Lauchlin of the Bad Heart

by D. R. MacDonald

  “We’re into this little milling business on the side and we got to work our way out of it. That’s what I tell him every day. I put up the seed money. I peddled a fucking lot of fish to put it away, a little here and there, and he’s never come through for what he owes me. There he is in a new Ford pickup. Don’t mention it, though, none of my goddamn business. He still expects a cut of what we make but I’m holding it back now. I’ve carried us. We did a stand of pine up at Gordon Adam’s but it’s more in the red than the black, what with the hours put in, supplies, repairs. Where does he get off firing axes at me?”

  “Maybe he thinks he’s an Indian. Does he have Power?”

  “Power?”

  “A kind of supernatural strength, even magical, mystical.”

  “Only with a weapon in his hand. No magic in that boy.”

  “Take him to court then.”

  “For what?”

  “Sue him for what he owes you and break it off. You can prove what he owes?” Lauchlin glanced at the house. Tena was gone from the window.

  “You’re damn right, yes I can. I’ll look into that, yes. I’ve had enough. He was the idea man, but most of the money and sweat is mine. What a deal. He’s from out west too, you know, not far from Moose Jaw, thereabouts. That’s how we struck it up like, that connection. Not much to go on, is it?” Clement swiped sawdust off his shirt. He squinted at the sky. “I’m tired of this, Lauchie. I’d like to take off and get drunk, right now, like I used to. But I can’t. I can’t come home that way anymore. So, back to work.” Clement ducked away into the dark barn and Lauchlin heard him tossing metal aside, swearing under his breath.

  Climbing into his pickup, Lauchlin scanned reflexively the contours of the mountain, the clouds above it, thin and stilled in the heat. The strait narrowed down behind their land, the mountain face rose up steeper, looming in its density. There was no reason to wonder about the condition of the Slios road, but it did pass quickly through his mind, how long since he’d been up there. He’d driven up there with his father, just a boy helping him deliver groceries and supplies in the old pickup, his dad would let him drive the easy stretches. They’d take the ferry across to Little Harbour at the western end of the mountain road and his dad would put him at the wheel part of the way before the road got steep, past some good land where a family of Rosses had four farms. The road wasn’t so bad in those days, Jimmy MacLennan cut timber up there then and persuaded the government to keep it up, but when he left and came back to St. Aubin, it deteriorated. Its highest point was closed to cars now, the road too rough with little spring-cut gullies, and from rain carrying away the clay, exposing slippery stone, you could slide into the ditch, or worse where it was a long way down. It did not yet matter to him who might travel that road, only a detour now, or under what circumstances, one end to the other, from the Trans-Canada near Glen Tosh to Little Harbour where it started, and on east over the dangerous section along the Slios, levelling down gently, past where his grandparents’ farm had been, rejoining the Trans-Canada again near the bridge to St. Aubin. For Lauchlin that afternoon, the mountain was only landscape, forested and mute, the sounds of the farms, of people, that had drifted over the water on calm days when he was young, were gone. What other memories Lauchlin had of that road, he did not call up on this summer day as he backed his truck around and slowly headed down the driveway, because he saw Tena at the back door looking his way and he quickly raised his hand to her without thinking, then grinned apologetically, as if she could see that too. But he tapped the horn once and was sure he caught her wave just before she disappeared from his mirror.

  HIS MIND HAD DRIFTED back to that poem, to the sound of it in the kitchen, Tena attentive and still, when he recognized Cooper’s truck stopped at a slant by the gas pumps. He was talking to Shane, Shane shaking his head no. Lauchlin couldn’t hear anything until he shut off the engine and jumped out. Cooper turned that stare on him as he had up in the backland.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Ask him,” Shane said.

  “I come back to get the gas you owe me,” Cooper said evenly, though his eyes were burning. “Your kid here is too saucy for his own good.”

  Lauchlin stepped up to him. The man was clearly worked up, had been nursing this grievance for the past two days, and he was the sort who’d never let it go, inflamed as he was now against Clement.

  “Like I said, we pumped you what you asked for.”

  “I almost didn’t make the top of the mountain she was bucking so bad. Did I ask for that? Did I?”

  Lauchlin knew he should end this before it turned worse, the gas was due him, yes, but he couldn’t bring himself to admit blame, not yet, not to this man. “You seem to have a hell of a time with that mountain.”

  “It’s not the goddamn mountain. It’s you people, jerking a man around like you do.”

  There was a gleam of blank hatred in his eyes and Lauchlin flinched from it, it seemed so exaggerated, misplaced. Later Lauchlin could not remember if he himself had mistakenly started it, he might have put his hand on Cooper’s chest, just lightly as he was about to speak, to tell him, Okay, I’ll replace the bad gas you think I sold you, he wasn’t sure anymore because it happened so fast, and probably he would never have stuck himself so close to Cooper’s face anyway if he hadn’t just come from Clement’s, with a fresh vision of an errant axe wheeling through the air, but he saw the man’s lips tighten and he knew instinctively that a fist was coming and he slipped his head aside just enough, Cooper’s knuckles ripped across his ear as he caught Cooper with a short blow to the ribs that made him grunt. But that was all the boxing. Cooper seized him around the neck, tried to throw him down and they wrestled in a clumsy circle, locked together, their shoes tearing up the gravel, and Lauchlin began to panic in Cooper’s smothering embrace, so attuned was he to his stuttering heart, it drained his concentration, his breath was coming short and he opened his mouth wide, Your nose your nose! Lou Nemis used to yell at him in sparring, Don’t breathe through your mouth! Cooper sensed that slight slackening and slammed him back against the door of his truck, and where once Lauchlin would have sprung back and caught him cleanly with a right hand without even thinking, easily he could have cut him down, but now he thought, I don’t want to give out in front of this man, I don’t want to collapse to my knees like I did that afternoon, clutching my chest like a ham actor, he isn’t worth that humiliation, that risk. Lauchlin stood with his back against the warm metal of the truck, panting, a fist cocked, and Cooper seemed willing to settle for that. He gave Lauchlin a sharp snort of contempt, a sound Lauchlin had heard before when he was young, in the schoolyard, at a dance, a party, in the gym—a man suddenly unsure if he can beat you, and just as glad he doesn’t have to find out, not at the moment.

  Lauchlin straightened up slowly. “Shane, how much gas did you pump for him?”

  “Twenty dollars.”

  Lauchlin fished two tens out of his wallet and tossed them into the cab.

  Cooper picked up his ball cap, whacked off the dirt.

  “I got your number,” he said, as he climbed with deliberate casualness into his truck. “You and the rest of them.”

  “Good. Now you can take yourself out of here.”

  He took his time situating himself in the cab, starting the engine. He poked the two bills slowly into his shirt pocket, slipped on sunglasses and looked down at Lauchlin.

  “What say we go a few rounds sometime, just you and me?”

  “Beat it.”

  “You’re past it, buddy.” He smiled and pulled away, tires kicking gravel as he swerved onto the road.

  “He had a hard-on when he got here, Lauch,” Shane said. “Man, he was primed for trouble, that son of a bitch, and I’d have given him some anywhere else.”

  “Don’t get into it, Shane. Bad enough that I did.”

  Lauchlin regretted already what had happened, noticing that Malcolm had had a ringside seat, and there was rum in his eyes, his painkiller
, which meant the talk would flow, much like it did on Thursday nights.

  “He’s from way out west, that fella,” Malcolm said, as if that explained him. “My dad threshed wheat there in World War One. God, alkali water, worst you ever tasted, he said, and the snow flew in October. Prairies, Jesus, you can have them, they screw up your mind. You all right? You’re flushed. He never got a knuckle on you.”

  “Yeah. He did.”

  At the backroom sink Lauchlin scooped cool water over his face, his burning ear. His skin seemed to flare against his bones as he pressed a towel into his eyes. His sweat, not purely from exertion, had cooled and set him trembling. He held onto the sink until it subsided. Never had he laid back like that, just stopped, froze, even those two times in the ring he was good and beaten. But the limits were different now. Shorter, not predictable, or too. Common sense told you to live. Still, there was a complicated shame in his chest, tight, something unresolved that he’d had the power to prevent but didn’t, he had let himself get pulled into a flash fight, in front of the store, guilt over that, and then there was the prospect of himself as a man who could not fight, period. He’d been challenged. His shirt was darker with sweat than it should have been. He slipped a nitroglycerine pill under his tongue.

  Would Tena hear about it? What would she think of him? What would any woman think of him?

  From his chair Malcolm was telling Shane about his black shoe, why it had a hole snipped out one side filled with a tuft of white sock. “You need more room when you get older, that’s all, demands pick up in certain ways, peter out in others, so a shoe has to let some light in.” He looked up at Lauchlin, studied him with a concerned frown.

  “Now Lauchlin there, of the Bad Heart, his legs are still good, the man moves smoothly even yet. He had to dance years ago, am I wrong, Lauch? Had to shift those feet fast, eh? Didn’t, you got your head slammed. And to punch too, eh Lauch, come off that back foot, bam? You could do that, you were a damn smooth puncher. I saw this fella fight, Shane, did you ever follow boxing? No? Damn shame, all the goddamn good boxers we’ve had on this Island, the champions. Rocky MacDougall, Canadian featherweight champ. Johnny Devison, bantamweight. Tyrone Gardiner, lightweight title, Rock-a-bye Ross, middleweight. I was up Port Hawkesbury once, just standing room only, they took out all the seats there was so many frigging people there. Lauchlin on the undercard. Six-rounder, Lauch? Remember? Vince Patten was it? You could smoke in those days, the air was blue, somebody’s hat in your nose, up on tiptoes sometimes, everybody’s sweat and booze. I’m not a tall man, but Lauchlin there, he’s about right for a welter, little tall maybe. Good shoulders, good leverage. Nimble on his feet. Yes, he was.”

  Lauchlin popped a Coke from the cooler. He pressed the can against his hot ear and then drank from it. “You finished, Malk? I’m not a welterweight anymore.”

  “Am I lying, Lauch? Did I say one false thing?”

  Lauchlin stood at the big window, looking up the hill. “Who’d you see fight up in Port Hawkesbury?”

  “Oh, hell, who was it. One of the Bonaparte boys, I think. So damn many good battles around those days, I can’t recall all of them.”

  “How about today? Was I nimble today?”

  “Nimble enough. Eh, Shane?”

  “He’s hurting, that guy. You hurt him, Lauch.”

  Lauchlin shook his head slowly. “I couldn’t make myself do it, Malk. He was open wider than a barn door, but I had to back off.”

  “Well, listen, a storekeeper can’t go around flattening his customers, now, can he, even if they got it coming.”

  “Not if he was a prizefighter. I only caught him the once,” Lauchlin said. “I think I’ll go up to the house, get a bite.”

  “You know, Lauchie, she’s still a good-looking woman, your mother,” Malcolm said.

  “Ask her out, Malk, take her out to dinner. She’s been a bit hard on me lately.”

  “God help me then.”

  Lauchlin went up the hill slowly, dragging his own weight. He’d never liked a brawl. There was no satisfaction in it even if you came out on top.

  Johanna was outside waiting for him, snatching browned blossoms from the day lilies. The wind fluttered the long skirt of her dress, he didn’t know where she got those long dresses, they seemed dated, yet they looked good on her, she was so tall and slim. She shaded her eyes against the sun, wind gusting about her clothing, her brilliant silver hair.

  “I suppose you saw it,” he said before she could speak. He must have hit something on that truck, there was pain in his shoulder blade.

  “And who was he?” his mother said.

  “Clement’s partner. It’s settled though. That’s the last of him.”

  “I could think of better ways to settle it. But then I never thought much of that side of you.” They never talked about his days in the ring. When he’d told her he was going to box professionally, she’d said, What is that to aspire to, for Lord’s sake? You have a good brain, Lauchlin, and you want to let other men pound it out of you? You don’t let them, Ma, that’s the skill of it, you see. Use your brain, you get to keep it. You think ‘boxer,’ you think he’s some kind of pug. Not if he’s really good, Ma. Look at Blair Richardson. He’s a college student, he’s a champ, and that’s what I’m going to be. I’ll have a good run at it, then go to university. “Think of your heart,” she said.

  “It wasn’t a thinking situation.”

  “You were late getting back yourself. Shane shouldn’t have to deal with that.”

  “He won’t. It’s over.”

  Lauchlin kneaded his shoulder. Johanna’s bird feeder hung by the front window and a jay was clinging to it, stabbing his beak into the seed. “I brought Clement’s wife a tape to listen to. He asked me to do that for her.”

  “You’re getting to know that MacTavish woman.”

  “Like you know her husband. You fancy that fish man, don’t you, Ma?”

  “I always liked big men, tall men, it’s a weakness.”

  “Dad was ordinary tall.”

  “He wasn’t ordinary where it mattered. I said I found big men appealing, I didn’t say I wanted to marry them. Morag’s up there waiting for you, and you’re visiting a wife. Where have I heard this before?”

  FIVE

  A GOOD twenty years it was since Morag went off to Boston for good, changed her name to Margaret, and shortened it to Peg—If I met you down there and I liked you, she said. But Lauchlin preferred her birth name because of course to him that’s who she was, those two syllables shaped her instantly, her lovely waist and her long legs he had loved to run his hands down, her frank blue eyes and thick brown hair she’d worn long down her back when she was young.

  The warm morning had promised worse, trees were poised for wind that hadn’t come, even in the aspens not a shiver. Now this unsettling heat, it slowed the senses. Lauchlin was glad to be heading north toward Inverness, toward sea wind, and to leave the store behind. Sometimes he felt guilty, sure, how easily he left it, fled it in fact. But then he was not a storekeeper by choice, only by chance. Johanna said as he went out the door, Don’t you get excited about Morag again, and what about Tena you fetched the sugar for? She baked brown-sugar spice cake and I ate some, he’d said.

  Tena was becoming like a tiny, sweet hook in his flesh he could only pretend to ignore.

  Through the fertile Skye Glen, rolled hay was scattered across the mown fields of the valley, the foothills of Campbell’s Mountain, the Skye River off to the north. No farms like these anymore on St. Aubin, no soil like this, not on his side of the island. The back road twisted lazily, his mind one step behind his driving. Morag. And now her Auntie Nell had died, dear Nell, and Morag was home once again.

  At the little crossroads store at Cold Brook he stopped for a soft drink, chatted with the woman at the counter about the late-coming summer, the poor state of the back roads, the slipping Canadian dollar, and soon, in the course of things, he was inquiring about business. Well, it’s decent in
the summer, she said, when the people from away are around, still I’m the only show going right here, aren’t I. And then they were exchanging names, their own, relatives,’ Oh, you’re one of those MacLeans, she said, my dad knew your father, he ran that store down by the ferry? He did, Lauchlin said, until the ferry shut down for good, then he moved east a few miles. Yes, yes, we took that ferry when we had to go to Sydney sometimes, she said, and those last years the waits and the lines, weren’t they terrible long, though? We’d pop into that store and get an Orange Crush or something to hold us. A known store, respected, yes. Wasn’t there a boxer in your family, if I’m remembering?

  Lauchlin didn’t want to get into it. “Those were Southside MacLeans,” he said.

  “My dad saw him fight at the Forum, whoever he was.”

  “Did he win?”

  “Couldn’t tell you. I was a girl.”

  On the counter sat several small puppets a local man had carved for sale. Lauchlin picked up a figure of a sou’westered fisherman and danced the legs.

  “I had a little plastic puppet when I was a kid,” he said. “A fella in workman’s khakis, God knows why. Nothing heroic about him, mythic or military. He’d seem awful lame now, he wouldn’t make any sense to a boy. But I invented a life for him, you see. I took an empty cigar box and turned the bottom part into a store. I laid the lid open for an upstairs where the puppet could live. He was all cozily contained in that one dwelling—domestic life upstairs, downstairs he tended to customers. Christ, whatever was I thinking of? It came back to haunt me, didn’t it?”

  The woman was staring at him, he’d taken a turn she was not following.

  “There’s no upstairs here,” she said.

  “Of course,” he said, finishing his drink and setting the bottle on the counter. “It’s just that I didn’t want to be a storekeeper, you see.”

  A few miles from the store he pulled over along the Mabou River, placid and burnished in late sun, and sat in the car. She must have thought he was crazy, poor girl. Maybe he was, going to see Tena yesterday, feeling as he did and Clement not there. But it was innocent, and Clement knew. They’d done nothing but talk, after all. Talk with a woman alone could be dangerous, of course, innocence sooner or later had nothing to do with it. Nothing worthwhile started without talk.