“It was long ago, Tena.”
“Could we walk up past the light?”
“If that’s what you want. The footing looks okay, it’s dry.”
“Let me walk ahead of you a little. You just tell me if I’m off the path.”
“You left your cane at home.”
“I hate that cane. I need it, yes, my antennae. Sometimes I feel like a clumsy insect.”
The land narrowed toward the point as they passed the unmanned lighthouse, a white tower rising above a small white house that had about it an odd, shuttered, vaguely mysterious air, locked tight, no windows except a little one high in its seaward gable, behind the pane the staring eye of some device. Ripe timothy grass swished stiffly in the wind, a patch of daisies were defiantly bright and Lauchlin mentioned them.
“Oh, I remember!” she said, bending down to pick one. She touched it to her lips.
Somewhere out in the hazy, eerie sea a groaner buoy rocked. Far up the coast Cape Smokey. The Black Rock cliffs were dark like cake.
“Careful, Tena. We’re getting close to the very point.”
She laughed. “Your points, my points. Which are better?”
She stopped, facing the sea. “We’re high, aren’t we? Quite a drop, I remember. And there’s that long formation of rocks out there ahead. See it, that little island?”
“Yes, Tena.”
“Like a stone submarine, half-sunk? Let’s go on to the end.” She took small steps and he held her lightly by the shoulders.
Dusk spread over the water, the horizon was gone in a pale haze of violet, long thin swells brushed over slabs of rock below, soft spills of sound. He was tense, but he would take her to the prow of this headland if that was her wish, he had hold of her, no idea what was in her mind, this was all feeling and touch. The precipices on either side of them drew closer, the cliff falling cleanly to the clear dark water, submerged rocks rose, shimmered, subsided. He stopped her gently.
“Tena? You wouldn’t want to go further than this.”
“We’re where it’s just wide enough for two feet, aren’t we?”
“Right at the bow. I never went this far, we never got much beyond the lighthouse.”
“You were a temperate young man, you had discipline.”
“I don’t know about the temperance. We’re only a few steps from the edge, Tena.”
A gust of wind rocked them sideways and she drew her breath in sharply as Lauchlin steadied her in his arms. “I’ll hold you,” he said. “Lord, if you slipped, I’d have to go with you, girl. I couldn’t face Clement or anyone else.”
“I want to stay here, right here, for a bit.” She let her head rest back against his face, he tasted her hair. “It runs through my nerves, it tightens them, and they get stronger. Like muscle would. Does that make any sense?”
“I think so. Each time I fought in the ring it seemed like I could take more, I could handle whatever was new. Or so I thought.”
“Yes. I’ve had a lot of new. I’d like more, but of my own choosing. You know where I’d like to go?”
“Where?”
“To the Fairy Hole.”
“Way out Cape Dauphin there? That’s a good hike through woods, Tena.”
“I could do it, if you helped me. I was there once a long time ago but we didn’t get into the cave, the surf was too high.”
“I suppose if we planned it ahead, checked the tides. Took our time maybe, why not?”
The wind picked up and pushed at them and he tightened his arms around her. “If I were out there at sea,” she said, “I’d want to know the lighthouse was manned, that someone was inside it.”
“Campbells kept it when I was young, cousins, on my Granny’s side.” He was just talking, taking in sensations, and he didn’t know
where to go with them, their strange mix—Tena relaxing in his arms, tensing in the gusts, the salt wind, sea noises rising in the rocks below, and somewhere far in the back of this the faint thrumming of the mine’s air. He found himself saying something he didn’t want to say, “We should get on our way, Tena. It’ll be dark soon. Clement will be worried if he beats us home.”
“A couple more minutes, please. I want to take some daisies.” They stood as they were. The wind was shifting to the east and cooling. From a distance, one could have taken them for lovers, and Lauchlin felt such eyes at his back though no one was there that he could see. She was blind. He was holding her so she would not fall.
He guided her down the slope, her arm in his, a clutch of daisies in her hand.
HE WAS TIRED WHEN HE GOT HOME
that night, restless. He sat on the edge of the bed in his undershorts as Johanna passed by his closed door. He knew what was coming next and he cocked his ear for it: through the wall, suddenly out of silence, the winding of her alarm clock before bed. A ritual woven into his childhood, his dad had done it too, it didn’t matter how sick he felt or worn out, he had to reanimate that clock, the sound of that mainspring tightening assured another day. Lauchlin could feel it in his hand, its latent, unwinding energy, and the metallic teeter-totter of its escapement was such a part of his parents’ sleep they would surely have tossed awake without it, but for Lauchlin that sound meant the next day had already begun, its alarm was set, and too soon the dark winter morning would scatter his dreams, school called, chores to be done before breakfast. When he was older and home again, he had bought his mother for Christmas a good quartz clock whose battery would run, he told her, for several years and whose alarm was gentle matins bells, not the prison-break clangour of the old one. She thanked him but
no thanks, hers was fine, she didn’t like hands that slipped silently from one second to the next, she preferred her time demarcated, she wanted to hear its portions meted out, and she even mailed the old alarm clock away when the spring broke and it came back cleaned and ready for her. That new spring will take me further than I am likely to go, she said.
When the clock winding ceased, Lauchlin got up and began to shadowbox in the rippled, muted glass of his dresser mirror. Slow moves, all he wanted was to mime that old movement, even if the face he was jabbing at,
bing bing,
in the dim bedroom light, was his own, older, not cocksure and set anymore but tentative, tense, wary, the bruise in full, sickly bloom, the cut still taped, should’ve got a couple stitches. He’d savoured it there in the stinging rain, the hurt, he had to admit it, he knew he could take Cooper any time, rain or shine, if he did it quickly. But now that jaundiced cheekbone, the telltale tape he wanted only to disappear, fast—nobody knew the truth but Malkie, it was killing them how he got it, something to do with a woman, some said, half-right. He shook out his arms, shrugged his shoulders, stretched his neck side to side, come on, loosen up. Who was that woman way back, the night he fought up in Port Hawkesbury? She’d waited for him outside and he was pleased to see her because he’d won, his third fight with Tommy Flanagan, he had him figured out, knocked him silly in the third round. He had to shake Johnny and Hank first, tell them he was staying over with his aunt and he’d catch the train to Sydney in the morning, and then the woman took him to a dance up west, Port Hood maybe, she wore fishnet hose, he would never forget that. So ungodly sexy, wonderful to feel under your fingers. Was it that the mesh patterned so minutely the smooth skin, that subtlest of textures, there and not there, coolness and warmth? Of course there was the dance hall about them, fishnet legs, no way around it, soft shadows, curves. He ducked, dipped, slid right, left, feinted a jab and came across with a right-hand lead, then a hook, his
bare feet whispering on the rug, his gut was still tight, he clenched it, remembering the blows that had hurt there. Maddy had run her fingers over his ribs, his familiar, ruddied flesh. Not the way Tena had touched his face—trying to see him, know him.
When had he ever been afraid of desire?
He lay on the bed, breathing hard, hands behind his head, smelling his sweat. Clement trusted him. This evening he’d been, yes, a bit put out, but Lauchlin let Tena do the talking, she calmed the man down, convinced him that going to the point was something she had to do, then, this day, it made her happy, and she’d dragooned Lauchlin into taking her there. She did not tell him that they had stood in a hug high above the sea, not two steps from the cliff edge. He and Clement had drunk together in other days, had talked and laughed. They had shown an interest in each other’s lives. Was that not friendship? Not close, not deep, true. But still. Who clocked you? Clement said to him at the door, peering at his eye, and Lauchlin said, Whisky and the stairway, and Clement said, Were you going up or coming down, boy? Maybe it was a mistake to have put his arms around his wife. When he and Tena were alone again together, something new would be there and he wasn’t sure where it would go. Yet, she had welcomed the feel of him. Hadn’t she? She had been at ease in his arms. He would have to go carefully, he would have to touch his way along in the dark.
“
W
HERE
did he get swordfish? None of it around here anymore.”
“I didn’t ask him,” Johanna said. “He knew I wanted some and so he found it, I don’t know where.”
“West coast. Must’ve been frozen,” Lauchlin said.
“It’s fresh.”
“Tastes fine but I don’t know how it could be fresh.”
“I’m just eating it and enjoying it, I’m not inquiring.”
The sound of their cutlery against the plates irritated Lauchlin. Why the mystery? This was only fish after all, regardless of its origins. But his mother had a stubborn set to her face, it wasn’t worth pursuing. Yet the fish was Clement’s, he had brought it to the house.
“You’ve been spending time with his wife,” she said finally, when her swordfish was gone and she had a cup of tea in her hands.
“Tena? You sound like I’m sleeping with her.”
“People notice when she’s in your car and her husband isn’t. Somebody saw the two of you walking hand in hand, up Point Aconi.”
“They must’ve been hiding in the bushes then, there wasn’t a soul around but us.” Lauchlin, a slow eater, cut his fish without looking up. “There are people who notice too damn much around here, by half, especially what’s not their business. A dash of gossip spices a meal, Ma. Slow wits and swift deductions. She wanted to go to Point Aconi for a little while, she likes it there. If you’re blind, sometimes a hand is welcome, isn’t it? Clement knows I visit, every time I’m at his house he knows about it. If it wasn’t a help to him and Tena, I wouldn’t do it. He hasn’t said it bothers him any.”
“He wonders about it some. It wasn’t a complaint exactly, but I know it’s on his mind.”
“What are you, Ma, his shrink? It was his idea I find her tapes, read to her, not mine.”
“I give him a sympathetic ear, that’s all. He can’t tell Tena everything. He has no men he’s close to.”
“He wouldn’t tell another man much anyway, and that makes him no different than most men around here. But I think he’d tell me if that sort of thing was troubling him. Might take a couple whiskys.”
“He hasn’t told Tena that Cooper’s been following him in his truck sometimes, when he’s making the fish rounds.” Clement always gave Johanna a honk when his van passed in the morning, and she never missed a thing on that road she didn’t want to miss.
Lauchlin put down his fork. “He told you that?”
“He keeps a distance, Cooper does. Clement spotted him up a logging road somewhere you’d never expect it, like he had business there, but he didn’t of course, nobody knows him there. One afternoon up back of Baddeck, not a soul on the road and Clement sees that green pickup of his in the mirror. Clement stops right there to wait for him but Cooper turns off a side road. He went after him one day but by the time he got his truck turned around, the man had disappeared.”
“It’s odd, Ma, but it’s not illegal. You make him sound like a shape-shifter. We’ll have to get the Mi’kmaqs after him.”
“Talk sense. Didn’t he follow him partway up the New Pabbay road last week?”
“The
Slios,
you mean? He knows those back roads. He does jobs for summer people.”
“Clement thought he’d try that summer house way up there high, the old MacKinnon place beyond John Alec Morrison’s, Americans own it now. But he could tell they hadn’t been down in a while, they live in Connecticut, I think. He’s off down the road a way when he notices in his mirror a truck pull out of the driveway, you know what a goat run that is, and isn’t it that Cooper fella’s? I told Clement, Put the Mounties on him.”
“For what? He hasn’t done anything, Ma.”
“Trespassing?”
“By whose complaint? It’s not posted, and he’s done work for them anyway, I think. Okay, it’s a little strange. He’s irksome, he’s not dangerous. ” Lauchlin didn’t want to screw his head around with suspicion, there wasn’t much to go on. But Tena’s little episodes—what about them? She had a rich imagination of course, she admitted that, powerful, too vivid sometimes to share.
His mother left the table and he could tell she was at the window in the parlour, putting some distance between them. She often talked to him from there, raising her voice a little if he was in another room, her eyes on the mountain where she’d had her young life. It seemed to give her strength.
“I hardly know who’s on the mountain anymore,” she said. “It’s come back to itself, say what you like.”
“I’d be the last to deny it, Ma. But somewhere down the road they’ll find a way to mess it up.” He left the table and stood behind her. “They’re planning a huge quarry up above Cape Dauphin, going
to blast it and dig it out for forty years, ship the gravel to the States.” They’ll never do that up this way. The ghosts of the old people would rise up, so help me. Gordon Stewart, Sam MacLeod, Annie Munro, the Gunns, my father and mother.”
“I remember the winter Sam died. December. No smoke in his chimney for two days. Dad noticed and sent someone up there.” He died in the course of nature, was the way Granny would have put it, an expression that seemed to fit the deaths of the old.
“Noticed, yes. We looked out for each other. One of the last, Sam was, he and Mrs. Munro and poor Johnny Gunn. Johnny got strange there at the last. He’d stand in the middle of that old road up there and tell you his horse ran off, that he was waiting for it to return, If you see the creature, he’d say, shoo her the hell home, would you? He had no horse, not by then, poor soul.”
Johanna returned to the kitchen and began to clear the table while Lauchlin finished his tea. “She won’t run off from him, will she, not like his first wife did,” she said, at the doorway with a plate in her hand. “Not blind she won’t.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Clement’s first wife, she got a bit cracked with religion, that’s how come she went back west.”
“I didn’t know he had a first wife.”
“He lived in New Waterford for a while when they first arrived. The wife was with him then.”
Lauchlin’s cooling tea seemed to have no taste. “Tena isn’t running anywhere. She has none of that in her.” Why was he angry that Clement confided in her this way? Christ, he’d always withheld himself from his mother, as she from him, what they let each other know were more like glimpses through the crack of a door, and here was Clement baring himself, and she consoling him or whatever it was she said. Was it the intimacy that bothered him? That it was unmanly?
He heard her running the tap hard over the dishes, clattering them onto the drainboard. No fault of Clement’s really, that’s how he was put together: like Lauchlin, he moved in his own ways.
Returning to the doorway, his mother said, “You’re attracted to adultery, is what you are.”
“What did you say, Ma?”
“It’s the married ones you liked best, always.”
“Morag was married? Come on, Ma.”
“Name some more if you can. Later Morag was too, gone to Boston a good while before you took up with her again. She had a husband then, the summers she came home.”
“If you could call him that. A flat-out alcoholic. He was like a big handsome kid, and a hypochondriac to boot. He could barely wipe his arse without her. She was the only good thing in his miserable life.”
“He was a good-looking man, J.J. Black. Always well-dressed, nicely groomed.”
“Lying in the street he didn’t look too spiffy. Ask Morag.”
“But married, she was supposed to be safe, wasn’t she, then?”
“Safe from what? Me? Jesus.”
“You took to her again, more than ever.”
“I don’t know where you get your notions, Ma.”
“Think of the women you’ve been involved with over the years, after Morag left. Married, every one of them.”
“You didn’t know the women I was with, Ma, the where or the when of them.”
“It’s true, and you know it.”
“I
don’t
know it, and what difference does it make? Nothing to do with Tena MacTavish, or Clement either, nothing.” But it did: he was doing for Tena what Clement could not. “Haven’t I been up to see Morag? Don’t I always when she’s home? If there’s any woman…”
“Yes, and you see her just as you always have. Even your voice is
different when you mention Tena MacTavish. I’m not a fool, and I’m not blind either.”
“I might argue with that, but I’m going down to the store instead. Who knows, a good-looking wife might drop in.”
“Listen. I will say this once and be done with it. Morag loves you, and she has loved you ever since she came to this house. You don’t think that is worth something? I don’t care anymore if she’s Catholic or what. That doesn’t matter to me. You think what it might be like if that girl
didn’t
love you, if she just quit you for good and never came back. You expect her love to be there, for the asking. I shouldn’t have to tell you it’s a privilege, with a history like yours.”
“It’s between me and Morag, Ma.”
“Yes. Your dad was the same way. He wouldn’t talk about anything to do with the heart.”
“Ma, it’s not your life.”
“No, and it never would be.”
“I can tell you this, Morag has a man who wants to marry her.”
“Has she now? You’ll want her more than ever.”
“Yes, Ma, maybe I will, when I see her again.” But Tena was the here and now, wasn’t she. He wouldn’t tell his mother he dreamed about her. Every day at some odd moment he would shut his eyes and try to visit a kind of darkness that might be Tena’s though he knew it was not. His hands sometimes would close into a circle and he was holding her waist, turning her slowly toward him. What was he to do? Was he not a help to her, a set of eyes now and then, however limited, compromised, imperfect? Without him, no poetry, no picnic afternoon, no trip to Point Aconi. He had no right to want her beyond this role, but he did. What did that make him? He wanted to
know
her, and to hell with Johanna for all that.
THE REST OF THE DAY
he could not shake what his mother had said. He’d given Shane a couple days off to go to Halifax and stitch up his unravelling romance with Jenna Marie, futile though that surely was: she had new tastes not just in causes and music and books but in men. Lauchlin was impatient with customers, forgot their change, told them he didn’t have things that were sitting in plain sight. Then a weekender, wearing the resort attire favoured by some Cape Breton males—a muscle shirt over a proud belly, shorts exposing stark white legs enhanced by dark socks and sandals—presented himself at the counter and asked if they had lubricated condoms in stock. Lauchlin stared at him for a few seconds before he spoke.
“You here on a dare?”
“Can’t go into town, buddy, I’m in a hurry,” the man said. He grinned behind his sunglasses. “I might lose it.”
“Sorry,” Lauchlin said, with exaggerated patience, “we don’t carry sexual products. We don’t have condoms in rainbow colours or family tartans or with that little rooster comb on the tip. We have no lubricating oils, unless you’re going to have sex with a sewing machine. We don’t have, at least this week, any dildos, single or double, no vibrators, with or without batteries. No dirty videos, no dirty pictures, unless a really pale middleweight in baggy trunks is your thing.”
The customer turned to Mabel Cameron, waiting behind him. “Is he always like this?”
“Every day of the week,” Mabel said, giving him a little smile.
“Now somewhere,” Lauchlin said, craning his neck, “I do have an old LP of MacLean and MacLean—no relation—some raunchy stuff on there. Apart from that, no. No sexual items to be had.” The man, flexing his hairy shoulders and tattoos, gave him a dark look but left, muttering about a head butt.
The store closed in on Lauchlin, all its niggling concerns, and he had to keep reining in his mind as it roamed back and forth over the women Johanna had conjured. Attractive women, all in their particular
ways, and yes, he thought about women every single day, at any hour, moments or minutes, true, moving back and forth through his mind. They merged somehow, the earlier ones, with the feelings he’d had when his boxing and everything about it was good—the physical pride, the flush of winning, spells of intoxication with his own power. Married? Maybe they were, but all of them, as he remembered them, had wanted his attention, so why should he not have given it? True, there was both risk and safety in them, but he liked flirting with the turmoil of their lives. He had not been looking for a wife, ever. But the women he really desired he pursued carefully, slowly, never in a rush, and he got as close to them as he could before he drew back, that was part of what he had sought, a specific intimacy—to be inside the complex mix of their existence, secrets they shared only with him, to hold their trust, their confidence, their intimate intensity. It excited them to reveal themselves, he was a man they had no responsibilities to, and that excited him in some way as well, how they cared about him alone, amidst other ties, loves, even motherhood, and the risks of their clandestine meetings. The mistake he’d made when young was thinking that the way one woman was, so the next might be, should be, when in fact it was the promise of their differences that drew him—physical, emotional. He never talked about his affairs, never told a soul about any of them, any man or woman, and because they knew that about him, they were relaxed with him, and loved him more easily. A few he had lasted with for months, others a year or two, and yes, the only ones he’d cared about and liked to spend time with had been married, okay, they had husbands or were in some in-between state of splitting up or wishing they could or just wanting a man different from the one they were tethered to. But he hadn’t approached them just because they were wives, had he? He’d met them at a dance or a bar in Sydney or a party, or they were friends of friends, and sometimes, if around his age, they remembered when he’d been in the ring, or someone would bring it up, and if he was in the mood and it
seemed to his advantage, he’d let that play out, that faded excitement from his past, let them take his fist in their hands, ask him dumb questions about boxing, touch the scar tissue around his eye, those first touches were always telling, that subtle current, it was either there or it wasn’t. But there were other times when he’d cut the fight talk short, he could see an amusement in their eyes, as if they’d just learned that he was a former circus clown or a sword swallower. And hadn’t they, a few of them, been glad that Lauchlin was only a diversion, that he made no claims on their lives beyond the nights or afternoons they’d wanted him or he them? Yes, there were problems. Like Ellen who fell in love with him, who got so serious she told her old man about it and Lauchlin backed away, broke it off, the man called him up and started sobbing on the phone, You son of a bitch, get out of our life, and he did. But Linda’s husband, a hard drinker, started knocking her around and Lauchlin had to step in, before he pulled away, and set him straight, men who beat up women were disgusting, just bugs, not men, and Lauchlin told him if he hit her again, he would give him a taste of it he wouldn’t forget, and Linda said later, No, he hasn’t laid a hand on me since, but I guess it’s over with, you and me, isn’t it? And there was Meg, charming and humorous, just over forty—oh, women in their forties—and a little bored, she loved her husband and her two kids but she wanted a fling, just that, and Jesus they had one, a long and good one Lauchlin still recalled with a warm yearning, every bit of her was fun, and she kept their secret and her husband as well, so where was the harm, really, to this day? He’d weathered them all, and they him. He couldn’t see that he’d hurt any of them, aware as they were that he was only passing through. And Maddy, always Maddy, glad to be with him whenever it was possible, affectionate, uncommonly discreet. There was his medical issue in these affairs of course, he tried never to think about it when he was with a woman, but it was always somewhere in the back of his mind: Take me now, Lord, no better time for it all to go black.