Lauchlin of the Bad Heart Read Online Free

last of an apple, wondering when he might see her again. Clement’s van had passed the store early in the morning, Lauchlin had caught sight of the codfish flashing by. But he had not seen Tena on the road since that night he drove her home. Was it awkward for her to move about blind in the morning, fresh from bed? Was she alone in that house and around the yard all day? She did have visitors from town, women she knew, and the elderly Mathesons, her near neighbours, stopped in, Alan and Lorna, they’d spoken of her in the store, of how stubborn she was about help. Oh they liked that about her, in a way, her independence, her spunk as Lorna said, but they were a little baffled by her as well, you could never be sure she wanted you looking in.
    There was his mother making her way up the hill in weary, exaggerated strides, her hair silvery-white in the sun, as Granny’s had been. He had probably lingered up here too long but had she waited another five minutes, he’d have relieved her at the store even though he was in no mood whatever to be there. He was about to turn from the window but Slide MacIvor’s light-blue Buick was passing slowly on the road below, not at its usual speed but creeping and bucking along, its tailpipe spurting dark smoke. Slide had been a baseball player in his youth, a good one with pro prospects until he tore a knee, but somebody had hung “Slide” on him long before that, when he was a kid, something to do with him and winter ice, not the diamond at all.
    Johanna had stopped to catch her breath beneath the window. Lauchlin tapped on the pane and pointed at Slide’s car but she only nodded, touching absently petals of the rich red day lilies her elderson had planted for her many summers ago. Frank had long been the yardstick—doctor, husband, father, blessed by a successful Toronto life—but only after he had controlled his love of alcohol. Johanna had always been set against drinking and it had caused her great anguish to see her darling elder son, the one who had carried her hopes, take to it young and with such alacrity. The first time he had stumbled upstairs, collapsing every couple steps to get a grip on the giggles, she was appalled, but even as she scolded him into bed and threatened punishments she hadn’t the will to carry out, she knew that Frank was too like her brother Uncle Ranny, for whom alcohol seemed essential to his very soul. She feared that Frank might waste his intelligence, as Ranny had, at the desk of an insurance company, or worse. But so did her son, he was ambitious and wanted as badly to be a doctor as his mother did for him, and so he curtailed his drinking to binges she never knew about, doing well at university and medical school, fulfilling his residency and becoming a surgeon. There were still times, he had admitted only to Lauchlin in letters—he was always glad for an envelope from his brother, his letters were unlike anyone else’s, and who wrote them anyway these days?—when he lapsed and had to wrestle himself out of liquor’s passionate embrace, pulling back after a spell of uninhibited craziness he had enjoyed fully and dangerously, and always expected to again ( You have bouts of boxing, Lauch , he’d written, me of drinking, but for me there’s no final bell, no decision, no hand raised in the air—though there might be a few refs around—and no ropes define its boundaries ).
    So being measured by Frank did not trouble Lauchlin much, not anymore, at times they had clashed but he loved his brother, and every now and then Frank would surprise him with a long letter, details and observations he did not recount when he wrote to their mother. Lauchlin kept them all. Frank was an ER doctor now, not a surgeon as such, and he’d written sometimes about his life in that chaotic setting. But recently he had been planning a trip to Scotland, a break from medicine, up to the Outer Hebrides from where Johanna’sMacLeods and Campbells had emigrated, and