Lauchlin of the Bad Heart (37 page)

He let his head fall back on the chair back. The ceiling fixture held dead flies, diffused specks of black in pink glass. He sat up, leaned toward her. “I have to tell you something, Tena. I saw him that night.”

“What? Who did you see?”

“Cooper. That night.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Tena said. She frowned.

“I don’t mean I saw
him,
I saw a fella come…biking by.” Lauchlin squeezed his sore hand, massaged it. “How could I have guessed it was Cooper himself? Nobody ever saw him on a bicycle, Tena. Did they? Anywhere. I kept thinking, a kid, that’s a big kid. But he went on by me and…I don’t know. Nothing about him said who he was.”

“You
saw
him,” Tena said in a whisper. “The night before?”

“I didn’t know who it was, Tena. I’m trying to tell you, he came out of the dark, the fog, a small helmet crushed on his head. Under that greenish streetlight, try and see a face in that. For Christ’s sake, a man on a bicycle, three in the morning. Right there, on our road. It was…crazy. It seemed queer but harmless, at the time.”

“Harmless. But now you’re so sure…” Tena’s voice trailed away.

“Now we’re
all
sure, Tena, he confessed. It’s easy to be sure now. And it tears me apart.”

“But if you’d spoken up, if…”

“I didn’t even have a
suspicion,
Tena. Nothing dawned on me. Until Clement was dead. The poor man was already lying in the woods there. What is some cyclist in the middle of the night guilty of? Nothing made sense.” His words seemed dead as well, without conviction or solace, for either of them, he couldn’t make them anything more than what they were, their matter-of-factness drained him—this explaining was only for him anyway
,
it was no use to her, just another rip at her heart. If he could only have gotten past this point, this first step where she might understand his helplessness that night, accept that he’d had nothing to go on, that no real blame rested in him, assure him that no dim, inarticulate motive of his own had wormed into his unconscious, then he might reach her, he might keep intact what they had, nourish it again with his sympathy and attention and help. But she was shrinking from him almost physically as
she slumped, her hands working in her lap. He hadn’t the power, the words that could remove this obstacle between them, it was solidifying before his eyes. And what was his case anyway? How foolish to think she could understand what he could not, the recesses of his own heart. “I could have saved him, Tena? Is that what you mean?” he said, afraid.

She rose from the bed and moved slowly past him, touching her way, the back of his chair, the small desk, a table lamp, the television, as if she were finding her way out. She stopped at the window, pinching the curtain in her fingers. “How could I say? It might have turned out different, that’s all. I don’t know.”

“Who else would have made sense out of what I saw, Tena?”

“Someone,” she said.

“Someone? God, I suppose. Maybe my grandfather, he had the
taiseacht,
maybe him, oh, if I could have seen Cooper with the kind of eye Grandad had, I’d have come to your house and woken you in your bed, said, Listen to me, I’ve had this vision about a man clear on the other side of the water making his way along the mountain, I saw his light, and after he crosses the bridge, he will turn down this road, it’s you he’s coming for. You’d have thought me out of my head of course, Clement would have thought I was mad.”

“Not if you’d told us what you had really seen, a man on a bicycle and he looked like Clement’s partner, heading this way. You didn’t need any second sight for that, first sight would have done. Clement would have listened, he was ready to expect anything from that man. Wouldn’t we have sat down and tried to figure out what he was up to?”

“But you see, he eluded me, I didn’t know who he looked like or who he might be. Doesn’t a man have a right to look foolish on a bicycle, even at night? I had no idea where he was coming from or going to. I could have aimed at the
Slios
the strongest binoculars in the world, Tena, I wouldn’t have seen anything useful that night, not a man on a bicycle, pumping over that rough road. Jesus, I can feel him
over there right now, every night in my bed, see him weaving through that mountainside while all of us slept, but I can’t
stop
him.”

“But you woke up. You did see him.”

He had lost her. He could see himself transforming in her mind, inept, clumsy, a deceiver of himself, of her. He had wanted to give her the truth, but he wasn’t sure what it was, never had been. He thought desperately, irrationally, that if she could only see his face, he might have a chance.

“I don’t know what to say, Tena. I can’t think clearly anymore.”

“Me, and Lightning Lauchlin,” she said, her back to him. She gave a sad little laugh. “Alone in a motel. What would people think?”

“What they want to think, Tena. Like always.”

“Oh, my.” She wiped at her eyes with the edge of the curtain and when she turned around there were no tears. “I won’t see myself wither and wrinkle. That’s a plus for any woman, I guess. Oh, I’ll feel it all right.” She pressed her fingers to her cheekbones. “No anxious gazing in the mirror though.” She returned to the bed and lay down, composing herself on her back.

“Were you dangerous in the ring?” she said, her eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“Not dangerous enough, I’m afraid, in or out of it.”

She seemed to consider that. “Do you have a woman in your life? I never asked you that. I don’t know why.”

He wanted to say, In a way I had you, for a while. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

“What is she like? You never mentioned her.”

“She doesn’t live here. She…there’s no one like her.”

Tena patted the bedspread beside her. “Come and lie here next to me, Lauchlin. You don’t have to say anything more.”

“Are you sure that’s what you want?”

“I’m sure. Come.”

Awkwardly, heavily, he arranged himself beside her, his hands folded on his chest. They lay side by side without touching as if placed there separately. The room was growing dimmer. “I can’t be here alone all night,” she said to the ceiling. “I don’t know what I was thinking of.” He could feel her turning toward him. “Hold me, Lauchlin.” She relaxed against him, her head on his shoulder, he smelled her hair, the soap she’d washed with, felt her breathing rise and fall in his ear as she eased into sleep, he was grateful she could sleep, and that he had helped her there.

What was he holding, what life was this, what substance? Were he to lift her, would he feel in his arms what was essentially her, the weight of her being? He was embracing her yearnings, which now he could not even guess, her terrors, her love, and though the love was not for him, it was there, he was privileged to be near it.

SHE WOKE
,
SAT UP QUICKLY
, her breath held, her eyes straining.

“I’m here, Tena,” he said, leaning forward in the chair.

“Oh! Lauchlin. You’re still here.”

“I am, yes.”

She lay back on the pillow. “All that day he was lying there, under our own
trees.
” There was a quaver in her voice. “He was there all the time, while you and me were talking in the house.” She brushed at her eyes. “I’m so tired, Lauchlin, deep-down tired.”

“Go back to sleep. Please. Here.” He removed her shoes tenderly and set them on the rug. He turned the bedclothes back and helped her under them, then switched off the bathroom light. “I’ll be here in the chair. You sleep now. I’m not tired at all.” That was not true, he was, in his very marrow, but he did sit in the chair the rest of the night as awake as he would ever be, watching her murmur and turn in her sleep. Sometimes a tractor-trailer passed on the highway, geared
down for the bridge. A late car arrived and someone’s key scratched at the lock next door. There were muted voices, the scrape of hangers, running water, then silence. Travellers? Lovers? Man and wife? When Tena woke, she would not need him anymore. She would not want to hear him read to her, there was no book that would make her glad for his voice.
As I left the Teampull wind came up again cooling my face, no trees to temper it, Lauch, to break it. Wind singing all night, wind slammed a door shut so hard yesterday it could have cut my arm off, wind through the roofless chapel, wind driving the sheep to shelter under our parlour window, two dark birds sheltering behind a fencepost, preening, wind thrilling the buttercups across the road, so yellow in the grey day, the snags of fleece trembling in fence wire and bushes, wind about the house, like an engine revving up, down, driving slow, faster, circling in and away, all around the world, blowing no doubt in St. Aubin right now, carrying us back, down through the meadow behind the house, rattling your very windows, my brother.

T
HE
afternoon that Lauchlin knelt at Tena’s garden, an October wind raced cold out of the east, funnelling dry leaves into the air. Gravid, dove-grey clouds grew longer above the mountain. The poplar saplings, scrapping for space in the old pasture, had shot higher, lank and rustling, like a neglected cornfield. Brittle hollyhocks swayed, their stalks bent or broken. He twisted a leaf from a dead herb, brought it crushed and savoury to his nose. The taste stayed with him as he walked. He prodded with his foot a bit of machinery in the high grass, some piece of the portable mill stowed in the shut barn. The pickup truck was gone, sold. The rusty bicycle still lay in weeds under an apple tree, its twigs already nuzzled by deer. He didn’t go as far as where Clement had been hidden for a day, but he knew the blood was long since lost in autumn colour, browned into the earth under a damp mat of leaves.

The prosecution of Cooper was inching its way toward trial. Tena would return for it, but not to this house, and only as long as she had to. I have to start over, again, she told him on the phone from the Valley, and I’ll do it here where I came from. Rumours were that the house would be sold but no steps had been taken, and no one aware
of its recent history seemed anxious to occupy it. If they came now, the solemn, curtained windows would put them off, the rain-dusted panes, the gap-toothed shingles. But if they turned away toward the water, trees swept resplendently across the mountain, scarlet, golden, yellowing toward winter, and they might want to live here anyway, house or no house, that’s what this country could do to you. In his jacket pocket was an unopened letter from Morag. There had been no word from her about engagement or marriage or the man who took her to Greece, no words at all since she’d left. No matter what her message now, he would write her back, he’d want to tell her first, Morag, I need to see you again, no matter what, I’m sorry I didn’t get up there before you left, too much came down on me. I’ve done some travelling of my own, and I’m not finished.

They would have to be words that mattered as never before, and he would try to find them.

Suppose he had gone with Frank to Harris, and come back better, like his brother, in some good if indefinable way? He would write to Frank too. He’d been composing a letter in his mind, there were things to tell him. Lauchlin drove back to the store.

It was long dark by the time he closed up. The road was quiet, not a car in half an hour. The cottagers were thinning out as the days grew colder. There had been odd nights, if fog came down, when he walked to the road, up beyond the streetlamp’s citron light and back, but nothing that surprised him ever came out of the misty air, nothing that would give him another chance.

If.
The word could torture you forever.

Lauchlin pressed the letter flat on the counter, just her handwriting on the envelope seemed like a gift and he would open it later when he was finished here, when he was ready. He turned on his stool and looked into the backroom at the shadow of the heavy bag. He stood for a few moments with his hand on his chest before he took from the desk drawer the new cotton tape. Slowly
he wrapped each hand, wove the fresh white tape around tightly, over, under, flexing his hands when he was done, pulling on the gloves. Then he moved toward the bag, bringing up his fists, huffing through his nose, more misshapen than before, breathe,
breathe,
he slipped his feet into position and struck the bag sharp and hard, a punch you might have heard were you at the front door reaching for the handle, followed by another and another. He picked up the pace as the sweat came into him and his jaw tightened, and the bag swung in and out of the light, reeling, spinning, returning for another blow.

Ideas, interviews & features

D. R. M
AC
D
ONALD
was born in Cape Breton and was raised mostly in Ohio, with a stint in Maine during World War II. He recalls being a young boy in Boston when the war ended and the wild celebration in Belmont Square, men shinnying up lamp posts, car horns blaring. Years later, at Ohio University, MacDonald took his first steps as a writer, usually in the familiar idiom of authors such as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Wright Morris—writers with whom he identified because their Midwestern idiom was close to his. He was also drawn to Joseph Conrad’s sea-based stories because of his own experience working on Great Lakes ore freighters.

MacDonald was particularly taken with the writing of D. H. Lawrence: his intimate explorations of women and men, their contending passions and the peculiar energies of love. The ethnic flavour of Irish authors such as Frank O’Connor and Seán Ó Faoláin also struck a chord. Much later, Michael McLaverty’s feeling for the rhythms of country life and John McGahern’s insights into the complex workings of the heart resonated with his own concerns.

After a year in London teaching at a boys’ preparatory school, MacDonald enrolled in graduate studies at Ohio State University, pursuing an M.A. while teaching full-time, writing when he could. After finishing his thesis on translations of
Beowulf,
he began a novel about a Great Lakes seaman examining his life and origins in Cape Breton, a place so formative in making him who he
was. Two chapters of this manuscript earned MacDonald a Wallace Stegner Fellowship to Stanford University. He finished the novel there, and although it taught him valuable lessons about language and craft, and pulled Cape Breton into the centre of his fiction, he recognized that the protagonist he’d created could not carry the whole novel, an assessment some publishers agreed with. His writing moved to the periphery of his life, and when he resumed writing seriously several years later, he concentrated on short stories.

MacDonald has always felt a deep respect for the compressive, lyric power of the short story genre. He bought land from a cousin on Boularderie Island, where he was born, and took up writing there in the summers. The Cape Breton he had been born in and was getting to know more year by year called up stories he wanted to tell. In that landscape and among those people, he found his voice.

Every fall, MacDonald returned to teach at Stanford, but he continued to write short fiction at the same time. Being among writers affiliated with Stanford over the years—Wallace Stegner, John L’Heureux, Scott Turow, Raymond Carver, and Ron Hansen, among others—kept his standards high. MacDonald describes himself as a slow writer: “It takes time to get what I want on the page.” He was content to complete one very polished story a year.

This dedication to meticulously crafted prose has earned him a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Pushcart Prizes, and an Ingram Merrill Award. His first short story collection,
Eyestone,
was published in 1989 and his first novel,
Cape Breton Road
, in 2001. He completed his
second short story collection,
All the Men Are Sleeping,
in 2003.
Lauchlin of the Bad Heart
, his second novel, received much acclaim and was longlisted for the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

MacDonald is currently at work on his third novel.