Lauchlin of the Bad Heart

by D. R. MacDonald

  “No, it wasn’t just that, was it.”

  “I needed a place of my own to weep, that’s all. I think I’m past that, for the time being.” She opened and shut the clasp of her handbag. “The fish van was jammed up in the woods where that creature left it, did you know?”

  “He’s somewhere on the Island. Working his way west toward the causeway, some think. How, I don’t know.”

  “Easy to hide in Cape Breton, God knows, but not easy to live where you’re hiding. He’ll never last, he isn’t clever, creeping around, keeping himself alive like an animal. People ask me, Aren’t you afraid, Tena, him loose somewhere? No, I’m not. I don’t care. He had his chance. What can he do to me now?” She shook her head as if to clear it. “It was him that came back, you know,” she whispered, her eyes wide. “Him, in the fish van. Me in bed, listening.”

  Lauchlin felt a choking hatred for the man. He had not been there when she needed him last night, and Cooper, in his awfulness, had seized her imagination. “We’ll get him, it won’t be long.” Threadbare phrases, barely true in any case so far as he knew, his voice no different from anyone else’s trying to lift her spirits, a hopeless spectator, ignorant and powerless, as he had been that night on the road. Why couldn’t he say, I’ll find that man, I know the country? “They’re closing in on him.”

  “Are they?”

  “Like you said, he’s not clever. I’ve got some notions of my own where he could be.”

  “You’re not looking on your own, are you?”

  “I might, if they don’t come up with him soon. Clement’s hard on my mind, you know.”

  She touched his hand. “I know that…your knuckles feel rough.”

  “I pounded the bag. No gloves.”

  “I thought a boxer’s hands would be toughened, wouldn’t they?”

  “It’s labour that toughens hands, hard work. Like Clement did, in the woods and that.”

  “Oh, God, if he’d only stayed away from the woods…”

  Across the street Rita was doing a hunched little dance as if the air were freezing.

  “Looks like Rita’s getting antsy,” he said.

  “I should be going.”

  “I’d like to see you if I could.”

  “I’m still at Rita’s.”

  “They behaving themselves, the girls?”

  “They’re trying. Sometimes I just don’t want to talk, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “You’re in the wrong house, girl.”

  “Later I might take a motel room, just to get away for a little. After the funeral. After they find him.”

  “The police can’t search everywhere. Probably a local will turn him up.”

  He studied her, her weary eyes, the soft line of her lips, pale, parted to speak. He wanted to brush from her face the strands of hair she had not captured when she tied it back.

  “People are on the lookout, aren’t they?” she said.

  “All of us.” Could he have stopped him, that night, that morning? “I’d like to come see you, Tena, take you for a drive, give you a break from your company.”

  “I don’t quite know what’s happened to me yet. I feel like a bird, tiring, tiring, afraid to land anywhere.” She felt for the door handle. “I didn’t hear that thrush in the woods at all, just before Clement was killed. Every evening he sang gorgeously, then he stopped.”

  TWENTY

  HE wasn’t sure anymore just where that long, old driveway opened out at the road. The roadside brush, a confusion of shadows, was shifting in his headlights as he strained over the wheel. It was a hunch, but it felt right to him, logical, and he’d kept it for himself.

  Next time, Cooper had said. This was the time.

  Last night he’d been looking out the parlour window at the water of the strait, a stilled black mirroring the mountain, black as a seam of coal. Johanna, about to ascend the stairs, had paused at the first step, unwilling to leave off a conversation she’d been having mostly with herself. But what would that Cooper do after a crime like that? she said. Where would he get to? I don’t think that creature had any plan, plan doesn’t apply to what he did, he did it so badly. He had to be half foolish to begin with, coming across the mountain on a bicycle, can you imagine that? I can imagine just about anything, Ma, Lauchlin said, studying a distant spot up high on the slope that he knew lay under the effacing sweep of woods, east of the Slios: somewhere just about there, a house, an old rundown house. Tommy MacKinnon’s. Years ago you could see it, the fields were still clear enough around it. But just now, hadn’t he seen the faintest of light up there, no more than a firefly glimmer, gone? Something said yes, a certainty that elated him, a rare flash of joy. But could he be certain now of anything he saw at night? It didn’t take a TV detective to suspect Cooper, his mother was saying, Clement taking him to court over money, and him saying terrible things about Clement, more than one of us heard him, it got him a hard name. She took two steps up the stairs. Strange what drives you mad, she said. It is, yes, Lauchlin said, still at the window. No accounting for it.

  He’d wanted to tell her right then, I saw a strange sight on the road the other night, Ma, a man coming along in the dark on a bicycle. She would say, What was strange about him? It was late, I know, but what else? Are you talking about Cooper, is that who you mean? But there were things you didn’t tell your mother even if you’d lived with her much of your life and it would be a great help to you to release that truth stuck in your throat. It seemed now that somehow he had known that very night, after he left the road and lay in bed, that Clement would never bring her fish again, he had felt it but didn’t speak it even to himself, it had never come into words, so how could he have known, really, how could he have passed it on? You could not even call it a suspicion, it had been too deep inside him, some ill-formed, unrecognized deduction. No one could have picked out the old Slios road but it was there in Lauchlin’s mind, under the trees, every feature of it he was recalling now. Just along there maybe, just where the Slios begins and the road takes on its upward grade westward? The devil to find in the dark, hard enough in the daytime. The Americans who bought that property from the MacKinnon heirs had liked it as it was at first, difficult to get to, roughing it in the old farmhouse, no hot water, lights, or easy heat, privacy had been their main desire, seclusion, the feel of old country life as they’d imagined it, primitive, more natural, unsullied by urban dirt and frenzy and next-door neighbours. But something scared them up there after a while and they had a power line run up. Maybe the glow of oil lamps didn’t cut it on the darkest nights, when that stillness pressed on your soul, when the whole weight of the mountain seemed to settle upon you. They needed, when they went back to the States to good jobs and their regular lives, someone to keep an eye on the place, check on it, isolated as it was, easy for break-ins. And they’d hired the man who had cleared trees for them, Ged Cooper. And a few nights ago Ged Cooper had come along that very road on a bicycle, heading for the highway and then the bridge. There was the odd summer house down near the water, its back toward the road up high behind it. But who would have heard the faint slacketing sound of a bike chain, the panting of a man, or seen a dim bike light bobbing in the dark like a forerunner, if he had any light at all?

  When Lauchlin reached the little cemetery where his Granny and Grandad lay beyond the black iron cattle-gate, in the grassless clay, weeds blooming in the bald soil, he’d gone too far. He turned the truck around, backing twice on the narrow road. Running slowly in the direction he had come, headlights casting new shapes and angles, he spotted the driveway on the high side, fine gravel fanning out into the road from recent rains. He’d missed it in part because the mailbox had been stored away, post and all, the Americans hadn’t been back for two summers. He started up the rugged driveway a short distance, then stopped and killed the lights. Not wise, announcing his approach, he’d have to walk it. He sat gathering himself, taking the woods into him. He was no Mi’kmaq but he tried to think like them, and the tryi
ng felt good regardless, even if their myths were, to him, second-hand. Trees were a deep part of their universe, that he knew, roots tendrilling into the Underworld, branches reaching into the sky. The truck ticked, the silence settled in. He wished for a breeze, any noise in the leaves to cover him. Too bad Hank wasn’t here to give him a rubdown, loosen him up, a whiff of salts in his nostrils would clear his head. He groped in the dash box for a flashlight but found none. The darkness would do.

  Lauchlin remembered the way the old driveway switchbacked two or was it three times to cut the incline of the hill. They’d had a horse, the MacKinnons, to climb it, and later a second-hand truck, they’d made the best of their backland farm, no one else had tried to farm on this high side of the road, not on this stretch of the mountain. You’d have to be half-goat to scratch a living up there, Lauchlin’s father said, but the MacKinnons scrabbled it out for a few tough harvests, wearing out their horse and themselves. His dad had gone to see them sometimes and found them sitting on their steps, so worn out they could hardly talk. Jesus, what a climb, he had to take it slow, rest often, he couldn’t be a wheezing wreck when he got there. A sound, clear, something sliding through the brush carefully, pausing, proceeding. He went rigid: not near…moving off, but not fleeing—it hadn’t picked up his scent or the hiss of his breathing. Animal? Where are you, Shapeshifter? Who has Power tonight, me or you? You, I guess, as yet, since I don’t know just where the hell you are. He had to be a creature of the woods himself now, whatever he met, come at it like an animal with Power. When his eyes attuned to the dark, he stopped where the roadway turned west and knelt, sighting along the ground, but he couldn’t tell if anyone had been through here in a vehicle, the weeds and scrub were barely visible, just their ragged shapes. He took deep breaths, tried to ignore the tripping machinery in his chest, goddamn it, it would get him there, he would make it get him there. He had Power, he’d fought in the ring, he had clashed with better men than this, hurt them and been hurt by them, and only his heart, over which he’d had no control, had brought him down.

  But by the second switchback it was a longer road than he’d remembered, the one time he’d come up here with his dad in their old pickup, crossing on the ferry, groceries under canvas in the truck bed because Maggie MacKinnon was ill and Tommy not much better, they couldn’t get out, their old truck in disrepair, and Angus MacLean was an old friend of Tom’s anyway. The weather had been dry and the driveway rocky but negotiable. Lauchlin had been no more than thirteen but he knew a niece was staying with them, he’d seen her at the store once, a bit older than him and highly attractive, so he thought, her sullen lips and dark, unyielding eyes, slightly contemptuous of him which only made her more appealing, and so he came along with his father thinking there was a chance to meet her in a favourable setting, but she had gone home a week since to Point Edward, and his disappointment was so acute he could still feel it years later, this lost chance, it was the first feeling of that kind he’d had, when a woman took hold of his mind and his nerves, when what he had imagined about her mattered more than the girl herself, and her absence sent him stomping into the mountain woods, snatching at branches until he heard the truck horn shouting for him. What became of that girl? What boy undressed her first, saw her mysteries revealed? How was it he could bring her back now, in this ominous dark, the old feeling and desire intact?

  Lauchlin slipped a pill under his tongue. He leaned against the cool bark of a tree as his blood vessels dilated and surged. His hands shook, but he wasn’t in bad shape, really, considering that his heart was working hard at more than just climbing. How near to the house? Only the front pasture had resembled level ground and even it had a grade that could test your legs. Surely the Americans had cleared the old space around the house, or had Cooper do it for them. This wooded darkness gave everything a denseness, a weight, as if it were filled up with darkness, some reality greater than that of day. The trees suggested a mysteriousness they shared with every darkened thing. The Mi’kmaq had known this, felt this, and the Highlanders found it out in their own ways, they would have given this aura the Gaelic, and their own gods and devils.

  The way seemed to straighten out, a parting in the dark bank of trees, he knew it was aiming up toward the house. Not far now. There had been cows in the field that summer day, one of them off in the shade of trees staring at the truck, but he could barely conjure the sun and the warm smells of that farm, everything now was cooled and closed in. To quiet his breathing, he stepped to the side and squatted underneath old maple trees. Branches had come down around them and he felt among them until he gripped a good one broken to the length of a club.

  Was he up there? Oh God, let him be up there, let me have him. What would he do, what might he be dealing with? A man who hid himself and killed with a rifle, at close range. A man who rode a bicycle over the Slios road in the middle of a foggy night. Even the last, easy stretch had taxed him, hadn’t Lauchlin heard his tortured breath? There was nothing smooth about him, not the weekend cyclists’ fluid motion on that long, slow grade before he reached the store. But after that he’d have had clear sailing, almost coasting, a little downhill toward Clement and Tena’s driveway, fair going. He probably stood on the shoulder of the road for a bit, concealed in the shadows of the silver poplars, just looking up the driveway too at the house, rather like Lauchlin was now, getting his wind, feeling his sweat, his drubbing, rotten heart. He’d have been damned spent by then, ragged out, you would think. Was he proud that he’d made it there to the finish line? It was a feat, yes, Goddamn it it was, you had to admit it, stamina, the kind you get once in your life maybe, determination and adrenalin combining to push you through, Lauchlin had called upon it more than once in the ring…But of course Cooper wasn’t finished yet that night, only the first long part was over. The house had lain dark there before him, man and wife asleep. That kind of peace had no effect on him, maybe it only fed his hate. He must have shouldered the bike and carried it into the woods in back, he wouldn’t have risked that noisy sprocket, not after pumping over the stony road of this wicked mountain. He crouched by the fish van’s tire and pressed air out of the valve one gasp at a time so as not to wake the dreaming man and dreaming woman. Then he sat himself down in the trees, waiting for morning, for his enemy to appear.

  Behind him, the moon had worked itself higher, a patch of white latticed in treetops. A woman to the Mi’kmaq, the moon helped the sun make their world. When she was new, you could pray that she change you in some good way, but he couldn’t gauge the fullness yet. With each step, the house emerged, a dull shape against the mountain blackness rising away behind it. The heart of the Mi’kmaq woods was where reality became fluid, where anything could happen, any strangeness. The unconscious, the unknown, Chaos. The place where the map ends. There was enough clearing left to draw down a little of the starlit sky. The branch gripped at his side, Lauchlin took a few deep breaths before proceeding. He tripped in a deep rut, someone’s spinning wheels had dug it out of the last rain’s mud, and he rested on one knee listening, grass damp in his fingers. God, yes, there was a light in the back, dim. Kitchen. The Mounties had Cooper’s truck, so how did he get here? He could be anywhere, a man of malevolent patience, who hid, waited. Lauchlin shifted the club to his left hand and fisted his right, he’d never made a fist so clenched as this. He moved slowly toward the kitchen window, but his feet seemed noisy in the high weeds and he ducked against the house, listening. A voice, but faint. Another. He pressed his back against the shingles, slid carefully toward the windowpane. A single table lamp next to the sink. No one within its light. He strained to make out the voices, and soon he picked up the vapid, unmistakable cadences of a DJ. Radio talk, so harmless it would seem sinister were Cooper actually listening. Pop music replaced voice, the kitchen became a bit of light and murmuring, a window in the darkness. If he stood still here long enough, if that damn radio were unplugged, there might be other voices to hear, to tell him something. Here he was, armed with the
barest of weapons. Ah, that he could crush him, hear him fall. Tense as he was his heart seemed oddly steady, but even if it quit on him, seized up and the blood froze, he would go on, he would finish this.

  He tapped one foot out in front of him, located a single wooden step below the back door, and the door opened easily when he prodded it. Cooper could just as well be behind him as ahead of course, could be this very moment in the darkness of the yard aiming a rifle at his head, but he would likely speak first, as he must have spoken to Clement so he could freeze him as he advanced and savour the act, the gun shouldered and sighted, muttering the last words Clement would hear until the dark hole of the muzzle was at his eye. But Lauchlin did not fear a bullet here, so much had come down to this, it had to be the two of them, face to face. He slipped through the little mudroom and paused to take in the kitchen. A dish of stubbed-out butts on the wooden table. But how old? No smoke in the air. A mug on the drainboard. The radio music ended and a mall commercial took its place. Lauchlin waited until another song was cued, then moved past the lamp through the kitchen into the dark parlour, he didn’t want to dally in the only light, didn’t want to be shot through a window, not that shattering surprise. The wall was cool against his back. He listened intensely. This was the way Tena had listened, wasn’t it, that night, so acutely? Everything was night for her now. And wasn’t he after all listening for the same thing, the same man who came to her dark yard and stopped there, not once but twice? The air smelled of damp and mildew, the house needed an airing, windows flung wide. But not if you’re hiding. Again he listened, so intently he didn’t breathe. Old house sounds. A crackle of wood contracting in the night air. The tap of a moth against a screenless window. When his eyes had adjusted to the room and he could make out the forms of furniture, a chair and floor lamp silhouetted in the picture window the Americans had put in, he ascended the stairs, one hand sliding along the smooth worn wood of the banister, the thick stick raised in the other. He knew the old stairway would groan under him, and it did, every step he took made a joke of his stealth, but he didn’t care, he was as open as if he’d come off his stool at the bell, as stripped, as eager and elemental, just his physical self, no defense but boldness, madness. At the landing he stopped, waited. His breath seethed through his teeth, he held a fist high and close to his face, the club cocked behind him. The moon lit a room at the far end of the hallway, but the nearest door was shut. If Cooper were inside there, in whatever guise, and fired first, Lauchlin could spot the flash, maybe get a chance to jump him. He turned the knob agonizingly slow but its old latch squeaked: he shoved the door hard inward and yanked himself out of sight, the door whacked something solid inside but no other noise followed it, no shot, no shout. He listened: nothing. There was enough moonlight in the room to make out shapes as he peered around the edge of the doorway: nothing suggested a man, but even so…of course Cooper would shoot him, this was no game anymore, he had a murder on his head. Lauchlin pulled back into the hall.