Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  Her daughter was trying to rehabilitate her lowbrow taste in reading material with what Queenie called “serious” books—literary novels, prize-winners, Oprah’s picks. Sandra sent them down from Edmonton with encouraging notes scribbled inside the covers. Queenie never cracked a spine, but for the few written by Newfoundlanders or about Newfoundland. She took those on as a kind of patriotic duty, though it was a torture to get through them. They were every one depressing, she said. Or nothing happened. Or there was no point to the story. Half the books supposedly set in Newfoundland were nowhere Queenie recognized and she felt insulted by their claim on her life. They all sounds like they was written by townies, she liked to say.

  She turned the open book face down on her lap. “You heard Hayward signed on to the package.”

  “I been informed.”

  “Leaves you in a hard spot, I imagine.”

  “I still got Loveless,” Sweetland said, and they both had a laugh over that. He leaned his shoulder on the window ledge. “Never thought you’d allow Hayward to sign on, just the same.”

  “It’s Sandra talked him into it,” she said. “Going to put an apartment in her downstairs for us. Can’t wait to have us up there, she says.” Queenie made the noise in her throat again, to say it was just as likely she’d set foot on the moon as in Alberta.

  Sweetland didn’t give much for the possibility either. Jesse came to visit Queenie now and then and they sat through a showing of Titanic on his laptop. Or the boy would ask after her favourite book or movie or song, about when the toilet was put in or where her children were living now and what they did for work. Queenie had answered the same questions ten thousand times but she had endless patience for the boy. His monotonous interrogation one more tiny room she’d chosen to close herself inside.

  “I was born upstairs here,” she said. “Five youngsters I had, in the same room I was born in. Hayward can sign whatever he likes,” she said and she stubbed her cigarette in an ashtray beside the chair. “I’ll be leaving this house in a box.”

  He was up before light, at his table with tea and the laptop, checking the marine forecast. CBC radio nattering in the background, a plant closing in Burin, the fisheries minister pledging retraining and make-work projects for the people affected.

  He should just leave the goddamn radio off, Sweetland thought, enjoy the peace awhile. He headed out into the chill, walked down toward the dock through the stillness, until Pilgrim’s dog sent up a racket to mark his passing.

  “Shut up, Diesel,” he said. The dog strained at her chain and carried on barking until Sweetland reached the waterline. There was a single street light on the government wharf, half a dozen boats moored alongside. Sweetland turned left, away from the wharf, and walked out the arm toward his fishing stage. It was a tidy two-storey building, the second floor a twine loft where they’d knit their cod traps once upon a time. No one knew how old the building was, but Sweetland had seen it standing over the landwash in a picture of the cove from a hundred years ago. It hadn’t been used to clean or store salt cod in a generation, but he kept the building in pristine condition, the roof patched and tarred spring and fall, the outside walls ochred red. Even when he worked at the lighthouse he kept it up, scraped and puttied the windows, replaced the shores. Your little museum, Clara called it.

  He set the chainsaw and gas can and axe and lunch bag on the stagehead and climbed down into his boat, checked over the motor, the VHF.

  Jesse was out of breath when he clomped onto the longers. Shirt out of his pants, his face bruised with sleep. A jacket hanging limp in his hand.

  Sweetland nodded up to him. “Hand me down the chainsaw,” he said, and a thought struck him. “You’re not planning on bringing anyone along, are you?”

  “Just Hollis,” the boy said.

  “I’m not taking Hollis.”

  “He won’t say nothing.”

  “He never liked being on the water when he was alive. I’m not having the fucker in the boat now. Are you coming or not?”

  The boy turned away to carry on a hushed conversation with the dead man. Sweetland couldn’t say which way it would go until Jesse picked up the axe and stepped down onto the gunwale.

  It was nearly light by the time they turned to the mouth of the cove, pushing out into the whitecaps on the open ocean. A three-hour steam to the bay where he cut his wood and Jesse fell asleep halfway across. Sweetland stood with his face in the wind, watching the shoreline come at him, rising out of the ocean like a slow-moving tidal wave of rock and spruce.

  He woke Jesse before he eased into the bay, letting the youngster take the wheel. Steep hills above them, a mix of birch and var among the spruce. “Bring her around over by Nancy’s Rocks,” Sweetland said, and he walked out along the bow, tying up at a rusted iron ring drilled into the granite several lifetimes ago. They stepped off onto the shoreline together, the boy bounding up into the trees, eager as a dog.

  The wind came up through the day and the ocean chopped at them as soon as they cleared the bay on the return trip, the boat riding sluggish with a full load of wood. They swung into the lee of Little Sweetland as they passed, to get out of the worst of it a few minutes. The island humpbacked and barren and solitary. Two single-room cabins on the south side of Tilt Cove, satellite dishes screwed to the walls. Sweetland had never seen anyone use those cabins, though they’d been there for years.

  “This is where they put the buffaloes,” Jesse said.

  Every time they passed Tilt Cove he wanted this fact confirmed and then insisted on hearing the story behind it, the narrative like a toll required to make the passage.

  “This is the place.”

  “How many people was it lived here?” Jesse asked, which was a surprise to Sweetland. The boy had never shown the slightest interest in the detail before.

  “There was almost a hundred lived in there when I was your age,” Sweetland said.

  “What happened to them?”

  “They was all shifted out by the Smallwood government in the sixties.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “Here and there,” he said. “Placentia Bay. Burgeo, Hermitage. St. John’s.”

  “They’re all dead now.”

  Sweetland nodded over that. He didn’t know anymore where the boy’s head was going to take things. “Most of them, I expect.”

  “You helped get them ashore,” Jesse said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “The buffaloes.”

  “It was as good as a concert,” he said.

  Just home from his first stint in Toronto and working as a deckhand on a schooner shipping dry goods and salt fish along the south coast. The Ceciliene Marie. They sailed across the strait to Cape Breton to pick up the bison, the animals harried into individual containers and a crane lifting them off the dock, setting them into an improvised pen in the hold. Two dozen altogether, most of them yearling females. Two bulls. Unlikely-looking things, a thousand pounds each and most of the weight in the massive head and shoulders, top-heavy on those stick legs. The opposite of icebergs, Sweetland thought, nine-tenths above the water. The animals were walleyed, drugged-up and stinking of shit and fear. Five had died in the railcar on the trip from Manitoba, and Sweetland thought it would be a miracle if any survived the ocean crossing.

  It was the wildlife department wanting to add another large game animal to the few in the province landed them there. They planned to set the bison out on Little Sweetland to determine there was no disease risk to local animals, after which the herd was meant to be introduced to the larger island of Newfoundland. Though that step was never taken.

  The Ceciliene Marie sailed past Sweetland to overnight in Miquelon. They got drunk there, the wildlife officers and Sweetland, anchored off the last crumb of New France that was still a French territory. It was the only time he’d ever visited the place. The wildlife officers were all Newfoundlanders but for the fellow in charge, an American from Nevada who requested the stop in Miquelon. He took e
very chance he could get, he said, to spend a night in France.

  Wet and mauzy when they arrived at Tilt Cove the following morning. Dozens of people had sailed out from Fortune Bay and the Burin to watch the event, the harbour packed with boats and spectators on the roofs of the houses still standing in the cove.

  There was nowhere for the freighter to dock and they anchored off in deeper water, the buffalo loaded into their individual crates to be ferried ashore on a raft built by the wildlife officers. They’d hired Duke Fewer to tow the raft back and forth with his longliner. Sweetland was on the crane for the first dozen transfers, lowering the boxes onto the flat beside the schooner. The bison sedated and more or less quiet as they were hauled onto dry land. Staggering into the open with a stunned air about them, shaking those big rig shoulders and prancing drunkenly up away from the water. The people on the roofs hooting and shouting in disbelief as the mythological creatures wandered about in a forlorn herd, travelling and turning in a huddle, pawing at the sedge moss, sniffing the salt air.

  “They aren’t really buffaloes,” Jesse announced.

  “Is that right?” Sweetland said.

  “Bison aren’t related to water buffaloes or African buffaloes.”

  “What is it they’re related to, then?”

  “Cows,” Jesse said. “And goats.”

  It was some Google search the boy was quoting, a universe of facts at his fingertips. As if, Sweetland thought, he wasn’t tiresome enough on his own. “Be that as it may,” he said, “does Your Highness mind if, for the purposes of this story, I calls them buffalo?”

  “I don’t mind,” Jesse said.

  Sweetland took a turn on the raft after lunch and he stood with a wildlife officer as each crate was floated in, holding the top of the box to keep his place on the narrow flat. Ashore, he stood at the rear as the officer opened the door. If it needed encouragement to step into the open, Sweetland prodded the animal’s backside with a stick through a custom-made hole.

  They’ll come right through the wall if they minds to kick, the officer warned him, so watch yourself.

  The animals had all been sedated in the morning but they seemed to be crawling out of that fog as the afternoon wore on. The next-to-last cow was bawling before she was lifted off the schooner, rocking the crate in the air. They cinched the container to the flat, the buffalo’s hooves making the walls shake as they spidered around the outside. The smell and motion of the water seemed to unhinge her altogether and she slammed against the box as they started toward the landing site. All the wooden joints coming loose as the animal panicked inside, the container coming apart before they’d travelled thirty yards toward shore. The wildlife officer pitched into the water as the buffalo pushed for the clear and he grabbed a corner of the raft to hold himself afloat. Sweetland made a wild, stupid lunge for the animal’s tail.

  “As if I could have picked her up like a rat,” he said to Jesse.

  There wasn’t room enough on the raft for the creature to turn around. She tried to catch herself at the edge but bowled over, top-heavy as she was. A splintered wall of the crate was floating beside the raft and the buffalo fell onto it, the wooden sheet tipping beneath her weight. Sweetland standing over her as she thrashed, trying to right herself. She went down slowly at first, submerging like a boat taking on water. But once she was under she sank like a stone, as though she was on a line and being dragged down from below. That dark face staring up at Sweetland on the surface, eyes wide, bubbles streaming from the massive nostrils. He could see her descending through the clear water for a long, long time.

  “Could you see her on the bottom?” Jesse asked.

  “Too deep out there near the schooner,” he said. “Lost sight of her after awhile.”

  The rest of the animals survived the trip, but for one of the bulls who died within two days of the landing. Calves were born every spring and the remnants of the herd hung on for almost thirty years, though the buffalo never managed to take hold on the island. Sweetland would watch for them on the headlands as he passed by Little Sweetland, those shaggy outlines adrift in the mist like something called up from the underworld.

  “What happened to them all?” Jesse asked.

  “No one really knows. They used to walk out on the cliffs to lick the salt off the rocks. There’s a good many got killed that way. Could be poachers took some of them.”

  The boy considered that possibility a moment. “You ever tasted buffalo?”

  “Now, Jesse,” he said. “That would be telling, wouldn’t it.”

  He docked at the government wharf, for the flat expanse of it. Sent Jesse up to the house for his ATV and trailer, unloading the wood from the boat while he waited, throwing the ten-foot lengths up on the cement surface. Loveless stood across the way, leaning against a building about the size of an outhouse where the island’s bank machine was located. He had his lapdog at his feet, a bit of string tied around its neck as a leash. He had an unlit pipe in his mouth that he chewed from one corner to the other, running it back and forth like a gear shift.

  “More wood,” Loveless said finally.

  “You’ve got a real gift for observation, Mr. Loveless.”

  “Duke says you got enough split and stacked to keep hell in flames half of eternity.”

  “I’m planning on sticking around a good while.”

  Loveless looked up toward the ring of houses. “I heard Hayward signed on to the package,” he said. And when Sweetland didn’t respond he said, “Just the two of us now.”

  “Two is as much as we needs,” Sweetland said.

  Loveless said nothing then, his pipe repeating and repeating its mechanical journey.

  “Your little dog was running loose out the arm last night,” Sweetland said.

  “Can’t keep ’en barred in, Mose. I swear the little fucker knows how to turn a doorknob.”

  Sweetland had a look at the animal. There was some other P dog in the mix, Pekinese or Pomeranian, Loveless couldn’t remember which. Paid a fortune for it, Sweetland guessed, although Loveless refused to confess how much. Sara would never have allowed such a sentimental purchase where animals were concerned. Lotsa dog on the island, she’d have said. No good for working, that one. He’s hypoallergenic, Loveless liked to say, quoting the breeder’s advertisement, as if that excused the expense.

  “You got to get the dog fixed,” Sweetland said. “Won’t wander half so much after that.”

  Loveless reached down and the animal stretched on its back to have its belly scratched, the legs spread wide. “That’s a darlin set of balls he got,” Loveless said, and he gave the testicles an affectionate little rub. “Be a sin to cut them off.”

  Sweetland shook his head. He tossed the logs with a steady rhythm, every movement unhurried and deliberate. The wood cast up on the dock like it was coming off a conveyor belt. “Your cow ready to have her calf yet?” he asked.

  “Any day.”

  “Going to look after it yourself, are you?”

  “Sara’s no use to me dead and gone.”

  “You were no use to her, alive and well.”

  “I learned a thing or two off her,” Loveless said. “Never you mind.”

  “She didn’t teach you a goddamn thing about playing chess.”

  Loveless stared blankly, thrown by the sudden turn in the conversation.

  “You fucked up the chess game with Duke,” Sweetland said.

  Loveless took the pipe from his mouth, pointed the wet end down at Sweetland. “Duke told me it was a smart move I made,” he said.

  Sweetland straightened up from the work, put his hands on his hips. “How many times have Duke lost a game of chess in the shop?”

  Loveless raised the pipe to answer but realized there was nothing he could say to that point. He clamped the end back in his teeth and turned to watch Jesse creeping down the hill with the quad. The boy swung the machine around so it sat next to the growing pile of wood. Jesse took off his helmet and walked over to crouch an arm�
��s length away from the dog, wanting to know how old it was and where it was born and what it liked to eat and if it could be trained to use a toilet. Cut from the same cloth, man and boy, Sweetland thought. And regretted thinking it straight away. There was something wrong with the young one, but he was a different creature than Loveless altogether.

  They loaded the trailer with Loveless as an audience and Sweetland dropped Jesse at his door on the way up the hill.

  “You going out to check the snares tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

  “What about Monday?”

  “If the weather’s half decent.”

  “I could go with you.”

  “You got school,” Sweetland said.

  He drove along the side of his house to the shed. Stood the green wood against the fence at the end of his property. It would be next spring before he could cut and junk it up. He had longers in various stages of drying around the property, all waiting for the chainsaw. He was soon going to have to find somewhere else to pack it away. The back porch was full, one side of the shed stacked floor to ceiling with junks in rows, and more along the lee side wall. The twine shed and the old outhouse long ago converted to hold firewood. He’d stolen a section of metal culvert left over from road construction on the Burin, towed it across on Hayward Coffin’s punt. Packed it front to back, forty or fifty cords of wood, he figured. People said he would never live long enough to burn it all and he couldn’t stay out of the woods after more. It was like having money in the bank.

  SWEETLAND CAME AROUND at the government wharf with his boatload of survivors in tow and he threw a line up to Duke Fewer. Call out to the lighthouse, he said. See if Bob-Sam can raise the Coast Guard.

  We haven’t heard nothing about a ship gone down, Duke said.

  Well maybe they was out for a row and got lost. Give Bob-Sam a call.

  They were small, slight men, wide-eyed and unsteady on their feet. Sweetland climbed in to lend a hand as they were lifted up onto the dock. From there they were helped along to the Fisherman’s Hall where the women swaddled them in blankets and set about spooning soup into their mouths.