Lauchlin of the Bad Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

never seen, Harris, Mull, and the coast of Wester Ross, shewas keen to go there then, a restless girl anyway, she had that about her from the first. Lauchlin’s own restlessness now had nothing to do with going or not going to the Hebrides, he didn’t know what it had to do with exactly, maybe a sense of time that seemed, at certain moments, to drain the very blood from him. But he could not tell his brother that. Or that Tena MacTavish had stirred his attention. He regretted now his candour about his heart, telling her that. What’s the matter with you, Lauch, you’re not an invalid, you’re not an old man, Frank would say when Lauchlin projected himself into old age, so adept at this game now that his older self, a scarred and infirm figure he never expected to merge with, had become a separate person, someone he could still regard from a distance with sadness and pity.
    Hadn’t he kept his body as best he could into his fifties, fighting the paunch with sit-ups, though not like when he’d boxed and his stomach was flat as a table? He could still do a fast fifty, slower toward a hundred. Dr. Fraser was forever after him to eat slimmer, lose a few pounds, and he’d say sure, but Johanna’s cooking was such a familiar pleasure he never asked her to alter it for Dr. Fraser. His hair had thinned away like his dad’s and he had the same habit, as he talked or thought something over, of running his palm slowly across his pate as if he’d just discovered the hair was missing, not that he cared. Never mind, you have a nice head, Morag had told him more than once, dear Morag, and he’d taken ribbing about it so well no one mentioned it anymore. If once in a while he felt that clutching in his chest, that pinching pain, he fished out a nitroglycerine pill, but not often. He would check his blood pressure with his own cuff because he hated the doctor’s office, the uneasy wait among the ill and sniffling, the soft woosh woosh woosh of the inflating cuff, the needle trembling angrily as the doctor sombrely read the dial, and always it was high. Dr. Fraser told him, Lauchlin, you’ve got the white coat syndrome, boy, that or you haven’t been taking your medicine. Oh I have, but it’s true, Alistair, he said, I just hear the word “doctor” and up itjumps, popping a few more capillaries, eh? At home Lauchlin would pump up the cuff again and again until he got a decent reading, then stash it in a drawer for weeks. He was not fearful, in the main. He did not avoid risks just because they might tax his heart, he wished he had mentioned that to Tena while he was at it. Avoid the joys of women for that? Might as well take the count and be done with it.
    In the front field he grabbed a stalk of timothy to chew. An afternoon of bright wind, clear of flies, a day for outdoors, cool, he’d like to walk past the store, keep on going out back and find the old path down to the shore, he and Frank as boys had raced down it and, after swimming, back up. But now the return would be slow, a climb of cautionary rests. Overgrown now, hardly used since the last of the old-timers, Hector Stewart and Johnny Gunn, would row over in their skiffs from New Pabbay and climb it to fill their gunnysacks with supplies. Lauchlin had last done the path several years ago with Morag, slower than Hector or Neil, but with a nice layover in dry moss. Dear Morag. Her name still delighted and troubled him. She hadn’t come to Cape Breton last summer for her usual visit home, and he missed that, missed the sight of her, the sheer physical delight of her, despite their long and difficult affair. Maybe she had tired of him at last and was spending her vacation in some exotic place, he couldn’t blame her for that. He was hardly the man she had loved at twenty-two, strong and fit, afraid of nothing, nobody. He’d had a strong heart then, maybe a future in the ring. If he’d achieved that, if he had become a ranked fighter, any sort of champion, then, he