Tena was tracing its shape slowly with her fingertip, her eyes closed. She said suddenly, “I read once about a marine biologist who was blind. He did his research in tropical waters somewhere, I forget, feeling around in the shallows for shellfish, his specialty. There were poisonous creatures in that water, you know, he could easily have died
from, been stung. His fingers were so sensitive, they were better than eyes really, for that. He could feel the tiniest details by touch, all the complicated little differences. He discovered a new species, if I remember. I thought he was amazing then, but now…I’d like to have met him though. What courage, my God. And sometimes I’ve been afraid to reach into an old cupboard, because of webs and spiders.”
“He must have been blind since he was born,” Lauchlin said.
“I’m sure he was. Hard to think of that as a good thing, but…”
They reached a turn in the beach, the tone of the water darkened only a few feet from the shore. A new cottage appeared up on the bank, an aluminum outboard beached below it. A portly man and a woman were lounging on the deck under baseball caps and sunglasses, exposing more pale skin than was wise. They stared in that accusing way dark glasses have before they waved and Lauchlin waved back though he didn’t know them.
“I think we’re in someone’s summer paradise,” Lauchlin said. “Maybe we should go back.”
He brought the blanket down to the sand and they laid out the lunch she had packed, the sun warm on them. Tena said she wished she’d brought a towel to dry her feet, the wet sand was gritty.
“Here, this will do. Allow me.” He cupped her heel in his hand and gently brushed the sand away with a corner of the blanket, she flexed her toes back and forth, smiling, amused. “Between the toes too, if you please, sir,” she said. Her feet were slender, warm, the bones delicate.
“As you wish, ma’am.” He puffed at sand grains, his pursed lips as close to her skin as he dared. “There.”
“You have a nice touch,” she said. “For a boxer.”
“Ex-boxer.”
Tena handed him a sandwich and he noted the neat layers of tomato and ham and lettuce. There were hard-boiled eggs, pickles, a container of cole slaw. “What a fine lunch, Tena.”
“Thank you for bringing me here.” She had taken several bites of sandwich when she suddenly stopped and set the rest of it back on the wax paper. “When I was a girl I saw a black-and-white movie about being blind.” She chewed slowly and seemed to swallow with difficulty until she took a mouthful of water.
“There was a scene in a cafeteria where a blind girl was at a table eating, all by herself. About fifteen or so she’d be, that age when anyway you’re so open to hurt. She was blind born, but even so she was aware of the other people eating, the sound of silverware and talk around her, and so there was an awful self-consciousness in her, painful to watch. She was not working her fork and her knife in a normal way, and she knew that. There was no grace to her, her hands playing over the food until her fingers were soiled with it. She would crane her neck carefully toward a piece of meat, her mouth wide and her lips trembling. At home of course she could take her food as crudely as she wished, but here she was surrounded by strangers. Her eyes jumped around in her head, a terrible nervousness, I thought. I didn’t know that your eyes do that if you’ve never had sight, they have nothing to fix on, they just roam helplessly. She broke my heart. But she ate, God love her, she finished that food. And she had never
seen
in her whole life. Think of it. Everything she knew came from touch and noise. She was good at it, at making do without sight. She got around on her own, even in that cafeteria. She had a reference to things I’ll never get because I know what it’s like to have eyes. I’m always yearning to see again, reaching out for something familiar that I can
see.
That girl tuned into everything with her hands and her ears. Me, I was in between somewhere. What I had left didn’t seem like much, not enough, except for Clement. I told him, listen, go, leave, I’m going blind, I’m going useless. But he stayed. He didn’t leave me.”
Lauchlin was quiet. The tide was turning, beginning to curl past the point. “You’re anything but useless,” he said.
“I can make a lunch.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
She tugged from her blouse pocket three small stones and dropped them on the blanket. “I liked the feel of these. Don’t ask me why. I don’t have the fingers to tell if they’re pretty or plain.”
“Let’s see, that oval one is sort of a drab green, Tena, polished as it is. But this other one has a tiny fossil in it. A shell, it looks like.”
“Really? I
do
have sensitive fingers after all. So I’ll keep that one. I might take up geology, Lauchlin, who knows. No poisonous fish, at least.”
“You could start here, Tena. Cape Breton Island was high as the Himalayas once, millions of years ago, part of a vast range that ran clear over to Scotland. It split apart later and the Atlantic Ocean opened up, and we’ve been receding from Scotland ever since, ten centimetres a year. Won’t raise our airfares much, will it? The geology is similar, the stones, the fossils, here and over there. The Highlanders sort of linked it up again, I guess. Now we’ve just got the long mountain over there, not very high, waiting for the next ice age to grind it down.”
“It’s not coming soon, I hope. I’m not wild about ice. I took a fall last winter on the back steps. A bruise on my hip big as a dinner plate. I got to feeling like an old lady, taking little baby steps outside.”
“Fifty thousand years or so until the ice age, Tena.”
“Oh, good, I’ll be much better at all of this by then. And Clement should be done with his milling, I guess, so he can hold me up anyway.”
“You’d like him to be done now, I guess.”
“I want him to get out of the woods and free of that man. I feel strange about him, just the mention of him.”
“Cooper’s not a man to partner with, but Clement didn’t know that of course. People aren’t always what they seem.”
“We could’ve done without the money, if there’s any out of it at all. He was going to save up for a boat, try fishing. There’s talk now the fish plant is in trouble. Same old story here, isn’t it? Some
business starts up, riding high on government money, people get a few jobs for a while, then it’s gone. I couldn’t blame him for wanting something of his own.” Tena turned her face toward the water. “Is it deep out there?”
“In this stretch it is. Much deeper on the southside. That could hold a Loch Ness monster.”
“Any place can hold a monster, Lauchlin. I can feel water that’s deep, I knew it was deep. I don’t even have to set foot in it.”
The wind died away, the sun grew quickly hot. They drank cold spring water from a Thermos. “There’s an eagle up there, Tena, soaring away.”
“Did you know they can see eight times better than us? Three thousand feet in the air an eagle can spot a mouse in the grass. I don’t know how they found that out, but I’d be happy seeing two steps in front of me.”
THEY STARTED UP THE HILL
, Lauchlin taking a different route than the shady path they’d come down on. It was steeper, but the terrain more open, the footing more predictable. The air turned still and muggy. The sun was hot on his nape as he climbed ahead of her and the heat seemed to fatigue him. He didn’t want to rest so soon, but the grass was brittle and dry and sometimes his shoes slipped on it. He was conscious of the sweat on his face, you’d think he’d been running, not walking slow easy steps up this slope because a blind woman had her hand on his shoulder. He paused by a big grey stump, its wood checked and gapped with age. Surely she heard his hard breathing and felt the sweat in his shirt. He’d been too aware of his heart the first months after it went haywire, its trips and lurches frightened him, the sudden pain, like some struggling thing was trapped in his chest. But later he came to wait calmly, the tantrums of the heart would pass.
“Here’s a tree stump, Tena. It’s a fair seat. Sit down, take a break.”
“Lauchlin, you’re forever after me to sit down. Are you all right yourself?”
“I’m fine, girl. Sit. Little out of shape for this, but…”
She reached out for his face and he instinctively averted it so he could wipe it on his sleeve, but then he waited for her hand, his mouth poised to speak until her cool and soothing fingertips traced the contours of his face, pausing on his lips before she lifted her hand away. He closed his eyes.
“You take the seat, Tena,” he said, “I’m cooler when I stand.” He eased her onto the stump. At least she couldn’t see him, pouring with sweat, his hands trembling, from the heat, from her touch. Lord, if his heart turned on him here, if he had to tumble gasping into this grass, he would as soon take the count and be done with it than lie stricken at her feet, humbled beyond recovery. Jesus Christ, he felt old.
“I’m just going to sit right here on the grass, Tena.” His legs were shaky, no way around that, but his strength was coming back. They shared the Thermos and he slipped a nitro pill under his tongue. “Lauchlin of the Bad Heart, that’s me.”
“How is that you?”
“Around here if you give anyone a hook, they’ll hang a name on it. I’d just come home after the fight where my heart finally turned bad on me. A doctor said in the dressing room, I don’t like the sound of your heart, you get home and have it checked good. He was a two-bit fight doctor who wouldn’t stop a bout if your eyes fell out, but in Sydney later Dr. Fraser said it was quits. So, I was in the store a week afterward and a few folks had gathered there, hearing I was back, and that I’d lost a fight I should’ve won. You know, part sympathy and part nosy. Finally I told them, Look, I have to hang up the gloves. I’ve got a heart condition, that’s all there is to it, can’t be fixed. Oh, lots of discussion over that. They wanted details. Sad, indignant, disappointed, keen to blame someone or something. God,
what a shame, and you on your way up, boy, and so on. Then old Willie Gordon, as he’s going out the door, Willie Mor, Big Willie, he turns back to me and says with deep mournfulness, as only a man from Tarbot can do, Och, Lauchlin of the Bad Heart. That did it. Mine forever. Sometimes in jest, sometimes just to peg me, Oh,
that
Lauchlin MacLean. Lauchlin without the lightning.”
“I shouldn’t have let you take me down here, Lauchlin, really.”
“No, no, dear, it’s just the heat. I’m cooling off already.”
Mosquitoes from the bog had found them. He yanked out a spruce sapling and whisked them away from Tena’s face. Shaded under her broad-brimmed hat, she looked at peace, her eyes nearly shut as she raised her face calmly toward a slight breeze off the water. What was it about her blindness that aroused this confusing tenderness and yearning in him, as if his very need to protect her, to aid her, fed at the same time his desire for her? Yes, he wanted to touch her, he wanted to know what it was like to take her in his arms, even as he pushed that feeling away. In this grass he and Morag had made love a long time ago. Maybe that’s why he’d taken this route up the hill, though he hadn’t remembered that afternoon until now, their growls and murmurs, the smell of the grass in the air, the bugs they’d joked about, feasting on their naked, oblivious skin as they’d feasted on each other.
M
ORAG
was leaving soon and he drove up west to take her to a dance in Mabou, that’s what she’d asked him to do, she didn’t want them to sit in the house and then wander upstairs as they inevitably would. I’d like to go out, she said, on a date. All right, he said, fine, ignoring the tone of challenge in her voice. At the dance they met people they’d known years back when Lauchlin had spent time up here visiting Morag and Auntie Nell and Uncle Roddy, and he even danced two sets, and not badly at that, and then he sat down because he knew someone here was bound to remember his heart and ask him about it. He watched Morag dance with men she’d known and there was nothing to be jealous about because at least in these parts he was still her main man, wasn’t he? If any of these men had designs on that girl, they could forget it. But there was Greece on the horizon, and a man he’d never met who might marry her. He could not get his mind around that, that she’d marry a stranger and pull away from him for good. J.J. he’d known well, as well as he’d known that the man could never make a husband, for Morag or any other woman. Kevin Donnelly, a man he’d sparred with at the Sydney Police Club in the early days, sat
down next to him. I’d be a heavyweight now, Kevin said, patting his belly, I never got into it deep like you did, Lauchlin, but I liked the workouts. They recalled boxers from that time, swapped names and fights, those early four-round scraps and battles, short on artistry but great wars, some of them, young fellas out there swinging. Rocky MacDougall? He’s a schoolteacher in Antigonish since years, Kevin said, and Lauchlin wondered if he were better at it than himself. You heard poor Gordie’s got Lou Gehrig’s disease? But he can still wheel himself to the Steel City Tavern for a drink. Tough as nails, Gordie, Lauchlin said. You were no pushover either, Kevin. Ah, I just got a hell of a kick out of it, Kevin said, but you were good, you had a feel for the ring, you know? Like Blair Richardson, Jesus, what a natural, way ahead of older guys like me when he was still a kid. He came up fast, Lauchlin said, he had the gifts, right enough, pro at sixteen. Kevin recalled Lauchlin’s fight with Gaston Gagnon, how that fella had hooked off his jab so well until Lauchlin tagged him with a right cross to the heart and took the steam right out of him. One of my better fights, Lauchlin said, he hadn’t much left after that punch. When someone else talked about his fights, he let their versions hold sway, listening politely to this other take on memory. But in his own mind they would return with a singular and selective vividness he examined again and again. Of course he had forgotten details, and he was sometimes left with new configurations of the experience that surprised and perplexed him, as if his fights were not clear, unalterable events at all but ever-shifting, dodging phenomena that would not stand still.
Outside in his car they shared a few nips from Kevin’s bottle poking from a brown paper bag.
“How’s the body holding up?” Lauchlin said.
“On blood thinners. I’m so full of Warfarin, a rat’d drop dead if he bit me. You?”
“Steady enough.”
“First time I’ve seen Morag in a good while,” Kevin said. “You still paired off, you two?”
“We’re old friends. I don’t know about the pairing.”
“She’s held up well, that girl. Handsome as ever.”
“Jesus, Kevin, she’s only forty-eight.”
“Wouldn’t have guessed.”
There was a high moon on the sea, a wavering corridor of light, when they turned down Morag’s driveway. The dance had made her happy, the music and the clamour, meeting old friends, she told him that during the drive, and Lauchlin could not help but feel that for now yes they were a couple, going home, a river of moonlight on the water beyond the house. She had culled Aunt Nell’s possessions, the bits and leavings and corners of neglect, she had cleaned all the rooms and dispelled the musty air through windows open to sea winds and the raucous afternoon sun. She had displayed carefully artifacts that spoke of Nell and Uncle Roddy, and the life Morag had lived there with them, pictures and ornaments on mantel and tables, woven blankets and throws on sofa and chairs, quilts on the walls. It had the air of a private museum, but Lauchlin did not tell her that. The house was arranged as she wanted it, it was hers now. She would fly out for Boston the next day. She made them tea as Auntie Nell would have done when they showed up late, and set out bread and jam and date squares.
“How is your blind friend?” Morag said, waiting for the water to boil, her back to the stove.
Lauchlin was looking at the jam jar, labelled “blueberry” in Nell’s shaky hand.
“All considered, I guess pretty well. I took her to Munro Point a couple days ago.”
“Well, I won’t ask what you did there.”
“Come on, Morag. It was an outing for her, she doesn’t get much of that. She’s around home there alone a lot of the time when
Clement is working. There’s just the two of them. Or maybe three, in a way.”
“You mean yourself?” Morag raised an eyebrow at him.
“No, I don’t. What are you thinking? This fella who was partners with Clement, they fell out, and he’s been lurking in the background, there and not there. Tena suspects he comes around when she’s alone at the house. She can’t be sure, of course.”
“What would he do? What has he done?”
“Nothing you could call the Mounties for. Nobody knows him that well, he’s got no history here. I feel I have to help keep an eye on her, you know?”
“You’re more than capable of that, Lauchlin.”
“That’s all I’m telling you, I’m not saying another word about her.”
Morag poured their tea and they sat at the table. She watched him eat.
“You look a little tired tonight,” she said.
He glanced up at her. “I’m not as tired as you think, Peg Morag.”
“Aren’t you, now? Well, we don’t have any Hungarian wine handy. Just a pot of Red Rose.”
He didn’t speak until he’d emptied his cup of tea. “So, I’m seeing you off.”
“I’ll be back this summer,” she said. “I have another week or so. Still things to do here in the house, get it ready for winter.”
“And this fella, this guy with money, you might be married to him by then.”
“He wants marriage, yes.”
“And you?”
“If I can’t love him on a Greek island, where can I? He’s older, an older man.”
“There’s a Gaelic saying or two about old men and marriage.”
“I don’t want to hear them. Anyway, here we are, in the old house. I’ve got it looking pretty good since you were here, haven’t I?”
“You have. We’re keepers of old houses, you and me. Now don’t sell out for a catalogue house, all neat and low and plastic, will you. A honeymoon here?”
“No, I don’t see that happening. He might visit here later.”
She seemed calm to him. The old strains between them had not surfaced, maybe there hadn’t been time, but he wanted her to leave feeling good about him at least. He would not let himself believe that she would be gone to another man, again, for that would mean he’d have to devise a way to prevent it, have to set himself between them somehow, and he had neither the courage nor the will to reveal to Morag that he wanted her, because of course he wanted her as he had her now—the sheer appeal and comfort of her physical self, of what he’d always loved about her, but without facing up to the life he’d been living for so long, with just himself to answer for, to push along through the world, he could not take on the weight of another, he was not equipped. He knew nothing about this man with money and a nose for Greek islands, whether or not he was strong enough to hold onto Morag, not like J.J., a weak soul, a man wedded to drink. And, too, there was Tena now, kneeling in shallows, sifting water intently through her fingers as if she had lost something in the bottom sand, a gentle frown on her face, surely aware he was watching her nearby, at least she was safe. If that mattered to her, or how much, he could not say, but it mattered to him. He thought about her too often, too easily, as he was now. When he spoke with her, she sometimes cocked her head slightly, listening, like she was forming him in a new way, and he liked that, that she found him attractive just hearing him, sensing him, whereas before, in her sight, he’d been only the man in the store who’d pumped gas into Clement’s truck. She would turn her face suddenly toward him, as if she was trying to capture
something about him that she couldn’t see. She told him one day, You are your voice, I’ve never seen you, barely touched you. It excited him, that degree of her attention directed his way, unrealized, yet he could have told her, No, you
did
see me once when you first arrived here, you had your sight then, and I made no impression on you at all, your eyes skimmed over me like I was a doorpost, you were looking at something else, far off, maybe the mountain, I don’t know. Well, who could’ve known what would happen to them later? No one. If Lauchlin on that day had said something she’d remember him for, he might have gotten a little hold on her, just that much, so she’d wonder a bit about him, but instead they were lost in banalities, Clement and him, out by the gas pumps, so Lauchlin missed his chance that day, if he had one, Clement was still courting her then after all, they were not man and wife. Yet what the sight of him had not done, his voice had, she had a sense of his presence. Oh, it was vain of him, true, but she made him feel fresh, different, unencumbered by his familiar self. And here was Morag in front of him who had always loved him as he was. Only God knew why.
“Morag,” he said, “you don’t have to fall
out
of love with a person to fall
in
love with someone else, do you?”
She smiled, shook her head. “What are you thinking? It’s not the same love, not to my mind, not equal. It’s…weaker. There’s a heat that never burns out, I think, and you can’t spread that kind of love around.”
“And this fella, this man you might wed…what kind are we talking about?”
“You know, I don’t really want to discuss him with you, Lauchlin. You took up too much of my love, for a long time. I never had enough left for other men. And they know it, the decent ones do. They know love when they see it and when they don’t.”
“I never demanded that of you, did I? I hope I didn’t. I never said love me or nobody.”
“Not in words. No, you didn’t do that. But love doesn’t need words, does it. After a while you have to feel, well, that’s love if anything is. He doesn’t touch me the way you do. There are looks, and favours, and kindnesses. Things add up. He’s not you, and together he and I are not us. Nobody else is ever like us. Are they?”
“
Socraichdidh am posadh an gaol,
Peg Morag. Marriage sobers love.”
“Did you memorize that? You don’t take me seriously, Lauchlin.”
“I take everything seriously, dear. Better if I didn’t. I don’t know anymore what it takes to want marriage. I don’t have that want, I guess. I do have others.”
“You know,” Morag said, “when I’m away from here, when I’m in Boston or any other place beyond the Strait of Canso, I can manage without Lauchlin MacLean. I go for long stretches without him even in my mind.”
“But right now you’re here, Morag, and so is he.” Lauchlin smiled, seizing the moment. “Lauch’s the main event, you have to do a couple rounds with me, the last before I retire.”
“I feel more like one of those card girls in bikinis, the ones who circle the ring between rounds holding up the next number.”
“You’d make a fine one. I can see you in—”
“Stop it, Lauchlin. Listen, you finish the tea. I’m going upstairs and I’ll come back down to say goodnight.”
He listened to her movements overhead, the slow compression of her footsteps in the old stamped-tin ceiling. The night had chilled down, he could feel the cool breath of it from the back door. He lay his head on the table. What kept a man with a woman? What complicated facets of her? You woke up, she was sleeping next to you. Years of days and nights. There had to be a spark that kept striking day after day, that required no thought, no urging. Renewed and inexplicable each morning, strongly felt, peculiar to you and to her. There had to be forgiveness for petty angers and flare-ups, for acts of meanness, irritation, cold silences.
He heard Morag coming down the stairs and raised his head. She stood in the doorway wearing a blue flannel nightshirt past her knees.
“Is that Nell’s?” he said.
“Lauchlin! It’s chilly tonight, if you haven’t noticed.”
“Nothing to worry about when a woman takes to a nightshirt, unless it’s flannel. Oh the feel of flannel, it reminds me of my Granny.”
“I need some flannel in my life. Silk is cool, it’s for the young, and the sleek.”
“You’re more than sleek enough, Granny. Well, as Uncle Lion used to say, Choose your wife with her nightcap on.”
“Are you driving home? It’s awful late. There’s a spare bed, of course.”
“Spare and empty?” He reached across the table and took her hand in his. “You’re all but engaged, girl. And here’s me, the old, worn-out lover who won’t be at the wedding.”
“Poor, poor Lauchlin.” She searched his face. “Why do you always pull me close at times like this? Before I married J.J. you were the same, and afterward you fairly ate me alive.”
“J.J. treated you badly, he never knew the woman he had. Anyway, this might be the last time we can be
here,
the two of us, like we used to be.”
“Lauchlin, you live in used-to-bes. I want a love to come home to. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“I should’ve brought Roddy’s fiddle along. I think I could play a mournful air tonight, I’ve got the music in me now.”
“Good night, Lauchlin.”
It was a tiring drive home, more than it might have been given the dark, and he had to pull over once along Lake O’Law while he gave himself a jolt of fresh air and pissed in the trees, and by the time he was gliding down the long curves of Kerry Mountain toward the bridge, he had the radio up to fend off drowsiness before he hit
the hairpin where more than one sleepy driver had sailed off into the woods for good. But when he reached the store he shook his head clear as his headlights caught a truck pulled up at the pumps, a man pacing slowly back and forth beside it, smoking. Christ, it was Cooper. Lauchlin felt his heart heave in waking anger, that Cooper should be there, now. He turned in and rolled down his window, calling out that the store was closed, but it sounded even to him too much like a challenge. Cooper stopped and squinted into the headlights. His cigarette glowed for a breath, subsided.