Lauchlin of the Bad Heart (8 page)

They touched glasses. Lauchlin finished his rye, set the glass down. “Any more of that?”

“I haven’t been to town. As I said, I was just going.”

“Don’t let me interrupt you, Mad.” He smiled.

“Oh you wouldn’t do that, Mr. MacLean. Lauchlin Interruptus? How’s your health, by the way? You’re looking all right.”

“And I feel all right. Champion.”

“Goodness.”

MADDY HAD STRIPPED THE COVERS OFF
and Lauchlin, just in his jeans, lay back on the dishevelled sheet watching her place a short, waxencrusted candle on the bed table. She winced toward the flame, a stubby joint in her lips. She took a hit, then held it out for him.

“No, thanks,” he said. “Don’t need it.”

“I hope you’re right, dear.”

She took the smoke in tiny sips and pressed the roach into a saucer.

“It’s good for my
chi,
” she said. She started to pull at his belt buckle. She’d always liked to undress him.

“Wait, Mad. Do something for me.”

“I’ve done enough for you, I think, mister.”

“Close your eyes, tight. Then unbutton your blouse, but real slow.”

“I don’t want any scary stuff.”

“Have I ever done anything scary? Shut your eyes, I’m only watching you, that’s all. Button by button, slow. Slowly. Eyes shut!”

“What have you been reading?”

“Imagine you can’t see at all, you’re blind. Keep your eyes closed. That’s it.”

“Lordy, he used to do this for
me.
”

“And I will again, just not on this particular day. Let’s do it all by touch. Don’t peek. You’re blind.”

“And you?”

“Same. My eyes are like yours.”

Maddy let her blouse slip to the floor. Smiling uncertainly, she gave a little shiver and felt for him along the bed, her nipples hard. “Different,” she said. “Definitely.” She worked at his buckle until it loosed, then tugged off his jeans.

He kept his hands behind his head, eyes shut, concentrating, his expression serious, focused, feeling her warm hands slide along his hips, over his belly, his chest. He tensed, sucking in his breath, she touched his lips and pushed a finger gently between them, he took it with his tongue until she withdrew it, tasted it with a kissing sound and then her hands slowly shaped his torso, down his legs, up, a soft current along his skin. He was hard and she stroked him lightly everywhere but there, Aha, she whispered, as she closed her fingers
around his cock and slid her mouth softly over it. He pushed his hands through her hair, and when he pulled her up to him she said, Can I open my eyes now? and he said no, brushing her eyelids with his tongue, they kissed, a long play of lips and tongues they’d always enjoyed, and then he moved over her and into an intense, whispering rhythm, everything receding but themselves.

Returning from town that afternoon, up a long grade on the Trans-Canada, Lauchlin passed a cyclist, pedalling hard but at crawling speed, head down against a west wind, totally focused on his own effort, his bicycle loaded with touring packs. A hundred yards behind him his partner, a young woman in matching helmet, was in pursuit, making less headway. Nothing wrong with those hearts, and there were far worse grades than this ahead of them. Lauchlin glanced at himself in the rearview mirror: nothing wrong with yours either, laddybuck.

IT WAS LATE THE NEXT DAY
before Lauchlin found time to turn up the MacTavishes’ driveway, the spindly poplars, insistent flashes of leaf, this field is ours, they said. Bella MacKenzie, its last holder and tenant, the rest gone or died, Lauchlin had visited now and then in her final years, not bad years for her because like many country people of her generation, if you made it past seventy chances were good your body could carry you a long way further, further yet if your mind was sharp. Great silver poplars conducted you nobly toward the house, there was a peace to them, in their size a warm sense of time, but they shot out runners through the fields, their silvery-leafed saplings advancing high at the house, filling a windy full-moon night with scrawny shadows, a startling grove to witness out your window. Past the slight turn, the old grey-shingled barn, in daylight a bit broken, long in need of a new roof. And the house before it, steeppitched roof, severe gables, a long old-fashioned porch, not sat on
since Bella rocked there, a coat of white paint over its shingles, so hasty you could see brushstrokes as you passed, and at the rear of the house a room once used as the summer kitchen but now the only kitchen, and then the wide yard, unkempt but for the small garden under the kitchen sink window, great buds of hollyhock yet to bloom, a greasy engine listing in the grass. A gutted truck cab, pitted blue, sat barely hidden in the western trees, and near the barn heavy truck parts lay rusting in weeds, an obvious axle, wheel hubs, an engine block. The fish van, as always when Clement was off milling, was parked just behind the kitchen, adorned with the curving silver codfish. As Lauchlin stepped out of his truck, he caught a faint smell of fish. Like many of the old properties no longer farmed, bits of its past persisted, the little pig barn, a slumping wagon shed that still held one wagon and, one wheel skewed by rotted spokes, a buggy. Clement had not had the time to alter the place much, he had moved in and set his things down among what was here and lived in it, and when Tena arrived, beginning to go blind by then, he cared even less about sprucing it up. Pretty soon only what she can touch will matter, he had told Lauchlin, I’ll be sure whatever she reaches for is okay, the paint can wait. Clement’s pickup was gone. A few plastic bins that had held fish in ice were stacked or scattered.

Tena had been on her knees, bent over a small garden not far from the back steps. The tall poplars beyond her were blustery with wind. Big clouds, the colour of the gypsum cliffs at Little Harbour, ferried patches of blue eastward. She’d stood up when he climbed out of the truck, her hair in wisps about her face, a streak of soil on her cheek where she’d brushed at flies. She didn’t smile until he spoke. “Good day, Tena.”

“I didn’t recognize your truck,” she said. “It’s not an engine I know, or the squeaks.”

“I could use a new one but it gets me around, Tena. How does your garden grow?”

“It’s fair, considering. We had that killing frost in early June, so things are late, but look, my basil plant is doing well.” She held up a small stalk and he sniffed the leaves. “Smell.”

“Lemon?”

“There’s licorice basil too, and other herbs. It’s tough to weed though, I have to be careful what I’m yanking out. I know we have heritage plants here. Old irises and hollyhocks under the window.”

“You’ve got some old monkshood there, I’d say, by the blooms.”

“It’s so poisonous. I remember what flowers look like, now I have to know what they feel like, their leaves and buds, stalks, even their smell. If I’m not sure, I wait until they’re high enough to tell. When they blossom I’m still happy though. I think I can feel a colour in my fingers, but maybe I can’t. I don’t want to ask anyone—is this a purple iris or a yellow one? The roses of course I can smell, and the lilacs, oh God, they were as dreamy as ever this year. It’s their scent anyway that makes them so beautiful. They stay with you that way. Clement’s never sure of any flower until he sees a bloom. It’s been a grand day, hasn’t it?”

“It has, Tena.”

“The sun comes and goes but it felt so good. How’s the mountain looking?”

“It’s mottled with shadows. Patches of lighter green where the sun is, moving over the dark.” He realized he was pointing and lowered his arm. “Whitish-grey clouds. The water’s grey, no blue to it now.”

“I’ve been feeding the birds.” She waved toward a tottering apple tree where a feeder hung from a drooping branch. “I listen to them call and scrap with each other. I know the goldfinches. There’s one now, isn’t there?”

“Two. Male and female.”

“You know, sometimes if I’m back there at the edge of the woods, I hear this lovely birdsong. Early in the evening, a rich sound, flute-like.”

“That’s a hermit thrush, Tena. Thrushes see better in dusk and shade than other birds.”

“Really?”

“Some say it’s our nightingale. Old Charles G. D. Roberts thought so. ‘Over the tops of the trees, And over the shallow stream, The Shepherd of sunset frees The amber phantoms of dream…’”

“That’s lovely.”

“‘O hermit of evening! thine hour Is the sacrament of desire, When love hath a heavenlier flower, And passion a holier fire!’…That’s all I can remember. Only the good lines stuck with me.”

“I wish I could remember any lines at all. You’d think I’d be better at that now, wouldn’t you? It’s not lines and words that stay with me, more the images. It’s like they sidestep the old sight, and my new sight has to give them things to do.”

“I have some new words for you anyway, I guess.” He told her that he had an audiotape, a selection of Canadian stories for her to listen to, but of course he could get her something else if she preferred. She listened, her head to one side.

“That’s kind of you, Lauchlin. I enjoy fiction, or I did. Anything’s fine with me. Come in.” Clement had put a new railing on the steps and she mounted them easily into the kitchen. “I was listening to the radio, and then I just had to come outside. I have to concentrate on every little thing sometimes and it wears me out. Tell me what’s new at the store.”

“Nothing is new there, ever. A house burned down. Americans, the Hawkinses’, just down the road there. Arson, looks like.”

“How mean. I’m afraid of fire. I can smell a burnt match a mile away.”

“I think it was more insurance than meanness, Tena. The Hawkinses wanted to sell, couldn’t get a buyer. It was the old MacNeil place. Every stick of furniture had been moved out beforehand, there wasn’t a thing of value left in it. It amazes me sometimes what you can get away with in this country.”

“You sound like Clement.”

“I do? Sorry.” But he was only sorry that he seemed in any way like Clement. “He has good reasons to sound off.”

“He does, and he does.”

“The first story on the cassette I haven’t read, Tena, but it’s by Tessie Gillis, she lived on a farm up north and wrote these stories pretty much on her own, no literary schooling or anything like that. She was from away, Montana, married a Gillis there from Cape Breton and came back here with him. She had a useful perspective, I think—the outsider’s. That allowed her an honesty of a certain kind, mixed in with her love. A little sentimental sometimes but a real eye for the hard life up there back in the forties and fifties.”

“Let’s listen to it,” Tena said. He set the cassette in her palm and she inserted it into the player she kept on the counter near the sink. “Do you like tea?”

“If it’s strong.”

She laughed. “Have you ever seen a weak cup of tea around here?”

Lauchlin sat down and watched her, fascinated by how she moved in this space. She plugged in the kettle, took down a teapot, a tin of tea. She reached for each object with a sure and rehearsed movement, she didn’t grope or fumble, not in this room. When had Clement stopped reaching out to guide her or keep her from falling?

The skilled voice of the audio reader entered the room and Lauchlin felt obliged to listen, though he didn’t catch all the beginning, he was watching Tena, her long slender hands. Afternoon light flooded the kitchen suddenly and brightened her hair. She grasped the high handle of the steaming kettle and filled the teapot, pouring slowly and listening, stopping when the tone said full.

She set out cups and squares of brown-sugar spice cake and joined him at the table. “I like mine weak. Go ahead when it’s steeped to your liking,” she whispered. “I’ll pour my own,” which she did, deftly.

The story on tape seemed to involve a country woman enduring a harsh Cape Breton winter, one of the old winters so commonly laden with snow. She was ill and confined to her bed and had to watch her husband and children getting by without her. Tena listened carefully, her eyes toward the window. Lauchlin felt awkward, joining her this way without talk, he had thought she would play the tape later. The voice went on and he did not want to disturb her by filling his teacup. The bedridden woman had turned in on herself, losing touch with her children, her husband, her waking life slipping away. Suddenly Tena half rose from her chair and switched off the cassette.

“I didn’t know what kind of story it was,” Lauchlin said quietly.

“It’s not that. Sorry. I’m all right. I just drifted off some place I shouldn’t have gone. I wanted children myself, once. You haven’t taken your tea. Here.”

He let her reach for his cup and watched as she poured tea into it and set it back down.

“You do very well with that, with everything,” he said.

“Oh, my.” She took slow sips of her tea. He was disconcerted by the dirt streak on her face but he didn’t want to tell her about it. “When you’ve had sight all your life, facing forty is hard enough,” she said. “But I had to shift my sight into my fingers, my ears. How can you be ready for that? So long seeing and loving sight, you just can’t one morning be tapping the walls one room to the next, not in a house you’ve walked through, danced through when you felt like it, even in the dark. You can’t be happy about that. Every step’s a cliff, isn’t it. Patting for wall switches, lamps, chairs, embarrassed at meals. For a while I wouldn’t eat until Clement finished and left the table. Try lifting a fork to your mouth sometime in the dark. Play pin the tail on your dinner plate, stretch your mouth for food that isn’t there. The spills. Water glass, houseplant, you know the dirt’s there on the floor, you can feel it with your foot but you can’t dust it all up. You’re mislaying so much sometimes you stand there and cry.
I never cried when he was home, I was too glad to have him there. I picked up flowers and pressed them to my face, I was desperate to
feel
them, smell them. Days when something has been moved—not a lot, maybe a few inches—but you miss it completely, your fingers playing over every spot but the right one. You try to dress by material, this must be that red cotton blouse, but maybe it’s not. You don’t want to look foolish. Did you make a nice mouth with your lipstick, or something hideous? Is your hair wild? The phone rings and you can’t get to it in time because you’re always hitting something that hurts, bruises on your shins, your thighs. You fall. You get shy in ways you’d never imagine. It calms down after a while. And Clement was there. Easy, Tena, he’d say, that’s not a problem, never mind. But it
is
a problem, and how can he know how much? Blind from birth, you wouldn’t know anything
but
that, it’s the way the world would feel to you, there’d be nothing else. Me, I’ll always be afraid of what I can’t see, I’ll always
want
to see. That’s what hurts. It doesn’t matter if I can make tea without spills or breaking china. Sorry, I’m talking so much. I don’t usually.”