After his house burned to the ground, Uncle Lion moved over to the Southside. He salvaged what tools he could and loaded up his old Dodge with the belongings he’d flung out the upstairs window until smoke drove him out too. It wasn’t that high a jump and he was too enraged anyway to get hurt, he could have leapt ten stories without harm that night, convinced as he was that someone had burned him out. Nobody believed that or came forward about it, though more than one man on the island would have gladly put a match to anything Fraser Lion owned. Too many enemies, they can go to hell! he’d shouted to Lauchlin’s father from the window of that slow and sagging car, brown like an old boot, he’d rented a small house and outbuildings from some MacIntyres over on the Southside where settlers had come from Uist, and since he was around them then and getting older and just wanting to be Lion, he turned Catholic and could be seen at mass in their handsome little church over there, above the St. Andrews Channel. That was just for spite, Johanna declared at supper after they’d heard, and Angus said, He’s a contrary man, Johanna, never was there one more so. You know, he had a cat’s metabolism, he could fall asleep anywhere instantly, and wake up just as fast, claws bared. Lion was buried in that Catholic cemetery, less cranky by then, softened by the prospect of death perhaps, or maybe he’d just picked the right religion. A small, flat stone in the southeast corner noted his service in World War One, Eighty-Fifth Nova Scotia Highlanders, and Lauchlin, boxing seriously by then, laid stalks of August thistle on it, their hirsute lavender heads.
But this had been Lion’s true territory, he’d been his own man. Lion had put his feet down here where his father had put his, and that made it like no other place in the world. That was what we all wanted, wasn’t it, some piece of ground, however small, where we had power? Life would always be harder for those without it, no power even of land. For Tena, robbed of sight, was she poorer for it, or had she a new power, stronger, brilliant in its way? We had a hard snow that night, Lion said one day out of nowhere, his eyes pausing long enough to stare out the frost-scarred window. Big drifts in the morning, he said, and I lurked high in one and when the minister come up along it, minding his feet, I leapt on his back, I staggered him down into the snow. Well well, he says, seeing it was me, aren’t you the lion though? Name stuck. Nine or ten I was maybe, like you.
There wasn’t a photograph of the man anywhere. Lauchlin was best at conjuring him in words, if it seemed the right time to do so.
Often when he was in training he had come up here, not walking the path slowly as he had today but running it hard, churning, his legs were strong, any hill was a workout. But when he got here, he always missed Lion and Lion’s house standing in the clearing, he jogged around its remains, the grass already high in its sad collapse, and he circled it again, a scent of burnt wood in the air whenever it rained, he wanted to yell, Uncle Lion, I’m on my way! And then he would turn back toward home, plunging through the dappled, branch-whipped path, eager to strike into sun.
You’ve got too much Fraser Lion in you, Johanna would say to Lauchlin when their wills collided, when he drank too much, when she got word that he was seeing a woman she disapproved of, when he shut himself away in his room or went cold on her, when he insisted that how he lived was his own affair.
There was a high breeze now, he twisted a slender stalk of fireweed in his fingers. A thick brown bee clambered among its lavender petals, buzzed away, pantaloons yellow with pollen. A car horn sounded from the direction of the house. That could only be Frank, no one else would call him down like that. He tossed the flower away. It was hot now, he was not in a rush. The fragrance of summer was full, the humid scents of ferns, warm resins in bark, and as he emerged from the trees into the old hay meadow high above the house, he could see his brother below like a chauffeur waiting for a passenger, his rump to the hood of a big black, rented car he’d parked near the back door. Lauchlin took his time coming down through the blond grass. Frank seemed to be jotting something in a palm-sized notebook. Hearing Lauchlin he looked up, tucked the notebook in his shirt pocket.
“Here he is,” he said. “I thought you’d be in the store.”
“I’m too much in the store. I was up by Uncle Lion’s.”
“That cranky bastard?” Frank had never liked Uncle Lion, nor Lion him. “His old ruins? I’d rather visit a wolf den.”
“You didn’t know him, Frank, sometimes he was fine.”
“Like when?”
“With me, lots of times. He started me boxing.”
“Was that good?”
“Yeah. It was.”
“Hello, Lauch,” Frank said, smiling suddenly. He extended his big hand and Lauchlin shook it. “I’m not here for long, but any time here is good.”
“You have a good trip down?”
“I did. Here.” He was unscrewing the top of a silver flask.
“I never drink on duty. I have to be relieving Ma, I’m late. You’ve been down below, I guess.”
His brother took a nip, kept the flask in his hand. “Momma looks good, a little tired maybe. I suppose the store is limping along?”
“It does, and I’m not much of a crutch, Frank. It’s not the way I wanted to grow old, making change and filling sacks. Ma keeps it going, not me.”
“I suppose there’s no point in me asking after your heart.”
“You mean that bumping thumping thing in my chest or its tender incarnation?”
“I mean, for Christ’s sake, are you taking care of yourself? How are you eating?”
“Don’t push a heart diet on me, Frank, it’s for rabbits.”
“You look heavier.”
“I’ll never be as heavy as you anyway.” Frank was taller, and just big with a big voice, he could make a whisper sound hearty, he had a kind of shambling strength, but he’d always been clumsy on his feet and he put on weight easily even as a kid, easier yet after he’d started to drink. He had the MacLeods’ size and that black hair, greying, over the wide brow, still thick as a mane, damn him, and his eyes were Johanna’s, sharp light blue. Lauchlin had more MacLean in him, he was lank and wiry, ruddy, red-brown hair while it lasted and quiet, dark brown eyes that could rarely hide the feelings behind them. Frank had little of Lauchlin’s athleticism, a lack that grated on him as they were growing up, Lauchlin fleet and teasing, darting out of reach. Frank had watched with mixed sympathy the sudden disintegration of his boxing career. Later on, there was of course the matter of Elaine, but that was not Frank’s fault. What Frank always had were deft hands, surgeon’s hands. He could, as a boy, build exact models of ships, equip them with the tiniest of details, tweezer in a davit or a winch handle or a belaying pin precisely, not a quaver. When she first met him, Elaine had told Lauchlin, on that summer afternoon they’d been alone upstairs, Frank has wonderful hands, did you ever notice? You mean the way a woman would notice? Lauchlin asked her.
“I do a hundred sit-ups in the morning,” he said. “I love the old dishes. Ma tried Dr. Fraser’s meals but they depress me. I hold out for a cheerful run of meat and potatoes, and anything with butter of course. I still love pies. Why does it matter? You want to sew some new arteries into me?”
“I’ll save my skills, and my breath.” His brother drank again, then narrowed his eyes toward the back hill. A breeze combed the long hay, too weed-ridden anymore for livestock. “That summer Lion’s little house burned? Momma said it was a spark from his pipe, must’ve caught turpentine or sawdust or something, but I told her no no, Momma, spontaneous combustion. Fraser Lion in a fury, went up in smoke and took the goddamn house with him. That’s terrible, don’t talk like that, she said, but she had a smile in her.”
“She liked him more than you think.”
“Go ‘way, she’d get disgusted with him. Everybody did, one time or another. He was too crabby to live.”
“He wasn’t always pissed off.”
“Good for him. What a eulogy.”
They went in to the kitchen table and sat talking. His brother had bru
shed up on gossip down at the store but he picked at Lauchlin for details, for anything new.
“I get a kind of hunger for this place,” he said, taking in the kitchen that had changed little since he went away. “Especially now.”
“Why now?”
Frank went quiet and stared out the window. Cumulus clouds, as sculpted as white stone, eased brightly through a blue sky streaking to grey.
“I should have called home this morning. I just wasn’t in the mood. But that’s not right, is it? Moods aren’t for doctors.”
“You’re human. But I’d hate to have your hands in my chest cavity if you weren’t in the mood.”
“Don’t worry, Lauch. I’m competent, always, always when it matters. I won’t be excavating you, in any case. Unless you roll in with a bullet hole.”
“That’s a disappointment.” Lauchlin drank water from a tumbler. “I was hoping you could fix me up.”
“I’m not a head doctor. If I was, I might try an ambition transplant.”
“If I have any ambition to spare, this time of life, it’s all yours.”
Frank leaned forward on his elbows. “What are you going to do with yourself, Brother? Are they going to lay you out on that store counter some night like they did our Dad?”
“I’ll be all right. We have ambulances now, if you haven’t heard.”
“They’d better be parked damned handy.” He sighed and sat back, took a mouthful of scotch from his flask. “What’s with Morag these days? You still in touch?”
“You could say that. She was down for a bit.”
“I always liked Morag. A great girl. Pity she had to hitch up with J.J. Black. Why in God’s name, a fine-looking woman like her.”
“Women liked J.J., he charmed the pants off them. I liked him all right myself, old J.J., we went on a bat or two in our young days. Had a dry wit, and he could hold his liquor then. It ate him up later on, turned him into a pain in the arse. But I’d have been one too, if Morag had married me.”
“Drinking’s not your problem, is it?”
“There’s other ways to be a problem.”
“I know. I’ve tried a lot of them.”
“Poor J.J. would’ve been all right, he’d have made a life, even a decent husband to somebody, if alcohol had never once crossed his lips.”
“Oh Lord, lots that can be said about.”
“No, no, it was true love the first time J.J. kissed a glass. Booze was his beauty, not Morag, not any woman in reach. His heart was made for drink.”
“Daddy hid whisky in the root cellar and I saw him come up the ladder with it one night, cradling it like a bomb. I was about fourteen, I guess. I was down there in the dark next day, groping around like a blind man. Jesus, that first mouthful was awful, but I sure did like the effect.”
“You quit later, you put a career ahead of it. Wife, family.”
“It’s always there though. It’s a room I want to pop into alone and close the door. I can’t of course, not usually. Now, this trip to Scotland, ten days, do what I like. Drink, put some words on paper. I want to write.”
“But you’re coming back, you’ll pick up your life again.”
“I’ll put the mask back on. I’m good at it.” Frank drummed his fingers. “You seeing some woman in particular these days, or you still playing around?”
“I get by.”
“You always did, and from what I heard, you had some close calls.”
“I don’t know where you’d hear stuff like that.”
“Sure. You might have married Morag. That was my impression.”
“That was Ma’s impression, which I’m sure she passed on to you. I was licking my wounds at that time, way back. I wasn’t fit to marry anybody. But if I had…Well, she went off and did her own life. Better for her, that was. Waiting around for me was a dead end.”
“Is that what she thinks?”
“She does. She must.”
“Momma said you fancy a blind woman down the road, a married one yet.”
“She want you to talk to me about her, is that it?”
“Not exactly. You’re not a kid.”
“Thanks.”
“She thinks there’s trouble there, that’s all. You like to go to the edge sometimes.”
“Her old man, Clement MacTavish, he’s a friend of mine, and so is she.”
“Sex trumps friendship, I’ve often observed.”
“Who said anything about sex? Jesus.”
Frank raised his hands and smiled. “Not my brother! No worries, then, eh?”
“Who’s without worries? You?”
“I won’t get into that, not now. Damn it, why don’t you come to the Hebrides with me? We’ll ferret out the MacLeods together, stare into our dark, tribal past. Drink their whisky, eat their oats.”
“Not the time, not for me.”
“Time? Jesus, how much time do you think you’ve got? It wouldn’t be that blind woman, would it, by any chance?”
“There’s nothing to say about her.”
“Fine. You always liked the married ones.”
“Ma tell you that too?”
“She didn’t have to.”
“What about Elaine? Can’t she go to Scotland with you? She had a yen for travel.”
“I don’t want to get into her yens. What’s the big concern for Elaine anyway?”
“I’m just inquiring. She’s my sister-in-law, Frank.”
“Yes,” his brother said, drily. “She is.”
Lauchlin was not sure even now just what his brother knew, if he ever found out exactly what they had done. Elaine and Lauchlin had wandered outdoors separately that summer night a long time ago, spirits high after a garrulous supper of lobster and sweet corn and wine. No plan or signal, not consciously, not that Lauchlin could recall. He had been on his way back from pissing in willows in the back field, taking his time, glad in the air, the kitchen too hot and full of Frank’s cigar smoke and the loud cheery stories he told when he was toasted, cutting loose that night since he didn’t have to slice into organs the next day or stitch anyone up, he was still a surgeon then and they had not been married long. This was what his brother loved, conviviality, affection, and plenty of alcohol, and Johanna loved listening to him despite misgivings about French wine bottles on the table, Frank was her beloved son, if he’d been God she couldn’t have been more proud of him. Reverence for doctors ran deep in her generation, where a country doctor was scarce and far away, a hero when he made it to your door. An MD was going to come out of this house if Johanna MacLean had anything to say about it. Frank, sharp in school and ambitious at an early age, had obliged her easily. But that night, Lauchlin was weary of his brother’s talk, the medical anecdotes and travel tales from expensive holidays, he felt smothered by him in the closeness of the kitchen, marginal, his boxing career behind him, limited by a faulty heart. In the moon-washed field he came upon Elaine under a canopy of trimmed-up spruce where she’d stooped to pee, moonlight on her pale behind, then on vibrant yellow panties as she tugged them up, he’d seen them faintly through her white jeans earlier. She froze when she heard him. Is that you, Lauchlin? He laughed, Did you think it was a bear? Maybe worse, she said. Well, he said, a bear would study you first probably and take his time. Really? That’s comforting. If I don’t get this fly zipped, there won’t be a next time, it’s caught. He said, Can I help? Yes, my fingers are thumbs, she said, and she raised her arms as he gently worked the zipper free, neither of them talking, hardly breathing, amused in their own ways. You prefer the outdoor plumbing? he said. And you? Aw, he said, it’s an old habit, dear, a good piss under the moon. Incomparable, when there’s a warm breeze like this, many’s done it, men and women alike. She turned away and stared at the stark white moon. She wanted to be kissed, he knew that, and he stepped closer and gently turned her face toward his. They stood there kissing hard, lost in a perfect opportunity of stolen pleasure, no other circumstances could have joined them just this way, in the hushed space of
a country night. This had been, at the time, an unexpected flare of passion, the two of them wordless in that pale blue light. And then his mother called out the back door, Lauchlin, are you there? They caught up their breath in whispers, and he moved away toward the light. Yes, Ma, I’m here! Off to bed, are you? Where’s Elaine? she said. I wouldn’t know, Ma, I’m not her chaperone, as he slid past her through the doorway. In the remaining, hot days of his brother’s visit, Lauchlin and Elaine regarded each other with disguised, ambiguous looks. She was his brother’s wife after all and Lauchlin knew little about her except that she had been a dancer and her limbs were taut and tanned by the summer, and when she walked he watched her naked calves flexing, a dancer’s walk. The following night, Lauchlin, after drinking alone in the kitchen and pondering the near horizon of his own life, had rolled up the stairs toward bed. Under the dim peach glow of the hall lamp, Elaine, in a nightie of a similar shade, was leaning against the landing rail, Frank snoring profoundly in the room behind her, sleeping full throttle, used as he was to snatched slumber. She didn’t say a word to Lauchlin when he stopped at the top stair, and he smiled at seeing her there, surprised, pleased: a woman waiting for you, like that, no gift quite like it. He knew his mother was still awake down the hall, he could see light under her door, that kept them quiet, not a word, but when Elaine stepped toward him he took her litheness into his arms and they left enough heat in each other to kindle another meeting, he was sure of that, relieved that they’d tasted each other again, felt muscle and skin. The next day she had begged off a trip to Louisbourg to tour the fortress, pleaded a rest, and Frank went off with Johanna in the Cadillac he’d rented in Halifax. Lauchlin came up from the store for dinner, his heart already primed, and, after they had chatted foolishly at the kitchen table, eager and postponing at the same time, they went up to his room and undressed with comic swiftness, tangling clothing as they hopped and danced it to the floor. He thought later that her desire for him was mainly curiosity, as so much desire was, she had run her fingers over his body, traced the scars, the dark welt of a ruptured appendix—his first dip toward death, twelve years old, fighting peritonitis, delirious, unaware of the danger he was in—and the barbed wire tear across his heart, then above his eyes, and the bare-knuckle nick over his cheekbone, she pressed it, smiled, but she never made it clear whether he had satisfied that curiosity in any memorable way, fun though they did have on that old and loose-limbed bed, headboard slapping the wall. They threw themselves into each other, a joyful noise, and he hadn’t forgotten one detail of it, one taste, one sound. There had seemed no real harm in it then, that squall of passion, even the secret pleasure of stealing, for a little, the woman his brother loved. But he was not sure anymore what harmed and what didn’t, or in what ways. He had this impulse in himself: whenever there had been an intimate chance with a woman he wanted, to shed her clothing and his, he had seized it without thought or reflection—it was always now, take it, blindly. Had that not been much of the allure?
Lauchlin of the Bad Heart Page 20
