he’d enlisted when he got out of prison and survived three years in France to the Armistice, Lauchlin never knew what triggered the things he said about it (What I hated most was the foot rot, my boots were never dry, never, he’d say suddenly, and on any day of sun rows of grey socks fluttered on his clothesline, or hissed from a length of manila twine strung above the kitchen stove when weather was bad). He might let Lauchlin fetch a clamp, a can of glue, a spirit level, steady a board, square a line. Or he might mention a boxer from way back, like Jack Munroe, men from his time, Munroe had been born and raised right here on the Island, and Jack a war hero in France besides, God, what more could you want from a man. Lauchlin liked his uncle’s grim humour even when he didn’t understand it, he liked being allowed to listen to him say things he thought Lauchlin didn’t get, liked looking on quietly while Lion fashioned a piece of a table or a chest, liked the screech of his chisel as he pumped the treadle lathe, the smooth chewing of a mitre saw, the swift, precise whap of his hammer. No one else was granted this privilege, to watch as this handsome furniture took shape in the hands of this difficult man so easy to dislike, his work so easy to admire.

  The day Lauchlin wondered aloud why his uncle had no electric tools like he’d seen in a magazine, Lion said, as he gestured to the shop around him, No power here but my own, laddie, and then he put his hands up like a boxer’s. His frowning smile was new, and bending at the knees he beckoned Lauchlin closer. Turn your fist over when you throw it, like this, see, and tight, he said. He tapped Lauchlin on the chin just hard enough to jar him and tear his eyes, to let him know the truth of a punch. His uncle’s breath was sweet with rum that day, his scarred fists seemed huge, and clenching them altered him in some way, something went coiled and dark in him but he joked it away, thrusting his chin out and tapping it, Here, here, wee Lauchlin, hang one on me, you get a free one, boy. Lauchlin whaled at his arms until his uncle laughed and begged off. You’re some keen, he said, for a little fella. Then he rummaged in a drawer and came up with a thin, soiled book, blew sawdust from the pages. You’re a good reader, read this, he fought the great John L. Sullivan twice, was in Jim Corbett’s corner when he took the heavyweight title. Taught me a few things, the rest I learned the hard way, the only way. So will you, if you take to it. That’s how you stand up to people. You get knocked back on your heels again and again, sure, life does that. But it stiffens your spine. You learn a little each time it happens, if you’re smart you find out, you feint and dodge, you keep your balance. After a while you step forward instead, you strike back. And he’d turned back to his drawknife, talk was done for that day.

  Lauchlin did read the book, in bed by flashlight he studied Professor Mike Donovan’s The Science of Boxing, page after page of black-and-white stills, Donovan and a young assistant demonstrating “blows, guards and parries.” The posed photos suggested no movement at all—they had the frozen quality of their locale, an 1890s portrait studio, not a gym, the backdrop not bags or ring ropes but a well-worn wall canvas with a faded mountain range.
Both men wore fat grey boxing gloves and the professor’s blows mashed gently into his opponent’s obliging face, more like elaborate pushing than fisticuffs. Nevertheless, the professor had been a world middleweight champion in the bare-knuckle era, he was up in years but in good trim, all grey, balding and muttonchopped to his opponent’s thick youthful hair, and black waxed moustache. Both wore the light-coloured tights of the day, and each technique—“How to evade a right-hand crosscounter to the head” or “Left-hand lead for the body”—was choreographed, their postures arch and exaggerated like those of dancers. Studying them, Lauchlin thought that, to these men, the act of boxing was this slow-motion tableau, as set and scripted as a rite. They didn’t much resemble the boxers he saw in the theatre newsreels, and later on television—a rapid and staggering flow of blows, counters, speed and collision, mauling waltzes into the ropes, heads grinding skin to skin as they dug and chopped at each other’s body. But he practised the moves anyway in his bedroom mirror, satisfied, for now, with his own series of poses, feeling a flashbulb pop as he moved from stance to stance, he’d seen photos of local fighters in the Post. It wasn’t until later, when Professor Donovan fell apart in the amazing action and hurt of a real fight, that he realized that what happened between the posed blows, guards and parries mattered far more than mastering the stills, and that no book could teach him how to link them all together into a true dance, continuous, partnered, reactive, and, a man hoped, deadly.