Lauchlin of the Bad Heart
D. R. MacDonald
For Lilli, with love
I have blundered sadly and often but I have at least been wise enough to know that in the inexplicable lies whatever meaning there is in life.
—Alasdair Maclean,
Night Falls on Ardnamurchan
N
OW
, when Lauchlin fixes on Tena MacTavish, it’s as she was that night, blind in her bed, up in that old MacKenzie house, just listening to sounds in a dark she will never forget, awake with worry anyway, her husband’s fish van grinding up the driveway, such a familiar sound. But there was something about it that disturbed her, and the crows in the air, she’d never heard crows at night, yawking like dogs. The engine noise had pushed into her exhausted mind, the van oddly slow, like it was feeling its way, and somewhere behind the house, near the trees, it stopped. That perplexed her, on the heels of Clement’s disappearance, gone since morning when he hadn’t shown up at the fish plant. Why was he not coming into the house? After the events of that day she needed to hear his voice, his steps in the kitchen below would do, so crazily had that whole day leapt about her, swirling around her blindness. But Clement did not come into the house in the dark of that night. No one came into the house. Every cold, mystifying second told her something was terribly wrong. Her hearing, so acute now, blind hearing, sifted the faintest noise for anything clearly and familiarly him, Clement. But she heard, as she would tell Lauchlin later, only the
leafy whip of branches, crackle of twigs in the underbrush. And then the van backing up, turning slowly, passing under her window, leaving again, its engine a slow growl. That’s when, still in her bed, she called Lauchlin, himself restless, unable to sleep, the phone near his pillow so he could grab it at one ring, sparing his mother its alarm. Lauchlin, Tena said, I don’t know in God’s name what is going on here. Can you come?
L
AUCHLIN
knew little more than her name that first time she came into the store that night in late July. He had just quit working the heavy bag in the backroom, he was stepping back from it, his face flushed as it swung toward him, his knuckles stinging under the thin gloves, his breath quicker than it should have been, than it used to be, and when he heard a faint tapping on the front steps, he stilled the bag in a hug. He’d hung the “closed” sign but not locked up. Behind the counter he peeled off his damp gloves and through the big front window saw a woman taking the three stone steps unsteadily, old grey stones from the ruins of Uncle Lion’s foundation, they were new to her then, their worn concavities. She prodded the screen door with her white cane, felt for the latch. She paused there as if she’d lost her nerve or her bearings, her face pale in the smoky old screen. Lauchlin, getting his breath back, didn’t move either, but never was he more aware, in that short silence between them, of little noises he’d been listening to for years. The drumming of the cooler. The electric wall clock, encircled by dim green neon, rattling along unfixed, declaring brightly it was afternoon when in fact it was night.
“I’m not here to buy,” she said, inside now, the door at her back, “I only wanted to see could I get all the way to the store, on my own.” She was a little out of breath, her colour was high, her temples, like his, touched with sweat.
“I’d say you’ve done it then,” Lauchlin said. “Here you are.” He knew she was Clement MacTavish’s wife, Clement had brought her to the store once when they first were together and she still had her sight, she had sat in Clement’s truck that afternoon while he was filling the tank out front, a pretty woman behind dark glasses, looking, at that time, self-conscious and maybe humbled already by what was happening to her eyes, Lauchlin never knew the whole story on that. Clement took to coming alone to the store, and he said little about her. But Jesus, here she was, and some pluck, caning her way along this road at night, the odd car whipping by. When Clement first moved to Cape Breton, to St. Aubin Island, all the way from Saskatchewan, Lauchlin had used to play cards with him, have a few drinks, but that was a good while back, before he met this woman who consumed his attention and spare time and later married him. She was a slender woman in her early forties, her hair a fine, soft blonde that darkened where she drew it tight in a ponytail. She had a pleasant, oval face, her skin smooth as a girl’s, and when she spoke, he found himself watching her small but pretty mouth. “Purchase is not mandatory. If it was, I’d be a lonely man.”
“You don’t sound lonely, not to me. How far is it to the highway?” she said.
“Three miles and a bit. That’s a risky manoeuvre, dear, going along the shoulder like that, with the kind of drivers we get. Can I give you a cool drink? It’s sticky weather.”
“You’re Lauchlin? You run the store, Clement said, so I guess that’s who I’m talking to.”
“Mostly my mother runs it. I run away from it, when I can. And you’d be Mrs. MacTavish, I think, Clement’s missus.”
“By any chance have you seen him today?”
“Clement, he went by this morning early, in his own pickup. Not the fish van. My mother is often watching, if not out this window then from the house up above, there isn’t a car she doesn’t recognize or remember. She knows your husband, he’s peddled fish to her a long time, so she sights his van when it goes by.”
“Sometimes he’s late home. He and that partner of his, working.”
“How are they at the milling and all?” Lauchlin knew the answer.
“Not so good. They’re up somewhere off MacQuarrie’s Cross. I haven’t been blind all that long, you see, I worry about him. I didn’t used to.”
“Maybe,” Lauchlin said, coming out from behind the counter, “you’re not so sure of things as you were, not being blind for long, like you say.”
“I had more confidence when I could see, of course, yes. Who wouldn’t? Certain things are clearer than ever, though. Funny, isn’t it.”
“Here, sit down. It’s quite a hike from your house.”
“Would you ask a sighted person to sit down? I’m just curious.”
“I well might. That’s the sort I am. Here.” She let him take her arm and he directed her into the press-back chair his dad had liked when he was alive and Malcolm down the road liked now.
“You know my house then?” she said.
“Every house on the road. I grew up here, until I went to high school in Sydney. Yours is the old MacKenzie place. Four generations of them there, before you.”
Her eyes didn’t have a blind look to them but rather an unusual brightness as if she were still trying fiercely to see, she directed them slightly to the side of him, her brow quisitive.
“Yes. I can feel them in the house,” she said, “they lived there so long. You can’t just take a house like that over, can you? Too much life in it. Do you like keeping a store?”
He laughed. “Not a matter of liking, dear, I have a bad heart,
I might as well tell you. But like they say in the movies, he wasn’t always that way.” He rarely mentioned his heart to a woman, it unmanned him to admit to it even yet, but now he simply set it on the table—they both had afflictions they’d had to get used to. She couldn’t see the framed photograph of Blair Richardson on the wall behind him, one of the best middleweights in the world in the 1960s, so he didn’t bother to explain what that had to do with him or his heart. She might after all have a low opinion of the sweet science anyway, many did.
“Is it dangerous, your heart?”
“Lord, yes, always getting me in trouble.” But seeing she was earnest, he said, “Will it kill me if I push it, do you mean? No, I’m not frail. I know the signals. The heart says, Hey, ease up, I pop a pill. It’s defective but reliable machinery, if you don’t gun the engine too much.”
“You must take care of yourself then.”
“Depends who you ask. My brother Frank’s a doctor, so he’d say no, Lauchlin is not keeping with the regimen. But I’m not rash, you won’t see explosions of energy out of me. I’m okay.” He thought but didn’t say, Better this than what’s happened to you, better this than blindness. He brought her cold water from the fridge. “Here, try this.” The cool glass startled her as he put it in her hand. Her eyes were a pale golden brown, with a touch of fire he thought odd at first, such light in them, but then she hadn’t always been blind, had she. She seemed to sense him looking her over, so he backed away, embarrassed that he’d taken that obvious liberty.
“You must meet a lot of people,” she said. “Do you like that?”
“A few I could do without. That’s the way though, isn’t it?”
“I don’t see so many as I used to, unless they visit. Please don’t think I took off from home on some crazy impulse.”
“Brave of you is what I’d say.”
“Clement wouldn’t. I didn’t feel too brave when I tapped past
those terrible dogs. What a ruckus. I couldn’t tell if they were fenced at first.”
“Down the road there? Guard dogs. It’s a house that needs guarding. ” He didn’t mention that the couple in it had been dealing drugs since they moved to St. Aubin from town, but everyone knew and the Mounties were watching them, waiting. Three Dobermans, triggered by anything passing by, snarled and leapt and bayed behind murky pen wire back from the road, lean and frenzied, hurling their slobbery muzzles at the fencing as if it were a throat. “They’d scare anybody, those animals, but they never run loose.”
“When I can hear them, I can
see
them. What’s the time, please?”
“My demented clock says quarter to six, but it’s really closer to nine, past our closing. I live just above the road.” He glanced out the big window, past his mother’s dusty cactus, at the house up the hill. She would be at the parlour window or maybe, depending how she felt, up in her bedroom by now, waiting for him to come in so she could call down, Who is that woman with the white cane, wasn’t that Clement’s wife? He had chided her yesterday for gazing out so much, and she said, It’s all right to stand at curtains when you’re old, we do the watching, she said, the watching’s for us, you’ll know someday.
“I should be getting back home,” Tena MacTavish said. “I left Clement’s supper on the warm. And you know, I’m hungry myself. Hard work, this walking.”
“Let me drive you. It’s almost dark.”
“All the same to me,” she said. She stood up and handed him the glass she hadn’t drunk from. Maybe she didn’t want him to watch her. “Thank you for the offer, but I have to do things like this by myself, I can’t always wait for a ride.”
“Clement didn’t stop for his
Post
today,” Lauchlin said. “Not much in it. The fish plant is in trouble, that’s on the front page.”
“He already knows.” She rolled the paper up in her hand and reached toward the door. Lauchlin moved ahead of her to open it. “I
suppose he’ll be back when I get there,” she said. “He wouldn’t care to see me on the road.”
“He’d be worried, no doubt.”
She seemed to consider this. Then she said, “You know him pretty well, do you?”
“We got together, now and then. That was before he met you.”
“You come by and get together again. He shouldn’t miss out on that because of me.”
“Thanks, I will. I know he’s busy.” Lauchlin’s last recollection was him and Clement clinking glass after glass of rum in the man’s kitchen, not long after he bought the MacKenzie place, until Clement asked solemnly, Am you my friend, Lauch? And Lauchlin said, I ams, and they lost the trail of whatever they were talking about afterward, women or fixing up rundown houses or Cape Breton boxers versus boxers from western Canada, like Rocky MacDougall’s three fights with Billy McGrandle from Edmonton, Rocky taking Billy’s featherweight title in the final one, and when that subject ended in sand, Clement sang a basso, barely coherent and maudlin rendition of “Red River Valley” before he passed out face down on the table, and Lauchlin sat there wondering what he was doing there at two in the morning, drunk and talking to himself when he might have been with a woman. Clement had not yet met Tena. “You know, you should wear light clothing at night, make yourself more visible on the road.”
“I didn’t?” She fingered the sleeve of her navy-blue blouse, then the collar, her cheeks colouring. “No,” she said softly, almost to herself. “It’s not the yellow one.”
He opened the door for her and watched her counting the steps down, her back as straight as his mother’s and her chin up. She proceeded carefully past the gas pumps, her cane raking the gravel, and at the edge of the asphalt road she paused under the sodium streetlight before leaving its yellowish haze, into the darkness toward home.
He thought to get in his car and take her there but she had already refused. Up the hill, a light in his mother’s room. One car and then another went by at high summer speed, couldn’t wait to get to their cottages at the Head, gear up for weekend parties at the edge of the water, Roaring Willie and all the clatter of drink. Lauchlin had been to enough of them over the years, even when he was boxing he went sometimes, bawling out songs with his pals, staggering into the arms of women even if they weren’t holding them wide. No parties anymore, he preferred a woman he liked and himself, just the two of them, private, mostly quiet but if they wanted to make a little noise, they did, someone like Maddy, though he hadn’t seen her in a long while. Who except her would think he had any of that old merriment left? Morag of course, yes, he hoped of all of them she still did, but she wasn’t in touch now. In the prime of his physical life, he could abuse his body and recover fast, now he had to husband what remained. Malcolm was due soon to talk about that old life and drink whisky in the backroom.
A car flashed by, stirring the muggy air, and in seconds there was the chirp of tires as it braked, its lights swerving away, then continuing on. She must have been a sudden figure on the road. A nerve-racking trip all the way to her house, and just her cane to track with, she could feel the darkness, night had tensions you could not miss. Tired and anxious to get home, but too proud for help. How would she know when she reached their driveway? And what would Clement think if Lauchlin allowed her to go off alone like this after dark?
He locked up quickly, left the front light on for Malcolm. He didn’t want to disappoint him on a Thursday night.
She’d gone farther down the road than he expected, but soon his lights caught the scattered pages of the newspaper she’d dropped, then the reflective shaft of her cane. She shied toward the ditch when he stopped his truck beside her.
“Mrs. MacTavish,” he called to her over the roof, the engine
running, “it’s me, Lauchlin from the store. Let me drive you home. Please. Walking this road is dangerous at night, for anybody.”
“All right. Thank you.”
After fumbling for the seatbelt she let him buckle her in. “Sorry, it’s an older truck,” he said, “these things are awkward,” and he was clumsy too, leaning that close to her, his knuckles skimming her waist. She was a little out of breath and there was a film of sweat under her eyes, across the bridge of her nose, and he wanted to dab it off, a crazy, tender urge.
She rolled her window down, closing her eyes to the wind, wiping strands of her hair from her face. He didn’t drive fast, the road was rippled with tar ribbons, and indeed there was no hurry in him that night, he was not rushing toward anything he thought he wanted or needed, on this road he had been driving much of his life.
“I was too tense,” she said. He could barely hear her. “It’s exhausting, wired so tight just walking along.” She could not see the overgrown spaces, trees and brush hiding the old pastures and fields that even in his boyhood were losing, or had lost, animals and crops and hay. The old farmhouses were surrounded by neglected land that had turned back to woods now, and driveways often ran to them through groves of second-growth trees, and that was the sort of house he was driving Tena MacTavish to this night.
“Myself, I wouldn’t walk this road even in the daytime, Mrs. MacTavish.”
“Tena,” she said, “please,” her eyes still shut, a light smile on her lips. “Mrs. MacTavish sounds like an old lady.”