Lauchlin of the Bad Heart (2 page)

“There’s no old lady MacTavish on this island, I’d have heard.”

“I’m a lot older than I was when I came here,” she said. “Time isn’t just years.”

“I figured you for, well, seventy or eighty anyway.”

“Did you? I’d better change my hair or something. Or is it the cane?”

“Ah, that must be it, you and your hobbling gait.”

Lauchlin turned into the line of great silver poplars MacKenzies had planted a hundred years ago, his headlights catching the white undersides of their leaves, washes of goldenrod, then he levelled toward the old white house and its poor paint. The driveway was humped and pitted, he proceeded slowly, the truck rocking. Unmown poplar saplings had assembled in the field, a nervous, spindly gathering, as scorned as alders if allowed to flourish this way like weeds. His lights turned the near woods into stark shadows, then scanned the dark green van “Atlantic Fisheries,” and a logo of a silvery cod on the side panel, a size far too optimistic for the times, swept across the old barn Clement used as a garage, grey but holding (they’d had a few beers, him and Clement, in there more than one afternoon, the planks of the threshing floor blackened with grease, a dry smell of manure still in the dusty air), and lit the glint eyes of a raccoon fleeing a small garden. Lauchlin jumped out to help Tena but she was out the door already, and stood collecting herself. “Smell it?” she said. “Sawdust. Clement’s here.” His pickup was tucked behind the house. “Come inside.” It sounded perfunctory, an easy courtesy, but he wanted to accept.

“I’ll just say hello,” he said. “Old Malcolm might be waiting for me.”

From under the back-door light Clement came nearly running.

“Good God, Tena, what could I think, the lights burning and you not inside or out?”

“I went for a walk, dear. I get tired of waiting supper for you sometimes.”

“A walk? Jesus.”

“I can make my way down the road. Well, I can. Can’t I, Lauchlin?”

“You did, Tena, yes. I drove her back from the store, Clement, she only went the one way.”

“Should be no way, at night on this road.”

“Oh, please, Clement. I don’t want to be babied.”

“It’s not that, girl. It’s not that at all.” He hugged her quickly in his long arms and stepped back. His work shirt was flecked with sawdust and it clung finely to his greying stubble, his black eyebrows and salt-and-peppered hair a little wild, and the bare light behind him. “You could get hit by a car so damned quick. Oh, hell, never mind. She’s stubborn, Lauchlin, Jesus, what can I do? Come in for a drink. I need one, if you don’t. I’ll take me shower later.”

Tena accepted his arm and Lauchlin followed them into the kitchen, struck by its neatness now, Clement’s bachelor clutter gone, though everything seemed to be in a slightly odd place, the toaster, the spice rack, the electric kettle, not the way his mother would keep them. Clement set out a bottle of Canadian rye, but Tena excused herself and Lauchlin listened to her slow steps up the stairs.

“Sit down, Lauch,” Clement said, pouring them each a drink. “Been a long time since you sat in this kitchen, I guess.”

“I’ll stand, I can only stay a minute.” Had Tena not left the kitchen, he would have sat. They drank without speaking, listening to the sounds of Tena overhead, the creak of her steps.

“Some changes in my life since them days, boy,” Clement said. He had an easy laugh, gravelled by cigarettes. A deep inhaler, he could talk for a full minute before smoke stopped trailing from his mouth. He’d shrugged off Lauchlin’s lectures on tobacco, Lauchlin had never smoked, it seemed as dirty now as it had when he was in the ring.

“There’s no change in mine, I have to tell you,” he said.

Clement poured them another glass. He was a big man, roughly handsome, but his face had lined fast for his age. He lowered his voice, nodded toward the ceiling. “It’s not been easy, you know. Still some getting used to.”

“For you too, you mean.”

“Believe it.”

“She seems a determined girl.”

“She has spirit, she does. I’m not home enough.”

“Where you milling now?”

“The old MacIntyre place, John the Baker’s. Some fella from the States bought it and he’s got the notion he’ll build a house with his own wood. Maybe. Anyway, if I had a partner that was worth a shit, I wouldn’t be deep in the hole. That portable mill cost a good bit but it was my penny, most of it. He still owes me his share, and he’s not pulling his weight besides. What’d he buy that new truck with? Wish I’d never went in with him. Tena was against it.” He smiled to himself. “She didn’t like his voice.” He glanced at the stove clock. “Jesus, I got to get up early, Lauch, and peddle me some fish.”

Lauchlin finished his rye and placed the glass on the table. “My mother, she’ll be looking for you.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t miss that call. She likes her fish all right, and a little gossip along with it. Look, thanks for taking Tena home, eh? I can’t keep an eye on her all the time. I should more, I know. She hates to be fussed at just because she’s blind.”

“I was worried about her, on the road there.”

“Well, boy, she’s more than enough worry for one man, God love her.”

Lauchlin sat in his pickup, the taste of rye in his mouth. Upstairs a light had come on and the murmur of voices drifted through a window screen. Were they going together to bed? An image passed slowly through his mind—in her blindness, her fingers undoing buttons, her blouse sliding from her shoulders. Not late, but who knew how early she started her day, what it was like to wake and lie there without seeing. A breeze trembled through the high grass, rousing scents of summer. The woods stood black in moonlight, mysterious no matter how long he’d been around them. There was always wood you didn’t know. The motion-sensor light Clement had installed above the big barn doors had switched on. Whenever he set one off, Lauchlin couldn’t shake the feeling of being exposed in
some underhanded act, pissing or prowling, but of course whoever was in the house usually slept peacefully on, oblivious to what triggered it—a deer, a dog, a thief—and after a few minutes it went out, its ineffectual vigilance complete. The light cast a dramatic shadow across the front of the barn, deepening the darkness beyond it. In the distance the mountain lay out long and dark, not a light or feature on its flanks, and Lauchlin gave it no particular attention apart from the brilliant clarity of the stars above it. As he backed his truck around, the headlights caught a low tire on Clement’s van. He wouldn’t bother him now, Clement would spot it quickly enough in the morning, if he hadn’t already, and Malcolm was surely waiting glumly at the store steps, not happy at all to be locked out, but not willing to go home either without finding Lauchlin, without talking the fights.

I
F
you lived along the north side of St. Aubin Island, Kerry Mountain was always there, your eye took it in without thought. Lauchlin had no reason to ponder the deep nap of its slopes, they ran almost unbroken from the long ridgeline to its almost indiscernible shore. You could if you cared to, had to, glance north, across the wide river-like strait, and there it was, all the way to Cape Dauphin, all the way to the sea. A few in St. Aubin might still know, but not many, that a stretch of it was once named
Slios Garbh,
Rough Slope, or just the
Slios,
and that the mountain road, all but invisible now in the woolly mat of trees, followed the southern flank for several miles. If you knew like Lauchlin where that road ran, you might just make out, barely, a thin spruce line through the hardwood trees, rising gradually from the east of the Trans-Canada, then falling away toward Little Harbour in the west. You had to use a road to remember it, but there were no customers over there to carry groceries to, as Lauchlin and his father had done years ago, and Lauchlin’s relatives on the
Slios,
a handful of cousins, his grandmother and grandfather MacLeod, and a bachelor uncle, were long dead. Whenever he did take the mountain into his consciousness, it was not to consider who might or might not
be traversing that lone road, or what its trees were hiding there, but to remember when he knew it—only ruins of houses now which the
Slios
road had served, scraps of barnwood, rubble fences of fieldstones under the roots of trees. It was a very old road, in the 1700s no more than a path the first settlers had ferreted out, those who gave it the Gaelic, but they had found it, they didn’t make it. Mi’kmaq had tramped it through hundreds of years before Highlanders arrived, who could say how much time had passed since they had first sensed out the best route east and west. The first Highlanders, people from the Isles of Harris and Lewis who’d left their treeless moors, rocky hillsides and
machair
meadows and the lovely sands of their beaches, had found the woods discomfiting, thick and dark, haunting, oppressive.
Duthaich Nan Craobh,
the Land of the Trees took getting used to, but once the stone-laced soil was cleared—and what labour—they loved their fields, the owning of them. A relative of Lauchlin’s, a Campbell, had settled here along the mountain in 1829 and wrote back to his brother-in-law in Lewis, urging him over,
Thank God I am well pleased for coming to this country, as I find myself quite easy; having occupied lands called my own, free from all burden whatsoever. I go out and in at my pleasure, no soul living forces me to do a turn against my will, no lairds, no factors harry, no rents nor any toilsome work, but that I do for myself.
A few farms were carved out along the lower, gentle slopes, and Lauchlin’s great-grandfather MacLeod’s had been one of them. The
Slios
road bisected it, the good land lay to the south down to the shore of the strait, but to the north it rose steeply into the woods that had now reclaimed the high backland farms where the living was a hard scratch, the soil thin, the rock often too great to move even after the trees were downed.

After his MacLeod grandparents moved from Sydney back to the old farm because Grandad had contracted silicosis laying brick in the steel mill furnaces, Lauchlin had climbed up the high side as a boy with his cousins to pick berries, to hunt with bows of sticks and string, to howl and hide, later to fish in a small lake far up, hidden, a
place of escape. Grandad was too sick then to have much to do with them, his high-boned handsome face taut and flushed with illness, he sat alone and quiet in a sunny room, he was not to be disturbed, Granny sterilized his dishes before she brought him his food, sun was thought a cure but it wasn’t.

His grandparents had travelled the
Slios
in wagon or sleigh hundreds of times, and Granny walked it too when she was old and widowed and alone, in the summer she set out on foot to visit neighbours who were still left, hanging on like her, to Johnny Gunn’s or the Munros’ or the Stewarts,’ always in a straw hat, broad-brimmed, her back straight, like his mother’s, she had the good bones of the Campbells, and the pride. He loved being left in her care as a boy, he and his brother dropped off on her shore from Sheldon Murray’s fishing boat where she was waiting for them, her arms wide,
mo gaol,
my darlings. Lauchlin lay awake in the morning waiting to hear that first footstep into the pantry, the creak of a loose board her foot always came down on, a warm sound in the quiet house that announced the imminence of fresh biscuits and bakeapple jam and strong tea, rich with sugar and milk from her cow, and the shower of her affection when he came downstairs. They were all gone now, she and the other Highlanders’ descendants, Johnny the last Gunn died there alone, the mountain overwhelming the cherished spaces the settlers had dug out of the woods. One by one the fields closed in with spruce, and the mountainside, except for a few summer house clearings near the shore, regained the fullness of its forest, its history, its animal life hidden again beneath trees. You couldn’t drive the road anymore, Lauchlin had tried it a few summers ago with Morag, looking for old places, the cemetery. There was a bad section up high, unstable and dangerous where springs were always cutting up the surface, silting away dirt and gravel, exposing bare rock, and the Department of Highways had closed it off to cars. If you wanted a feeling for how the mountain dropped down, you could look at the power-line pylons plunging
from the ridge, two great cables swooping out across the water for half a mile and dipping to another pylon at the St. Aubin shore, not far from Clement and Tena MacTavish’s.
Duthaich Nan Craobh.

As he stared out the parlour window in early afternoon, it was not the mountain but Tena who was on Lauchlin’s mind. He bit into the last of an apple, wondering when he might see her again. Clement’s van had passed the store early in the morning, Lauchlin had caught sight of the codfish flashing by. But he had not seen Tena on the road since that night he drove her home. Was it awkward for her to move about blind in the morning, fresh from bed? Was she alone in that house and around the yard all day? She did have visitors from town, women she knew, and the elderly Mathesons, her near neighbours, stopped in, Alan and Lorna, they’d spoken of her in the store, of how stubborn she was about help. Oh they liked that about her, in a way, her independence, her spunk as Lorna said, but they were a little baffled by her as well, you could never be sure she wanted you looking in.

There was his mother making her way up the hill in weary, exaggerated strides, her hair silvery-white in the sun, as Granny’s had been. He had probably lingered up here too long but had she waited another five minutes, he’d have relieved her at the store even though he was in no mood whatever to be there. He was about to turn from the window but Slide MacIvor’s light-blue Buick was passing slowly on the road below, not at its usual speed but creeping and bucking along, its tailpipe spurting dark smoke. Slide had been a baseball player in his youth, a good one with pro prospects until he tore a knee, but somebody had hung “Slide” on him long before that, when he was a kid, something to do with him and winter ice, not the diamond at all.

Johanna had stopped to catch her breath beneath the window. Lauchlin tapped on the pane and pointed at Slide’s car but she only nodded, touching absently petals of the rich red day lilies her elder
son had planted for her many summers ago. Frank had long been the yardstick—doctor, husband, father, blessed by a successful Toronto life—but only after he had controlled his love of alcohol. Johanna had always been set against drinking and it had caused her great anguish to see her darling elder son, the one who had carried her hopes, take to it young and with such alacrity. The first time he had stumbled upstairs, collapsing every couple steps to get a grip on the giggles, she was appalled, but even as she scolded him into bed and threatened punishments she hadn’t the will to carry out, she knew that Frank was too like her brother Uncle Ranny, for whom alcohol seemed essential to his very soul. She feared that Frank might waste his intelligence, as Ranny had, at the desk of an insurance company, or worse. But so did her son, he was ambitious and wanted as badly to be a doctor as his mother did for him, and so he curtailed his drinking to binges she never knew about, doing well at university and medical school, fulfilling his residency and becoming a surgeon. There were still times, he had admitted only to Lauchlin in letters—he was always glad for an envelope from his brother, his letters were unlike anyone else’s, and who wrote them anyway these days?—when he lapsed and had to wrestle himself out of liquor’s passionate embrace, pulling back after a spell of uninhibited craziness he had enjoyed fully and dangerously, and always expected to again (
You have bouts of boxing, Lauch
, he’d written,
me of drinking, but for me there’s no final bell, no decision, no hand raised in the air—though there might be a few refs around—and no ropes define its boundaries
).

So being measured by Frank did not trouble Lauchlin much, not anymore, at times they had clashed but he loved his brother, and every now and then Frank would surprise him with a long letter, details and observations he did not recount when he wrote to their mother. Lauchlin kept them all. Frank was an ER doctor now, not a surgeon as such, and he’d written sometimes about his life in that chaotic setting. But recently he had been planning a trip to Scotland, a break from medicine, up to the Outer Hebrides from where Johanna’s
MacLeods and Campbells had emigrated, and he wanted Lauchlin to go with him, he would foot the bill, tickets to whisky. Johanna was pleased—she no longer hoped he could have what Frank had, but she still thought that time spent with his older brother could only be good, that even proximity might make Lauchlin take up the slack in his life. But Lauchlin had shied away from the invitation, not because the trip did not appeal to him—he had always wanted to walk that particular ground in Scotland their people had come from—but because the timing felt wrong, something here needed his attention he couldn’t quite pinpoint, and he didn’t like Frank covering expenses, knowing he could not easily cover his own. Just enough money to get by was all he’d ever cared about, after his purse hopes in the ring had vanished along with the others. He got along with a disability pension from the teachers’ union. That’s the trouble with you, Johanna would say, just
enough.
You have to want more than enough to get ahead, money or whatever. Yes, Ma, he said. I’m okay with the whatever.

Now Johanna shaded her eyes at the mountain as she sometimes did when she was at the flowers. She had memories over there across the water, any kind of day, any shift of weather might turn them up to her even though the house she’d been a child in had long been absorbed by woods. She was a tall woman, straight and thin, had greyed young, her white hair rolled into a bun, every day of her life that Lauchlin remembered her hair was done up that way, and no one ever said it did not suit her, it did, and she knew it. Not that she would have worn it any other way regardless, it was as if God had told her, Johanna, that’s you, wear it forever. It gave to her what Lauchlin had come to think of as a schoolmarm look, a term she would receive coldly were he ever to use it. Indeed she had taught school before she married, in a one-roomer down North River, but she hadn’t been at it long enough to get lean and bitter, like his fifth-grade teacher old Miss Lamond, not as old then as Lauchlin now, who had detested
boys, she would bristle at the sight of one, because she hated men and took pains to humiliate them while she had the power, her tongue lashing like a switch, stinging even the thick boys—their clumsy minds, their dirty hands—who thought nothing of being slapped in the face but winced and squirmed under her persistent mockery.

But Lauchlin’s mother was in no way like Miss Lamond. She’d had her bitter times and not a few of them with men, but she rode with that, she had come through it with two sons and a stillborn girl, and one son had come back with a bad heart to the old house and remained with her, the wish of more than one widowed mother of her time and generation. She was keener on the arrangement than Lauchlin was, not because he didn’t love her but because he had known what it was like to live by himself, in Sydney, in Halifax as a student and during his first teaching job, and back to Sydney. He had liked that simple freedom not to be observed every day by someone with a vested interest in your life. If you woke up alone and moved through your house alone, a whole dimension of judgement was absent, a range of comments and inquiries and looks, small disagreements about salt on your food, about the bathroom, about dishes, about churchgoing and church, about his brother Frank and what he had done grandly and Lauchlin had not, about music in his room turned up loud on certain nights he just wanted to get drunk to it, about his sarcasm in front of the television set that sometimes ruined her favourite shows, about his visceral affection for Pierre Trudeau long after that political honeymoon was over, about sleeping late when he lingered in a vivid morning dream, about a phone conversation with an old boxing pal Mikey Cook because she thought he sometimes dwelled too much on that violent and disappointing part of his life, about the women he saw and spent time with who called him sometimes at odd hours, about long hot baths when he was hungover or depressed, about her not wishing to be left alone into the wee hours of the morning when he was off all night with a woman—she Johanna who had lived in
this house by herself for the years he was away working or at university or teaching and was all but fearless so far as Lauchlin could tell—about his whereabouts when she could not locate him. It wasn’t that she badgered or scolded, it was just that her desire for information about him was always there, even when unspoken. Just that kind of unwanted interest had changed his life. When you were a kid, it was all right, you’d think it strange if your mother didn’t care where you were or what you’d been up to, but as a man he didn’t want it.