Lauchlin of the Bad Heart (12 page)

He talked to her from the hallway door while she boiled the crabs she’d bought off the local wharf that afternoon. He told her about Clement, who’d moved here a few years ago, he had some family connections here way back, none of them left now, about his difficulties with his milling partner, and with caring for a woman who lost her sight after he fell in love with her, a turn he hadn’t been prepared for. How do you prepare for that anyway? Morag said, and Lauchlin said yes, he often wondered about that himself. But when Morag said, This woman wouldn’t happen to be a looker, would she? Lauchlin hesitated: in that instant he could see Tena so clearly, under that flickering fluorescent light the evening she first came into the store, a bit shy and uncertain but proud she had walked the road alone, not a looker the way Morag meant, there was nothing glamorous about her, but in her bearing appealing, her hazel eyes surprising in their light and warmth. Simple, unadorned beauty, like a woman he’d seen in a Renaissance painting. She’s okay, he said.

Morag laid out the table, a meal Auntie Nell would never have made because snow crab was not fished until late in her life and never desired by her generation, and a salad with avocados and small shells of pasta would have been too strange, not what she’d have in her larder even had it been available. They cracked and picked at the long crab legs, absorbed in the task, murmuring, the meat was sweet and they dipped it in lemon butter. Morag preferred it to lobster, she said, and Lauchlin said he could take one just as well as the other, it wasn’t worth a debate. They opened a bottle of white Hungarian wine, I only ever drink wine when I’m with you, Lauchlin said, why is that? Their old, lingering problems stayed under the table, beneath the sheer pleasure of the meal, the growing glow of the wine, the easy carnal warmth that always rose between them when they were together like this, regardless.

“Oh, Morag, you’re sleek,” Lauchlin said when they’d worked the wine down to an inch, still at the kitchen table where a west wind cooled them through the back door. He yearned to reach across the table and touch her but he didn’t. “Why did you hate your name, dear? It’s you.”

“It’s not a city name, and I wanted the city, didn’t I? Fine for here, with the Gaelic and links to the old country, but it sounds like something in a churchyard, on an old stone.”

“With lichen on it, limestone, all water-carved and blurry.”

“That’s it.”

“But that’s nice too, that kind of stone. Morag, dear, come over here to me. Please?”

“You’ve said that oh so many times, Lauchlin.”

“I mean it, I only say it when I mean it. I want to put my arms around you. Nobody feels like you in my arms.”

“Lauchlin. Do you have any idea how much that hurts, after all this time?”

“I love your face, the look of you now.”

“And tomorrow? I wish you were lying, I wish you were just like other men I’ve known, they’ll say anything, and after it’s over, they got nothing to say at all.” She paused. “But I’m with a man now and I like him. He wants to marry me. I’m only here the week, then he’s taking me to Greece, to an island. I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“Ah. Well.”

“I’m sorry, I had to tell you. Don’t let it ruin our meal.”

“You were married once, dear.”

“Does that mean I’m finished then?”

“First time sorry, second time sure, I guess.”

“Don’t play with me, Lauchlin.”

“I just hope he’s better than that first fella J.J., that’s all.”

“You were the first fella, and if I don’t stay away from you, you’ll be the last. Good Lord, Lauchlin, we could have had a life together. What a horrible waste.” She put her face in her hands. She was never quick to cry and tried hard to hide it.

“I don’t know what to say to you, Morag. It’s never worked out, has it. I didn’t want to go to Boston. I might have if I’d stayed in the ring, seen it out. But I lost that, and then I didn’t give a damn.”

“Oh I’d have stayed here for you. You must have known that.”

“Morag, think about it. Remember how you felt in those days, how badly you wanted to get away from here?”

“I did, I did. Was that terrible?”

“Well, God, no. But stay here for
me?
Oh hell, come over here, please. This is all we’ve got right now. That’s the truth of it, you in Boston, me down in St. Aubin, and still we meet up and we do our dance. We push the old furniture back, burn each other up, like we used to. Christ, that’s something. Come over here. Please. Am I right?”

“No, not exactly, Lauchlin. Like you say, it’s not that simple.”

“Yes. I know. Tell me, Peg Morag, have you done well for yourself?”

“Am I working and making good money? Will I have a decent pension when my hair is white? Yes to all that, that’s what matters around
here, isn’t it? But I am not married, I have no children. I wanted kids and now it’s too late. I wanted a man once but he wouldn’t have me. Is that doing well? I don’t know. Not bad for a pasture colt, I guess.”

“Jesus, Morag. It was never that I wouldn’t
have
you. I couldn’t take myself down to Boston with a bad heart.”

“Some have gone down with worse.”

“You live a different life there, it’s nothing like mine. A Peg life. I’d have cut into that, now wouldn’t I?”

“You don’t know how I live down there.”

“You’ve had lovers down there, you have a man who wants you.”

“I’m not supposed to? Listen to him. Maybe we should compare sins sometime.”

“No, no, I mean you’d have wanted that anyway, other men, you were still young when you left here. Imagine being saddled with me in those days. Things had already happened to me. We weren’t the same age, in more ways than years. In Boston, we’d have pulled and pushed at each other worse than we did here.”

“But here there’s never been anybody else. Not for me. For you? You can tell me, I’m a big girl. I won’t break down weeping.”

“Nobody like
you.
Suppose you hadn’t gone away, that you’d stayed?”

“I still wouldn’t be married to you, would I? I would for sure be married to somebody, I’d have done it to spite you, done it out of boredom, done it for a family of my own. You’d still be living with your mother. I never got to live with mine.”

“You sound so sure of everything, Morag. Boston’s done that to you.”

“Would you have married me if I stayed?”

“Ah, Morag, this is impossible. I haven’t married, have I?”

“You never would, you never will, so that’s little comfort to me.”

“Well, if it’s comfort you’re after, maybe I can do something about that, depending.”

“Yes,” she said with a bitter smile, “that comfort you’re good at.”

“A man has to be good at something, if he’s to keep on going.”

“I’m almost engaged, Lauchlin.”

“I don’t see a ring.”

“Greece. He’s giving it to me there.”

“I bet he is. Be a fool if he didn’t.”

“Lauchlin, now listen.”

But she got up slowly and he pushed his chair out from the table so she could sit on his lap. She did, she lay her head on his shoulder and he held her, rocking her a little in his chair. She began to hum but so softly he couldn’t say what it was. He kissed her neck, felt in his lips the faint vibration of her voice. He slid her skirt higher so he could touch the soft skin of her legs. “God,” he said, “I love your legs, every bare bit of them.”

She looked into his face, her eyes moving over it. “You have to be careful, Lauchlin. You’re getting on, you know. Look at those lines.”

“Don’t worry about me, dear,” he said. “Pace is everything. Right? We’ll make it a slow round, a long one, no bell. A little dancing, fancy footwork, nice clinches. This is too happy, you in my arms, to be a risk to my heart. God wouldn’t do that to me, would He? Anyway, if I had to choose…”

He kissed her hard and slow and then he said into her ear, “Where is that old green robe of mine anyway?”

“Why are you whispering?”

“Is it here, in the house?”

She drew her face away from him, looked in his eyes. “In a trunk, upstairs.”

“Put it on for me. Would you do that for an ailing man? This once?”

“Oh, you’re ailing all right, I can feel it.”

“Come to me in it, like you did that night.”

“You on the bed?”

“Me on the bed.”

“Whatever’s to become of you?” she said, sliding off his lap. She kissed the scar on his brow. He smiled and got up. He still wanted to believe, vain though it was, that what Morag had with him she could have with no other man, but what else had he to offer her anymore but making love?

HE LAY ON HER BED
, listening to the soft flutter of the curtain. He reached lazily for its hem and held it. In Sydney, years ago, his room had been August hot, he had stripped to his waist, there in his trousers on the pale bedspread drawn neat and tight. Boxing had made him tidy, given him a care for space, for ways of moving well in it, fast. Things had their place or they messed with your mind. Your body is your equipment, his first trainer told him, put it away clean. He pressed his fingers lightly over the bones of his face, remembering the swollen cheek, the taste of stitches on his lip, the haze of hurt behind his eyes. He had imagined, that night, her skin cool under that stained green satin where, earlier, his own had been bruised and burning with sweat. And then the wonderful sight of her, unclothed there suddenly amid the savage ache of his loss. Lord, you could wake the dead, he told her.

Morag came into the bedroom with only the faint light from the hall behind her. She stood beside him, the robe cinched around her waist, and though its folds draped her body gracefully, he saw the satin had dulled, satin was like that. He watched her solemnly as she offered him an end of the tie, its lightning yellow tip. Pull it, she said, like I did. He did, slowly, and the robe parted, slid liquidly to the floor. Ah, he said. God love you.

When he woke in the morning, a squall of rain was beating grey off the sea, cooling his face through the open window. The skin of his back lay warm against Morag. But he was thinking, When would Tena expect him to visit? What book would he read from when she turned to him there, waiting?

L
DROVE
to their house two days later, early in the evening when Clement was home, two cassettes on the seat beside him. He’d taped one off a Caedmon record from the fifties he’d dug out, heavyweight poets reading their work. He’d listened to it in his room and thought that maybe he didn’t read too badly himself. He was no Dylan Thomas, true, but Auden was no great shakes, and Eliot a cold fish. A girl at Dalhousie, who saw poetry as a litmus test for a relationship, had given the LP to him after they’d spent an evening taking it in, Lauchlin supine and attentive on her bedroom floor, wearing a grave expression, she on the bed murmuring lines now and then while Lauchlin nodded sombrely. She liked brandy and he’d brought her a bottle, and somewhere after “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” she was next to him on the floor, their backs against the wall. She tried to stay on the high ground through Auden’s elegy to Yeats, but by the time “The day of his death was a dark cold day” faded into the cooler corners of the room, she and Lauchlin were listening to the sounds of each other.

“I just wanted to drop these off,” he said to Clement at the back
door, lingering to glimpse Tena at the kitchen table mending a red shirt in poor light.

“No, come in, boy, come inside,” Clement said. “I got something to tell you.”

Tena stopped her needle as soon as he entered the room, gathering the shirt in front of her.

“Lauchlin, is it? How are you?”

“I can’t complain, Tena. Yourself?”

“Sewing a button.” She kissed her finger. “If I draw blood one more time, that’s it.”

“I told her I can sew me own buttons,” Clement said. “She’s stubborn that way. Sit down. Listen, Lauchie. I got me a solicitor, Dave Campbell, to bring suit against Cooper, like you said. He says I got a case, it shouldn’t be that difficult to get the money Cooper owes. If he
has
any.”

“That should get him out of his corner. Does he know?”

“I told him, I won’t work another day with you, you can stay home. We got things to settle up, equipment, and like that. Look, when I heard he went at you over at the store, I thought, that’s it. I don’t want him around.”

“You can keep away from him now,” Tena said quietly, spreading the shirt out, fingering a button. “You’d have ended up fighting, the two of you.”

“He wouldn’t take me on, he knows better. I got thirty pounds on him.”

“He must’ve been a little snarky about it,” Lauchlin said.

“Cursed me good, sure. I just ignored him, but I didn’t turn my back to him. Oh, he’s a little man. Have a drink with me, Lauchlin.”

“I will.”

Tena rose from her chair, the shirt in her hands.

“Don’t let me chase you from your own kitchen, Tena,” he said.

“I’m not going far.” She turned around carefully from the table,
making her way into the parlour, one hand reaching ahead of her. He watched her ease into a stuffed chair. The lamp beside her was unlit and he was about to get up and turn it on for her before he caught himself.

Clement poured them each a rye, relating eagerly the details of the legal steps he had undertaken, pleased with this new course of action and the retribution it promised. “Thanks for putting me onto that,” he said, “it’ll hit the bastard like a fist. He’s proud in a kind of crazy way, you never know just what’ll set him off. I wouldn’t have thought of the legal thing myself. Matters like this usually got settled with a fight, you know, where I come from, and that was the end of it.”

“I couldn’t say it’s rare around here either, that kind of settling. But what are you left with?”

“You know who has to shut up at least, ease off. Cooper, he plays with your head.” Lauchlin let him talk, glancing now and then into the next room where Tena had resumed her sewing, the needle moving slowly through her fingers. What else did she do, could she do, with her evenings? So many things only sight would allow, or so it seemed. He knew that Clement turned in early, but did she? He regretted he hadn’t come in the afternoon. Now that she had the new tapes, he’d lost an excuse to return, and the mood of reading the poems to her was gone. Clement offered another drink. “Just one,” Lauchlin said. The tapes lay on the table. Clement picked one up, squinted at the label. “Poetry, eh? She likes it, I know.”

“She might not like that one. I’ll bring her something different if she doesn’t.”

“We’ll check. Tena? Come in here, girl, talk to us a little.”

Tena appeared in the doorway. She held up by its shoulders the broad expanse of Clement’s shirt. “The button? How does it look?”

The white button was off-centre and Clement shot Lauchlin a quick smile. “It looks great, Tena, fine, dear. Lauchlin wants to know
if you like his tape selection. Look, I’ll put one on your cassette here. Okay? Poems.”

“Here, Tena, sit down.” Lauchlin pulled a chair out for her. She touched him, holding onto his arm until she was seated, a self-conscious movement but graceful, practised. Clement downed another whisky, and the rich, hammy voice of Dylan Thomas filled the kitchen, turning all of them quiet.

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound

In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat

On the silent sea we have heard the sound

That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.

Under the mile off moon we trembled…

“He lays it on a bit, doesn’t he?” Clement said, lowering the volume.

“He’s a Welsh bard,” Lauchlin said. “They’re allowed to do that.”

“And bed’s allowed for me, I’m up at four,” he said. “Not like the storekeeper here. Eh, Lauch?”

“Not like the old days, no, when I was training.”

“Training for what?” Tena said. Lauchlin didn’t reply and Clement, cheerful with whisky, stepped in.

“This man was a boxer in his heyday, girl. A damn good one, they tell me. Say, Tena, maybe we should start up a store after I get clear of this milling mess. Eh? We could work in it together.” Lauchlin recalled that this very kind of sudden enthusiasm had led to the milling project.

“Where?” Tena said. “I think Lauchlin has it all locked up, on this road.”

“No, no, please,” Lauchlin said. “Free enterprise, competitive markets. I’m a great believer, Tena, in all that. Backbone of the nation. To tell you the truth, if the store was mine, I’d sell it to you in a second,
every box and bottle. But my mother, she’d never part with it. We’re going to seal her up in an old flour barrel when she goes.”

“I like your mother,” Clement said, standing behind Tena, his large hands lightly on her shoulders. “She’s a right smart lady.”

“She is, Clement. She’s all of that.”

“Don’t rush away, now, Lauchie. Listen to the tape, you and Tena. Makes me sleepy, I’m afraid, that kind of talk.” He laughed, kissed Tena’s cheek. “Goodnight and goodnight.”

Thomas’s sonorous verse wove quietly around Clement’s heavy tread up the stairway.

“He has a wonderful voice, whatever else about him,” Tena said. “I’ve heard him on the CBC.”

“Hell of a boozer though,” Lauchlin said. “Boozed his brains out.” He’d as soon his boxing career had not come up, she hardly knew him. She’d imagine him with a mashed nose, cauliflower ears, a simian brow of scar tissue. The toilet flushed upstairs. Boots hit the floor. Tena moved a spoon slowly through her fingers. She turned the tape lower.

“He’s been riding high all day,” she said. “This court business.”

“It’ll get him his money.”

“Maybe. You don’t know what Cooper is like.”

“Do you know him, Tena?”

“He’d make a bad enemy. That’s the feeling I have about him. I couldn’t say I know him. I’ve never seen him of course.”

“He’ll drift away, once you’re clear of him.”

“It couldn’t be soon enough for me. He came here one afternoon. Clement was on the fish truck and I heard a knock at the back door. I called out, then I came to the kitchen and listened because sometimes my hearing is too keen, you know? He must have been standing there looking me over, just inside the kitchen door. I could feel someone there, I can do that, I don’t have to see them. He spoke and I jumped out of my skin. Sorry I scared you, he said, but he wasn’t sorry at all. I
told him to go, I didn’t care if he was Clement’s partner or what he was, I said, You knew Clement wasn’t here. But you know, he stood where he was for a good minute or so. I could hear his breathing. Please leave, I said, and he did. Everything about him seemed insolent somehow.”

“He enjoyed your discomfort by the sounds of it.”

“Who knows what he brought with him from Saskatchewan? A suitcase of resentments, Clement says, anger.”

“Maybe he’ll pack them up again and move on.”

“Listen!” she said. “Can you hear it?”

Through the frantic moths on the screen door an owl cooed faintly.

“That’s a barred owl, Tena. Way down in the woods. I wouldn’t have picked it up but for you.”

She smiled. “It’s my brain, it magnifies everything. I heard a noise downstairs one afternoon, nothing loud, and I thought it stupid to be nervous over that, I was always trying at that time
not
to get overwrought. So I felt my way down calmly toward the kitchen, my hand out in front of me but relaxed, it wasn’t expecting anything, but I turned the corner and suddenly it pressed against a man’s chest and I nearly fainted. My voice went, all I could say was Oh! Oh! Then I heard Alan Matheson apologizing, he must have seen the look of horror on my face. He’d just walked in the kitchen door as usual, he’d come to see how I was, and I wasn’t too good there for a couple minutes. I’m warier now, I
expect
surprises, so I’m on my guard. I’d rather not be like that, if I had the choice. I don’t think I am anymore.” She slipped off the ribbon tying her ponytail and her blonde hair fell straight and thick, she dipped her head, swept it softly back. There was a conscious patience in her gestures. Maybe that’s what blindness did to you.

“I should go, Tena. You must be tired.”

“Oh, I won’t go upstairs this early. You haven’t told me about boxing yet.” She turned her hazel eyes on him. “You don’t
seem
like a boxer.”

“You mean what, punchy? Like Cauliflower McPugg? ‘Answer da phone, will ya? A flock flew over dat time’?”

She laughed. “No, no. I mean I can’t see you beating up on people.”

“You thought, here’s this fella with a lousy heart, all pale and shot, how could he be a boxer, right?”

“No, Lauchlin. I don’t see a man like that either.”

He was curious just what man she did see, but he didn’t ask. Did she eye him, nose him, hair him, give him what kind of a face? “Boxers, Tena, well. People have all kinds of notions about them. I knew all the local fighters from the newspaper and radio when I was a kid, boxing was big around here and I wanted in on it. I wasn’t going around looking to flatten somebody. I wouldn’t let you step on me either, and I’d take a fight if it came my way, even when I was small. Win or lose I’d go at it, you wanted respect, I guess. You have to have that in you somewhere, but it’s not boxing. I liked the training, hardening up, I took to it, you see. I loved it. Johnny Cechetto picked me out, he trained young boxers at the Police Club, got me in top shape and I won my first bout, four rounds. I could run like a marathon man in those days, miles. Strongest time of my life. I knew guys who’d load twenty tons of coal in the pit and then come in and train. To be on top of it, physically, nothing like that, nothing.” He glanced at her, surprised by his vehemence after all this time, as if he’d just come from the gym. “There’s no telling just what kind of man will take to it, Tena,” he said quietly. “He can surprise you. In the ring, a tiger. Out, mild as you please.”

“Were you like that?”

“I guess. Blair Richardson, British Empire middleweight champ, was polite and quiet, a shy man. He didn’t need some cute ring name either. You know, Kayo or Killer or something.”

“And you?”

“Oh, Jesus, don’t ask.”

“Come on now, you must tell me.”

“I’d rather tell you my middle name is Mary.”

“Is it?”

“Okay, all right. Lightning Lauchlin. How’s that?”

She clapped her hands. “Lovely! I like it.”

“Believe me, I didn’t come up with it. Yes, lightning in a bottle, that’s me. Sorry, I was gabbing away over your tape. I think I detect Parson Eliot reading from ‘The Waste Land.’”

“I’ll listen to them again. Thank you for bringing them.”

Lauchlin stood up to leave. “Don’t worry about Cooper. He’ll be out of the picture soon.” He protested when she rose to follow him to the door.

“Oh, I just stand at the door sometimes, listening,” she said. “Clement clattering around in the barn. Sounds in the fields, the woods. I can hear the water at times, Mathesons’ dog, Alan’s tractor, crows squabbling, wind in the poplar leaves. I hear a car go by and I want to be driving again. I used to drive all over the Island, everywhere. I did social work, I went to homes with problems. I saw a lot I didn’t want to see, but I’d be grateful for it now, ugly or not. It makes you so domestic, this blindness, you’re bound to house and yard, and the convenience of others. If you think life is predictable
with
sight, it’s ten times more without it, Lauchlin.”

“Tena,” he said, turning back toward her after he’d stepped outside. “I’d be glad to take you anywhere.” He wasn’t sure just what he meant or how it sounded. “Drive you, I mean. If no one else is available and…”

“Would you? That’s so very kind I want to say yes immediately, Lightning Lauchlin. I would love to go to the shore. It doesn’t have to be far. I haven’t been near the water in so long.”

Lauchlin glanced up at their bedroom window, dark now.

“And Clement? Would he mind?”

“He’d like it if I got out more. What he doesn’t like is me walking the road.”

“I can’t blame him for that. Listen, I could take you to Munro Point then, if that would suit you. I used to go down there the odd time, when I was younger. We’d have to hike to the shore though. I mean, you can’t drive close…”

“When?”

“Tomorrow? After dinner?”