Lauchlin of the Bad Heart (13 page)

“I’ll bring us a lunch.”

“Tomorrow it is.”

It had come to him without thought, he hadn’t been down to Munro Point in ages. He’d tell Johanna he had to go to Sydney. The walk would not be an easy one, not either way for Tena, and for him coming up the hill. No one would be down there of course, maybe it was as simple as that, they wouldn’t be seen. Should he care much? He wasn’t sure how he would be with her, what sort of awkwardness might come their way. At times he was unsure in the face of her blindness, as if he had to remind himself in mid-sentence, in mid-gesture, that she required something from him that other women had not.

T
HE
day was hotter than Lauchlin had expected and the noon sun was sultry. He hated hot weather, when just walking you’d work up a sweat. He drove up through the newer cemetery, itself bare of trees though enclosed by woods, its tombstones far apart and solitary in all the waiting space, one fresh grave of raw clay marked with a lonely wreath.

“Where’s your family then?” Tena said when he mentioned that none of his relations were buried here.

“On Man o’War Point, some over in New Pabbay, a few at Black Rock, St. David’s. They’re all over.”

He parked the truck where the service road ended, not far from a high pylon of latticed girders that received the powerlines swooping down the mountain and across the strait. Something high in its metal gave off a deranged sound overhead, a metallic flapping, like a broken windmill.

“What a miserable noise for the dead,” Tena said as he helped her down from the cab.

“It’s the wind in that pylon above us. We’ll be out of earshot pretty soon.”

The puddled ruts of the roadway narrowed to a path and Lauchlin held her hand behind him. She wanted to walk normally, if they could, she’d said on the way, I can manage, but she yielded to him on this unfamiliar ground. They emerged on the slope of a broad hill, its maturing hay rich and dark, running down to a small woods near the road, and beyond that another hill rising, dark with forest but for the Drummond church, high and white in a neat clearing. “This was all Munro land once, he had a lot of it. I heard someone from away has bought it but I don’t know who. It’s a handsome field anyway.”

“What does it look like?”

“Like a broad green breath, you’d want to take it in with your arms wide open.”

She spread her arms. He couldn’t see her eyes behind her chic sunglasses.

“Can you feel it?” Lauchlin said, studying her face under the wide brim of a straw sun hat, the way she pursed her lips and concentrated.

“Tremendously. Yes.”

He took her hand again and she let him guide her as he looked for an opening. “It’s grown in since I was here,” he said. The last time, he had wondered if he would make it back up the hill, if his heart might clap suddenly like a cracked bell and send him face-first into the black mud of the bog. But he felt stronger now. On the north side of the ridge, the hill was thick with brush and scrub trees but there was a path, a narrow worn tread. He could see the shore trees where he wanted to go and the water beyond it, but there was the bog to avoid, if he could remember where it lay. “Here,” he said, “this looks promising. The footing’s not too bad. Put your hand on my shoulder and we should be fine.”

“We will,” she said, “I’m sure.” He made his way carefully, telling her to mind the tree roots or a dip in the turf. But they were in a grove mostly of thin birches, well-ferned underneath, a lovely light moving through them in the wind. He skirted an anthill, a neat khaki mound
over which ants darted, tidying up bits of duff in their manic way. Ravens were fussing in the treetops, rawking to each other, always at a safe remove, surveilling. A short stretch of black-mud bog was bridged by spruce logs and she put both hands on his shoulders as he smallstepped them across. The path ended near the shorebank, and when he saw the big limestones half-buried in the moss, he suggested a breather. He told her about the man the point was named for, Alexander Munro, who’d emigrated here with his wife from Scotland in the early 1800s to open a school.

“It’s a great spot, I’d have loved to be schooled here by the water. I don’t know what drew him here but he knew how to pick a site,” Lauchlin said. “Frontier hardships, primitive conditions, Jesus, that didn’t daunt him or his wife, educated Glasgow people, they just pushed ahead, set it all up from scratch,
did
it. A crude log house the first year, later a proper house they taught in, then a schoolhouse down here. Most of these kids were terrible poor, they’d walk miles to get here, their parents had to build them little shelters to sleep in, out of small trees and brush. Boarding school, St. Aubin style. It was like the Middle Ages, Tena. They brought their own food with them, oats mostly, and weekends they’d walk home. But they wanted to learn so damn bad they’d put up with all that, and felt lucky for the privilege. No mean education either, Munro taught mathematics, Latin, navigation. Yes, it was an academy, really, in every sense of the word. His wife taught the girls to sew and things, domestic arts, I guess we’d call it.”

“No math, no navigating for the girls?”

“That was the times, Tena. But they got schooling, the girls, they could read and write when most of their parents couldn’t, not even in Gaelic. There’s a cenotaph in the old cemetery dedicated to Munro, from pupils of his who went away and did well in the world, as far as New Zealand. I used to wonder what it was like to arrive from Glasgow in this remote place, no roads, no house set up to receive
you, facing what the pioneers faced. Nobody asked him to come, he had no guarantees about
anything.
That’s what always amazed me, his character and drive. I became a teacher but I never had a calling for it, not that sense of sacrifice. A singular man.”

“With a singular woman.”

“No doubt about it, Tena. She had to make do in unimaginable ways. Run a pioneer house, for God’s sake, and teach.”

“That hard life impresses you. You might have thrived in a time like that, Lauchlin.”

“Me? Not even if the school had been built and waiting for me, Tena, with a well-appointed house next to it, whisky in the pantry. No illusions on that. I mean, the Munros were
teachers.
I kind of fell into it, by default. I don’t know just where I thought boxing would take me, but it didn’t anyway. Illusions there all right. I tried to make the best of teaching but there were days when I wanted to do just about anything but walk in the door of a classroom and force knowledge on them I couldn’t make them see the need for. I wasn’t any damn good at that part of it. I wanted to impart to my students truth they couldn’t get without me, but the longer I taught, the less I believed I had that truth. Never a problem for my mother, in that one-roomer over at North River. All grades, all basics, this is the map of the world. Teaching kids now, you can barely raise your voice to them, let alone your hand. Respect was a given in my mother’s day, but that was fading when I left. If they wanted to learn, I could teach them something, but I hadn’t any gift for prying open a stubborn mind. These days it’s called charisma, I think. The ring sapped it out of me, whatever of it I had. I didn’t have enough left to take me anywhere else.”

“You’re hard on yourself.”

He laughed. “It’s you, Tena. You’ve got me talking and I can’t shut up.” He was never one to talk up his own history, but here he was—as if the fact that she could not see him made him want to open up.

“You gave your students some good things, I know you did.”

“They learned some of their own history maybe, of what’s around them. I made them read Mi’kmaq tales—a different way of looking at the world. How many of them knew the captain in Jack London’s
The Sea Wolf
is based on Alexander MacLean from East Bay? No relation to me, but he went out to the west coast with his brother Daniel and became a notorious sealing captain—stealing furs, smuggling guns and liquor, piracy. What grabs them is the now. I used to tell them the now makes no sense without the then.” Lauchlin looked at his hands. “I never had in me Munro’s sense of purpose, not for students. I did as much for them as I could but I didn’t make them my life. I’d wanted to be a boxer, if you’re asking me what I wanted to
be.
I wanted to be a British Empire champion, like Blair Richardson.”

“You did?”

“Really did. I never looked beyond that, when I was young. The Empire was a big place then, the Commonwealth. Awful good fighters from those parts of the world.” He could see her working up some image of him, of boxing, what he’d told her of it, he had no idea what that was but he pressed on. “I won some decent fights, nobody could take me for granted. I was young and fit as a lion and I never laid down for anybody. If hard work could make a champion, I’d have had a title sooner or later, anyone who knew me could tell you that. I was plenty strong, that was no problem. Yet I knew strong fellas who had nothing special in a punch, and skinny guys, lanky, they could ring your bell.” Where had this come from, spilling out of him? He never went on like this, not with a woman he hardly knew. “You have to be tough in a cold way too, in the ring. Not tough like Munro and his wife—every waking morning, every hour of the day—but in the ring, yes.”

“You still have a passion for it, don’t you?” Tena said.

“I don’t want to live in the past like that, but sometimes I can’t stay out of it. It beats ringing up a box of macaroni.”

“I slip into the past too much myself. It’s little help to me, but so much of me is
there.
Where else can I see it?”

“Of course, Tena. What’s wrong with that anyway?”

“It can distract you from other things, it—is that a bird?”

“A kingfisher. Blue and white, big head, long sharp beak.” They listened to its rattling call as it plunged from a bare tree limb. “If that fella goes for a fish, it’s done for.”

“Did he get one?”

“It’s in his beak. Shall we go on?”

Further along the shorebank, off in the shade of thin pole trees, deadfalls, spiky-branched and grey, lay broken in the sunken space of a cellar, its bottom dark with wet leaves. They came into a clearing, scattered with poplar saplings, young willows, and grey stumps from long-ago logging, brown cores in their cracks.

“We’re near the point now,” Lauchlin said. “The water’s shallow out for a ways, you can see the sandy colour, gravel and sand, then she gets dark abruptly, falls off deep there.”

Tena lifted her face. “It’s so lovely and warm.” She slipped off her sunglasses. “The sun is bright, I can feel it. I don’t suppose I need these, do I?”

“Don’t hide your eyes anyway, they’re pretty.” Sometimes blind eyes were not.

“What good is that? Better they were ugly and sighted. The mountain feels nearer here, Lauchlin. Is it?”

“You’re as close here as you’ll get to it, maybe half a mile across the water. Rises steeply on the other side. I don’t suppose that mountainside looked much different in Munro’s day than it does now, forest thick as fur. Except for that powerline pylon up there on the ridge. There was no road along the mountain then of course. A path the Indians made probably, and the settlers took it up later. The ones who pioneered up high near the ridge, I don’t know how they survived on that soil, it’s like the skin on a backbone.” He ran his eye from east
to west where the ridge tapered down toward Little Harbour. Very difficult to pick out that old road if you weren’t aware of it, and even then it didn’t easily give itself away, maybe subtle shadow lines where hardwood turned to spruce, all but invisible here, you’d have to study it, and who would bother? When he was young he had flirted with a plan to hike the
Slios
clear up to the ridge there, in the heights where it had never been cleared, virgin trees, and its steepnesses intrigued him, the wooded ravines you would notice only when light hit the slope a certain way. Start from Granny’s house. Another fantasy, though was it not more powerful for that? He might have been disappointed had he done it and found no magic up there. Morag went to the big city to look for hers.

“My Uncle Ranny walked the
Slios
more than once when he was a young man, looking for a house with a dance in it. He swore to me he stumbled over a ghost one night on the path home, a white form that up and ran away. I’d say it was a sheep, I told him, and that got him hot. He wanted his ghosts, and he expected me to be serious about them, like the old people were. Ranny said if you didn’t believe in the second sight,
taiseacht,
you’d never get it, not even the drift of it.”

“I believe in it,” Tena said. “I do. Do I need to know Gaelic?”

“Oh, I don’t think so, Tena. A
taisear
sees disturbing things sometimes.”

“Indeed, yes.”

“Premonitions of death.”

“Their own and others’.”

“You don’t hear much about it anymore, the old-timers are passing away. Will I spread our blanket here? You can sit and have a rest if you like.”

“I don’t need to rest, I can rest at home.” She stepped toward the bank and stopped, raising her hands to the light breeze, then pulled off her straw hat. Lauchlin dropped his shoulder bag and laid out an old blanket his grandmother had woven, a dark grey rectangle of
wool on the dry grass. With a woman with sight, he would simply say, Let’s take a walk, I’ll show you what’s here, but now he wasn’t sure. She tended to turn into herself anyway, tilting her head thoughtfully, absorbing what was around her in ways he could only guess. Jesus, he had brought her here for what, to sit on a blanket and eat lunch? What had been in his mind? He didn’t always know anymore. The blanket lay there like a signal of distress.

“Could we go down to the water?” she said.

“Of course, Tena. It’s a nice bit of beach.”

Near the water she brightened, holding onto him she pulled off her shoes and tossed them aside with her hat. Lauchlin retrieved them from a rope of dry eelgrass and followed her as, barefoot, she waded in cautiously, ankle-deep. She stooped and sieved the water through her hands. “It felt so cold at first but it’s warm now,” she said. When she strayed deeper, she felt it on her legs and stopped, stepping sideways toward shore. Lauchlin, oddly pleased, wondering at her, moved along above her like her ward, plucking a whitened stick from the sand and wielding it like a cane. There seemed no need to talk, she was enjoying herself. She scooped up handfuls of gravelly sand as she went, letting it rain slowly through her fingers until she’d sifted out a mussel shell, a razor clam, an empty oyster, a stone she gripped hard before discarding it. But she paused when she found a small crab in her palm, dead white but intact, feather-light like the ones scattered along the shore, eviscerated by ravens or gulls. “That’s a green crab you have there,” Lauchlin said, “they’re mean and tough, they’re not native. Arrived in ballast probably and they’re raising hell with other shellfish.”