Lauchlin straightened up slowly. “Shane, how much gas did you pump for him?”
“Twenty dollars.”
Lauchlin fished two tens out of his wallet and tossed them into the cab.
Cooper picked up his ball cap, whacked off the dirt.
“I got your number,” he said, as he climbed with deliberate casualness into his truck. “You and the rest of them.”
“Good. Now you can take yourself out of here.”
He took his time situating himself in the cab, starting the engine. He poked the two bills slowly into his shirt pocket, slipped on sunglasses and looked down at Lauchlin.
“What say we go a few rounds sometime, just you and me?”
“Beat it.”
“You’re past it, buddy.” He smiled and pulled away, tires kicking gravel as he swerved onto the road.
“He had a hard-on when he got here, Lauch,” Shane said. “Man, he was primed for trouble, that son of a bitch, and I’d have given him some anywhere else.”
“Don’t get into it, Shane. Bad enough that I did.”
Lauchlin regretted already what had happened, noticing that Malcolm had had a ringside seat, and there was rum in his eyes, his painkiller, which meant the talk would flow, much like it did on Thursday nights.
“He’s from way out west, that fella,” Malcolm said, as if that explained him. “My dad threshed wheat there in World War One. God, alkali water, worst you ever tasted, he said, and the snow flew in
October. Prairies, Jesus, you can have them, they screw up your mind. You all right? You’re flushed. He never got a knuckle on you.”
“Yeah. He did.”
At the backroom sink Lauchlin scooped cool water over his face, his burning ear. His skin seemed to flare against his bones as he pressed a towel into his eyes. His sweat, not purely from exertion, had cooled and set him trembling. He held onto the sink until it subsided. Never had he laid back like that, just stopped, froze, even those two times in the ring he was good and beaten. But the limits were different now. Shorter, not predictable, or too. Common sense told you to live. Still, there was a complicated shame in his chest, tight, something unresolved that he’d had the power to prevent but didn’t, he had let himself get pulled into a flash fight, in front of the store, guilt over that, and then there was the prospect of himself as a man who
could
not fight, period. He’d been challenged. His shirt was darker with sweat than it should have been. He slipped a nitroglycerine pill under his tongue.
Would Tena hear about it? What would she think of him? What would
any
woman think of him?
From his chair Malcolm was telling Shane about his black shoe, why it had a hole snipped out one side filled with a tuft of white sock. “You need more room when you get older, that’s all, demands pick up in certain ways, peter out in others, so a shoe has to let some light in.” He looked up at Lauchlin, studied him with a concerned frown.
“Now Lauchlin there, of the Bad Heart, his legs are still good, the man moves smoothly even yet. He had to dance years ago, am I wrong, Lauch? Had to shift those feet fast, eh? Didn’t, you got your head slammed. And to punch too, eh Lauch, come off that back foot,
bam?
You could do that, you were a damn smooth puncher. I saw this fella fight, Shane, did you ever follow boxing? No? Damn shame, all the goddamn good boxers we’ve had on this Island, the champions.
Rocky MacDougall, Canadian featherweight champ. Johnny Devison, bantamweight. Tyrone Gardiner, lightweight title, Rock-a-bye Ross, middleweight. I was up Port Hawkesbury once, just standing room only, they took out all the seats there was so many frigging people there. Lauchlin on the undercard. Six-rounder, Lauch? Remember? Vince Patten was it? You could smoke in those days, the air was blue, somebody’s hat in your nose, up on tiptoes sometimes, everybody’s sweat and booze. I’m not a tall man, but Lauchlin there, he’s about right for a welter, little tall maybe. Good shoulders, good leverage. Nimble on his feet. Yes, he was.”
Lauchlin popped a Coke from the cooler. He pressed the can against his hot ear and then drank from it. “You finished, Malk? I’m not a welterweight anymore.”
“Am I lying, Lauch? Did I say one false thing?”
Lauchlin stood at the big window, looking up the hill. “Who’d you see fight up in Port Hawkesbury?”
“Oh, hell, who was it. One of the Bonaparte boys, I think. So damn many good battles around those days, I can’t recall all of them.”
“How about today? Was I nimble today?”
“Nimble enough. Eh, Shane?”
“He’s hurting, that guy. You hurt him, Lauch.”
Lauchlin shook his head slowly. “I couldn’t make myself do it, Malk. He was open wider than a barn door, but I had to back off.”
“Well, listen, a storekeeper can’t go around flattening his customers, now, can he, even if they got it coming.”
“Not if he was a prizefighter. I only caught him the once,” Lauchlin said. “I think I’ll go up to the house, get a bite.”
“You know, Lauchie, she’s still a good-looking woman, your mother,” Malcolm said.
“Ask her out, Malk, take her out to dinner. She’s been a bit hard on me lately.”
“God help me then.”
Lauchlin went up the hill slowly, dragging his own weight. He’d never liked a brawl. There was no satisfaction in it even if you came out on top.
Johanna was outside waiting for him, snatching browned blossoms from the day lilies. The wind fluttered the long skirt of her dress, he didn’t know where she got those long dresses, they seemed dated, yet they looked good on her, she was so tall and slim. She shaded her eyes against the sun, wind gusting about her clothing, her brilliant silver hair.
“I suppose you saw it,” he said before she could speak. He must have hit something on that truck, there was pain in his shoulder blade.
“And who was he?” his mother said.
“Clement’s partner. It’s settled though. That’s the last of him.”
“I could think of better ways to settle it. But then I never thought much of that side of you.” They never talked about his days in the ring. When he’d told her he was going to box professionally, she’d said, What is that to aspire to, for Lord’s sake? You have a good brain, Lauchlin, and you want to let other men pound it out of you? You don’t let them, Ma, that’s the skill of it, you see. Use your brain, you get to keep it. You think ‘boxer,’ you think he’s some kind of pug. Not if he’s really good, Ma. Look at Blair Richardson. He’s a college student, he’s a champ, and that’s what I’m going to be. I’ll have a good run at it, then go to university. “Think of your heart,” she said.
“It wasn’t a thinking situation.”
“You were late getting back yourself. Shane shouldn’t have to deal with that.”
“He won’t. It’s over.”
Lauchlin kneaded his shoulder. Johanna’s bird feeder hung by the front window and a jay was clinging to it, stabbing his beak into the seed. “I brought Clement’s wife a tape to listen to. He asked me to do that for her.”
“You’re getting to know that MacTavish woman.”
“Like you know her husband. You fancy that fish man, don’t you, Ma?”
“I always liked big men, tall men, it’s a weakness.”
“Dad was ordinary tall.”
“He wasn’t ordinary where it mattered. I said I found big men appealing, I didn’t say I wanted to marry them. Morag’s up there waiting for you, and you’re visiting a wife. Where have I heard this before?”
A
GOOD
twenty years it was since Morag went off to Boston for good, changed her name to Margaret, and shortened it to Peg—If I met you down there and I liked you, she said. But Lauchlin preferred her birth name because of course to him that’s who she was, those two syllables shaped her instantly, her lovely waist and her long legs he had loved to run his hands down, her frank blue eyes and thick brown hair she’d worn long down her back when she was young.
The warm morning had promised worse, trees were poised for wind that hadn’t come, even in the aspens not a shiver. Now this unsettling heat, it slowed the senses. Lauchlin was glad to be heading north toward Inverness, toward sea wind, and to leave the store behind. Sometimes he felt guilty, sure, how easily he left it, fled it in fact. But then he was not a storekeeper by choice, only by chance. Johanna said as he went out the door, Don’t you get excited about Morag again, and what about Tena you fetched the sugar for? She baked brown-sugar spice cake and I ate some, he’d said.
Tena was becoming like a tiny, sweet hook in his flesh he could only pretend to ignore.
Through the fertile Skye Glen, rolled hay was scattered across the mown fields of the valley, the foothills of Campbell’s Mountain, the Skye River off to the north. No farms like these anymore on St. Aubin, no soil like this, not on his side of the island. The back road twisted lazily, his mind one step behind his driving. Morag. And now her Auntie Nell had died, dear Nell, and Morag was home once again.
At the little crossroads store at Cold Brook he stopped for a soft drink, chatted with the woman at the counter about the late-coming summer, the poor state of the back roads, the slipping Canadian dollar, and soon, in the course of things, he was inquiring about business. Well, it’s decent in the summer, she said, when the people from away are around, still I’m the only show going right here, aren’t I. And then they were exchanging names, their own, relatives,’ Oh, you’re one of
those
MacLeans, she said, my dad knew your father, he ran that store down by the ferry? He did, Lauchlin said, until the ferry shut down for good, then he moved east a few miles. Yes, yes, we took that ferry when we had to go to Sydney sometimes, she said, and those last years the waits and the lines, weren’t they terrible long, though? We’d pop into that store and get an Orange Crush or something to hold us. A known store, respected, yes. Wasn’t there a boxer in your family, if I’m remembering?
Lauchlin didn’t want to get into it. “Those were Southside MacLeans,” he said.
“My dad saw him fight at the Forum, whoever he was.”
“Did he win?”
“Couldn’t tell you. I was a girl.”
On the counter sat several small puppets a local man had carved for sale. Lauchlin picked up a figure of a sou’westered fisherman and danced the legs.
“I had a little plastic puppet when I was a kid,” he said. “A fella in workman’s khakis, God knows why. Nothing heroic about him, mythic or military. He’d seem awful lame now, he wouldn’t make
any sense to a boy. But I invented a life for him, you see. I took an empty cigar box and turned the bottom part into a store. I laid the lid open for an upstairs where the puppet could live. He was all cozily contained in that one dwelling—domestic life upstairs, downstairs he tended to customers. Christ, whatever was I thinking of? It came back to haunt me, didn’t it?”
The woman was staring at him, he’d taken a turn she was not following.
“There’s no upstairs here,” she said.
“Of course,” he said, finishing his drink and setting the bottle on the counter. “It’s just that I didn’t want to be a storekeeper, you see.”
A few miles from the store he pulled over along the Mabou River, placid and burnished in late sun, and sat in the car. She must have thought he was crazy, poor girl. Maybe he was, going to see Tena yesterday, feeling as he did and Clement not there. But it was innocent, and Clement knew. They’d done nothing but talk, after all. Talk with a woman alone could be dangerous, of course, innocence sooner or later had nothing to do with it. Nothing worthwhile started without talk.
But the set-to with Cooper still bothered him, coming as it did after Tena. Worse than a ring loss. He fumbled underneath the seat for a pint he had stashed there. He needed a buzz for where he’d been, and where he was going.
Beyond Inverness he took the old coast road, where the sea, wide below him, was arriving in long unhurried waves, the slatch lazing between them. The dirt road of the settlers, following the sea cliffs, climbing, descending where open land to the west intervened. The farmhouse Morag, orphaned as an infant, had been raised in, gothically gabled, its shingles chalky white, lay far back, a line of sea behind it, amid broad and level fields of browned grasses, flecked with pink thickets of dog rose. All that remained of a farm was a grey saltbox barn, its steep metal roof rusted to a startling red, the
Atlantic showing deep blue in its ravaged openings, and two scattered outbuildings, likewise weathered and shedlike, splaying slowly into the grass. The long driveway was a corridor of Queen Anne’s lace and graceful spikes of sweet clover. Morag’s new silver car was parked in fresh-mown grass and he pulled in next to it. Years ago she used to be waiting for him when he came, all the way from the road he could see her leaning against a white porch post or sitting on the steps, watching him.
He closed his eyes: wind soft in the big maples, summery, warm, remembered. He could have walked inside but instead he rapped on the wobbly screen door. From some room Morag called, Come in. The house smelled of old shut-away furniture and he could feel windows flung open everywhere. He found her on the parlour sofa, her pretty knees pressed together under a thick album. Morag glanced at him over the rims of reading glasses. She could still look fine with nothing but lipstick. Her hair was short now, curly, becoming, he had to admit.
“It’s you, Lauchlin,” she said. She didn’t get up.
“You were expecting someone else? A gentleman caller?”
“I thought you might be Jimmy down the road.”
“Jimmy-Down-the-Road never gives up.”
“Oh, he’s just helping me with things, Jimmy is. A house this old gathers so much and I have to be back in Boston soon. I suppose I’ll have a yard sale sometime. Auntie Nell, she threw away nothing, and left no will either.”
“She never expected to die, I think. You’re looking fine, Morag. You need the cheaters though.”
She pulled the glasses off, folded them. “Middle age, eh?” She cocked her head, gave him a little smile. “You’re not so bad yourself, for an older fella. Hair’s a little sparse.”
He slid his hand across his scalp. “Should I get a rug?”
“Only for your floor. Lauch, come look at this.” The scrapbook of
heavy black pages lay open on her lap like a Bible, the faux leather cover warped from damp. She patted the cushion beside her and he sat down. He made no effort to kiss her or put his arm around her, nor did she him, but the old velveteen sofa sank them close together and he felt the warmth of her against him. A wonderful uncomplicated desire for her ran lovely along his nerves, charged with deep affection. It always amazed him that he could feel this way again after all they had said to each other the last time. Yet the absences had seemed to heal them, they could still draw blindly close so quickly. Everything but the old, raw love he’d felt for her receded.
The album page was pasted with snapshots of Morag. A squinting girl in a white communion dress. Older and taller between her Aunt Nell and Uncle Roddy, an unhitched sleigh behind them. Then one from high school down in Sydney around the time he’d met her. And several of her and Lauchlin together, she still in school or just out of it, he maybe twenty-one when he’d turned pro and was working at the steel mill, on his own, St. Aubin and the family store behind him, so he’d thought.
“You seemed happy there, a lot of the time. Weren’t you?” he said.
Morag looked at him. “I was. But not all the time.” She turned a page. “Look at you,” she said. There he was in the Venetian Gardens gym, posing at the speed bag, gloves raised, Blair Richardson looking on in street clothes, handsome, unmarked. A clipping from the
Post: Canadian middleweight champ checks out Cape Breton prospect Lauchlin MacLean.
“Blair showed up for a workout that day,” Lauchlin said. “Home from college in Boston. Had a fight for the British Empire title in the works. I sparred a bit with him, but I was nervous as hell, I was in awe of him. Jesus, he had a right hand. Thirty-five knock-outs.”
“Aunt Nell cut these out of the
Post,
every one of your fights.”
“God bless her. The first time you brought me here she said, Oh we always liked the boxing matches in this house. A gang in the kitchen, packed around an old battery radio listening to Joe Louis
fight Max Schmeling the second time. When Louis won, they went nuts, she said.”
“I read your write-ups to you. Remember? I’d bring the
Post
around. If there was a photo, I’d save it. I lost them in my moves, I guess.” Morag tapped another page. “Look at this.
Big test fight for MacLean.
”
“You didn’t have to go far for a test fight in those days. Harold Donovan. God, look at him. Glace Bay Forum. I could never get set for a good combination, I might catch him with a jab, two jabs, but he’d slip my cross. I knocked him down later, he got up at nine. You can just see my legs there. Took a decision off him. I was green, I should have knocked him out. I…” He smiled, shook his head. “
Should have.
Sorry. That’s my middle name.”
He stared out the side window where fog far out at sea was advancing, white with sun. Morag touched his cheek, withdrew her hand. “Do you want to talk, or what?”
Lauchlin closed the album. “I start to feel faded like that old newsprint.” He looked at her face, his hands in his lap. “Do you still have that boxing robe I gave you, by any chance?” He wanted her to have kept it, foolish though that sentiment was.
“The green one, with your name on the back.”
“My
ring
name, dear.”
“It’s not the sort of thing I would throw away. A long time ago I put it on a few times when I was alone, bloodstains and all. Crazy, eh? Did you want it back?”
“No, no, God, no. I might be tempted to make a fool of myself. Just curious. It cost me a few bucks and I wasn’t earning much. I had that chance to go down to Minneapolis-St. Paul, a good fight town in those days, maybe get started in the States.”
For that prospect, the satin robe. Irish green, with yellow cuffs and lapels and tie, on the back a bolt of yellow splitting his name, “Lightning Lauchlin.” Draped on the hanger it had embarrassed him,
something out of a bad movie, but when he shouldered into it the first time, he felt an unexpected pride—he was not Lauchlin in grey gym sweats or a dowdy terry cloth robe, this was identity, colour, the performer he had to become for a raucous crowd three minutes at a time, a fighter, a name. It hadn’t been his idea, the name, he didn’t want it, it was corny, but they said, Listen, you got to have a gimmick, and a promoter from Minneapolis said over the phone, You come down here and we’ll bill you as the Irish Thunderbolt, but Lauchlin said I’m not Irish, everyone knows I’m as Scotch as you get. Doesn’t mean a thing in the States, the promoter said, down here you got to be Irish or Italian, a Scotchman won’t cut it, won’t draw a crowd, and you don’t look like a dago. How about McLaverty? Lauchlin McLaverty, the Irish Thunderbolt. No? How about we just change the spelling, make it like McLane? Lauchlin said okay, maybe, when you get me a bout. In Minneapolis they’d changed Gordie MacDougall’s name to McDugan. But Lauchlin didn’t get that fight anyway as it turned out, he wore his new robe right here at home but he lost a decision to Benny Mowbry from Saint John, a bout he should have taken, in his prime as he was, a step up for him. But that night his heart gave him problems not even he could slough off, tightness in his chest, pain, and his wind went on him, the best shape of his life and his stamina gave out by the fifth round, he didn’t understand what was happening to him, his mouth gaping for breath, he had to clinch, he had to hang on, Johnny urging him from the apron, Your
nose,
breathe through your nose! Lauchlin thinking, The way I feel,
two
noses wouldn’t do it. He lost every round after the third, after starting out sharp, in command, getting off well, the fight going just as he and Johnny knew it should, and then it wasn’t. The green robe, trying it out that night, wearing it as he’d climbed through the ropes, draped over his shoulders as he left the ring, feeling its absurdity. He’d given it to Morag after the Mowbry fight, he wouldn’t wear it again. Later that night he was lying on his bed, still hurting, sore. Morag was with him
and he wanted her to take the robe and burn it, but she said, Take it I will but I’ll never burn it. Let my mother wash it then, he said, there’s more blood than there should be in that gorgeous satin. No, she said, Auntie Nell will do that. He let her have the robe because he loved her and its sweat and promise still meant something. When it graced her body, he forgot how it had looked on him, he had shucked it like a skin. Morag was as tall as he was, her long legs he’d admired since the first time he saw her. That night when they were alone in his room in Sydney, she came back from the bathroom wearing the green robe. He undid the tie and she slipped it off at the edge of the bed, naked, lovely, the robe at her feet, he didn’t know what in hell was the matter with him, crying when she hugged him, nothing like that had ever come over him in his whole life.
“Too bad you didn’t get to Minnesota,” Morag said.
“It didn’t turn out all that well for Gordie, did it? Fine for a while, travelled around the States with that Flanagan stable. Then he did a stint on skid row, filtering antifreeze through loaves of bread.”
“Gordie came back from that, he kicked it. He saw some of the world too.”
“Ah, the world, the world.” Morag had travelled eagerly as soon as she’d had the means, and the further she’d gone, the more Lauchlin had dug in his heels at home. He was uneasy anyway among the welltravelled, defensive, cynical, early on it had caused friction between him and Morag who loved to fly off somewhere new, and Frank had pestered him to take trips. You have to get off the Island, he’d say, if you want to get anywhere. “Nell never went anywhere, didn’t hurt her.”