Lauchlin took comfort in that information, that Clement had indeed driven down the road this morning, toward the main highway. He was out there somewhere beyond this part of St. Aubin, beyond this sphere of blame. Whatever had happened to him, it had not happened nearby.
“There’s a Mountie down there now,” she said. “We have to go down, Shane’s alone.”
“Alone with half a dozen people. You go ahead. See what they want.”
“What the devil do you think they want?” his mother said sharply. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Who’s the Mountie?”
“It looks like that new fella, the young one from New Brunswick.”
“Arsenault.”
“He’s nice enough.”
“If you’re not drunk at the wheel.”
“Why should he be nice if you are? Far too much of that here. When they drove horses, we had a chance.”
“I don’t drive that way, Ma.” Lauchlin lifted the lid of a big black pot on the stove.
“Well you have, and you probably will again. I suppose you’ve read your brother’s postcard?”
“It was addressed to you, Ma.”
“He’s enjoying himself, by the sounds of it.”
“Good, I hope he is.”
“So could you have.”
“And miss all this excitement?”
“I don’t understand you anymore.”
When the phone rang, he didn’t move to answer it. He spooned meatballs onto a plate, buttered a slice of bread. Johanna came scowling in from the parlour, yanked the receiver up. “Yes! Shane? Yes. Right away. Of course. The Mountie wants a word with us,” she said, cradling the receiver carefully.
“That would be you,” Lauchlin said, sitting down at the table, his heaped plate in front of him.
“You come down too. For God’s sake, he might have something to tell us, and he wants to know what we know.”
“You’re the one who saw Clement go by this morning, not me. Let me eat first. I want to eat. Then I’ll be down.”
On her way past him, Johanna snatched the salt shaker from his hand. “You’re after using it again, a blizzard of that on your food. You just don’t care, do you?”
Lauchlin ate slowly. He didn’t know why he was so hungry right now, it was like after a hard fight, after it was all over he’d wanted a meal like this, that smelled of home. A big helping, in a kitchen, like this kitchen. It had healed him more than once. He could hear a car slowing down at the store, having spotted the Mountie’s cruiser no doubt. Even with its whirling lights turned off, what had more pull than a police car at roadside, a cluster of people pursing their lips? As soon as Arsenault left, Lauchlin would go to Tena’s. She would need him. Wouldn’t she? Yet he could not rid himself of an odd sense that he was involved in what was happening. Could Clement have done something foolish…? No, totally unlike him, he’d talk it out straight, he wouldn’t sneak off and harm himself intentionally, selfishly. Wasn’t that kind of man.
From Frank’s letter he shook out photos taken with the old Zeiss.
Trouble is,
Frank wrote on the page he’d wrapped them in,
I wanted from that camera shades of the old black-and-whites, like those snapshots pasted in family albums or scattered with playing cards in Dad’s bureau—can’t recreate it, that tint of time and place. But it’s only in my mind anyway, it’s not out there for capture. The atmosphere I wanted had far more to do with me than with Harris itself. Regardless, there’s Marsail at her front door, holding her hair in that wind that kept her flowers down, but a good-humoured smile. And the deaf weaver who urged me into his shed to show me the Hattersley loom he weaves tweed on. Even so, something. You’ll notice in a lower corner of each photo a smear of light—a tiny leak in the bellows—a mote in the eye of my vanity, my misplaced sentimentality. And Lauchlin at the Fairy Hole beach. There you are, my brother.
Lauchlin studied himself: sitting on the rock looking rather flushed, sweating, elbows on his knees, the backpack flung aside as if he’d reached some sort of finish line. The truth was that he looked older than he wanted to there, exposed, unready—not a man a woman would move toward.
He pressed the pages flat on the table, drank his tea as he read on,
Frank in the Hotel Rodel pub, South Harris.
Got a table to myself in a worn Victorian room, dark panelling, a wood fire blazing in the big fireplace. A pint of Younger’s Tartan, a double whisky. I’m kind of free-floating this afternoon. No one here knows a thing about me, who I am, what I am. I feel pleasantly absolved of duties, tasks, reflections, utterly alone, undemanded. The doctor is out. You should try it sometime. Clack of snooker balls behind me, two young men with shaved heads. I like their banter, You’re hitting her too harrrd, Jimmy, ease up, sighting along his cue stick, clamping hard on his cigarette, squinting. A pleasant sound of conversations from the bar across the hall, a warm murmur of accents and glassware, a woman’s sharp laughter. I could sit at this little table all afternoon, you’d like it too. You’d appreciate, my pagan brother, the masonry carvings up high in the tower wall of the church across the road, St. Clement’s. One’s a woman with spread thighs exposing her swollen genitals. And a short distance away on the same wall there’s a man grasping his penis, and it’s a real hammer. What a sight going into morning mass. A little abraded by time now, must’ve been something when they were freshly carved. Fertility symbols, I suppose. This was a Celtic church, after all, not Presbyterian. Could you imagine these effigies in St. Aubin on the outside wall of the Knox Church? Sure, just before they burned it down. St. Lauchlin’s. Does your friend Clement know he shares a name with a saint? Keep that in mind…
But hey, out in the graveyard I did find a MacLeod of your stripe, Brother, from Berneray. Old Trojan, they called him. It’s never too late, he married a third wife at seventy-five and had nine kids with her. Funny how that can work for some, not others. I’m a one-woman man, or was.
Another gill for me, then home. Excuse the handwriting. I’m feeling criadhealus, touched by drink. I’m learning new words but only useful ones. Our Granny sat me down once and made me learn some Gaelic. I forgot most of it but this stuck: thig crioch air an t-saoghal, ach mairidh ceol, agus gaol. An end will come to the world, but music and love will endure. Nice sentiment. I would like to believe it like she did.
I don’t know when I’ll get this mailed. What are you doing with your life?
Lauchlin sniffed what looked like an ale stain on the paper, the
faint yeast, then folded the letter away into its envelope. What was he doing indeed?
CONSTABLE ARSENAULT HAD DRAWN
the curious, they’d grouped around him, listening, telling him what little they knew, those who knew anything. The constable was listening to Johanna and taking notes.
“I couldn’t miss it,” she said, “his fishery truck, heading for work as usual.” She didn’t tell him she was hurt that Clement hadn’t hit the horn for her.
“You saw him at the wheel?” the Mountie said.
“Well, after all, who else would be driving it?”
Lauchlin told him he was probably in the backroom when Clement passed by, but he had driven up the back roads to his milling site.
“We’ll go up there too, if you could tell us where it is,” Arsenault said. Lauchlin wanted to say, Look, the man is not
up
there, I’d have seen something of him, but he didn’t. The Mountie had procedures to follow, and Clement’s possible itinerary.
“There’s not many roads on this island,” Lauchlin said.
“But he covered more than St. Aubin,” the constable said. “The fish company gave us his route.”
Effie had taken Brute out of her car and was holding the big Newfie on a leash with some difficulty while it sniffed the Mountie’s shoe.
“You going to track him down with Bozo there?” Slide said.
“He’s a missing man now, is he?” Effie said, ignoring him.
“No, not necessarily. He’s overdue.” The constable slipped his pad into a shirt pocket. He looked at the grey sky. “There are degrees of ‘missing.’ If he is
on
the road somewhere, we should find him soon. If he’s off it, that’s another degree.”
“Maybe two,” Slide said from the edge of the group.
“He might have gone somewhere he doesn’t usually. People do that sometimes, they break their routine,” the Mountie said. “It’s still early as far as missing goes. We just hope he isn’t hurt.”
Hurt. Lauchlin had not yet thought of Clement as hurt. That word had not come into his mind and he didn’t want to entertain it. If he’d wrecked his truck, of course…but the man drove like an eighty-year-old most of the time, speed limit or less. Arsenault bought a bag of peanuts from Shane before he drove off.
Johanna disengaged herself from the others and intercepted Lauchlin as he headed for his truck.
“Are you away searching?”
“The constable didn’t have a lot to tell us,” he said.
“He wouldn’t tell us everything he knows anyway.”
“Nobody knows much, I’m thinking. A lot of talk.” He climbed into the truck. “I’m going up the road to Tena’s, see how she’s faring.” He looked ahead through the windshield.
“Yes, you do that,” his mother said. “Maybe you can be of use to her now.”
A
LAN
and Lorna Matheson, her nearest neighbours, were still with Tena when Lauchlin arrived, Lorna at the back door holding it open for him, touching her white hair, unpinned by the wind. “Lauchlin, dear, the Mountie’s been here and gone, come in, come in.” Tena sat at the kitchen table. She looked calm, Alan in his overalls hovering over her, his battered straw hat in his hand. A big round-shouldered man with wild tufts of grey hair, he gestured with his hat toward the yard. “No word yet, Lauchie,” he said. “They…”
“That’s fine, Alan,” Tena said. “He’ll stay with me now, I’ll be fine. Thank you for coming over, for helping me out.”
“Oh my dear, never you mind, we’ll stay.” Lorna took her hand and patted it gently. “It’s no trouble at all.”
“No, you and Alan, you go ahead home to your supper. Enough fussing over me. Lauchlin’s here.”
The Mathesons protested but seemed relieved. At the door Alan looked meaningfully at Lauchlin.
“Our dog,” he said, “she barks when that light comes on over at Clement’s barn there. Sets her off. You can understand it, at night.
Something’s out there, tripping the switch, all the sudden like, fox, raccoon.” He squashed his battered straw hat on. “She been at it today, for some reason, broad daylight, can’t shut her up. I’ll have to put her inside, I guess.”
Lorna lingered at the doorway, leaned back in, saying again she could stay and would, but she’d come over anyway later, and call us, call us, dear, for any reason at all. Clement’s fate was too indefinite, that troubled them, as it did Lauchlin, made them uneasy, their comforting gestures a little awkward and unsure because, having long pitied Tena’s blindness, they did not know what degree of pity to offer now.
Lauchlin said, when they were gone, “How is your sister now?”
“She’s out of danger. The skull fracture is not as bad as they feared. I’ve talked to her on the phone. Oh, I’m so sick of the kitchen. All this day he’s been missing I’ve been on my feet. Just going through the house, you know? Doing stupid little jobs. It was, If I don’t sit down, the awful feeling I have can’t get a hold of me.”
“What feeling?” Lauchlin said. He straightened a knife and fork, framing a clean white plate.
“You couldn’t know, I think. It grew in me.”
“Dread, is it?” He wanted to find the pitch of their last meeting in the store, or at Point Aconi, the note and tone of it, but he couldn’t. She seemed to offer him no special role in this crisis—if it were a crisis—even though it was close to them both.
“Like that, yes,” she said. She closed her eyes, she looked drawn and weary, in her light cotton dress, thinner and fragile.
“I guess the Mountie had a look around?” Lauchlin said.
“Not much. I don’t know what he’d be looking for, Clement’s not here, Lauchlin. He took down information mainly. About Clement, his health, us, friends. I told him about Cooper, that little history.”
“They’re searching the roads now anyway, that’s where they should be.”
“I heard a helicopter. I hate the sound of it.”
Lauchlin felt he should be searching himself. But he wasn’t a cop, after all, not a detective, and it would sound foolish to be looking for evidence. Evidence of what? What or who, apart from Clement MacTavish, might they be looking for?
“Clement was all right when he left, wasn’t he?”
“Everything about his leaving seemed okay, this morning,” she said. “He’s been feeling down but he was in good spirits going out the door. He called my name up to me. It was a while before I heard the van start up, after he said goodbye.” She opened her eyes and fixed them on the ceiling. “I like to lie in bed a while, more now than I used to, when I had sight. It’s still hard to start the day blind, I admit that. I was lying there in the warmth he left, under the covers. Cozy.”
Lauchlin had the urge to tell her, Listen, Tena, I saw something odd last night. If he shared that with her it might draw them closer, bring them back to where they’d been, they could try to make sense of it together. But he was afraid of the risk, of what was already in motion, hurtling away from him or nearer him, he didn’t know which. The night cyclist seemed his own mystery, an encounter only between the two of them.
“Anyway,” he said, “let’s not think the worst.”
“I’ve had all afternoon to think it, Lauchlin.” Tena sat up and smoothed the lap of her dress. “He was quiet with me, the constable, considerate. I was peeling a cool carrot so carefully while he asked me questions. Little strips of orange curling from my hand, I let them fall to the floor. I won’t ever forget the colour of a carrot. If I’d been blind since I was born, you see, I wouldn’t be so…afraid of what the Mountie might find. I wouldn’t want him to
describe
it. Did your husband park his truck just out back there? he said. There’s an oil patch in the gravel. Probably, I said, it was never far. I could hear him outside before he left. Then Lorna stopped over, and I said, What would he be looking for out there? And she said without a tick, Blood,
I suppose, Tena. And why blood? I said, it frightened me to hear that, and Lorna said, That’s what policemen look for, dear.”
“Don’t listen to Lorna, she’s been watching cop shows. It’s a routine search, that’s all.”
“You’ve eaten, Lauchlin? Yes? I’ve done supper, it’s cold now. Everything I touched went heavy, I could barely lift a pot. I was so slow, gathering what I needed, you’d think I was picking things from my garden like I used to, not just groping in cupboards. I had to listen for a boil, sniff for burning, I’d forget.” She held up the back of her hand, the skin glistened where a red streak had been greased with butter. “I burned myself on a hot pan, I was listening for the phone all the time, and for his
truck,
you see. The van.”
Lauchlin reached for her hand but she had put it in her lap.
“What can I do for you, Tena? Can I do anything now?”
“Just be here for a little while, that’s all. I’ll be all right. He’s not coming home to eat, I know that. Sit down and talk to me. Tell me something different, that doesn’t have anything to do with today. Tell me…about one of your fights. Yes.”
“It doesn’t seem like the time for that, Tena.”
“Oh I think so, I think maybe it is, Lauchlin.”
“A good fight or a bad one?”
“Clement never mentioned any bad ones.”
“Clement never saw me fight.”
“Either way. I’ll listen.”
He sat at the table, where no place had been set. She had spread a flowered tablecloth faded side out and the hem hung unevenly over his knees. He could have told her about beating Vince Patten, Vince was still a fighter then who could take you to the limit, past his prime though he was, and he’d been a test for Lauchlin, he didn’t do anything pretty but he could bang you up, grind away at you, break up your nice moves, he clinched and grabbed, he loved to work inside, his big head all over your face, jammed in your neck, he’d punch you
anywhere he could hit you, not cleanly, he didn’t care if he hooked you in the hip or the head, he kept battering away, he could make you look bad, clumsy, your range and timing thrown off again and again until you got as bad as he was and did something foolish. He’ll take you out of your game, Johnny had warned him. But Lauchlin, tiring in the fifth, frustrated, afraid maybe he couldn’t handle a man like this after all, slipped a wide right of Patten’s and hooked him hard in the kidneys twice,
bap bap
same spot, and whipped a short right to the heart, Patten stumbled backward, then lurched at him again and Lauchlin came back with an overhand right as sweet as anything he’d ever thrown, the leverage in it, he felt it all through his body, Patten’s mouth went wide for air and he slid along the ropes almost to his corner before he fell sideways like a sack of rocks, and Lauchlin knew by the sound of him hitting the boards he wouldn’t get up, the ref could sing the numbers as slow as a hymn, it wouldn’t matter, and at ten Patten was still sitting on his can. A big win for Lauchlin, early on it showed he could take what came at him, that he was coming along, Johnny said, I told you to go downstairs on him, see? Pay attention, look at him now, forget the head shots, the body’s what got him. That bout earned Lauchlin twenty dollars, and that was better than most. But this victory that he had loved to recall, so clear even yet, had no lustre now, even though he could remember it in this room, on this day, bell to bell.
“The fight my nose got busted, I could tell you that one. That’s one you could know about.”
“Yes. I should know things like that. About violence, injury.”
He wouldn’t tell her that it was a fight when his heart spoke up, sent out its undeniable alarms. “I was vain about my nose anyway, Tena. It was still intact, you see, it said, Nobody can hit me here. My mother’s nose, Granny MacLeod’s, aquiline, she called it. Nobody had been good enough, quick enough, to break it. Always that extra sting in a nose punch anyway, bullseyed in your face like it is, it wakes you
up. But this fella Buck Odom caught me with a left hook, wicked, I walked right into it.” His eyes blinking blinking, tearing up, blood in his mouth, his throat, but by that point in the bout everything that had elevated him as a boxer, his hard-won skills and energy and racehorse conditioning, his reflexes, speed, mind, seemed to atrophy with each round, as if he were a fighter not of sixteen fights and climbing but of fifty and wearing out, aging, battered, weak in the legs, sucking wind through his mouth, drowning. “Hank packed the nose, stopped the bleeding, but I knew it was mashed.” What the hell’s wrong with you? Johnny yelled, you look like a drunk out there, and Lauchlin said, I don’t know I don’t know, hearing in his own voice the baffled, nasal flatness of an old boxer. “I finished the fight, though, Tena, I stood under the hot lights waiting, God, my robe was heavy, my hands were lead. When the referee raised Odom’s left hand in the air, I just wanted to sit down, right there on the canvas.” Lightning Lauchlin. “Here,” he said, leaning near her. “This is the nose. What do you think?”
Tena hesitated, then reached for his face. She traced her finger along his cheek, the line of his nose where the bridge swelled. He kissed her hand lightly as it passed his lips, she gave him a fleeting smile.
“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t call it aquiline.” She looked toward the window. “I told the Mountie what I remembered of the morning,” her voice close to a whisper. “I didn’t tell him we’d made love and that I was dozy in bed when he left.”
“I don’t suppose that’s what he was after.”
“He was very polite, almost tender. He knows about Clement, his fish route. I told him about his routine, his habits. But after he was gone, then I remembered a noise from the morning—quick and sharp, and over with. Just like that. Then everything turned normal again, in a second, and when I heard the van going past, below the bedroom window, I lay there warm for a while, thinking about him.”
“I’d mention that, if the constable comes back,” Lauchlin said.
We’d made love.
Why did she tell him this? It left him feeling oddly
weak, like bad news about himself. He had welcomed frankness from her before, confidences, but not this. “The noise…they’d want to know.”
“It might be nothing. Just a sound.”
“Like what?”
“Like…a bottle of champagne. When I first heard it. I thought of the night we got married, Clement popping a bottle he’d bought in Sydney. We poured it out in a couple of tumblers, in a room in the Keltic Lodge in Ingonish. Clement splurged, it’s an expensive place, you know. We’d walked to the end of Middle Head, up high there, it’s beautiful, a windy evening and the sea all around. You could slip to the rocks so easily, I remember thinking. But that was the sound, yes. Pop.”
She said she needed a cup of strong tea and didn’t object when Lauchlin jumped to plug in the kettle, he had to move around, his heart was pulling at him.
“It probably wasn’t a tire, a blow-out,” he said. He breathed deeply. “Seeing as you heard the van leave.”
The phone rang and she raised her hand, she would get it, she moved directly to it without a misstep and Lauchlin listened to her, her voice low. After she hung up, she kept her hand on the receiver, her face to the wall.
“They haven’t found the van. They’ll keep searching with the helicopter but of course…they’re still covering the roads. The constable, he’s a nice young man.”
“Not much new to go on, I guess,” Lauchlin said.
“He wanted to know if I was okay, if I was being looked after. I told him I don’t need to be looked after.” Then she covered her face in her hands. “Oh, for God’s sake, what am I saying.”
As Lauchlin sat her down at the table, urged her to drink her tea, they both froze at the sound of a car as it bounced into the backyard and lurched to a halt.
“I think it’s the Marrs and company,” Lauchlin said, standing, his hand on Tena’s shoulder.
“Now?” Tena said softly.
“It’s the kind of now they like, dear. I can tell them to go.”
“No. No, don’t do that. They’ve come to see me before and I had fun with them, so it’s okay. She’s a hot sketch, that Rita.”
He watched the small delegation of women ease themselves out of a faded blue Honda, Nelda Marr and her sister Carrie from The Mines, and their cousin Rita MacRitchie from North Sydney, all middle-aged women who’d gotten the word about Clement and piled into Carrie’s little Honda to drive out. One was widowed and two divorced and their children were grown and gone, so they had time to hang out together and play cards and drink a bit, which enlarged their gregarious natures and set them on the road toward friends or relatives, some of whom were glad to see that little car pull up unexpected and some not. Tena didn’t know them well but she had visits from them once in a while because they were drawn to people with infirmities, shut-ins, seeing themselves as dispensers of cheer and gossip from the outside world. Deaths and calamities brought them as well, an antidote to the solemnity of the wakes now, wakes were not like they used to be in the country, sometimes noisily festive and musical, keeping the devil at bay until morning. They could never handle gravity for long, the girls—something in the chemical mix of their personalities responded to alcohol, and they had to find things to laugh about. Carrie and Lauchlin had had an affair some years back, until her divorce when she turned her attention too fully on him and he backed away. He was not thrilled to see her at Tena’s door, not now.