Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  At the top of the climb he stopped beside the King’s Seat to take in the view of Chance Cove and the island north and south, even though Jesse wasn’t with him. Jesse had asked a thousand times if those stones had been assembled into the vague shape of a throne or if it was an accidental configuration, but no one alive knew the answer. Probably no one else had ever thought to wonder about it.

  Sweetland went as far as the lighthouse, to put out a few rabbit snares that he and Jesse could check on in the morning. A surprise to welcome the youngster back, to scour the week’s worth of city grit from his mouth.

  It was almost four o’clock by the time he made it back to Chance Cove. The government man away on the ferry and the town’s emissary come and gone from Sweetland’s house for now. He backed the quad into the shed and covered the machine with a tarp, went into the house through the back porch. Ran cold water from the tap while he reached for a glass.

  Sweetland drew his hand back when he caught sight of the folded sheet of paper propped inside the cupboard. Stood still while the water ran, trying to think when he’d last opened that door. He used the same glass out of the drain rack for days on end, which meant it could have been planted there any time during the past week. He turned off the tap and took the sheet down, held it at arm’s length. YOU GET OUT, the message read, OR YOULL BE SOME SORRY.

  He refolded the paper and opened the drawer below the forks and knives, set it in beside the other notes he’d found tucked around the house over the last six months. They were all the same, comically sinister, offering vague threats against his person and his property, all written with words and letters cut from print headlines and glued to the paper like a ransom demand out of the movies. It was a ploy so amateurish that Sweetland would have thought Loveless was behind it, but for the fact the spelling was more or less correct. And Loveless was the only hold-out left besides himself.

  Sweetland shut the drawer and took down a glass, drank the water in slow mouthfuls. He couldn’t bring himself to take the threats seriously and he’d never mentioned the notes to anyone. He wasn’t sure why he was holding onto them. In case, was how he thought of it. Though he couldn’t say in case of what exactly.

  He was up early the next morning with the radio on. Made himself a sandwich and an extra for Jesse, packed them with two tins of peaches. He put on his boots in the porch, carried his coat and knapsack outside. Paused there a moment, listening, then slammed the door as hard as he could. Pilgrim’s dog started barking mad where she was leashed in the yard, the sound of it echoing up off the hill behind the cove.

  “Shut up, Diesel!” Sweetland shouted, louder than he needed to. “Shut the hell up!”

  He puttered around the ATV underneath the purple glow of the street light attached to the shed, strapping his .22 to the handlebars, tying the canvas pack onto the carryall at the back. Heard Pilgrim’s door open and close and the sound of the boy running. Glanced up to see him motor along the side of the house. He was within two feet of Sweetland before he came to an abrupt stop and he stood there at attention, staring up into the old man’s face.

  Lank and pale, the boy was, like something soaked too long in water. The purple light making his face look sallow, cadaverous. “Jesse,” Sweetland said. He had never made peace with the youngster’s name. It sounded fey, feminine, like something off one of those soap operas Sweetland’s mother used to watch. He’d tried to rechristen the boy with half a dozen nicknames—Bucko, Mister Man, Hunter—but Jesse would only answer to his proper name.

  “You going up on the mash?” the boy asked.

  “Got a few slips out,” Sweetland said. “Thought I might see if I had any luck. Clara know you’re up here?”

  “Mom’s still asleep. I told Pop.”

  “And what did your pop say?”

  “He told me not to be a nuisance.”

  Sweetland nodded. “Get your helmet out of the shed,” he said.

  Sweetland drove out the back of his property and when they reached the King’s Seat at the top of the path Jesse slapped at his shoulder, shouting for him to stop. He jumped off the quad and ran across to the stones, pulling the helmet from his head. The sun just coming up full, the ocean deepening blue in the new light. Jesse skipped up onto the seat and stood with his arms spread wide. “I’m the King of the World!” he shouted, his voice rolling down the hill toward the cove, picking up speed as it went. “I’m the King of the World!”

  Sweetland allowed he was the only person in Christendom who hadn’t seen that goddamn Titanic movie. Jesse knew the film so intimately he could quote every word of dialogue and sometimes did. He insisted on stopping whenever they passed the Seat and Sweetland waited on the quad while the boy had his moment.

  “Come on, Your Highness,” he said finally, “the day idn’t getting any younger.”

  Beyond the King’s Seat, the trail went east to Vatcher’s Meadow where Glad Vatcher summered his animals—half a dozen cows and the bull, twenty head of sheep fenced on forty acres of marsh grass and gorse. There was a gate on both sides so people could cross the meadow when the animals were moved into the barn for the winter, but the summer path circled the field. They drove inland about half a mile, following the barbed wire fence, until they picked up the trail on the opposite side, ravelling east over the headlands to Burnt Head. The plateau was dotted with massive granite boulders that Jesse claimed were called erratics, dropped there by retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age.

  Is that what they’re teaching you in school these days, he’d asked.

  Saw it on television, Jesse said.

  It was a wonder to Sweetland what stuck in the youngster’s head. He still insisted on taking off every stitch of clothes just to take a piss and couldn’t be counted on to flush the toilet, but he could lecture a body on a hundred different topics—aircraft, the digestive system, moon landings, Mount Everest, ping-pong, whales. Sweetland dreaded getting the boy started on whales. Their Latin names, their numbers and size, their diets, their migration routes, the sound and meaning of their songs. It was as if there was a tape in the youngster’s head just waiting for someone to press Play.

  Beyond the mash, the trail veered out toward the ocean. Ancient rock cairns placed every twenty feet along the path, to keep walkers from going over the cliff edge in the dark or in stormy weather. Three hundred feet to the surf below. The top of the old light tower was just visible beyond the rise, out on Burnt Head.

  Sweetland pulled in behind the abandoned lightkeeper’s house which had been sitting unoccupied the ten years since the light was automated. Jesse ran up the rotting steps, holding his hands to the windows and reporting the latest damage. Storm winds had stripped the ocean-side shingles and the relentless wet had rotted through the ceilings, the floors a mess of ceiling plaster and soaked insulation. Mouse shit on every surface. Sweetland hated even to look at the place. “Don’t you go inside there,” he called.

  He took his .22 and backpack off the quad and they headed inland again, the new light flashing on their right shoulder as they walked clear of the ruined building. Just a beacon on a metal tripod drilled into the farthest point of rock these days. A hundred feet north of the beacon there was a helicopter pad built overtop of the Fever Rocks, used by the Coast Guard when they brought supplies to the keeper, or came out for light maintenance. A helipad, Jesse told him it was called.

  You’re making that up, Sweetland had said.

  Am not.

  There’s no such word as hellish pad.

  Helipad, Jesse had repeated. Nothing insulted the youngster more than inaccuracy or invention. With the one notable exception, he was literal to a fault. He spelled helipad for Sweetland, to underline the word’s veracity. He’d always been a champion speller. Near-photographic memory, according to the Reverend. A generation ago, the Reverend said, they’d have called the boy an idiot savant.

  I’d say that’s about half right, Sweetland said.

  Sweetland still called it the hellish pad
, over the boy’s objections. He never missed a chance to lampoon Jesse’s childish seriousness. He had hoped to goad the youngster off the beaten track of his thoughts, to make him look at the world from a slightly crooked angle, though it made no appreciable difference and he kept at it now mostly out of habit. For his part, Jesse seemed to accept Sweetland’s mockery as a fact of life, granting him special dispensation to behave like a fool, a kind of court jester in the youngster’s kingdom of the exact.

  Beyond the pad was a decommissioned winchhouse, and leading down from the winch to the water was a higgledy series of ladders screwed into the cliffs, two hundred feet in length, angled awkwardly to follow the contours of the rock face. The Fever Rocks were the access point for the lightkeeper long before choppers were an option, supplies and materials hauled up by winch from boats below. The ladders were still maintained for emergency access to the light when the weather was too foggy for a helicopter to fly. They looked like something designed and built by Dr. Seuss. Generations of island youngsters had rowed out here to climb it on a dare. Sweetland had managed it once, he and Duke and Pilgrim drunk and in the dark. The sight of it still made him feel slightly nauseous, almost sixty years on.

  The path led into a section of scrub forest and passed above a ravine scored into the island’s back, and from there on to its southern tip. It was how the keeper used to travel to the south-end light above the Mackerel Cliffs, a five-hour trip by horse and cart back in the day. Sweetland managed it in just over an hour on the quad. The path was rarely used anymore and was nearly overgrown, the spruce crowding in. They had to walk single file, Jesse out in front, the wet branches soaking their sleeves as they went.

  Clara had gotten the boy a haircut while they were in St. John’s, cropped close at the nape and sides. Sweetland could see the seashell whorls of the double crown at the back of Jesse’s head. A lick of hair sticking up between them, a rogue pook that had gone its own way since he’d had enough hair to comb. Before Jesse learned to walk, Sweetland used to twirl it around his finger to make it stand straight, like a headdress feather in the cowboy movies he’d watched with Duke in the old Toronto theatres. Mommy’s little Indian, he called him.

  The youngster couldn’t stand anyone touching his head now and Sweetland thought he might be to blame for that. He could just resist the urge to reach out and smooth the lick down.

  The slips were tailed at the base of spruce trees where the runs crossed the trail. They were tied to an alder standard he’d pushed firm into the ground, the silver noose snugged around with brush. A rabbit lying in the first snare and Sweetland knelt to help Jesse work the wire free of the neck, tying a length of string around the paws so the boy could carry the animal across his shoulder.

  They walked nearly two hours before they stopped for lunch, settling in a clearing beyond the valley. The peak of the Priddles’ cabin half-hidden among the spruce and birch below. The racket of gannets nesting on the Music House headlands drifting up to them where they sat. They had two brace for their efforts and Sweetland laid the rabbits in the grass at their feet, the animals fat and sleek and bug-eyed. He dug out the sandwiches and they ate in silence a few minutes. When Jesse finished his lunch he sang for a while, belting out the details of some bygone disaster, though it wasn’t a performance. The audience was irrelevant, Sweetland knew. The song part of a private landscape that surfaced now and then into the wider world.

  Sweetland rooted in the bag after a tin of peaches, which was the only fruit the boy would eat. Only from a can, only Del Monte. Sweetland had a cupboardful at the house. He opened the top, passing it across when the song was done.

  “Pop says it’s just you and Loveless wants to stay now,” Jesse said.

  Sweetland stared across at the boy, who was focused on the tin, shovelling the fruit into his mouth with a plastic spoon. He hadn’t once mentioned that whole business before now. From what Sweetland could tell, the issue of resettlement had never registered in the peculiar peaks and valleys of the youngster’s mind, though it had been the main topic of conversation in the cove for years now. “Will I have to go?” Jesse asked. He was still staring into the tin as he ate.

  “Not as long as I’m around,” Sweetland said.

  The boy scooped the last of the fruit into his mouth, tipped up the tin to drink the juice. It was impossible to say what he thought of it all, one way or the other.

  “So,” Sweetland said. “You just come back on the ferry yesterday, was it?”

  “Mom took me to see the doctor into St. John’s,” he said. Like this was news to Sweetland.

  “And what did the doctor have to say to you? You’re retarded, is it? Antisocial? Codependent? Mentally unstable? Psychopathic?”

  “No,” the boy said.

  “Well what are you going all the way into St. John’s to see him for then?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “Your mother’s the one should be seeing the doctor.”

  “She sees him too,” Jesse said. “She goes in after me.”

  Sweetland smiled. “Fat lot of fucken good it’s doing her, hey?”

  “I don’t know,” the youngster said.

  He’d gone too far, Sweetland thought and he said, “Never mind me.” By way of apology.

  “I don’t mind.”

  He let out a breath of air, stared away down the valley. Even Sweetland thought it was a lonely life for the youngster sometimes, stuck in that head of his. Surrounded by geriatrics and imaginary friends. And as if on cue, Jesse said, “Hollis went into St. John’s to see a doctor one time.”

  “Where’d you hear the like of that?”

  “Hollis told me.”

  Sweetland’s brother, the boy was talking about. Dead fifty years or more. “Is that a fact,” Sweetland said.

  “He was into St. John’s most of the winter one year.”

  Sweetland got to his feet and busied himself picking up their bit of material, packing it away. “Finish up now,” he said. A feeling like bugs crawling on his skin he could only get clear of by moving. “We got better things to do than sit around here jawing.”

  They cleaned the rabbits at Sweetland’s kitchen sink. Jesse on a chair to hold them aloft by the hind paws as Sweetland flicked a blade through the fur above the ankles, peeled the coats down the length of the carcasses an inch at a time. Flesh the colour of mahogany and grained like wood. The mottled guts slopping into the stainless steel bowl of the sink.

  The phone rang and Jesse jumped off the chair to answer but Sweetland stopped him, afraid it might be Clara. “You wash up,” he said. “It’s time you got home to your supper.”

  The boy rinsed his hands under the tap as the phone jangled on awhile. He said, “Are you going out after wood tomorrow?”

  “Might be.”

  “I could help.”

  “Take one of these down to your pop,” Sweetland said, and he slipped a naked carcass into a clear plastic bag. Jesse waiting with his freshly washed hands held out, as if he was about to receive a ceremonial sword.

  After he’d scoured the sink, Sweetland went out the back porch door and walked around to the front of the house. Looked east and west like someone deciding on a route before he ambled down through the cove. He went by Pilgrim’s house, but he didn’t so much as glance in the windows, scurried past with his eyes averted.

  Sweetland carried on to Duke Fewer’s barbershop, a one-room shed next to Duke’s house. There was a barber’s chair as old as Buckley’s goat screwed into the bare plywood floor. One wall mostly mirror, the other pasted with faded photos and newspaper clippings yellowed with age. A buzzing neon light fixture, a coat stand, a sink in one corner, a wood stove opposite to heat the room through the winters. Two wooden chairs along the wall below the photos, and, on a low table between them, a chessboard beside a stack of magazines—National Geographic and Time, Sports Illustrated and Maclean’s—that dated from thirty years before and hadn’t been touched in nearly that long.

  Duk
e was sitting in the barber’s chair with the three-day-old paper arrived on yesterday’s ferry. His praying mantis legs crossed in a fashion that seemed barely human. Didn’t glance up when Sweetland came in and looked to have dozed off with his heavy-lidded eyes half-open, but for the habitual tremor in his hands that made the paper shake. “Be done in a minute,” he said finally, and Sweetland took a seat, stared down at the game in progress on the chessboard.

  Duke bought the barber’s chair from a second-hand building supply in St. John’s when the cod stocks collapsed and the government ended the inshore fishery in ’92. Sweetland had tried to talk him out of it. To begin with, there were only ninety-odd people living in Chance Cove in those days and every one of them got their hair cut in Reet Verge’s kitchen, but for Ned Priddle who was bald as a cue ball. And Duke had never cut hair in his life, regardless. Man nor woman was willing to sit in that chair and let Duke at them with the clippers.

  Duke rustled the paper. “Pilgrim was by earlier. Said you and Jesse was out checking slips.”

  “Got a couple brace on the backside, above the Priddles’ cabin.”

  “Pilgrim says Clara wouldn’t very happy about it.”

  “I don’t imagine,” Sweetland said quietly.

  Duke had a straight razor and a shaving cup and offered shaves for a dollar fifty. As far as Sweetland knew, he had no takers on that offer either. A tax write-off, Duke called it when he put out his shingle. Though it was anyone’s guess what exactly he was writing off. Twenty-odd years he’d been spending six afternoons a week out here, sweeping the floor and reading the paper, watching passersby through the tiny window beside the door. His ex-wife had abandoned the island twenty-five years ago, his children all shifted off to one part of the mainland or other. He gossiped with the men who dropped in for a cup of tea, a gander at the chessboard, moving a piece here or there. Duke played the white and never lost.