Lauchlin of the Bad Heart

by D. R. MacDonald

  “Well, you’ll be your own man over there then,” Lauchlin said.

  His brother gave him a sardonic look and got up from the table. “To hell with it for now anyway,” he said without explaining what he meant. He stretched his long arms and yawned at the ceiling. “You know what I have the urge to do? Stretch my hairy legs and hike to the Fairy Hole.”

  Lauchlin could see his promise to Tena slipping away, the whole scenario of taking her there: he could not tell Frank about it, could not turn him down again.

  “Way the hell over there? When?” he said.

  “Have to be tomorrow. Momma and the young fella can handle the store. How often do I get here? But maybe it’s a hard haul for you, eh, Lauch? All the way to the cave?”

  “I’ve a hell of a lot less to haul than you do.”

  Frank grinned, ducked into a mock boxing pose, peering between his fists, then backed away toward the stairs. “See you at supper, Brother.”

  Lauchlin glanced at the clock but he didn’t get up. He listened to his brother move about upstairs. He knew that he was pausing at doorways, looking in, he always did before he entered his old room where the bedsprings protested as he sat and took in those things of his that remained—an anatomical poster of the human body, a wooden model of a Nova Scotia shallop he had left for his mother, a framed photograph of himself in a white medical school coat, a good head taller than three like-coated chums, stethoscopes dangling from their necks like Olympic medals. Johanna kept the room up for him, as if he might appear like he used to on holiday break. Lauchlin was sorry that Tena had been mentioned at all, she was being pulled into a field of gossip, like himself. Had he sullied her in some way? He would not go to her house while his brother was here, never say her name. Above him, water drummed in the bathtub.

  LAUCHLIN’S BROTHER CAME TO A STOP above a big-stoned streambed that cut through the surrounding woods and veered ruggedly out of sight toward the sea. A narrow path snaked down the side of the ravine, and the stream was dry enough to take them to the shore, close to the Fairy Hole, a sea cave at the foot of the cliff the ravine cut through. Lauchlin had let Frank set the pace, lead all the way along the woods path, its ups and downs treacherous with old tree roots, swollen like veins. With Lauchlin behind him, he didn’t stop, he pushed on, but halfway in, short of breath, he’d quit talking. He’d wanted Lauchlin to yell, Hold up, take a breather, but he hadn’t and Frank was too stubborn to stop. Now he stood sweating and panting, fumbling for his flask.

  “That was a walk, Lauchlin,” he said over his shoulder. “I forgot how goddamn far it is. Donkey’s years since I hiked Cape Dauphin.”

  “Everything’s been years by now.”

  Lauchlin had halted behind him, his shirt clinging with sweat. He leaned on a walking stick and breathed deeply as if he were just sucking up this good country air, balsam and salt. This was not the hike he had anticipated a couple weeks ago, a day trip with Tena, another step closer. But the path through the woods was rougher than he’d remembered, the streambed too rock-tossed for the uncertain steps of the blind.

  “We rappelled down the cliff face, me and Tommy MacMullin, the last time I was here,” he said, when his breath was calm. “Faster route, but this gulley is the easier way.”

  “Must have been a while ago. Want to try it again?”

  “If you go first. I was maybe twenty-two. I swear, the shape I was in I didn’t need a rope.”

  “You know, you could live a long time, Lauch. It wouldn’t take a hell of a lot.”

  “Do I want to live a long time? I’m not sure I do.”

  Frank squinted up at the grey, diffused sun. “Maybe you’ll shorten it a little this afternoon then. We’re going inside the cave, right?”

  Frank was smiling, daubing sweat from his face. When they were boys, Lauchlin had usually voiced the challenges—Climb the tree, Frank, I’m already up, Jump that brook, Swim out there and back, you can’t do it—but now the cave, a big dark mouth low in a cliffside, was not appealing. If he had checked the Post for tides, and begged off because of that, Frank would have seen it as backing out. Even if it were mid-tide now they’d have to wade or move along slippery rocks, and high tide would flood the entrance, they wouldn’t get in at all. Maybe he’d get lucky, but he couldn’t hear any surf.

  “You bet,” he said. “What’s the point of all this if we don’t go inside?”

  THEY WENT AT THE DRY ROCKS SLOWLY, each into his task, placing a foot carefully on every teetering stone, Turn an ankle here, Frank shouted, I’m not carrying you back! I could never, Lauchlin said, carry you five feet! That was all they said, the ravine was still and hot, humid, the pale rocks warm, the water at the base of them subdued in small pools or trickling seaward tinted brown and clear. In spring it would be a torrent, even a good rain would soon take them by the legs, sweep them away. Now the only noise was their own, their sharp breathing, a scuttle of kicked stones. Frank made for a flat boulder high at the bank, sat himself down with a great sigh. He beckoned Lauchlin over as if this were an approved waystation. This time Lauchlin accepted the flask, the whisky taste so good that he held it on his tongue before he swallowed. Frank grinned at him. Lagavulin, he said. It’s fine, Lauchlin said, but it doesn’t slake the thirst much. Depends on the thirst, his brother said, taking back the flask and swirling it. Lauchlin sat down, the rock warm on his haunches. The sun caught them square, a white glow in a grey sky, nothing moving. The trees above them, clinging to the banks, were still.

  “Too bad Elaine couldn’t come to St. Aubin at least,” Lauchlin said. “And the boys.” She, not his nephews, had drifted into his thoughts in a warm, daydreamy way, and he amused himself wondering what she might be like now, were she here alone, around him, in what corner they might draw close. Slightly plumper, ever since she had children, judging from Christmas photos, but nicely so.

  Frank stared at him for a few moments before answering. “She took them to her mother and dad’s, up in northern Ontario. A lake there and boats and other kids around. Summer fun. You know about summer fun.”

  “She used to like Cape Breton.”

  “She wasn’t a mother then, motherhood tames a woman. Or so I thought.” He laughed grimly. “You wouldn’t know about that, a mossback bachelor like you. Anyway, it’s harder now, finding the time, getting everything coordinated…” Frank took a swig, then watched a hawk circling high. “She’ll come back here, I suppose. Maybe when the boys are done with college.” He pushed the flask into his back pocket. “Or maybe never. Let’s go.”

  They reached the mouth of the stream, where the rocks grew smaller and fanned into the sand and gravel of a beach. Lauchlin felt stronger here at the ocean, a vague pain that had threatened to define itself into something sharper had faded and he had to wonder if it didn’t come more from his head than his chest: you see a steep hill, your heart cringes. At the water’s edge a wave washed gently over Frank’s shoes but he didn’t move. He had a pair of German binoculars to his eyes.

  “Looks like eagles nesting out on the Bird Islands. I don’t remember them there. Just guillemots and puffins and whatnot.”

  “Not in numbers maybe but they were here.” To their right the sea cave was hidden in the high cliff facing the sea, you had to wade a bit to see it or climb along its brow, a thin ridge in the rock could take you close to the mouth, if the hand-line that had been there years ago was still bolted to the cliff flank. Lauchlin was not keen on the sky, darkening to the southeast, dirty clouds rounding unevenly into fullness, and there was a lazy swell rising, breaking up the beach with a hiss like spilled beads, whitening around Frank’s ankles, jumping him back.

  Lauchlin said, “We’ll be getting wet anyway. There’s wind out there that hasn’t reached us yet.” He inhaled the grey expanse of sea, it lifted him, the slashes of white, that raw energy. Tena would not see it but she would feel it, oh how she would. Maybe he could bring her here yet. “Tide ebbing?”

  “Can’t tell yet, but we don’t wa
nt to be up in that damn cave with rollers coming in.”

  “The Fairy Hole spooking you, Frank?”

  “Nothing with a name like that should spook anyone. It’s not what the Indians called it, that’s for sure, unless they were running a gay resort.”

  “I don’t know the Indian name but you can bet it has one. This was Kluscap’s cave, the big Mi’kmaq god. Long before our folks showed up. He could form landscapes, Kluscap, and this is one of them.”

  “Why don’t we take the rope?” Frank said. The hand-line curved underneath the overhang toward the cave. The foothold ledge ran narrow as a dress shoe.

  “It’s fine if you don’t slip. You’ll get a dousing and a few bruises.”

  Frank busied himself with their dad’s old Zeiss, focusing out toward the Bird Islands in the ground-glass viewfinder, then slowly waving the light meter in front of him. He stepped back a few paces clear of the foamline, snapped the shutter. He turned and snapped it again where Lauchlin was resting on a rock. “We might need towels then,” he said. “It’s going to be a wet entrance if we go in the front way.”

  Frank took a nip from his flask, squinted at the dark, restless line of weather. Lauchlin didn’t like the colour of the sea, a grey that seemed to be rising from the deep, not absorbing the sky. Maybe his brother would settle for the hike and forget about the cave.

  “So what do you think, Lauch? Shall we go where the fairies live?”

  Lauchlin moved down to a patch of sand. “They don’t live there, not year round. I don’t think Kluscap would welcome a band of fairies crashing in his summer home. But maybe way in deep you’d find them.”

  “You sound like you believe that.”

  “Dad did. Said they tied horses’ manes into knots, soured the milk. If you didn’t watch the cradle, they’d snatch a healthy baby and put a sickly one in its place. They scared people, yet it was said they could give a fiddler the gift.”

  “They gave you what, Lauch, the gift of the gloves?”

  “I don’t think I qualified. But I could have used the magic.”

  “I only saw you fight the once, home after med school. You could’ve used it that night.”

  “What night was that? Donny Wilmot? No, Red Reid it was. My third pro fight, I was barely off the ground. Four-rounder.”

  “You won it on a cut, or you’d have lost it.”

  “You never saw me in my prime, when I was good and getting better, every fight.”

  “I did see you in your prime. But what did you get from boxing except pain? Tell me, what? Look at your face. You strained your heart in the ring, you pushed it, brother.”

  “Nobody takes my face for a boxer’s, Frank.” Was that true? He couldn’t remember an instance, only Tena’s fingers studying his face, everything a kind of Braille for her, surfaces, textures, configurations, they said things, they spoke. “You saw one fight, Frank. One.”

  “Okay, I never liked boxing anyway. It’s not great for hearts, or heads either.”

  “I’d be stuck with the same heart no matter what I’d done with my life or where I did it.”

  “There’s other factors. It’s not just genes.” Frank put the camera away in his backpack. “Suppose our folks had never left the Hebrides, that we’d grown up in Harris?”

  “I might have never boxed,” Lauchlin said, breathing carefully to isolate a twinge of pain. “I’m thinking you’d have to go to Glasgow or Edinburgh to get into that. And would you be a sawbones?”

  “Maybe. A great medical history in that country. Scots reward education, and you don’t have to be rich to get it. I’d have chosen medicine regardless, I think.”

  What had Lauchlin chosen? Never anything with clear-eyed will except the ring. The rest he’d meandered into, like teaching, like returning to St. Aubin, losing himself in women whenever he could.

  “It’s all moot anyway,” he said.

  “Not everything.” Frank set his backpack on a high rock, inserting his leatherbound notebook in one of its pockets and his flask in another. He scanned the sea. “I don’t want to get trapped in there if we’re hitting the tide wrong. Let’s do it.”

  Without a word his brother was wading toward the narrow archway in the wall of rocks below the cave mouth. You could just about walk dry through it in a low tide, and into the calm pool behind it, but now the sea surged high above his belt and he whooped, in glee and challenge. The wave receded, leaving the rocks glistening, and Lauchlin rose reluctantly from the warm sand and followed his brother before he could goad him. He moaned as a swell rose coldly up his heated skin, he’d popped a nitro just in case, he wanted to emerge from this a breathing man, not bobbing blue-faced in the sea, uglier than a drowning, leaving his brother to haul him up the beach. Risks like this were good, weren’t they, didn’t they put a flush to your skin, keep muscles toned, the mind alert? He would see Tena again, damn it, he would, whatever that would mean, he’d tell her about the cave, its dangers, and that he would gladly take her anywhere else, an even better place, high or low. What had drawn her to a sea cave anyway, strange woman that she was? He groaned, the water felt colder somehow than it should. Was this just age, noticing the chill more now, or did his reluctance lower the temperature a few degrees? He was almost to the wall of rocks when another wave lifted under his arms, pitching him forward, he gasped, gagging water before his feet found bottom again and he pushed off, half-walking half-paddling through the archway, inside to the tidal pool, not calm but swirling just below the cave entrance where Frank waited, dripping, shaking his hair like a dog.

  They were both soaked to the neck after clambering up the wet rocks and up into the cave, climbing higher to a rocky floor where the chamber constricted toward a tunnel-like opening. The cave had looked dark from outside but inside was a high cavern, lighted just enough from the tidal pool and the busy sea beyond it. Lauchlin sat on a ledge rock where he could look down at the ragged opening. Water rushed suddenly in through the archway, disturbing the pool, foam circling, fading to calmness.

  The humid air tasted of chill. Lauchlin’s brother stood with his back to him, tromping his feet slowly, barely lifting them.

  “Not that cold, really,” he said.

  “Cold enough. What should we do, Frank? Plant the clan flag here or something?”

  “I’ll do that on some hill in Harris. A family flag will suffice for here, that banner of brotherly love. What say we go in deeper?”

  “Where it tunnels back into the mountain, there isn’t any end to it. That’s what the old-timers say. If they went into it deep, the air got bad and something blew their lanterns out, some kind of spirit.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Do we know everything? Mi’kmaq spirits have been here centuries, deep as these rocks.”

  “Listen, Brother, low oxygen put those wicks out. No mystery there, sorry. Always Carry a Good Flashlight is my motto. If I could say it in Latin, I would.” Frank turned and moved past him a few feet into the tunnel opening. “It’s not too bad, we’ll have to crouch a bit.”

  “Forget it. I’m claustrophobic. Further along there you have to squeeze through small openings. No thanks.”

  But he could hear his brother huffing further in and he got up and found him squatting where the ceiling rocks lowered. The light was dim and Lauchlin could feel the mass of rock above him. His breathing seemed quicker, shallower. “This is it for me,” he said.

  “Ah, Lauch, I was hoping we’d get into the heart of this mountain. Dispel the myths. We’ll rest here for a little, get acclimated, then we’ll explore the passageway. I mean, we’ve come this far.” Frank eased himself back on his haunches, showing his teeth in a smile. Lauchlin sat back, bracing himself with his hands, ready to bolt. He could hear the water surging louder at the cave mouth, now out of sight. The dank air smelled of brine and stone and sea-slime. Frank bent toward the passageway, peering into it. “I say we press on, Lauch. Until it’s too dark to see, that far at least.”

  “You�
�re on your own.”

  “Momma didn’t buy the fairy business, by the way,” Frank said, his voice low as if he were revealing a confidence. “She has too much sense. She scoffed at Dad, Good Lord, she’d say, Angus, don’t fill the boys’ heads with that, please. But maybe you went for it. You liked the folk stuff.”

  “It’s part of who we are.”

  “You’re a romantic, you think with your nerve-ends, your fingertips. My brother the boxer, the fighter, believer in things that go bump in the night. The lady’s man.”

  “I’m no lady’s man.”

  “We’re all lady’s men, one way or another. The blind girl thinks so, I bet.”