A weekender came in looking for videos and cigarettes, two big items Lauchlin’s mother refused to stock regardless of the constant requests from the cottage folks down beyond the old ferry wharf. They’d argued about it more than once, People do smoke around here, Ma, in case you haven’t noticed, and they’ll just get them at the gas station up on the Trans-Canada. But she hated smoking and wouldn’t relent. As for videos, she believed them mostly trash, violence and murder and mush. And besides, she said, I don’t want the business of lending things out, you’d be forever chasing them down. But the day went on. A young woman was seeking garden gloves for her mother and was satisfied with the white cloth ones in stock, which pleased Lauchlin too because he was long wearied of crestfallen customers who expected the same items they could find in a town. Do you have maxipads? No, sorry. Coriander? No, salt and pepper and chili powder is about it. Bok choy? Surely you have fresh parsley? No, we have what you see there, potatoes, carrots and turnips. Mineral oil? No. There’s a kind of rye cracker we get at home? No rye crackers at all? Nope. Triscuits. Saltines. Marine varnish? No. Two cans of porch paint, one green, one red. A set of dice? We need another set for liar’s dice, it’s rained for three days. No, sorry. Frozen
blueberry waffles? Sorry, no frozen items like that. Cordovan shoe polish? Just black or brown. Any soy milk? Soy what? Sauce we have. Sometimes they made him feel like the cheese shop proprietor in the English TV comedy who seemed to have in stock no requested kind of cheese whatsoever. Now and then his assuring them that he did not carry what they sought only set them to a stubborn inspection of his shelves, peering myopically at labels as if he were concealing the true contents for the hell of it or holding the item back for someone else. He did have some merchandise that no one called for, ever, but that had languished on the shelves for years because Johanna, sentimental about its connection to his father and the old-timers he had stocked it for, could not bring herself to remove the stove blacking or pumice or a few bars of Fels-Naptha soap or a few six-volt headlight bulbs, though an American passing through did buy the last can of separator oil, price unadjusted for inflation. Locals knew of course just what they could get from MacLean’s and what not, but for most of them what they got was something not for sale—an exchange of mutual concerns and common interests, a connection. Stores like this had always been the centre of settlements like St. Aubin, not a village as such anyway but the remnants of a run of small farms laid out down a long road. And today the store did not even have gasoline, just diesel with a dollop of gas in it, and Lauchlin turned away two customers on their way back to Sydney, sent them up to the Trans-Canada.
Sometimes when his hands were lying idle on the counter, his father came to mind, a man who did want to keep a store and had kept a good one. The night he died Lauchlin had described to people over the years, one of those boyhood memories that never diminished, though he knew that he recounted it a little differently each time, the words were not the same, the images, the sentences, depending on his mood, on what emotions that incident called up. But always there was, through the store window, that sight of his father laid out
on the counter as if it were a gurney, his shirt collar unbuttoned, someone bent low near his face, another man on the wall phone, a dark automobile parked aslant, its door wide open as if the driver had leapt out of it, the motor running. He was fascinated by his dad’s peculiar immobility, there on his back, the counter cleared of its common objects, face peaceful, eyes closed, as if it were a joke he were going along with, a prank—nothing like the way he grabbed a nap on the kitchen daybed, something terrible about him there on his own counter, this bustling, energetic man laid out like a corpse, his glasses off and folded neatly on the top of the register. Your dad’s taken a turn, Lauchlin, Johanna said behind him, appearing suddenly, her voice calm but strained, go up to the house and stay out of the way here. Frank was at high school in Sydney, so Lauchlin watched from the parlour window alone as two men carried their father to the car and set him down carefully in the backseat. The car was a shiny black Meteor with whitewall tires, and he saw his mother look it out of sight before she went into the store his dad had left for good.
Jamie Campbell came in wearing his skimpy running shorts and cradling in his arms a box of wild mushrooms the colour of scrambled eggs. A wiry young man always scouring the woods for possible merchandise, Jamie had discovered they were full of chanterelles and there was a market for them. He proposed that he and Lauchlin serve it. He had taken up long-distance running and could be seen padding along at all hours. Jamie had trouble keeping a job, he was highstrung and sooner or later he had to get back to the country and into the woods, it seemed, but the running had calmed his manic bouts, as if it assured him he was indeed going somewhere of his own choosing. While he talked he pumped his legs in place.
“Come on, Lauchlin. You have to take a chance with something new. Right?”
“But who’d buy them, Jamie? Nobody I know eats mushrooms like these.”
“Time they did. These are
choice,
Lauch, they’re not toadstools. You know what they sell for in stores? Twenty bucks a pound. The French love them.”
“That wouldn’t recommend them necessarily,” Malcolm said.
“All right,” Lauchlin said, “what do you want me to do, take the box on trial? Listen, if anyone dies, I’m coming after you.”
“Never happen, Lauchlin. Safe as blueberries.” He smiled. “Safe as St. Aubin.” And he was away out the door, down the steps in a bound, a frail, determined figure breaking into a run.
“Well, you made
him
happy,” Malcolm said.
“He’s a good kid. He’s found a way to use his body to help his mind. It can work, I know. Wasn’t your cousin Dougal a good runner?”
“Dougal was, and he was down from Judique just yesterday. He was telling me that Nell MacSween died. She’s Morag’s auntie, isn’t she?”
“Indeed she is.” Lauchlin turned away quickly, his face hot. Morag should have told him, called him from Boston or wherever she was and let him know. They had not exchanged a word since she’d left two summers ago, they used all their words up anyway, it seemed, by the end of every summer they were through with each other, tired out again, ready to part. But Jesus, he had liked her Auntie Nell, more her mother than an aunt, and Nell liked him too, from the start. So you’re the boxing boy, are you? she said the first time Morag took him home, I’ve got some fresh venison for you, that’s what you need, good red meat. Aunt Nell had been there those early years when he loved Morag with a passion it pained him to recall, when he was a coiled and savvy fighter on the way up, and it hurt that Morag had left him out of Nell’s death.
“That news took a damn good while to work its way here,” he said, straightening unneccessarily cans of soup on a shelf behind the counter. “When did she die?”
“Must be a couple weeks anyway.”
“How?”
“They found her in her back field, near the cliff edge. Took a stroke or something. That’s how it is you get to be eighty.”
“If you live alone, nobody looking after you. Someone should’ve known she was in the field. She liked to wander down there, by the cliff, look out at sea. Toward England, she said. Came over as an orphan, just ten.”
“She was looking in the wrong direction then, but a well-liked woman she was. Dougal said so.”
“Dougal doesn’t know the half of her.”
“How did Tena MacTavish get blind anyway?”
“A benign tumour behind her eyes. So Lorna Matheson said. I didn’t ask, she offered it.”
Two cyclists veered in past the pumps and leaned their bikes against the wall below the window, young men wearing the latest gear, panting, their helmets off, hair bright with sweat. They were seeking pure fruit juice but settled for Lauchlin’s orange drink, passing a bottle between them, gulping it down. One of them gave Lauchlin a coy grin.
“Are you Lauchlin MacLean? You were a teacher?”
“Maybe.”
“My dad had you in high school, for English. He said you ran a store out here. He told my mother you were a bit of a lady’s man.”
“Was I?” He had never thought of himself as a lady’s man. That had a dandified air to it. He didn’t bother to ask what the father’s name was. “Didn’t impress your mother much, I guess.”
“You were tough but fair, my dad said.”
“I suppose I was fair enough, at everything. That was a long time ago.”
Once in a while a former student would come in, usually by chance, though less and less as he left his teaching years further behind. Most were unaware that this is where he came from or where he’d ended up, he’d never been a teacher who shared his personal life,
even though that put him at odds with the times, with pedagogical trends that urged you to open yourself up to students, get down there on the rug with them, so to speak. In the store, depending on what sort of experience they’d had with him and how long ago, they might be pleased to see Mr. MacLean behind the counter (he had never let them call him Lauchlin or urged on them any recollections of the ring), telling him, in that sincerely insincere way that some of them could master, Oh, we enjoyed your classes so much. Whether it was true or not didn’t matter, to him or to them. They smiled, he smiled, the ritual was over. Others who happened by the store might pretend they didn’t know him at all, easy enough if they hadn’t liked him anyway, easier yet if he them. It was always quietly embarrassing to bump into a student who’d disrespected him because they both felt, by now, sheepish about it, that mutual failure.
“Nobody this side of the island has a bicycle but kids,” Shane said, sitting on the cooler, looking them over.
Malcolm lifted his gouty foot off the stool slowly as if it might detonate. “Take your life in your hands riding on this road, not much shoulder for a bike, and those ditches are backhoed deep.”
“Not a bad road really,” the shorter cyclist said, retying his blond ponytail. “The grades are easy. Aren’t they, Mel?”
“We’re circling the island, then heading north,” Mel said, “Cabot Trail. St. Aubin’s kind of a side trip.”
“Yes,” Lauchlin said. “It is.”
Sometimes on summer weekends cyclists would pass, crouched seriously into expensive equipment, skin-tight clothing, neck to shoes. Lauchlin let them fill their water bottles in back and use the toilet. Curious, they might ask about the big leather bag hanging in the backroom, but Lauchlin would point vaguely to the framed photos of Cape Breton boxers on the wall. It’s just a souvenir, he’d say. Old times.
“Not hard going on this island, sure,” Malcolm said, “young men like yourselves. But see that mountain across the channel there?
That’ll wake your hearts up.” They had pumped over worse than that, Mel said, steeper, higher, and you could tell by their legs they had, their bodies were lean and their thighs powerful. Shane followed them outside and chatted with them as they readied their bikes, pointing at the gears, the seat, then at his well-chromed black Honda raked and ready under the big poplar tree. The cyclists bounced their tires and smiled, then mounted their bikes and eased into the pedals, cutting smoothly onto the road and away, leaning into that languid physical confidence that Lauchlin remembered, when death was the fate only of the old and the unlucky.
For a good while after he quit fighting he would, when alone, fall into throwing punches, ducking, weaving, bobbing, not intensely, not the headshaking shoulderjumping craziness you got worked up into in a gym, in the sweat and stink and that pounding energy that came from every corner, now more like a little dance his body asked for, his mind needed, it loosened him up—a peculiar way of moving in the world that had once set him apart, like an animal in the woods. But he did not want to be seen at it anymore. Punch-drunk, they’d say, look at him, he’s gone foolish, they get that way, you know.
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON
when Lauchlin remarked that he hadn’t seen Slide MacIvor’s car go by again, he hoped it hadn’t quit on him way up at the Head where he paid calls on a certain woman. It doesn’t take him as long as it used to, Malcolm said. Isn’t he a little old for that? Shane said. Listen to him, Lauchlin said, I’d better hang it up. But it wasn’t Slide at all who showed up near suppertime but a new pickup with a metallic green paint job, and it came up to the pumps badly, backfiring. Lauchlin didn’t recognize the driver at first as he sulked in the cab for a good minute revving the rough engine. Then he jumped out, stopping to sniff the gas pump nozzle. He reamed his finger around in it and sniffed that too.
Shane laughed, sliding off the cooler. “He planning to get high on that or what?” He was down the steps quickly but stopped short after the man said something to him Lauchlin couldn’t hear. Shane shrugged and the man pushed past him. Seeing his face, Lauchlin checked himself and stayed behind the counter.
“What kind of gas have you got in that pump out there?” He let the screen door slam behind him.
“Irving regular is what it says. The tanker filled it just this morning, ” Lauchlin said. “Should be fresh.” He had been prepared to apologize, but now he stiffened. He had met Clement’s milling partner only once and hadn’t cared for his strange aloofness, standing away from you, taking you in.
“Fresh
diesel,
sure. What are you pulling here? Eight gallons of that sitting in my tank and I’m to get over the mountain home?”
There was some odd thing about his eyes, Lauchlin would tell his mother later, there’s no life in them, like a cod’s on ice. Shane had slipped quietly through the door and stood by the stove.
“You’re sure it’s the fuel?” Lauchlin said, placing his hands flat on the counter. He still had that instinct for sizing a man up, how his build might be neutralized, used against him if he had no boxing skills, just height and weight, if there were latent speed in how he moved or stood, because even if he swung with a loaded fist, he’d have to hit you square or you could counter him, come back on him quick and hard. Malcolm was inconspicuously straightening himself up in his chair. “Maybe your timing’s off. Bad plugs.”