“Listen, Auntie Nell wanted to but she had no chance, taking care of the old woman for so long when she was young, way down north there. She told me, Morag, you get off and away when you’re ready to go. Don’t stay here. I’d have gone to Boston if I could, she said, I was over twenty before I ever earned a dollar of my own. You go to Boston, Morag. Make your way there.”
“Well, so you did,” Lauchlin said. He got up and moved about the room, touching things on the mantel, a clapperless bell from an old shipwreck, a brass artillery shell Roddy brought home from the Great War, as he always called it. Lauchlin had liked Nell’s little eccentricities, her fondness for ghost stories, her solitary walks in the snow, the glittery rope necklaces she loved and jangly bracelets. She was gone but the house spoke her everywhere. He picked up a framed photograph propped against the clock. “I’ve never seen this.”
“The English kids on the ship? Look at them, all lined up for their picture. In their best clothes, not a clue about what awaits them. The little girls in their felt hats and white collars, squinting, grinning in the sun. Can you find Nell? She was just ten, for God’s sake. That broad smile, you can’t miss her.”
“That’s got to be her there, eh?”
“Imagine, shipping her all the way from England to the back end of Cape Breton, 1930. She arrived at that house by horse and wagon, a smart little girl who’d lived in Liverpool. Hadn’t the slightest idea where she was going. I’m sure she fared better than most of those poor kids, she had pluck. They were sent here to work, that’s all. Cheap labour.” The children were posed in Sunday clothing, as if for bright futures, and their chaperones, three respectable men in suits and fedoras and two matronly women in large hats, stood behind them. Two older boys were peering through a life preserver stencilled with the ship’s name.
“God knows where they ended up,” Lauchlin said.
“Working for farmers out west, a lot of them, like little slaves. No one thought anything was wrong with that? Sending foster kids to Canada because their parents were too poor to get them out of the government home? Nell was shipped here to look after an invalid woman, Mary MacLeod, Mary and her brothers trained her in the house, and she did it until the old woman died. Oh, she was homesick, sitting there wondering what kind of people she’d come to live with,
speaking Gaelic all around her, neighbours dropping in to look her over, she said, talking about her no doubt, and what gibberish is this? she was thinking. There was a lot of hard work into it, she told me, but they were good to her, the old woman and her bachelor brothers. But isolated, Lord, yes. She grew up fast. She had no childhood, she never knew what childhood was. Everyone around her was over fifty, no kids at all except at school. No wonder she took me in so gladly as a baby, and gave me love. She knew. Here, I felt old, she said, not a young child like I did in Liverpool. I cried when she told me that story about herself. She never went on about England, just that one night when I found her photos in the attic, her mother, her brothers. She didn’t mean to but she passed that fear on to me, Lauchlin. I came to feel it—that your feet can be swept out from under you and you can be carried off, God knows where. And it happened to me. I didn’t expect it would be you who’d do the sweeping, and I was God knows where for a long time.”
“Old pictures can be a curse, Morag. We shouldn’t dwell on them.”
“Go ‘way, and you with photos all over your walls. Blair’s up there I bet. You wanted to be as good.”
“That was a mistake. I thought I
could
be.”
“So did we all, Lauchlin.”
“A man could want worse,” he said. “He was champion, more ways than one.”
“Yes, and he had a lovely wife and a child on the way, and dead at thirty of a brain tumour. Here you are, still breathing.”
“Oh, I do have that, Morag, Peg of Boston. My breathing is reliable.”
“I never asked you to call me Peg, if it bothers you.”
“It’s another you, that’s all. Peg’s a person I don’t know so well.”
“You could have, you could have come to Boston where she lives and works and spent too much time waiting for you.”
“Boston would’ve killed me.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic, Lauchlin. It never killed lesser Cape Breton men, and Boston is full of them.”
He watched her go to the seaward window, closing her arms about her.
“Nell’s favourite view,” she said. “God rest her soul. She took over this place when Grandma passed away, the two of them here for so long with no men until Roddy came home for good. In this house most of her life with the sea out the window, nobody left but her after Roddy died. Now it’s mine, Lauchlin. I’m glad it’s mine, but I’m afraid of that too. It takes hold of me sometimes when I’m alone here, it scares me a little. I loved my Auntie Nell, but I don’t want to live out my days like she did. A woman who should have had children, but Roddy was so much older than her. He was the last one along in a big family. Always one or two who stayed at home, there wasn’t enough marriage to go around, I guess, none left for them.”
“You’re not going to end up like that, Morag, dear. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“You wouldn’t, no. You never have. Anyway, Nell left you this.” She opened a battered case propped in a chair and lifted out a fiddle.
“Roddy’s violin? Well, Jesus, it’s a lovely old instrument, but I don’t even play the air fiddle.”
“She told me, last time I saw her, I want Lauchlin to have this. We walked through the house and she’d say so-and-so gets this, someone wanted that, and I wrote it down. She knew you didn’t play.”
Lauchlin held it in his palms as if she’d just handed him a baby. “It should go to a player, don’t you think? A lot of good young fiddlers around now.”
“She always liked you. Always asking after you. To her, you were a player, in a way.”
He plucked the strings softly. “A broken string there.”
“Easy to find a new one.”
“Remember the night Roddy took it out and played just for the two of us? We danced right there in the kitchen.”
“Didn’t he say he’d play at our wedding? That brought you up short, boy, scared you to death. I had to convince you later I never mentioned a wedding to Roddy or anybody else. He just saw we were happy…”
“He was a great old fella. There’s a lot of music inside this box.” Lauchlin drew the bow slowly, lightly over the strings, then set fiddle and bow back in the chair. “I’m not the man to call it up.”
“As a dancer you were more than fair.”
“My footwork has suffered some, Peg Morag.” He faced her, smiling. “I could dance with you right enough.”
“Let’s walk. I’ve been indoors so much and there’s a breeze now.”
HE LET HER LEAD THE WAY
. “Nell’s last little journey, this, they found her over there, face down,” Morag said, but she kept on toward the shore. “She was soaked with rain, but she had wildflowers in her fist. I liked that.” The path meandered through the level meadow toward the sea, a horizon wide and blue. Lauchlin’s brother Frank said this coast reminded him of Ireland, but for the groves of conifers in the hills. The Northumberland Strait was struck with afternoon sun as the path descended steeply to the shore. Not a swimming beach, it lacked the sand some further stretches had, here all rocks and stones. On summer nights in their early years he and Morag had come down here anyway, built a small fire, sat on boulders kissing fiercely until the surf hissed over the coals and grabbed coldly at their legs. Or they stayed above in the grass, near the cliff edge, there was no one and nothing to bother them, they loved all weathers then, they huddled in rain, laughing, they didn’t need sun, they were powerful with each other, immune to wind or cold. Now and then Nell might call for
them from the house but she never sought them out. Morag had been a good Catholic girl, and Lauchlin, being older anyway, had respected that for a while. She’d been rehearsed in all the rote responses to a man’s desires and he had no quick argument against them, not at those moments he most needed to, when they had tasted so much of each other there was nowhere else to go, too much warm skin under their hands, their lips, that new delirium, almost enough but not quite. Flushed and fit after a workout, Lauchlin loved to be with her, his body seemed invincible then, his mind sharp, he gave off some special heat, a kind of glow. Then one night in a gathering blizzard they had stopped in St. Aubin on their way north from Sydney, where Morag was boarding with cousins her last year of high school, and Lauchlin’s mother had said, leery of Catholics though she was, There is no way you can take this girl all the way to Inverness, you’ll stop right here, I see little enough of you now as it is, you away in Sydney, and that blessèd boxing. After his mother was asleep, Lauchlin slipped across cold floors into Morag’s bedroom that had been his brother’s before he left for university, she was awake too, and he slid under her quilts, Just to get warm, he said, rubbing his icy feet against hers, then I’ll jump back in my own. They chattered in whispers about the cold, the snow rising on the window ledge, and soon their underwear was off, jammed into the foot of the bed. Naked in a room where they could see their breath, they flung back the covers, legs entwined. Laughing quietly, they offered their heat to the winter air, cooling off on purpose so that their next embrace, unimaginably tight, would be delicious in its warmth, rich, ultimate, fusing, nothing in the world as contained, as private. In spells they slept, they woke, turning into each other, slept again. Lauchlin woke alone, startled by window light, and then Morag’s heat against his back, her arm lightly across his chest, her breath peaceful, or so it sounded to him, he could think of nothing else he wanted more than this, and he allowed himself this gladness for a few seconds before he swung out into the cold
room, glancing quickly at the laden trees, the windblown drifts in the field, his mother would be up soon. He left his door ajar and leapt under cold sheets, shivering, smiling. Morag. Jesus.
“I’ve met a woman who’s blind,” Lauchlin said as they poked along the shore. Morag was long-stepping from one big sandstone rock to another. Some were emblazoned with iron oxide designs, swirls of red landscapes, like storms on Mars. With a sandalled foot she pointed to her favourite, a half-embedded stone decorated like a cave painting, mysterious and abstract. “Wild horses,” Lauchlin said, kneeling to admire it, its surface warm to the hand. “Rearing up, they are, like flames.” Morag’s foot, tanned from sunbathing, was near his face and he gave her toes a quick kiss.
“Careful,” she said. “I’m ticklish there. Who is this blind woman then?”
“Wife of a friend.” He plucked out from the stones the neck of a green beer bottle, flung it further where the waves washed out into foam. “You ever know anyone who was blind?”
“Sort of. In Boston. He ran a cigarette and candy stall in a post office. We used to chat about this and that. He was there for years. You put a bill on the counter and he could tell what it was, a dollar bill or a twenty, he’d just brush his fingers over it.”
“But you only saw him, you didn’t know him.”
“How would I know him? That was his life, that stall. He almost lived in it.”
“He might have surprised you, he was more than that stall.”
“I don’t think he wanted to surprise anyone, Lauchlin. He had enough to deal with. Getting to know this blind woman, are you?”
“You could say, a little. I’ve read to her. That sort of thing.” He wanted to hear what that sounded like. Was it so odd, as his mother had implied, just not done with a married woman? “I know her better than I did.”
“And her husband?”
“Fine with him, he knows me. It’s what she likes, so it’s fine.”
“So you’re sort of like…what? A visitor of shut-ins? A social worker?”
“A friend. Just a friend.”
Morag gave him a skeptical smile. She sat down on the rock.
“The man in the post office, he said one day, out of the blue, You’re pretty, I can tell. It shocked me. I blushed, and I don’t blush easy.”
“Why? He was right.”
“Was he? I wondered what made him think that. How could he possibly know anything about how I looked? He never touched me.”
“He liked you, he wanted you to be pretty. Only natural.”
“One day he just wasn’t there anymore. The stall was gone. No one seemed to know what happened to him. But he was older of course.”
“Like me.”
“Even beyond your years, Lauchlin, if you can believe that. How is old Frank, by the way?”
“He wants me take a trip to Scotland with him.”
“Well go, then. You always wanted to. Get off this island for a while.”
“Ten days in the Hebrides.”
“So? Take it.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Lauchlin, it’s the old country. It’s not like you’re flying to Morocco or someplace. What’s to keep you from going?”
“Nothing really.” Lauchlin had been nowhere more foreign than the Nova Scotia mainland, and two trips to Boston by car back in his boxing days. People like his brother, expertly in transit, at ease in the larger world, who talked offhand about the landscapes of Europe, about renting cars and sailing through this city or country, fluent
in the food and drink, the charming out-of-the-way lodgings and villages, made Lauchlin feel hopelessly bound to St. Aubin, unsophisticated, at his age he could never catch up if he tried. Boxing, he hadn’t
needed
to go off the Island, plenty of fighters and matches right here. If he had climbed high enough in the rankings, then sure, he would have gone beyond the Maritimes, west or to the States where the big fights were. But after his heart started to fail him, that was it for the ring, no fights at all, only memories of them. Still, Scotland had been different: he had always wanted to know what it felt like to be where his people came from, up there on Harris, and on Mull. Yet he couldn’t turn his mind in that direction, not now.
“Maybe we should go back. The wind’s up,” he said.
Up the cliff path, the sun was growing hazy behind them, fading above the sea. Spray leapt into the light as waves boomed over the rocks, foam scrambling upward. At the top of the cliff Morag took his hand and they said no more until they reached the house.