Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  She’s on her back, Uncle Clar said when Sweetland first asked what she-moon meant. This was long before he was old enough to understand Clar’s cryptic explanation, and he couldn’t remember now when it came clear to him. Likely it was Duke got there first and passed the details on to him. A year older, and more reckless, always pushing ahead of what was handed out. It was Duke took Sweetland dogging the young couples when they were boys, chasing them up onto the mash or to the meadow out behind the church where they snuck off to mess around in the grass.

  Pure devilment at first, doing their best to be an annoyance, pelting the couples with crabapples or spruce cones. Battering the hell out of it then, the young fellow flinging rocks at their heads. It was like hitting a hornets’ nest with a stick. Until it became something more serious and surreptitious. The game about slinking as close as possible, seeing as much as you could. Sweetland trying to describe it to Pilgrim afterwards, dresses pushed above the thigh, the naked skin and busy hands down there. Bare asses silvered in the moonlight. Pilgrim’s eyes wide with blind wonder. Lord Jesus, what a world they were living in.

  Watching Queenie Coffin undress through her bedroom window, the summer her sister took sick with typhoid. Queenie Buffett, she was then. The tiny bedroom on the ground floor. Standing up close to the panes to take off her clothes for him, bold as brass. Hair cropped as short as a boy’s, pale nipples on a board chest. Hairless skin down there, that foreign crease looking oddly chaste. A simple pleasure between them, to see and be seen. Hardly a sexual thing at all, Sweetland thought, but for the hard-on that troubled him for hours afterwards. At some point he considered he should do the same for her, but Queenie showed no interest in a tit-for-tat exchange. And it was a relief to him that she did not.

  He’d sat behind Queenie in the one-room schoolhouse for two winters and they seemed a pair of sorts because of it. But they were just two among the battalion of youngsters that knocked around in the cove together, fishing for conners off the stagehead, carting their dippers up on the mash to pick berries in the fall. During the quarantine she was moved out of the bed she shared with the sister and they jerried up a room with a cot and sheets hung from the ceiling on the ground floor. Sweetland would visit with her at that window, talking back and forth with her through the glass. There was a wooden vent at the base of the frame and he would smuggle treats to her, sweet-bread, raisins, a whip of licorice. Caught sight of her changing as he made for the window one evening and stopped dead. Queenie coming straight up to the panes when she saw him there. Bored out of her mind probably, pent up and restless. Half a dozen times after that she had undressed for him, presented herself a few minutes before putting on her nightclothes, her manner serious and unhurried. Her nakedness like a new thing to him each time, as if another layer had been peeled away.

  And then her sister died. Which, it turned out, was the end of many things. He carried on visiting with her through the weeks of quarantine that followed, but never saw her naked again. Stopped expecting or even wanting it. Years later, it was Hayward Coffin who took her up onto the mash, and Sweetland thought nothing of the fact. The exchange at her window something he’d never spoken of, to Queenie or anyone else. Dead and buried up on the hill now, that young girl and her strange, unacknowledged gift to him.

  Sweetland looked over at the clock’s blank face. He couldn’t begin to guess what time it was. Late, was all he knew. He sat up, reached for his clothes. Sidestepped the door, went out the hall and downstairs into the dark of the kitchen. He drew off a glass of water at the sink and drained half in one go. The angry, alien glow on the waterfront flaring beyond Queenie’s house when he glanced out the window.

  The fire was lighting the entire harbour by the time he made his way to the shore path, flames coming through the stage’s ceiling, through the door standing open, through the broken panes in the side window. Sweetland could see all the way across to the government wharf and beyond it to the church on the point, clear as day. He could see his boat set loose from the stagehead, drifting away from the fire toward the breakwater. Cinders were dropping through the floorboards, hissing as they hit the water pooled in the landwash underneath, flankers rising lazily on the drafts of heat, floating out across the cove. Sweetland couldn’t get within thirty feet of the burning building but he could smell the gasoline used to set the blaze. The place must have been soaked to go up so fast.

  People running out of their houses behind him, shouting over the noise of the fire. Youngsters sent up onto the roofs of nearby buildings to sweep burning embers off the shingles. The Priddle brothers and Reet Verge and a dozen others carted buckets of seawater to put out spot fires in yards and the grass along the paths. Garden hoses sprayed down from houses further up the hill and Glad Vatcher brought his boat along the waterline, dousing the closest buildings with the stream of a pressure washer.

  The inferno was so intense that the stage collapsed on itself and fell into the landwash within an hour and there was only watching it then, the entire population standing over the slowly dissipating heat, their clothes and skin stained a pulsing red and orange in the dark light. Sweetland looked up and down the line of eerily lit faces, like some biblical image of the apocalypse. The anonymous arsonists standing there among them, taking it in.

  THE ISLAND WAS OVERRUN in the wake of the incident with the lifeboat. As if, for the first time ever, someone had placed Sweetland on a map for strangers to find it. RCMP officers and investigators from the Coast Guard and Transport Canada arriving in twos and threes to take statements from Bob-Sam Lavallee and the Reverend and Sweetland himself.

  Bob-Sam had the Coast Guard officers stay at the lighthouse during their visit and they told him what they knew. The men in the lifeboat were, in fact, Sri Lankan and they’d all spent a life’s savings to be smuggled into the United States. It was anyone’s guess how they ended up bobbing around the North Atlantic. There were two that died in the hold during the trip and they thought they were all going to perish down there before they were lowered in the lifeboat and cut loose. Not so much as a drop of water among them.

  What about the ship they were on? Sweetland asked.

  They was snuck aboard in the dark, Bob-Sam said. And put off in the middle of the night. Never spoke three words to any of the crew. White fellows, they said. But they could’ve been Russian or Scandinavian or Spanish.

  There were reporters and photographers coming off the ferry runs for a while as well. Most of them stayed only as long as the ferry was docked and they charged around Chance Cove in a mad rush, snapping photos and taking quotes from the folks they spotted on the wharf or outside the houses. They were like a crowd of wild goats let loose in town, butting their heads into sheds and kitchens to nose around with their cameras, tearing off without so much as a kiss-my-arse. The women going on about the cinnamon colour of the refugees’ skin and the hair on them so black it gleamed like oil. Loveless inviting them in for watery drinks and Jam Jams, making himself out to be a central character in the events. They was a sight, sir, he liked to say, come out of the fog like a boatload of the dead, poor souls.

  Sweetland was poisoned with the whole affair and wished they’d all fuck off home out of it, leave him and the island alone. But everyone wanted to hear his version of events and hunted him down to pose the same half-dozen questions. All of them asking him to spell his name, for accuracy’s sake. Sweetland, he’d say as they bent their heads over their notebooks, S-w-i-e-t-l-u-n-d.

  They glanced up and he shrugged. It’s an old Swedish name, he said.

  A few reporters settled in for days at a time. A fey gentleman with a southern accent and a limp who claimed to be writing for The New Yorker, though nothing appeared there that Sweetland ever heard of. An old-time drinker with a Toronto magazine who asked to be shown some local colour and spent a night passed out under Sweetland’s kitchen table with his pants around his ankles.

  There was a television crew from the CBC who set Sweetland up near the waterside windo
w in his stage. A crowd of youngsters at the open door to watch and they recruited young Hayward Coffin to hold a silver reflector just out of the frame. The interviewer asking Sweetland how he felt, coming upon those lost souls out there in the fog, to find the dead boy in the lifeboat.

  How I felt? he said.

  Yes, she said. She was Ruthie’s age, or thereabouts. She wore pink slacks and a short white jacket and clownish makeup she retouched whenever the cameraman changed positions or swapped out his battery pack. An air of mainland entitlement about her. She’d come at him with a puff pad before they began and he tried to fend her off. It’s for the glare, she explained as she lowered his arm and had a go at his face with the powder. He took a dislike to her that seemed unaccountably fierce.

  How I felt? he asked again.

  Her eyes didn’t waver. Were you surprised? she said.

  No, he said. No, I had a letter come the week before, asking me to meet them out there.

  She smiled and nodded. She turned to the cameraman and he lowered the camera from his shoulder. She leaned toward Sweetland with both elbows on her clipboard. We’re just trying to tell the story here, she said to him, her voice almost a whisper. No one’s trying to embarrass you or make you look foolish.

  You’ll want to talk to my sister, he said suddenly, surprising himself. He hadn’t spoken three words to Ruthie since the night he’d caught her sneaking out of the Reverend’s office.

  Your sister?

  She looked after the one that died, down to the church, he said.

  Sweetland was devoted to Ruthie who had lost her father before she had a chance to know the man. He was often first awake in the house when she was a girl, and she came out of her mother’s room to meet him at the top of the stairs, shivering in her nightdress. He carried her down to the kitchen in the dark of winter mornings, sat her on the stove while he laid shavings and kindling into the firebox, feeding the flames for quick heat. Ruthie chatting away to him about the dreams she’d had or some game she’d been playing with the cat or the size of Mrs. Vatcher’s drawers on the line. He’d lift her down once the fire had taken hold and send her into the pantry for plates and cutlery to set the table while he fried a panful of capelin.

  Sweetland walked her to the outhouse after dark, watching the stars as he waited for her to do her business. Carried her on his back when they climbed up to the mash to pick berries, Ruthie singing into his ear as payment for the ride.

  It was Sweetland who killed the rooster when it went after Ruthie. A creature so vicious you couldn’t turn your back to it, his mother carrying a stick to slap it away when she went out to collect the eggs. The red comb flopping side to side as it strutted around in a military rage. Ruthie skipping innocently across the yard one afternoon and the cock flying up at her, slashing at her clothes and face. Talons sharp as fish hooks. Tore her dress at the shoulder, ripped one earlobe so it hung by a string of flesh.

  Sweetland beat the bird to death with a barrel stave while his mother sewed Ruthie’s lobe back on with needle and thread in the kitchen. He was so savage the rooster couldn’t be cleaned to make a meal of it.

  That’s a waste of good meat, Uncle Clar said, scraping the ragged mess up with a shovel.

  Sweetland was still in a lather. He could hear Ruthie bawling in the kitchen where Hollis was holding her arms while their mother stitched the girl’s lobe in place. He swung at the animal as Uncle Clar walked past him, wanting to kill the dead thing over again. The ring of wood against the shovel making his elbows tingle. He stamped on the ruined corpse where it fell to the ground.

  Are thee done? Uncle Clar asked him.

  I’m done, Sweetland said. Though he knew he was not, and likely never would be.

  That same murderous commotion at work in him now, though he didn’t know who it should be directed toward, the Reverend or Ruthie. That blind fucker, Pilgrim. The fallen world itself.

  What’s her name? the reporter asked.

  Sweetland looked at her dumbly.

  Your sister, she said. What did you say her name was?

  Ruthie, he said. Ruth Pilgrim.

  I will definitely talk to her, the reporter said. As soon as we’re done here.

  And he answered her questions about his feelings then, making a bloody fool of himself from all he could tell.

  6

  THE RCMP PATROL BOAT out of Burgeo motored into the cove a week after the fire. The constable came to Sweetland’s house and asked about the smell of gas everyone remarked on and his boat untied and if there was anyone who might be holding a grudge against him or might have a reason to target his property.

  “Only everybody,” Sweetland said.

  The constable made a useless note in his black notebook, and Sweetland thought for a moment about digging the threatening letters out of the drawer where he kept them. But there hardly seemed a point to it.

  “So you have no idea who might be responsible?”

  “Could be half a dozen people. A dozen,” he corrected himself.

  “Well,” the constable said. “Unless someone comes forward with more information, it isn’t likely we’ll ever know who set the fire.”

  “Won’t no one come forward,” Sweetland said. “I wouldn’t tell you myself if I knew.”

  The constable cocked his head. “Why is that?”

  If you scald your arse, Sweetland’s mother used to say, you got to learn to sit on your blisters. He said, “I got what was coming to me, I expect.”

  Sweetland went down to Duke’s shop in the afternoon to look in on the chess game that was going on without him. Pilgrim already sitting there with Duke. The two men had been interviewed by the constable as well and they couldn’t let the topic go, throwing out names of the most likely culprits, speculating on how they might have gone about it, the idiocy of risking every building in Chance Cove.

  “It’s lucky you still got the boat anyway,” Pilgrim said.

  “Whoever it was,” Duke said, “wanted to make sure you had a way to get the hell out of here, is what I think.”

  The chess game looked to be halfways done already. A couple dozen moves made on each side, a third of the black pieces removed from the board. As though time was running out and the players were in a race to finish.

  “You still planning on going out for the food fishery?” Pilgrim asked.

  Sweetland gave him a look that Pilgrim could sense from across the room.

  “Jesse’s been asking,” he said by way of explanation.

  “I don’t know if Clara would be too keen on the notion.”

  Pilgrim made a motion with his shoulders. “Might be she’s feeling a little more kindly toward you,” he said. “Account of the fire taking your stage.”

  “A silver lining to every cloud.”

  “Come over tonight,” Pilgrim said, “after the youngster’s gone to bed. We’ll see how it goes.”

  He watched the house from his kitchen window that evening and waited half an hour after Jesse’s light went out. Walked around to the back door and let himself in. Pilgrim called from the living room and Sweetland went along the narrow hall, stood there in the doorway.

  “How’s the house?” he asked.

  “Everyone’s grand,” Pilgrim said.

  Clara didn’t turn her head from the television and Sweetland thought it was a mistake to have come. “What is it you’re watching?”

  “Mad Men,” Pilgrim said. “Clara can’t get enough of it.”

  Sweetland glanced at the screen. An office of impeccably dressed men from another age, all of them smoking like tilts. Pilgrim got up from his seat. “You’ll have a drink,” he said and went by Sweetland to the kitchen. “Go in and sit down.”

  He took a chair just inside the doorway, his eyes on the television. Every fifteen seconds someone lit up a fresh cigarette. It made him crave one himself.

  “When was it you quit smoking?” Clara asked, as if she could sense that urge rising in him.

  “I don’t know. Som
etime after your mother died.”

  “She was always after you to give them up, I remember.”

  “Ruthie was always after me to do one thing or another. Thought I needed mothering, I spose.”

  “She thought you needed a wife, more like it.”

  “Well,” he said. And he shrugged at the television.

  “I remember you used to let me light them for you.”

  He looked at her. “I never no such thing,” he said.

  “You did,” she insisted. “I’d sit in your lap and strike the match on the side of the box.”

  “How old were you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Five or six.”

  “Ruthie must have loved that.”

  “Mom never knew a thing about it,” Clara said. And then she said, “I can’t believe you forgot about that.”

  “More can I,” he said. He hated confronting those lost moments, being presented with some detail from his past and having to look on it like a stranger. It made his life feel like a made-up thing. A net full of holes.

  “I still expect to see you with a cigarette, for some reason. Even after all this time.”

  “I could light one up, if that’d make you feel better.”

  “There’s only one thing would make me feel better about you.”

  He turned back to the television.

  “It wouldn’t be the end of the world, would it?” she said. “To live somewhere else?”

  Pilgrim appeared in the doorway, holding a drink. “Moses,” he said, “where are you?”

  “In hell, I think,” Sweetland whispered.

  The drink was rye and water without ice. Pilgrim hadn’t brewed shine since Clara came back to Sweetland with Jesse in tow. Couldn’t make it cheap enough anymore to compete with the controller’s liquor, he said.

  They watched the rest of the show in silence but for Clara setting the scene for Pilgrim now and again. They’re in a car, she’d say. He’s in a motel room with his secretary. Sweetland and Clara talked aimlessly during the commercials while Pilgrim was making fresh drinks in the kitchen and he tried to keep clear of anything that might sour the visit. Before he left, Sweetland said, “Be all right if I looked in on him a minute?”