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

draw on notes and letters. I quit doing that. I listened hard. I know now if there’s a smile in a voice or not, and I wait to hear it. Would you read something to me? Clement’s tried but he getsflustered, and he doesn’t have the time anymore. But what am I saying? Neither do you, you have a store to run. I’m sorry.”
    “Shane’ll hold the fort. Anyway, I’d like to make the store selfserve, you just grab what you need and leave the money on the counter. No, I’ll read to you, Tena, of course I will. I used to read to my students. I got the lazy ones to remember something, maybe, or at least I kept them awake.”
    She took a book from a counter drawer and held it out to him. He leafed through it, an anthology of poems, well-thumbed. “You have favourites here, I see,” he said, opening at a bookmark.
    “Is it Anne Wilkinson’s? Clement left the mark in there. It’s for a day like this.”
    Lauchlin read slowly. He hadn’t in years and he was tentative, shy under the intentness of her listening, so focused upon him, and he wanted to do it well. He let his voice find its way for a few lines until the rhythm of the language took over,
In June and gentle oven
    Summer kingdoms simmer
    As they come
    And flower and leaf and love
    Release
    Their sweetest juice,
    he gave it some force and volume and the domestic atmosphere of the kitchen seemed to recede,
Then two in one the lovers lie
    And peel the skin of summer
    With their teeth
    And suck its marrow from a kiss
    So charged with grace
    The tongue, all knowing
    Holds the sap of June
    Aloof from seasons, flowing.
    The lines came home to him as he finished and he felt himself blush foolishly. She seemed to be looking past him, somewhere else. He noticed the refrigerator’s hum, the scree of a hawk high outside.
    “That’s lovely, thank you,” she said. “Some lines I can remember but I could never hold a whole poem in my head. I didn’t need to, once.”
    “What about Braille?” he said. “I don’t know anything about it, of course, only a man in Sydney who could read it like a demon.”
    “I couldn’t go through all that, learning it. If I were young I might. I wouldn’t have the patience now, I couldn’t sit down for it. It’s not what I want. It’s so…blind. That must sound silly.” She took up her teacup, turned it in her fingers. “It’s nice to have your company.”
    “Do you ever mind being here alone, Tena? I suppose you did at first,” Lauchlin said.
    “I was fearful for a time. But I got over that. I don’t mind. In the day, at least. Lorna Matheson over the way visits, and Alan her husband looks in on me sometimes. Good for gossip, they are. But I wouldn’t have them at the poetry. You can be alone anyway, even with people, when you’re blind, or so it seems at times. Just me, among voices. Oh, I have visitors, women from town. But some of them pity me, they don’t know it, but they do. They think me helpless. I used to knit, Clement has two sweaters I did for him. My dad made me my first needles out of sucker sticks when I was little. Later I could work the needles fast without even looking at them, but when I lost my sight, I couldn’t knit at all. Funny, isn’t it? Why should that be?” She turned her head suddenly toward the window where the first blooms of black hollyhocks swayed in the wind, a little crazy in their floral lushness. “That’s Clement’s pickup. I thought he’d be milling until dark.”
    Lauchlin hadn’t heard the truck but he did now, its door opening and slamming. “Shall I put the book away?” he said. He didn’t want Clement to see he’d been reading poetry to Tena, as if it were unmanly somehow, or too intimate, and it disgusted him to think like that. But he placed the book in her outstretched hand and she set it aside.
    “Lauchlin, how’re you now?” Clement looked tired, his dark-green work clothes patched with sweat stains, mud on his shoes and the knees of his pants.
    “I brought Tena