Free Lauchlin of the Bad Heart by D. R. Macdonald Page A

where Lorna Matheson was at the counter and offered to drop it by the MacTavishes. Lauchlin, enduring a sarcastic comment from his mother about the lengths he would go for a customer if she was good-looking enough, stopped short of insisting he do it himself, it was too obvious. It’s not what you think at all, Ma, he said on the way out, it’s the storekeeper in me.
    He took a shower and shaved carefully. But he stopped his razor halfway down his throat and glanced out the bathroom window at the road where Tena had tapped her way along the shoulder that night, where she would have emerged from under the big tree just before the store, that canopy of maple leaves. She had probably had her fill of testing the road at night. He tried to imagine what it might be like, feeling the gravel of the shoulder under your feet, hearing a car approach, feeling its backwash as it rushed past you. In the mirror, he ran his fingers above one eye, over the hard ridge of scar tissue, he’d had his cuts but only once badly (What fight was that? Kenny Kupchak with that hook quick as a snake? Malkie would remember), he’d never been a bleeder. What conception of him did Tena have with nothing but his voice to go on and what little he’d told herof himself? How would she feel him, sense him? His hands, his lips, would they feel different than if she could see them too? Could she hear the expression on his face? He closed his eyes and moved his hands in the space around him. Odd that she made him more conscious of himself, not less.
    He sat on his bed in his undershorts, shaking his head at what the room had accumulated. Books, some fiction and poetry he had liked or liked to teach when he could, stories of Conrad, Lawrence, Hemingway, Morley Callaghan (he’d usually include the side-story of Callaghan and Hemingway, pals, putting on the gloves once in Paris and Callaghan, smaller and lighter, knocking Hemingway down), Hugh MacLennan, Alice Munro, she knew the provincial life, though her truth was sometimes beyond his students. A few books on boxing, John L. Sullivan’s ghostwritten memoir, a volume on the bare-knuckle era. A cassette player and tapes, most of them Irish and Scottish groups now, Planxty, the Bothy Boys, Silly Wizard and the like he’d had for a good while, and the young Cape Bretoners getting good names, the Rankin Family, the Barra MacNeils, Ashley MacIsaac, just a kid yet, and Natalie MacMaster, music to get toasted with, to boost a mood. The boxing gloves from his last fight hung by their laces on a dresser mirror post—he’d never pulled them on again. When you lived so long in the same house, life telescoped and the old and familiar could seem just-arrived. He liked old things, their particularity, imbued with a past, an era. They defined themselves, stood out against the sameness of the new. His bedside lamp, a converted oil lamp with a cobalt base. A small desk of his great-grandfather MacLeod’s, brought over from Scotland. An oak chair Uncle Lion had made. An oval picture frame with convex glass—grandfather and grandmother MacLean in their twenties, unsmiling and proud. Too many things on his walls, they needed a culling, an artistic rearranging. Morag had an eye for that, but she hadn’t been in this room in years. You need walls twenty feet high, Lauchie, she’d said once. He had hung something when thespirit moved him, then something else above it, below it, off to the side, a stab at asymmetry. He would wake up and, depending on how he felt, his eyes would snag on a photo or an object and he’d lie there while its memories seeped into him. An 1811 print from England Morag had bought him in Boston, a bare-fisted match between Tom Crib and the black American Tom Molineaux, the white fighter‘s eyes disfigured even though he won, Molineaux’s endurance wasted from drinking in pubs. A portrait print, same era, of James Figg with his shaved head, the father of English boxing who’d taught gentlemen the