Lauchlin of the Bad Heart

by D. R. MacDonald

  Pushing backward with his free foot, he was able to turn the chair bit by bit so its back was to the stove, then close enough to rock the spokes against the thick metal trim, which he did, hard, again and again until he heard the crack of wood and felt a spoke give and go loose and then another, its sharp edge jabbed into his spine. He rested. Good country chair, but old. There was slack in the rope now and he pulled himself forward in the chair, tugging the broken spokes from their sockets. He cursed Cooper as he worked at a key knot, straining to get a glimpse of it, then digging at it with his fingernails. By the time he broke it and untangled the rope, he was exhausted and he sat a while longer massaging his wrists, his hands. It would be a morning without sun. The early light was grey in the windows. He stood up, steadying himself for a few seconds before he went to the sink and drank from the tap, splashed his face rapidly with that mountain water so cold it left him breathless. He soaked the dishtowel and pressed it against his nose as long as he could stand it, then he set about getting outside. Cooper had locked the doors but a window in the mudroom came out and he scrambled through it slick as a thief.

  He stood shivering in the high grass, running his eyes along the dark, surrounding woods. They yielded little, far less than the stones of Frank’s ruined church. Nothing came to Lauchlin but a wind sweeping across the mountain, an ancient sound in the trees, and it soothed him as he began his descent.

  TWENTY-ONE

  LAUCHLIN sat in his truck in front of the motel, set back on the hillside against spruce woods. On the other side of the highway, the strait lay out deeply below, in metallic hues of early evening. He had found out from Rita that Tena had moved to the Tartan. She wouldn’t listen to anyone, Rita said on the phone, wouldn’t hear of it, off she went by cab and didn’t want anyone with her, wanted to be by herself. Good Lord, Lauchlin, she’s blind, you know.

  He had not seen her since the funeral. He’d been a pallbearer, they’d offered him honorary, no doubt because of his heart though no one said so, but he said no, I want to carry. Even one-sixth of Clement’s casket felt strangely heavy. On the other side of the open grave Tena was composed between the Mathesons and Rita, a black broad-brimmed hat shadowing her face. He watched her, his eyes scoured from lack of sleep ever since he’d come down from the mountain and walked four miles, stopping only to bathe his aching face in a cold brook, to the trailer park where he rousted Eddie MacCormack. From the office he called the Mounties, keeping details selective or vague, he did not want anyone to know he’d been up in that house for several hours tied to a chair, not with Eddie listening a few feet away in his pyjamas, it would be all over the place by sunrise. Bad enough he had to lie that Cooper, after Lauchlin found the house empty but with evidence he had just departed, had sneaked down the hill and made off with his truck. Later he’d lied again to Arsenault about his mashed nose (Eddie was circulating his own colourful version), claiming that, while taking a shortcut through a dark ravine, he’d pitched face-first into a boulder. The Mounties gave him a good combing anyway, he told them, Look, it was a wild hunch, and Harrington said, We’ll follow the hunches, not you, that was reckless. He told Malcolm only what he wanted to, and Johanna even less. But he had been right about Cooper’s chances: the man had to get off the Trans-Canada in daylight, he hadn’t a prayer of making it to the causeway, abandoning Lauchlin’s pickup on Hunters Mountain Road, and a local spotted him a few hours later just walking along a dirt back road, no rifle, too tired to care, smoking the last of his tobacco, putting his hands in the air as soon as he saw the Mounties’ cruiser come round a bend. Lauchlin wanted to believe that he had helped a little, that without his truck to flee in Cooper might have hidden out longer on the mountain, might have taken some unpredictable turn, caused trouble, harm, but Lauchlin never mentioned this to anyone, and even were it true, it would not matter nearly enough. Clement was under the sod.

  The man could have shot him right there in the kitchen. Why not? There he was, bound and waiting. There were moments when he wished Cooper had.

  Champion. No other word like it.

  Room twenty-two. He kept imagining that he could still help Tena in some way, but his feelings sheered wildly between confusion and hope. The pale blue drapes were closed, a faint light behind them. But he didn’t move. He had the murder in his mind now, certain of its clarity and truth, and it would call up his attention again and again: he can taste the misty air of that foggy morning, hear Clement grunt as he breaks the tight wheel nuts one by one, spins them impatiently off, wrestles the tire away from the studs, mounts the spare, focused only on this irksome task, spitting a curse as he fumbles in the wet grass for a lost nut. He doesn’t, as he gives the wrench a final angry tug, hear steps behind him, first he hears Cooper’s cold voice some yards away, the low, mean mutter of it as the man, having come out of the dark trees, advances toward him, the rifle shouldered and aimed. Clement looks up but stays where he is, on one knee beside the rear wheel, sweating now, his flush of anger dissolving into fear because he so helplessly has fallen into this trap, and because Cooper’s voice has a strange pitch to it that he has never heard before. The man is trembling, Clement can see how tightly wound he is, and wonders how did he get here, when did he come into this foolish morning? Don’t dare move, Cooper says, and Clement says, calm and suddenly tired, as if he has not slept at all, Where would I move to? Cooper is above him, the muzzle fiercely close, It’s a twenty-two, Clement thinks, staring into the small black bore, refusing to look into this man’s face. In the periphery of his sight he can detect the blue plastic of a fish box in the grass and he yearns desperately for a simple thing—to lift it up, to put it inside the truck, close the door, begin again a day of work, be allowed the routine he sometimes hated but which now would give him joy. He cannot listen to what Cooper is saying, he knows this is all beyond words now, beyond anything imaginable. He says her name, he says Tena, as if she has this moment become everything—love, the whole weight of life, its mystery—and her name might save him, save them both, it is a call, prayer, shield, solace, thrill. His eyes flinch shut at the bullet’s blow, his head recoils, one eye springs open wide and clear, freezing a veering crow in the grey sky…

  A van with New York plates crept past, pulled into the parking slot two down from Tena’s. Lauchlin watched a family emerge from it one by one, stretching, talking to each other in weary tones. The father and mother rooted around inside gathering things while the two children wandered to the edge of the driveway, the boy scratching for pebbles to toss. His older sister, on the verge of womanhood, combed out her long brown hair with her fingers. She stood looking toward the water and the mountain, arms crossed beneath her small breasts. She spoke sharply to her brother as a stone arced over her head but she didn’t turn around. She seemed intent on this view, perhaps after a long day on the road, and the mountain stretched east and west before her, solid black, giving up no secrets this evening, the sky like windswept sands, blues, roses, windrows of smoky greys and whites. Lauchlin wondered if she wanted to know about that mountain, not just its benign surface, seemingly without life, but what lay beneath those trees, what was beginning to move there at night, what evil intent had slipped through its darkness, clumsily, lethally. No, not yet. She didn’t need to know that. Let her eyes sweep over that terrain and sky, the long, plum-coloured clouds sun-stained and washing slowly into dusk. Still, he would like to talk to her, ask her where they were going, what she might like to know about this out-of-the-way place she was but passing through, anything that might delay knocking on Tena’s door.

  He took a furtive swallow of whisky and tucked the bottle back under the seat. Something had made him hesitate when that bicycle came out of the fog, there was a blank space between seeing the cyclist appear and disappear: it had something to do with thinking, in some inaccessible corner of his mind, that Tena might need him if Clement were gone, it was as if his mind, his heart, jumped from that place—that night and the cyclist and not even the dimmest awarene
ss of who he might be—to another one, to her alone and needing him, needing Lauchlin MacLean.

  The evening had turned cool in an east wind and he’d pulled on his black Hebridean sweater before he left the house. Frank had sent it to him after he got home, Clothe yourself in a bit of Harris, he said.

  “Tena?” He knocked gently. “It’s me, Lauchlin.”

  “I know,” she said, unlocking the door. “The owner phoned me.”

  A motel room always made him think of women, the smell of it, its furnishings, and he was ashamed to have that feeling wash through him now as Tena opened the door and beckoned him in. He had never cared if the room were seedy or spartan like the old cabins or decorated like a middle-class bedroom, he’d always felt a little hard as soon as he stepped inside. Only the bed had mattered ultimately, the atmosphere of that.

  “I had no privacy at Rita’s place,” Tena said, sitting carefully on the bed. She had made no move to embrace him and he stood inside the door as if he’d been summoned. “They were good to me, God knows, but I didn’t even want to talk on the phone. People fussing over me.”

  “But why here, Tena?”

  “The owner knows who I am, knows you.”

  “Chester Penney. It’ll be all over the island by morning.” “Clement did work for him, sold him fish for his little restaurant. Do you have a cold?”

  He touched the piece of tape over the bridge of his nose, still tender as hell. “A little allergy…something in the air.”

  “Sit down, Lauchlin. You needn’t stand.”

  He sat in the easy chair, resting his arms on mint green doilies. Tena’s suitcase lay open on the bed like a huge book of riffled pages. “I guess I’m surprised you’re here,” he said. “So close to it all.”

  “I’ve been closer. Some friends were with me this afternoon while I grabbed things from the house. I took my time, I wouldn’t let it get to me. How did you say the Mi’kmaq put it? He had Power?”

  “Not anymore. He’s not a shape-shifter now, Tena.”

  “Oh, he’ll always be there, behind my eyes. I heard you found where he was hiding, over the way.”

  “But I didn’t get him. That’s what I was after.”

  “He’s a dangerous man, Lauchlin.”

  “Something is twisted into him, deep.” He regretted that he hadn’t strung Cooper along, picked at him more, but he might have pushed him just that much too far, like Clement did. “Maybe someone will tease it out of him. It won’t be us.”

  Though the motel was run by a man, the room seemed oddly prissy, kitschy figurines on little wall shelves, antique china plates mounted on the wall, sweet scenes of Scottish yesteryear framed on the flowered paper, Highland lasses and chieftains swathed in plaids, bucolic etchings of maidens and shaggy cattle, a great stag posed high in a glen, rigid with myth. The mugs, the figurines, the dinner plates would surely get lifted sooner or later anyway one by one, if not for larceny then to upset the fussy symmetry, the stifling, sentimental neatness of a spinster aunt. The knick-knacks woollied his mind, and he could feel at his back the large blank eye of the television, so out of place. A cheery white light glowed from the bathroom. Had Tena turned it on or had Chester while helping her in with her bag? They could have been anywhere in North America, nothing about the room put them specifically here, in St. Aubin. Tena seemed to be slipping away already, but he could not touch her, hold her, he had no right.

  “Johanna would take you in, Tena, she’d want you there. You don’t need to be alone like this.”

  “I wanted to be alone. I’m saying goodbye to St. Aubin, Lauchlin. One night here, not far from our road. I’ll face whatever I feel, lying on this bed. I have to buck up, I can’t take all this anger and confusion with me. There’s a bus to Halifax in the morning. It stops out front.”

  “That’s maybe six hours, if you’re lucky.”

  “I don’t want to fly. Slow time will get me there better, I think. I like to feel the bus stop, take people on, start off again. I listen to them talking. They don’t know anything about me.”

  Lauchlin had nothing to offer her, no appeal, no argument that could make her stay in St. Aubin.

  “I always liked talking to you,” he said. “Reading to you.”

  “Is there anything here to read? You could do that now.”

  “Doesn’t look like a room that would have much to read in it, Tena. Bad poems, if any.”

  “I left my poetry book in the kitchen drawer. It’s awful to forget things like that. But…that man dragged him through the grass, Lauchlin.”

  “Yes. He did.”

  He yanked open the drawer, any random Bible passage might do, they could listen to its testaments in this dizzying room, he might find a few verses that could help him. In a Maine motel on his way to Boston years ago, the desk had held a Gideon Bible, They all do, Frank told him, in the States. But here there was only stationery, a ballpoint pen logoed with “The Tartan Motel” and faux plaid colouring.

  He pulled his chair closer to her, he wanted to speak softly. She wore a light wool skirt, soft brown, pleated, but the side zipper was twisted out of line. He wanted to tug it straight, casually, with a joke, like an uncle or someone she loved. “Will you be on your way somewhere else, Tena, after Halifax?”

  “I’m going to the Valley, Lauchlin. I’m going home. I have my sister…”

  “But you’ll come back…?”

  “For the trial, then I’ll close out the house. And who would want to buy it anyway?”

  “This has been your home too,” he said stupidly, woodenly, a line that could be painted on a plaque on the wall, Home Sweet Home, he was filling space, trying to keep the hurt out of his voice, he couldn’t handle a long pause now, everything flooding into it. My God, Clement might still be alive and she would be down the road and he could come to see her, she would never be leaving…

  “I’d like to think you could come back and live here, Tena. I’m going to miss you like hell, I don’t mind telling you.”

  “I don’t know what’s…I don’t know what my mind will be like later on. I will miss you too, I will.” She reached for his hand and he took hers and held it. With her other hand she brushed her fingers along his knuckles.

  “Tena, listen…”

  She pressed his hand to her cheek. “We had something nice, Lauchlin. I don’t even know what to call it, it doesn’t matter. Everything feels flung about, blown up, falling everywhere, pieces and bits. His love isn’t here anymore, that’s what I’ve lost. Clement had his flaws, he did, like me. And you were there for me in a way…a way he wasn’t.” She released his hand and looked past him. “Love is the only thing you can carry into death. Everything else falls away from it, all the stuff of your life, junk really, things, just dust. Love goes with you, if you have it, if it’s flowed through your life and warmed you it will follow you. I believe that. And when it’s not there, suddenly gone, you…”

  “Yes,” Lauchlin said, “I know what you mean,” though he had only an inkling of such loss, he might not ever know. Morag he feared losing, yes, he’d known that for a long time and more than ever now, but she was apart from all this that was gathered in this room. Wasn’t she? And thinking of his mother gone was like imagining a world without weather. But Tena was talking about the love of lovers. He hadn’t expected that. When she had revealed that day of the killing that she and Clement had made love that morning, he was pleased she would tell him such an intimate thing, that she trusted him to know it and understand it. But when she implied that there had been urgency in their embrace—or maybe reviving a passion they had lost—Lauchlin had felt a stab of jealousy, of envy, that not even the fact of Clement’s death could erase.

  He let his head fall back on the chair back. The ceiling fixture held dead flies, diffused specks of black in pink glass. He sat up, leaned toward her. “I have to tell you something, Tena. I saw him that night.”

  “What? Who did you see?”

  “Cooper. That night.”
r />   “I don’t know what you mean,” Tena said. She frowned.

  “I don’t mean I saw him, I saw a fella come…biking by.” Lauchlin squeezed his sore hand, massaged it. “How could I have guessed it was Cooper himself? Nobody ever saw him on a bicycle, Tena. Did they? Anywhere. I kept thinking, a kid, that’s a big kid. But he went on by me and…I don’t know. Nothing about him said who he was.”

  “You saw him,” Tena said in a whisper. “The night before?”

  “I didn’t know who it was, Tena. I’m trying to tell you, he came out of the dark, the fog, a small helmet crushed on his head. Under that greenish streetlight, try and see a face in that. For Christ’s sake, a man on a bicycle, three in the morning. Right there, on our road. It was…crazy. It seemed queer but harmless, at the time.”

  “Harmless. But now you’re so sure…” Tena’s voice trailed away.

  “Now we’re all sure, Tena, he confessed. It’s easy to be sure now. And it tears me apart.”

  “But if you’d spoken up, if…”

  “I didn’t even have a suspicion, Tena. Nothing dawned on me. Until Clement was dead. The poor man was already lying in the woods there. What is some cyclist in the middle of the night guilty of? Nothing made sense.” His words seemed dead as well, without conviction or solace, for either of them, he couldn’t make them anything more than what they were, their matter-of-factness drained him—this explaining was only for him anyway, it was no use to her, just another rip at her heart. If he could only have gotten past this point, this first step where she might understand his helplessness that night, accept that he’d had nothing to go on, that no real blame rested in him, assure him that no dim, inarticulate motive of his own had wormed into his unconscious, then he might reach her, he might keep intact what they had, nourish it again with his sympathy and attention and help. But she was shrinking from him almost physically as she slumped, her hands working in her lap. He hadn’t the power, the words that could remove this obstacle between them, it was solidifying before his eyes. And what was his case anyway? How foolish to think she could understand what he could not, the recesses of his own heart. “I could have saved him, Tena? Is that what you mean?” he said, afraid.