He’d done his road work along here, this crossroad all the way to the Southside, that good summer before it all came undone. Home, helping Johanna in the store, that was fine, temporary, he was fighting well and he was on his way up, everyone said so. A bout with Henry Hinkley was in the cards, maybe in September, Hinkley was a banger but he knew he could beat him, that year or any year, even if Morag was away trying her luck in Boston, so young, the first break between them. Up this steep hill, really chugging that first morning, just donkey work, plugging along, the clay dust deadened with dew, sleepy, grumpy at having been shocked awake by Johanna’s alarm clock he’d borrowed, it would have been wiser to have turned down that fifth beer at the dance, and the long swig of rum from the pint the girl offered him, huddled the both of them in the backseat of her car, working methodically into each other’s underwear, murmuring encouragments, when the passenger door flew open and a man piled into the front seat, oblivious to them, drunk, he slammed the door shut and muttered away, his head lolled back on the seat, then he passed out with his mouth open, and Lauchlin and the girl he’d just met lost their chemistry along with their privacy, and he’d come home with sore nuts and the glum prospect of an early rising. But after a mile or two he’d risen up, he didn’t feel heavy anymore or slow and stupid, his lungs and his legs were working together on the grades, up, down, and the flats were sweet. He jumped puddles, kicked a stone ahead of him like a ball. Joey MacNeil’s bull gave him the red eye and looked to charge the rail fence, Whoa, Big Red, he’d shouted at him, I got a good right hand here, it’ll stop you in your tracks, and he would do a pirouette as he ran, jog backwards working his fists in the air, jab-right-hook, bambambam, and resume his stride, laughing at this dance, it was all his own, he was horse, he was eagle, he was the air. Etta MacFarlane, an old widow then, would wait for the sight of him, she would stand up on her porch in the old farmhouse she shared with a sister and wave, ask him if he’d like a glass of fresh milk, and he’d tell her, Thanks, Etta, I can’t right now, and she would yell, What else is there but right now, boy? And he’d give her a thumbs up, he was, yes, in the now of his life, he had seized it, he had power in his fists. But there were other mornings too, when he moved through a chilly mist, opening to admit him and closing behind, the landmarks dim, Etta’s house off away like a faded pattern in a quilt, and it seemed like the mist had shut him away, it was harder to cheer himself with possibilities, trapped as he was in that shifting space around him, a little world that began and ended with every stride.
But if he’d gone to Harris with Frank…I’ve seen the same sea birds here we see at home, puffins, guillemots, razorbills, shags. One dizzying gorge gave off into a cave hard to pick out under the sun’s angle, but the surge pushed into it with a profound, delayed thud. Sounds like the Fairy Hole would in a high sea. We didn’t stick around to experience that, did we, Lauch? Next time. And here it’s just me anyway, talking to myself. Feeling this great geologic distance is what I need. Distance. I ask questions, and who else to answer them but me? Maybe that’s good, maybe that’s what I had to come here for, alone. I turn a corner and there’s another mirror and in it I’m the only face. This is what comes, Brother. Get ready.
Lauchlin passed a pickup listing at the roadside ditch, beyond it the hunched forms of berry pickers out in a wild field, his eyes flicking across a blue-jeaned rump, the woman raising her head to glance at him, her black curls coiled tightly by a mizzly rain. The wet clay road was muddied, he wallowed through potholes, their melancholy splash, and the truck rocked up what had once been a road to an old house, no more than stones mossed under ferns, lost to fire years ago. The trees glistened with wet. Tree-drip pattered along the cab roof when he shut off the engine. Silence is different in trees, Lauch, in all that vertical denseness that troubled the Cape Breton settlers, coming from open landscapes like Harris and Lewis. Our bards wrote about the tyrannous forest, coille ghabhaidh, the black forest, coille dhubh, cleared and burned into coille loisgte, and the brutal winters, the midsummer heat, words etched in our Granny’s whispers.
Lauchlin walked the rest of the way to where he could see the clearing Clement had cut. If the man had lived in Harris, there would have been no timber to harvest or mill, but he’d never have had a Cooper to contend with either, skulking around, doing his mysterious man act. If you cast your eye across the gentle hills and moors of Harris, you could probably see just about anything moving on the terrain. Was it harder to commit a furtive deed there, or hide from its consequences? A man like Cooper might turn up anywhere of course, but maybe the open hills of Harris, the open sea, would not feed a temperament like his, secretive, stalking, like an animal just beyond the light of a campfire, in a flash gone into trees. The vast Cape Breton woods always reminded you just how far back your history did not go, and there was nature, breathing down your neck. Here the tree was still king, these boreal woods were not the woods of Scotland.
Clement had been up here only yesterday working, he’d stopped at the store for pop again. Why then did it seem so shut down, closed? There was his mill, a tarp cover blown partially back by the wind. A pile of sawdust, darkening and congealing in the rain. A pungent yet satisfying odour of fresh industry, interrupted, on hold. Spruce pitch, hemlock, and, faintly, gasoline. He peered into a garbage bag: the gnarled fingers of leather gloves, a set of ear muffs, safety goggles misty with scratches, a half-finished quart of Coca-Cola. Under clear plastic sheeting rough boards of birch were stacked, and planks of spruce and hemlock for framing. A pile of slabs to be cut up for stovewood. Lauchlin tramped among stumps, skirting heaps of slash, of limbs, discarded sections of trees, mushrooms as bright as egg yolks. Clement had been close to finishing here, he hadn’t cleaned things up yet, but he wouldn’t leave a site this way, he would come back in winter and burn the slash piles. Some didn’t, they left it as it lay. Lauchlin snatched up an empty oil bottle and tossed it on a rubbish pile. The surrounding woods were quiet. They went in deep up here in the high part of St. Aubin, you could get lost, people had. He kept moving toward the trees, a mixed woods of maple and birch, hemlock, spruce, even a few mature beech, you hardly saw them anymore, that all-purpose tree the settlers had favoured, wood to build with, make implements with, to love its yellow leaves in fall, to burn for winter. Lauchlin hadn’t been much in woods since he was young, they were always there, near and around, but no occasion to them anymore, except that walk with Tena to the point, a walk he would like to know again. Possible? Right now, in the confusion of his heart, something said it would not be.
He jerked a limbing axe out of a stump where a strong arm had embedded it. Woodcutting, in the winter. He was boxing then. A great workout, cutting firewood, pit props for the mines. Axe, bucksaw. Lauchlin swung the axe side to side, over his head, limbering up like a hammer thrower. Hector Fraser had told him he was good at wood, Hector, a prime axeman, proud as an athlete. Not a big man but with long arms, natural skill, he’d been put together for felling trees, at chopping frolics where lumbermen competed he’d excelled. He could limb a felled spruce as fast as he could walk down that tree, switching his axe, sharp enough to shave with, smoothly from one hand to the other as he moved down, chopping limbs away clean with one stroke maybe two, it was all there, timing, stamina, the unfailing hand and eye. In an era of blade warfare, he’d have swung a claymore, fought some chieftain’s battles, slashing with deadly force, but all he subdued here were trees, he sawed them to the ground, whipping his body into them again and again, awing onlookers and the men he worked with. Hector would weigh an axe like a baseball bat, twisting the shaft in his hands, taking short swings, warming up. Some are good at wood and some not worth a damn, Hector told him, they don’t have it. But you’re good, boy, you’re picking it up. Lauchlin had liked how the axe worked the shoulders, the back, the feel of it hitting home, you could pivot into it like a punch, two precise whacks and the trunk was notched. He’d stand back, breathing hard when the tree cracked and fell, sweating in the c
old sun, his breath frosted, sharp, like doing road work on a cold morning, in that slow excruciating light, his breath steaming, boots clomping. He longed for winter, he wanted it right now.
Lauchlin drove the axe back hard into the stump. The wet woods muffled the soft dripping in the trees. Woods were different when wind and sun were in them, in that drama of swaying limbs and moving light, your eye missed things.
On his way back, the tarp was flapping like a wet sail and he secured it with a rope tie. At his feet lay sawdust he’d kicked open, its blond core dry as an anthill. Clement had not been here today. There was no feel of him anywhere.
ON FERRY ROAD, a helicopter cut back and forth overhead, criss-crossing Lauchlin’s path, behind him, then ahead, not high in the air, peeling away at times over woods, slowing, hovering. There was an urgency to its pattern that Lauchlin wanted to ignore. It hung for a few seconds above a logging road, thrashing the trees wildly, before it wheeled away toward the Calabash. He could have told the pilot, I’ve been up the Calabash already, try another one. The chopper came within hearing again, then faded off south. At the roadside not far from the store, Malcolm was leaning into his cane, watching the sky from under his big felt hat as if there might have been an air attack. Lauchlin was surprised to see him there, but something in the intentness of his focus, the angle of his head, threw a chill into him. Lauchlin preferred to believe the chopper was on some routine patrol even though the pattern of its search said that was unlikely. He slowed as if to give Malcolm a lift but Malcolm waved him by, pointing in the other direction toward home.
Johanna was at the pumps as he pulled in, talking, hugging her arms as she often did, she and George Morrison and Effie Smith and Slide MacIvor, their cars parked at odd angles as if they’d leapt from them.
“A helicopter Mountie flew over!” Effie yelled when Lauchlin stepped out of his truck.
“I saw it, Effie.”
“I don’t think it was a Mountie at the controls,” Slide said. He smoked cigars continually and he carried a heavy belly above his belt, but there was still something about him, in his black, thin, slickedback hair and the way he stood, casually balanced, that made you think you could fire a baseball at him without warning and his hands would flash up and devour it.
Johanna stared at Lauchlin and he expected her to ask where he’d been, leaving the store to Shane. But she said, “It’s to do with Clement MacTavish.”
A dry taste came into his mouth. “I know,” Lauchlin said.
“The Mounties drove by a bit ago,” his mother said. “George knows more than I do. I’m going up.” Frowning, she turned away toward the house.
George was squinting at the sky. “Had an accident, I bet you,” he said.
“Well, he didn’t have it up there,” Slide said.
“Nobody knows just yet. Can’t find him,” Effie said.
“You know, he’s a great one for shortcuts,” Slide said, drawing on his cigar. “A truck could slip out of sight easy, down a back road.”
“Down a gulley, you know, sure. Under the trees,” George said.
“Wouldn’t see him from the air anyway,” Effie said. “You see anything on the road, Lauchlin?”
“Nothing, Effie.”
“Lots of places they wouldn’t find him for a week,” Slide said. “Little back bridges all over the county.” True, there were many places a man could run off the road and be lost to the eye, like Starr Corbett had twenty years ago, asleep or drunk at the wheel, his car sailing over a bank late on a rainy night, found dead two days later down in the trees.
“Malkie was here, Lauch,” Effie said, “but his foot hurt so bad, he had to go home.”
“He won’t miss much. I’m going up above for a minute. Tell Shane I’ll be back.”
His mother was not in the kitchen. He did not expect the dinner dishes to remain where Johanna and her friend had ended their conversation, a cigarette stubbed out in a small ashtray, the unusual scent of smoke still in the air as if she had left in a hurry. His mother was looking out the parlour window. The fog had risen to the mountain where it levelled the ridge in white mist. Lauchlin watched her from the doorway, waiting before he spoke. He had kidded her sometimes, trying to get her goat, It’s terrible grown over, isn’t it, Ma, the Slios?
“Maybe Clement took off with the money,” he said, to lighten the air a little, and for a second he wanted to believe it.
“Don’t be so foolish!” his mother said. “How far would he get with fish money? He wouldn’t make it to the Strait of Canso, and anyway Clement is no thief, of any kind.”
“I was joking, Ma.”
“Why are you talking that way? The man is missing for no good reason. His wife must be out of her mind. But I guess you’d know more about that than I do. He’s had an accident, it has to be.”
“I think so,” Lauchlin said. On the window chair lay Frank’s postcard to her. He wouldn’t share the letter, it wasn’t intended for her, certain allusions would not make sense and she’d want them explained, she’d be worried by them. Had he gone with Frank, would this be unfolding in his absence, whatever it was? “But somebody had to see him, you can’t miss that van.”
“I saw him go by this morning, from this very window,” Johanna said, shading her eyes. “He always gives me a little toot but he just went on by…” her hand sweeping across the pane as if following his track.
Lauchlin took comfort in that information, that Clement had indeed driven down the road this morning, toward the main highway. He was out there somewhere beyond this part of St. Aubin, beyond this sphere of blame. Whatever had happened to him, it had not happened nearby.
“There’s a Mountie down there now,” she said. “We have to go down, Shane’s alone.”
“Alone with half a dozen people. You go ahead. See what they want.”
“What the devil do you think they want?” his mother said sharply. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Who’s the Mountie?”
“It looks like that new fella, the young one from New Brunswick.”
“Arsenault.”
“He’s nice enough.”
“If you’re not drunk at the wheel.”
“Why should he be nice if you are? Far too much of that here. When they drove horses, we had a chance.”
“I don’t drive that way, Ma.” Lauchlin lifted the lid of a big black pot on the stove.
“Well you have, and you probably will again. I suppose you’ve read your brother’s postcard?”
“It was addressed to you, Ma.”
“He’s enjoying himself, by the sounds of it.”
“Good, I hope he is.”
“So could you have.”
“And miss all this excitement?”
“I don’t understand you anymore.”
When the phone rang, he didn’t move to answer it. He spooned meatballs onto a plate, buttered a slice of bread. Johanna came scowling in from the parlour, yanked the receiver up. “Yes! Shane? Yes. Right away. Of course. The Mountie wants a word with us,” she said, cradling the receiver carefully.
“That would be you,” Lauchlin said, sitting down at the table, his heaped plate in front of him.
“You come down too. For God’s sake, he might have something to tell us, and he wants to know what we know.”
“You’re the one who saw Clement go by this morning, not me. Let me eat first. I want to eat. Then I’ll be down.”
On her way past him, Johanna snatched the salt shaker from his hand. “You’re after using it again, a blizzard of that on your food. You just don’t care, do you?”
Lauchlin ate slowly. He didn’t know why he was so hungry right now, it was like after a hard fight, after it was all over he’d wanted a meal like this, that smelled of home. A big helping, in a kitchen, like this kitchen. It had healed him more than once. He could hear a car slowing down at the store, having spotted the Mountie’s cruiser no doubt. Even with its whirling lights turned off, what had more pull than a po
lice car at roadside, a cluster of people pursing their lips? As soon as Arsenault left, Lauchlin would go to Tena’s. She would need him. Wouldn’t she? Yet he could not rid himself of an odd sense that he was involved in what was happening. Could Clement have done something foolish…? No, totally unlike him, he’d talk it out straight, he wouldn’t sneak off and harm himself intentionally, selfishly. Wasn’t that kind of man.
From Frank’s letter he shook out photos taken with the old Zeiss. Trouble is, Frank wrote on the page he’d wrapped them in, I wanted from that camera shades of the old black-and-whites, like those snapshots pasted in family albums or scattered with playing cards in Dad’s bureau—can’t recreate it, that tint of time and place. But it’s only in my mind anyway, it’s not out there for capture. The atmosphere I wanted had far more to do with me than with Harris itself. Regardless, there’s Marsail at her front door, holding her hair in that wind that kept her flowers down, but a good-humoured smile. And the deaf weaver who urged me into his shed to show me the Hattersley loom he weaves tweed on. Even so, something. You’ll notice in a lower corner of each photo a smear of light—a tiny leak in the bellows—a mote in the eye of my vanity, my misplaced sentimentality. And Lauchlin at the Fairy Hole beach. There you are, my brother.
Lauchlin studied himself: sitting on the rock looking rather flushed, sweating, elbows on his knees, the backpack flung aside as if he’d reached some sort of finish line. The truth was that he looked older than he wanted to there, exposed, unready—not a man a woman would move toward.
He pressed the pages flat on the table, drank his tea as he read on, Frank in the Hotel Rodel pub, South Harris. Got a table to myself in a worn Victorian room, dark panelling, a wood fire blazing in the big fireplace. A pint of Younger’s Tartan, a double whisky. I’m kind of free-floating this afternoon. No one here knows a thing about me, who I am, what I am. I feel pleasantly absolved of duties, tasks, reflections, utterly alone, undemanded. The doctor is out. You should try it sometime. Clack of snooker balls behind me, two young men with shaved heads. I like their banter, You’re hitting her too harrrd, Jimmy, ease up, sighting along his cue stick, clamping hard on his cigarette, squinting. A pleasant sound of conversations from the bar across the hall, a warm murmur of accents and glassware, a woman’s sharp laughter. I could sit at this little table all afternoon, you’d like it too. You’d appreciate, my pagan brother, the masonry carvings up high in the tower wall of the church across the road, St. Clement’s. One’s a woman with spread thighs exposing her swollen genitals. And a short distance away on the same wall there’s a man grasping his penis, and it’s a real hammer. What a sight going into morning mass. A little abraded by time now, must’ve been something when they were freshly carved. Fertility symbols, I suppose. This was a Celtic church, after all, not Presbyterian. Could you imagine these effigies in St. Aubin on the outside wall of the Knox Church? Sure, just before they burned it down. St. Lauchlin’s. Does your friend Clement know he shares a name with a saint? Keep that in mind…
Lauchlin of the Bad Heart Page 26