Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  He got caught out there one afternoon in a pelting storm of wind and rain. He had wet gear in his pack but the rain fell in sudden steady waves and he was soaked to the skin before he so much as lifted his face. The keeper’s house was barred shut, the door to the old light tower padlocked, and he passed a wet night in the dank crawl space while the weather howled. He laid his slicker on the ground and huddled under one of the burlap sacks he’d brought for the potatoes, shivering awake every few minutes with the chill. Making a list of materials he planned to stash at the keeper’s house if he managed to live through the night—blankets, matches, a dry change of clothes. A tent, a barbecue. Homebrew, a side of beef. Duke’s barbershop. A duffle bag of sunshine.

  He fell asleep as he added to his ludicrous list and he dreamt of Jesse rocking beside him with his arms around his knees, singing “The Cliffs of Baccalieu.” He woke in the black and reached for the boy, his hand closing around one bony knee. “Jesse,” he said, but the youngster carried on with his interminable ballad like Sweetland wasn’t present. He turned and grabbed Jesse by the arms, shaking the boy as he shouted his name, and he woke up in the teeming black alone. Sweetland felt around blindly, kicking his legs as far as they could reach, just to be sure nothing was in there with him. “Jesus fuck,” he whispered.

  He listened to the marine forecast each morning after the gardens were put away and if the day looked fair he took his jigger and line down to the Love Boat to spend a few hours after his fall fish. He pulled around the breakwater into open ocean and went as far as Wester Shoals, forty-five minutes of rowing if the wind wasn’t blowing onshore. He let the boat drift on the shoal ground and ran his line overside until it touched bottom. He was never out of sight of land, and he kept an eye to the west’ard for signs of weather kicking up as he jigged the lead weight. The boat wouldn’t fare well in any kind of sea, he knew that. Most days he caught upward of ten to fifteen cod in the space of an hour or two and that was as long as he cared to be on the open Atlantic in Loveless’s craft.

  He fried himself a meal of fresh cod, or made fish and brewis, or stewed the cod’s heads with potatoes. He cleaned and salted what he couldn’t eat fresh, stacking the fish in briny piles. It was a process he hadn’t been involved in since the advent of flash freezing in the fish plants, sometime before Hollis died, and he’d forgotten how to salt the fish properly. Done right, the kite-shaped slabs of meat would last till the End Times of Revelations. But it was a ticklish business that people spent a lifetime refining. Burnt was better than maggoty, he remembered that much, and he buried the snowy flesh in waves of salt until he started running shy and was forced to skimp.

  He had his snares up on the mash, on runs in the bit of alder underbrush near Vatcher’s Meadow. He had two dozen laid along a mile or so, and he walked up to check the snares once he’d come in from fishing and had cleaned and put away the cod. If the weather was too dirty or uncertain to chance going out in the dory, he went first thing in the morning. He stripped and gutted the rabbits at the sink, boiled the carcasses until the flesh was falling off the bones. Bottled the meat and boiled the bottles to seal the covers tight. Stacked them in the pantry with his beets and relishes and jams and homebrew.

  He went up to the mash early after the first night of frost in October, knowing the chill would have set the rabbits running to keep warm. He headed for an outcrop of bald stone at the south end of Vatcher’s Meadow where Glad’s sheep used to huddle out of the worst of the wind and rain, and he climbed beyond that to the straggle of alder and gorse where he’d set his snares. He could see the grey glove of a rabbit in the first slip as he approached and he shrugged an arm free of his pack, set it down behind him as he knelt to work the snare free of the furred neck.

  The sun had come full into the sky. He had to shade his face beyond the brim of his hat and even so he had trouble picking out the details in front of him. He kept his eyes on the trees, watching for the next slip, and there was something amiss when he saw it, though the glare made it impossible to say what exactly. A rabbit in the snare, but it lay away from the cover of the bush. It looked to have been dragged to the wire’s limit, the standard hauled from the ground to put it on display in the open. He slowed as he came closer to it, glancing around as if there might be an audience watching to see his reaction.

  Sweetland knelt beside it, leaning on his rifle. The rabbit was on its back with the legs splayed wide and the guts torn out, the stomach cavity empty. But there was nothing human about the mutilation—the animal’s head was still attached, the wire slip biting into the neck—and Sweetland let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

  The eyes would be gone if it had been a crow or an eagle, Sweetland knew. A fox most likely, after the easy pickings.

  “Now, Mr. Fox,” he said aloud.

  He reached to clear the snare but his hands were shaking and it took a minute before they were steady enough to ignore. He stood holding the rabbit by the ears, trying to decide if it was worth his while bringing it home. “Now, Mr. Fox,” he said again. He underhanded the corpse into the bush and reset the slip before moving on.

  None of the other snared animals were touched. But it was a regular feature of the line afterwards, to lose one or two rabbits to predation. Sweetland considered trying to trap the fox, or sitting out on the mash near a fresh kill and shooting the thing when it came nosing around. But he found himself feeling oddly disappointed the days there wasn’t a mutilated carcass in one of the snares. He’d never laid eyes on the fox he was feeding, but even the sign of the creature’s presence cheered him, as if it was a kind of conversation he was having with the animal. And he came to think of the fox as company on the island.

  He walked an hour or more each evening, going out as far as the old incinerator to watch the horizon, to look in on the remains of Loveless’s calf petrifying in its metal tomb. He tapped the steel toe of his boot against the bell of the incinerator, to hear it ring hollow.

  The weather had turned for fall and even the warmest days had an edge to them, the wind cold enough to warrant a jacket. The dark coming earlier each evening, and he was often surprised to turn from the glim of light on the horizon to see the cove already settled into night. The abandoned buildings huddled and lifeless, their windows black. A gaudy rash of stars above them.

  He’d expected the place to feel larger with everyone gone, the way the house had after his mother died. Echoing and unfamiliar, caverned with absence. But it seemed smaller and strangely intimate, as though it had shrunken down to fit his solitary presence. Licked clean of all claims but his own. He went freely into houses he hadn’t thought to enter in decades, picking through pantries and kitchen cupboards for tinned food, for pickled beets and onion and bottled moose. Combing through closets and drawers for clothes or materials that might be useful, for batteries and tools and utensils.

  Toilet paper.

  He hadn’t thought to purchase any in Miquelon and had only five rolls under the bathroom sink. That scarcity worried him as much as his meagre store of food. In all the houses he’d gone into, there was never more than what had been left on the dispenser beside the toilets. Often not even that. He expected to run out before the snow settled in for the winter and he lay awake nights, walking himself through houses and sheds in the cove, picturing what he might be able to use as an alternative. Cut-up squares of carpet torn from a floor, rags made from clothes left behind in closets, unused rolls of wallpaper. Nothing seemed the least bit practical or likely. He considered Duke’s slender stack of magazines at the barbershop but he knew the glossy paper was a lousy substitute. And in the process of dismissing the magazines, Queenie’s library of romance and mystery came to mind.

  He had rifled through almost every building in Chance Cove, but hadn’t stepped foot in Pilgrim’s or Queenie’s, out of respect for the most recently passed. He had to pry the nails from Queenie’s door to get inside, stood still in the kitchen a minute. Cold must, the expectant stillness of objects
abandoned in a rush, ages ago. A cup and plate left on the counter. Queenie’s ashtrays scattered on every flat surface, though they’d been cleaned of their butts and ash before the funeral. The mouth of the green fridge propped open with a broom handle. Avocado green, Queenie said it was. She’d never seen an avocado in her life and didn’t know if it was fit to eat, but it was a nice shade of green. A calendar on the wall beside the fridge showed July of last year. The house like a stopped clock, waiting for someone to wind the spring to start it ticking again.

  Sweetland walked through the living room to the stairs. He’d never been up those steps in his life and he went cautiously, as if he might happen on someone coming out of the bath in their small clothes. Had to stop himself calling hello to the empty space. He found the books against one wall, beside the bed. He hefted three boxes from the top of the nearest pile and made his slow way along the hall. Another waist-high row of boxes stacked two deep in the spare room. “Well, maid,” he said. “I’m set for a while anyways.”

  He rationed his use of the radio to save the batteries, listening for the forecast in the morning and allowing himself half an hour before he doused the lamps at night. He missed the comforting chatter when he was about the house or working in the shed during the day, the background voices giving the weather or arguing the import of some political upheaval half a world away. He’d never sat inside without that company. Even when he worked at the lighthouse he carried a radio wherever he went, setting it near a window to lessen the static. Saturday-night blues on the CBC, rogue signals washing ashore from the States. Even French-language stations from Montreal and St. Pierre he could listen to for hours at a time, just for the impenetrable music of their conversation.

  Everything around him seemed louder without it, like someone had turned up the amplifier on the world. The steady metronome of the tides, the endless industrial racket of the gulls. The sound of rain approaching out over the ocean, how he could hear it coming miles off before it hammered across the island like a herd of wild animals passing through. A storm door kicked off its latch somewhere in the cove, banging and banging and banging in the wind, until he walked down the path to find it and tie the latch shut with a length of twine.

  A couple of times a week he ambled as far as Duke’s barbershop. Missing the man’s company. He sat in the barber’s chair and he used one foot to spin a lazy circle, not looking at himself in the mirror as he passed it. The place managed to smell like a barbershop though it had never operated as one, Barbicide and shaving cream and cheap aftershave, a richly chemical soup that Sweetland found calming. He always gave the chessboard a cursory once-over before he left the shop, shaking his head at the lack of progress, the two pawns locked in their stalemate. “Duke Fewer,” he said, “I got half a mind to put you on a clock.”

  On Sundays he did no work and he made the walk to the light at Burnt Head, just to fill the day. After his night huddled beside the cistern he had cut the padlock on the old light-tower door with a hacksaw and he went out there specifically to revisit it, climbing the ringing metal stairs to stand at the high windows of the glass room, watching weather systems play across the horizon in their massive swaths of cloud and precipitation and wind. He brought binoculars to scan the open ocean, across to the dusky outline of St. Pierre and Miquelon where the Frenchmen carried on their imaginary European pantomime, and back to the cliffs of Little Sweetland.

  Most days there was nothing else to see. He felt nearly invisible up there and he didn’t mind the feeling as a rule, though now and again he was blindsided by an apocalyptic loneliness he was afraid he might be unequal to. As if he was the only living creature on the face of the earth. He hadn’t consciously thought what it would be like to be alone on the island, imagined it vaguely as an extension of his experience working at the lighthouse when he spent most of his days to himself. But he was coming to see that those years of seclusion were diluted by comparison—a temporary appointment, an approximation of solitude.

  He stopped at the King’s Seat whenever he passed it, looking down over the cove and east and west to either end of the island. I’m the king of the world was the phrase that came to his mind, though he never spoke the words aloud.

  Beside Pilgrim’s house, the only other building in the cove he hadn’t gone inside was the church. Knowing already there was nothing in there of any use.

  A bishop or deacon or some other church mucky-muck came out from St. John’s to hold a deconsecration service in July, and Sweetland was hired to close up the building, shutting off the power and boarding the windows with plywood. The Reverend standing by as he worked, handing him the hammer or the drill, holding the boards as Sweetland fixed them in place.

  What is it you’re trying to save her for exactly? Sweetland asked.

  Just sentimental, I guess.

  Sweetland was about to lock and board the main doors when the Reverend decided he wanted to do a final walk-through.

  Afraid I might be forgetting something in there, he said.

  The only light inside came from the vestibule where the doors stood open and the two men carried flashlights into the artificial gloom. The pews receding in their dark rows like waves strobing onto a beach. They went through to the back office where the cupboards and closets had been cleared out. The air smelling of old carpet and bleach. The Reverend rummaged through the abandoned desk, holding the flashlight with one hand and rifling with the other. Two drawers whistled shut in quick succession and he cleared his throat, the way Sweetland remembered him doing before starting in on his sermons. Pardon me, it sounded like.

  I never did thank you, the Reverend said, for sending the note after Ruth died.

  Sweetland hadn’t been in that room since he happened on the Reverend and Ruthie sneaking out opposite doors of the church, the day he’d towed the Sri Lankan lifeboat into the cove. He’d almost forgotten the event it was that long ago. Or he’d forgotten how it made him feel in the moment. But it struck him fresh, hearing the Reverend speak her name as they stood there—how it didn’t seem a time or location crying out for a quick fuck, with a dead boy under a sheet outside the door.

  It meant a lot to me, the Reverend went on, not to hear the news second-hand.

  Ruthie asked me to let you know, Sweetland said.

  She had a rough time of it.

  The last few months was bad. It was a blessing when she give it up.

  The Reverend turned off his flashlight and stood still in the black across the room.

  Sweetland said, You knew about Clara all along.

  Ruth told me she was pregnant.

  That’s the reason you left when you did, I imagine.

  That’s why I left, he said. And that’s the reason I came back. Clara, he said. And Jesse.

  Strange you haven’t said a word to Clara about it, all this time.

  I don’t think that’s what Ruth would have wanted.

  Sweetland threw his head back and laughed. That’s very Christian of you.

  The Reverend cleared his throat again. I was hoping we might have gotten this conversation out of the way years ago.

  How many others were there?

  How many what?

  All them parishes you moved through, Sweetland said. Ruthie wasn’t the only one you dipped your wick into.

  Well, the Reverend said. She was better off without me, don’t you think?

  Sweetland scrubbed at his temples with the knuckles of both hands and sighed. That’s a job to say, Reverend.

  There was a long pause between them, like they’d lost their way in the woods at night and were afraid to take another step forward.

  You remember that young one, Sweetland said. The fellow died on the lifeboat we had in here.

  I remember him.

  I thinks about those fellows now and then, Sweetland said. How they wound up here, of all places.

  Wasn’t in their minds when they started out, I’m sure.

  What was it you said about it all? In that sermon?
>
  You remember a sermon of mine?

  Just the one. It was something about all of us being in the same situation. Lost on the ocean, like.

  The Reverend shifted behind the desk. I was always a bit obvious when it came to preaching, he said.

  Sweetland scooched his backside up onto the cupboard where the bulletins and mimeograph machine used to be stored, his flashlight trained on the floor between his feet. He flicked it off before he spoke again. I been wanting to ask you, he said. What happened with Jesse last year. You believe he drowned himself?

  On purpose, you mean?

  Everyone else seems to think as much.

  The Reverend flicked his light slowly on and off, on and off. I have no idea, he said.

  Hazard a guess for me, then.

  Honestly? I don’t think Jesse had it in him.

  He was all guts, that youngster.

  I don’t think the idea would have occurred to him, is what I mean. He might have made his mother’s life hell for a while with tantrums or going to the bathroom in his clothes or God knows what else. But killing himself? I don’t think so.

  It was an accident, then.

  You know how literal he was. He saw your boat missing down in the cove, I’d say. Might have thought you’d already left for good.

  And what? Headed out to the lighthouse to see if he could spot the boat off of Burnt Head?

  Seems about right. And then the fog came in.

  He missed the cairns on the path, you think. Fell off the headland out there in the fog.

  More than likely.

  Sweetland looked up into the darkness. He couldn’t tell if the man believed what he was saying. Or if it made any real difference to think it was true.

  The Reverend flicked his light on and off again, on and off, the face of it pressed against his hand so the flesh lit up like a Chinese lantern.

  Did Ruth tell you she used to talk to me about Hollis? he said.