Lauchlin of the Bad Heart Read Online Free Page A

he wanted Lauchlin to go with him, he would foot the bill, tickets to whisky. Johanna was pleased—she no longer hoped he could have what Frank had, but she still thought that time spent with his older brother could only be good, that even proximity might make Lauchlin take up the slack in his life. But Lauchlin had shied away from the invitation, not because the trip did not appeal to him—he had always wanted to walk that particular ground in Scotland their people had come from—but because the timing felt wrong, something here needed his attention he couldn’t quite pinpoint, and he didn’t like Frank covering expenses, knowing he could not easily cover his own. Just enough money to get by was all he’d ever cared about, after his purse hopes in the ring had vanished along with the others. He got along with a disability pension from the teachers’ union. That’s the trouble with you, Johanna would say, just enough. You have to want more than enough to get ahead, money or whatever. Yes, Ma, he said. I’m okay with the whatever.
    Now Johanna shaded her eyes at the mountain as she sometimes did when she was at the flowers. She had memories over there across the water, any kind of day, any shift of weather might turn them up to her even though the house she’d been a child in had long been absorbed by woods. She was a tall woman, straight and thin, had greyed young, her white hair rolled into a bun, every day of her life that Lauchlin remembered her hair was done up that way, and no one ever said it did not suit her, it did, and she knew it. Not that she would have worn it any other way regardless, it was as if God had told her, Johanna, that’s you, wear it forever. It gave to her what Lauchlin had come to think of as a schoolmarm look, a term she would receive coldly were he ever to use it. Indeed she had taught school before she married, in a one-roomer down North River, but she hadn’t been at it long enough to get lean and bitter, like his fifth-grade teacher old Miss Lamond, not as old then as Lauchlin now, who had detestedboys, she would bristle at the sight of one, because she hated men and took pains to humiliate them while she had the power, her tongue lashing like a switch, stinging even the thick boys—their clumsy minds, their dirty hands—who thought nothing of being slapped in the face but winced and squirmed under her persistent mockery.
    But Lauchlin’s mother was in no way like Miss Lamond. She’d had her bitter times and not a few of them with men, but she rode with that, she had come through it with two sons and a stillborn girl, and one son had come back with a bad heart to the old house and remained with her, the wish of more than one widowed mother of her time and generation. She was keener on the arrangement than Lauchlin was, not because he didn’t love her but because he had known what it was like to live by himself, in Sydney, in Halifax as a student and during his first teaching job, and back to Sydney. He had liked that simple freedom not to be observed every day by someone with a vested interest in your life. If you woke up alone and moved through your house alone, a whole dimension of judgement was absent, a range of comments and inquiries and looks, small disagreements about salt on your food, about the bathroom, about dishes, about churchgoing and church, about his brother Frank and what he had done grandly and Lauchlin had not, about music in his room turned up loud on certain nights he just wanted to get drunk to it, about his sarcasm in front of the television set that sometimes ruined her favourite shows, about his visceral affection for Pierre Trudeau long after that political honeymoon was over, about sleeping late when he lingered in a vivid morning dream, about a phone conversation with an old boxing pal Mikey Cook because she thought he sometimes dwelled too much on that violent and disappointing part of his life, about the women he saw and spent time with who called