Lauchlin of the Bad Heart

by D. R. MacDonald

  Should he say yes or no? There was truth to both. If he were too honest, she might shy away and she had just come one step nearer.

  “No fear there, Tena. I’d see you every blessed day if I could. But…I guess I can’t, can I? I shouldn’t.”

  “It doesn’t need to be every day. I just like to know that you’re coming.”

  “Jesus, girl. You can rest easy on that then. Anytime you want, I’ll find a way to get there.”

  “Soon, then?”

  “Very soon.”

  She smiled and took a deep breath. “Good. That’s settled then. There’s a place or two I might like to go to, if you might like to take me there.”

  “I would, and I will.”

  Carefully he put her purchases in the rucksack one by one and closed the zipper. “You told me you were feeling uneasy around the place, outside?”

  “Oh…what can I say? Maybe too much does happen in my head. That’s how I get sometimes, I sift and sift and pretty soon I find a hard bit of something and I work it up. So…raccoons, whatever. I don’t want to dwell on it, I want to keep moving, ahead.”

  “If you’d like a bit of reading, my brother left me two books. A memoir of the Hebrides and a collection of poems by George Mackay Brown. He’s from the Orkneys, I think. They looked interesting. We could dip into them, see what’s there.”

  “Yes, yes, I’d like that. All right, now on with the rucksack, and up with the cane.” At the chair she turned back to him. “Do you still hit your punching bag?”

  “Well, yes. Now and again.”

  “I’d like to see it. Could I?”

  “That old smelly thing? It’s in the backroom, it’s…”

  “Show me then.”

  He took her hand and led her past the counter and into the room, apologizing for the palpable clutter, stopping at the bag, afraid she might ask him to demonstrate and he didn’t want to say no.

  “Here he is. Tena, meet Bag; Bag, meet Tena.”

  She smiled as she slid her hand over the old leather, feeling its height, its circumference, touching the chain.

  “He’s something, isn’t he?” Lauchlin said.

  She gave the bag a soft push, waking the squeak of the swivel.

  “Yes,” she said. “He is.”

  He realized that her blindness seemed to make almost everything between them possible, the way they responded to each other, what they talked about, how they talked, even the way they moved in each other’s presence, he reluctant to do anything she might not detect, anxious that he not deceive her. Yet he wished she could see that black-and-white photo of him on the wall: in a lean crouch, his taped fists cocked at his face, a whisper of a smile, that smile of youth and confidence, his belly flat and hard as a board, his body oiled with sweat, just enough to bring out his muscles, a small mat of hair on his pecs, on his head the tight curls he’d watch swirl down the drain year after year. Those trunks had been new, a dark scarlet, he could smell the fresh satin yet, unstained, ready for his fight with Wally Bain, a step forward: that’s how it had been—two forward, one back.

  They stood without speaking as the bag’s squeak grew fainter and fainter and stopped. “Tena,” he whispered, leaning close to her face, just their breath between them. Her lips parted slowly, slightly, and he kissed them, not long but long enough to seal what he felt for her and she did not pull away until the sound of a car horn jarred them both.

  He took her hand in his. “Someone’s at the pumps. Stay a minute and I’ll drive you home.”

  She laughed. “You’re whispering. Nothing wrong with a kiss in the backroom, is there now? No, no, I can make my way, Lauchlin.” She rapped her cane on the floor. “I’m ready, and I’m good on the road, not like that night in July.”

  THE STORE WAS NOT BUSY but he made himself busy enough so that the hours would pass. Tena’s visit had both cheered him and unnerved him, the chance of being alone with her again. Malcolm phoned to say his foot was too damn sore to walk but he’d make their Thursday fight night if he had to hire a horse.

  Overhearing that he was hobbled, Maud Campbell, a widow Malcolm sometimes flirted with from the safety of his chair, said, An old man’s not much good for anything, is he? Lorna Matheson, picking up her newspaper, took exception to that, asserting that her Alan was as good as ever he was and in some ways better.

  “Well, God bless the both of you,” Maud said, with her sarcastic smile, and turned for the door.

  “She says that for spite,” Lorna said to Lauchlin as they watched her get into her car. She held up her copy of the Post. “I’m reading this to Tena. We’ve taken to doing that, you know, me skimming the headlines and reading her things she wants to hear about. Then we have a cup of tea.”

  “How do you find her these days, Lorna?” He wondered if Lorna had contributed to the rumours about them.

  “She’s a quiet girl anyway, Tena is, you can’t get much out of her. But she’s strong, she has backbone.”

  “You reading for her every day, are you?”

  “When I can. When she wants me. I guess you’ve done the same for her, Lauchlin, and that’s very good of you, busy man that you are.”

  “I’m glad you think so, Lorna, and others as well.”

  “Clement’s a good husband but he can’t do everything, now can he? No. Well, look at Rhonda coming, she’s got the big sunglasses on again.” She pointed out the window at Rhonda Murchison emerging from her car, a retired woman from Ontario who, along with her husband, had moved to St. Aubin a couple years before. The oversized shades were, Lauchlin knew, disguising another shiner. Her husband had clouted her again as he sometimes did when they drank heavily and railed abuse at each other. “You know, she’s got a tongue like a viper,” Lorna went on. “No wonder he gives her a smack sometimes, and then she flees the house. Did you know she slept on Hector’s front porch all night during a rainstorm?”

  “Did she?” He wasn’t sure if this was true or false, and he didn’t care. “At least she was dry.”

  “And one morning Sandy Bill found her out in his car asleep, imagine. ” Lorna lowered her voice. “But if you see them together a few days later they can’t talk sweet enough to each other, Burt and Rhonda.”

  “Some relationships are too puzzling to fathom, Lorna. Beats me.”

  “Well, I’m off. Stop in for a cup of tea some day, Lauchlin?”

  “I just might.”

  Rhonda exchanged a cool hello with Lorna as they passed at the doorway. She waited quietly while Lauchlin collected her items from the shelf behind the counter. She never talked much, as if there was too much talk about her already. Shane showed up on his motorcycle, its loud pipes filling the room.

  Rhonda picked up her bag of groceries. “I think I’ll get my husband one of those things,” she said, giving him a rare smile.

  “They’re dangerous, Mrs. Murchison.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Shane was late and apologetic. He hung up his leather jacket, ran his hands through his hair.

  “You look a little hangdog, Shane. Jenna Marie?”

  “You know how she is, Lauch.”

  “I know how she was. What’s up?”

  “She won’t let me read what she writes anymore, not even her poems.”

  “That might not be a tragedy, Shane. But I’m sure there’s more to it.”

  There was, he knew. A not uncommon situation—smart girl goes off to college, boy stays home, she grows in new directions, he, in her eyes, is stuck, stagnant and unsophisticated, and she has cast away her provincialism, the constricted horizons of her rural life, taken on interests he cannot or will not share because, in the main, he hasn’t the sensibility or education to do so, even if he wished.

  “She used to show me all her stuff, now she says I don’t understand it so why bother. It’s true, I don’t. I mean, I can’t figure out where she’s coming from. I wanted to tell her, Sure, I know what this or that poem is about, but it’s important to be honest, isn’t it? Wh
y tell her a lie just to make her feel good about me?”

  “She’s home now?”

  Shane was staring into the backroom. “She won’t ride on my bike anymore either. It’s juvenile, she tells me, she doesn’t like being toted around on the back of it, she says, like baggage, like a biker moll. Okay, I says, I’ll use the car. I drive her down to Halifax last week because she likes the music scene. We go out to a bar with her buddies, you know, from Dalhousie? Me, I felt like a fifth wheel. They’re talking about books, about going to India, Thailand, staying in hostels and this and that. There’s like two or three guys she seems tight with, but no boyfriend. I could deal with that better, if she had one, you know?”

  “You don’t mean you’d punch him in the nose?”

  “No, no. Just, who do I compare to, like? What’s better about him? I mentioned you showed me a few moves on the heavy bag? Jesus, she hates boxing, thinks it’s barbaric. That’s the word she used. I laughed. A big mistake.”

  “I’d lay off the bag for a while. She’ll calm down.”

  “I’m trying to clean up my act, not drink so much. I’d like to be worthy of her, you know, give it a try.”

  “Worthy of her? Just don’t tell her that, you won’t have a chance. Good luck anyway.”

  “I’ve got a date with her tomorrow, that concert over at the Gaelic College.”

  “Better wear a necktie.”

  “Sure thing, Lauch, I got dozens. You hear about the drug bust up the road?”

  “Johanna told me. It was time the hammer came down.”

  “You know the house?”

  “Sure. Deal in the country, less risk than the city, right? They put that double-wide up the hill, Red Horton’s old land, and kept to themselves. But talk about clumsy, obvious. Thought the locals were too thick to notice what they were up to. Cars coming and going day and night, peeling away, you can still see their tire marks. Might as well have hung a sign on the mailbox, ‘Drugs for Sale.’”

  “That big backhoe sitting down by the garage? It’s worth about eighty grand, I heard. I don’t think they ever used it.”

  “Malcolm said maybe they had to bury a body now and then. It’ll be sold, with everything else they own. The Mounties were watching them over a year.”

  “I won’t miss those damn dogs of theirs either. My bike drove them crazy.”

  “I know, they scared the life out of Tena MacTavish. The country’s different now, Shane. Nobody used to need animals like that. You never went up there, did you?”

  “No one I know did. It didn’t seem friendly like. I might’ve seen that Cooper’s truck up there once or twice.”

  “He’s not from here anyway. I wouldn’t have taken him for a weed smoker.”

  “They had more than weed up there, I heard.”

  “Well, whatever’s wrong with him, it isn’t drugs.”

  LAUCHLIN CAME UP THE HILL for dinner into warm smells of baking, of bannock and scones and pies.

  “Was that Tena MacTavish I saw this morning, coming out of the store?” Johanna said. She looked hot and damp and brushed strands of white hair from her forehead.

  “You know you did, Ma. She came to shop. And she brought us blueberries.”

  “Set them on the table. I’ll make some muffins if there’s time.” His mother said nothing while she spread dough on a cookie sheet. She inverted a water glass and pressed out biscuit shapes.

  “There’s a plate for you in the oven,” she said. “Roast beef and gravy, and the things you like with it.”

  He placed Tena’s basket on the counter. His mother prodded the berries with her finger. “You wouldn’t expect them all to be ripe, but there’s hardly a green one.”

  She poured the berries into a bowl and set them in the centre of the table. Lauchlin ate, roast beef was a favourite. He usually liked this midday meal, the clear glass teapot simmering on the stove, his mother bustling around him—that lulling atmosphere he sometimes resisted but sat himself down in anyway, like an old stuffed chair. What was Frank sitting down to today? Who with? There’d be a new language around him, new voices, fresh references, sights, knowledge, faces. There’d be more than the familiar sounds of a knife and a fork in a familiar kitchen, and Lauchlin felt suddenly dull and small, choked by the repetitions of his life. He ate a few more bites and pushed the plate away.

  “What’s the matter?” his mother said.

  “Appetite’s a little off. I’ll have a biscuit when they’re done.”

  Johanna was having women friends over for tea and gossip tomorrow and Lauchlin knew just how it would go. There’d be Mildred, a former schoolteacher like Johanna and himself, decrying the downfall of classroom discipline and the slovenly appearance of students, she’d offer up her latest tale of some awful teenager she’d heard about from colleagues who still taught, it used to just be cigarettes you worried about but now it was drugs, and some of the girls were as tough as the boys, you couldn’t demand much of anything of them anymore, they were foul-mouthed and disrespectful and you couldn’t lay a finger on them. Are they not, Lauchlin? she would implore him over her teacup when he came into the parlour to say hello, and he would say, Oh, I’m not sure they’re as bad as all that, Mildred. Annie Carmichael who’d gone to normal school with Johanna, a sweet woman who rarely took part in the gossipmongering but listened intently, blushing easily and sipping her tea fast, sneaking glances at Lauchlin until he smiled at her, it didn’t take much to bring red to her cheeks, especially the sexual innuendos Donalda MacCuish slipped deftly into any conversation before Johanna could shush her, a large, big-breasted woman with a crushing hug, and she’d always liked Lauchlin, appraising him with a broad smile, You looked grand as a boxer, she would say, and you still look grand, look at him, Johanna, that son of yours, and the women still after him. He knew them all well, he had been entering the parlour in their presence for many years, first at the behest of his mother and then on his own he would make an appearance, tease them a little, parry their comments, then leave—it was like being a young man again among these women who remembered him that way, and they all enjoyed it, the game of memory, as he did himself. Gloria Doucette, nervous Gloria, would likely be there as well, urging a game of Tarbash on them as soon as there was an opening, and even though Johanna had always hated cards she went along with it because they all shared a history and intended to carry it on. After cards, Johanna would sit down at the upright piano and run through old favourites with gusto, folksongs she’d have led in a classroom, a popular song from their youth, the women singing along. Other times, however, Lauchlin had heard her, alone, quietly play a work she never performed for friends, something private and complex, its pleasures purely hers. It was like suddenly hearing her speak in a voice he hardly ever heard.

  But Lauchlin would not drop in on the women tomorrow. They’d never let him get away without asking about the trip to Scotland he’d turned down: none of them had been there and they never would be but they held on dearly to their ideas about it, and, giving in to them in a way he often did with women, he would have to simply acquiesce to their notions about the place, the people, play up the clichés, and he would have to explain why he did not take up his brother’s wonderful invitation, Johanna looking at him because she too wanted an explanation he refused to give. And then Donalda would ask about Morag as she always did, always had, and maybe this time they’d even have something to say about Tena MacTavish and himself as well, that wouldn’t surprise him, a morsel of rumour like that could travel all the way to Meat Cove and be a three-course meal by the time it returned to St. Aubin.

  “You know, that’s not what her husband wants Tena MacTavish doing, walking the road,” Johanna said.

  “That’s between the two of them.”

  “Mmmm,” she said, glancing quickly at him. “Indeed. The two of them.” She slid the sheet of biscuits swiftly into the oven. “You were talking to Clement this morning then?”

  “For a bit.”

  “I don’t supp
ose he told you somebody vandalized his truck?”

  “He didn’t, no.”

  “The windshield. Was it that creature you used to work with? I asked him, and he said he didn’t know, but maybe. He’s more worried about his wife, he says, so he didn’t tell her. She’s acting some paranoid. That’s the word he used. Paranoid.”

  “I’m not sure he knows what it means. After all she might have things to be some fearful of. She can’t see.”

  “She can’t see him either. Are you finished with your tea?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s frayed, Lauchlin. He was right there in front of you this morning.”

  His mother set her timer and went into the parlour with the newspaper. Lauchlin flipped through the dismal mail, but at the bottom a postcard. A Greek island, stunningly white houses and a lovely aqua sea. When we get away from the tourists, this is as nice as I imagined it, but I shouldn’t get too fond of it, should I? I’m glad I got to see you. I’ll be back your way this summer. Then again, I guess it’s my way too, isn’t it. Love, as always, Morag.

  He slipped the card into his shirt pocket. The “we” stung him a little. But he had been glad to see her too, maybe more than ever, no getting around it. No mention of the man she was with, or an engagement. But she wouldn’t have told him that anyway, wouldn’t have put it in his face.

  Lauchlin took a few blueberries in his palm and pushed them slowly into his mouth. Tena had picked these, each one of them she had teased out with the tips of her fingers. They were just ripe, a slight tartness in the sweet. He ate more, snatching them with his lips, and he’d worked deep into the bowl before he stopped, surprised at his gluttony as he rolled a hard green berry on his tongue.

  LAUCHLIN DID NOT GO to the MacTavishes’ house the next afternoon, as it turned out, or the next: Tena was called away home to the mainland. Her only sister, Elizabeth, whom she was very close to, had been badly injured in a car crash and she needed to be with her, her condition was touch and go. Tena called him at the store, she wasn’t sure when she would be back but as soon as she was she’d let him know. Clement would see her off at the gas station on the Trans-Canada, put her on the Acadia Lines bus to Halifax where her brother-in-law was to meet her and drive her back to Annapolis Valley. Lauchlin could feel in her voice that she had pulled back from him a little—a family crisis affirmed the gravity of life, the priority of familial love, and whatever he and Tena had with each other had to be set aside to make room for it. He understood that. He told her he’d be thinking about her and hoped sincerely that her sister would pull through, she was young and had that going for her. When he hung up, he felt strange—something he’d been deeply anticipating had been postponed. Were he young, that would have hurt him, darkened him, but now his emotions were tinged with relief, a chance to steady himself, see more clearly just what might lie ahead.