Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  Hollis? Sweetland said vaguely, as though he didn’t recognize the name.

  Your brother, yes.

  No, she never said. Not that I remembers.

  She told me Hollis was—what did she call it? He was a bit touched, she said.

  He was a strange creature, all right. Moody, like. He’d go weeks at a time and not say a word to a soul. Got right low, sometimes. Spent half the days in bed. Always had his head into his school reader or some other book.

  He wanted to leave Sweetland to finish high school, didn’t he?

  He talked about it. I imagine he’d have gone over to Burgeo or Fortune or somewhere if Father was still with us. But there was just me and Hollis to go after the fish.

  Ruth thought he was sick with something. Physically ill, I mean.

  That’s what Mother told her.

  She didn’t even know he was at the Waterford in St. John’s those months he was gone. She thought he was doing some kind of schooling.

  Well we couldn’t very well tell her that her brother was in the mental, could we? She was just a youngster still.

  She knew a lot more than you gave her credit for, the Reverend said. And he stopped there. Waiting to be encouraged, Sweetland knew, but he wouldn’t give the man the satisfaction.

  That story about Hollis falling across the trawl line, the Reverend said finally, and you cutting it loose to take off the strain. She didn’t believe a word of it.

  None of this is any of your goddamn business, is it?

  Sorry, the Reverend said. Occupational hazard.

  They settled back into silence awhile longer, though there was no leaving things where they sat. Each man trying to wait out the other.

  Ruthie never said a word to me about any of this, Sweetland said.

  She wasn’t looking to cause trouble, the Reverend said. We were just talking about Hollis and she mentioned the story about the codfish running under the boat and you throwing the engine into reverse. She spent a long time thinking about that fish.

  The fish, Sweetland repeated dumbly.

  She said she saw you coming in alone and knew something was wrong. Ran down to the stage to meet you. And there was plenty of cod in the boat. But nothing the size you talked about.

  This is what she was paying attention to when she heard her brother was drowned, was it?

  It was a long time before it came to her, the Reverend said. And she’d probably never have taken note if there weren’t other things about the day that struck her funny. She said Hollis was different that morning. Happy almost. Gave her a hug, told her how much he loved her. Did the same with your mother.

  Sweetland was drumming his heels against the wall involuntarily and he made himself stop.

  Ruth thought he had it in his mind before he left the house, the Reverend said. To cut the trawl line himself, let the weight take him under.

  Jesus fuck, Sweetland whispered.

  And you made up some story about a fish because you wanted to spare your mother.

  Sweetland nodded in the dark. Set to hammering his heels against the wall again. That would have been the end of the woman, he said, knowing her son killed himself.

  It occurred to Sweetland he’d lied to Jesse for the same reason he lied to his mother, to spare the boy knowing the truth about his imaginary friend. He raised his face to the ceiling, fighting the ridiculous sense they were all standing in the darkness beside him, his mother and Ruthie and Hollis. Jesse.

  Hollis was suffering, the Reverend said.

  I expect he was. I wouldn’t very good to him about it all.

  It wasn’t your fault, the Reverend said.

  That’s your professional opinion, is it?

  If you like.

  I’d have done things different, Sweetland said, all the same. And a minute later he said, You misses him something awful, I spose.

  Who?

  Jesse.

  The Reverend flicked the light into his palm again, the pink lamp of his hand aglow across the room. Sweetland could see the dark bones of his fingers under the skin.

  Yes, he said. I miss him something awful.

  He took the scythe up to the new cemetery to cut the grass back around the graves.

  He’d been the unofficial custodian of the cemetery for years, mowing and raking the plots and keeping up the fence and straightening headstones tipped by frost heaves. He never named it as a reason for staying behind on the island, though it sat at the back of his mind beside all the other reasons he never articulated. Watching over Jesse’s grave. But he hadn’t gone near the place in his time alone in the cove. He hadn’t even walked up to the graveyard to look in on his way down from the mash, which had been a regular side trip since his mother died.

  He avoided the mowing until he risked the season’s first snowfalls, dragged his ass up the path wearing a hair shirt of dread. The grass past his knees by then and he had to cut a trail in from the gate toward the family stones. There was a new marker among them, a white wooden cross he didn’t notice until he was near enough to read the inscription, hand-lettered in black: Moses Louis Sweetland 1942—2012.

  It was set beside Jesse’s grave, in the same row as Ruth and Uncle Clar and his mother, and he laughed when he saw it, as if he’d managed to pull off an elaborate practical joke. But it was a fright to him all the same. They had never raised a marker in the graveyard for Hollis, lacking a body to mark, and it never occurred to Sweetland that someone might see fit to put one up for him. He left without finishing the mowing and spent the rest of the day anxious, expectant almost. Though he couldn’t settle on what was disturbing him exactly.

  He woke in the middle of the night and lay still a few moments. Seeing clearly what the visit to the graveyard had lit up for him, what he’d been avoiding all this time—that surreal, impenetrable experience on the Fever Rocks, lashed to the ladder with the dead boy in his arms. Sweetland was shivering uncontrollably before Barry finished making the climb and he shouted after the man, wanting to be untied from the corpse. Bawling for all he was worth. Barry didn’t hear him over the ocean’s racket or ignored what he heard and Sweetland watched those distant legs disappear at the top of the ladder. He bent his face to Jesse then, rested his forehead against the cold nape of the boy’s neck. Counted off seconds and minutes to mark the time passing but lost himself in the run of numbers, which made the wait seem infinite, and he spent what felt a long while in miserable silence. His teeth jackhammering as the fits of trembling ran through him. He pissed into his soaking clothes for the brief warmth of it and was colder again moments later.

  Jesse, he said, and then looked up the endless length of the ladder to stop himself talking to the dead boy. He could feel himself drifting despite the ropes at his back, his hold on the visible world slipping, and he started singing to stay awake. “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” and “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” as though it was the youngster he was trying to comfort. He sang the three childish songs in an endless round, his arms like a useless tourniquet around the last of his blood.

  Sweetland sat up in the bedroom’s blackness, feeling for his clothes. He lit the storm lamp in the porch and carried it outside where the flame curtsied in each gust of wind. He walked his quavering bowl of light up the path to the graveyard where the white marker was set in the ground beside Jesse’s. The cross couldn’t be left there, he knew. It was a false thing, which made the boy’s death seem even more inconsequential than it was.

  He hadn’t brought any tools, thinking the cross had simply been knocked into the dirt with a maul. He set the lamp down in the grass beside Jesse’s headstone, crouched behind the wooden marker and levered his arms beneath the cross-tie to pry it loose. Pushed and hauled from the top, trying to rock it free. He brought the lamp in close and parted the grass around the base to see it had been set in concrete.

  He caught a blur of movement outside the circumference of light then, a shadowed scurry that made him swing ar
ound in the dark. His heartbeat in his ears. “Fucken rabbits,” he said. Decided it was a job for daylight after all and walked down the path to his house. Refusing to allow himself a glance left or right as he went.

  He went back up to the cemetery in the morning, before he’d so much as started the fire, and sawed the cross off at the base. He carried it down the hill on his shoulder. My cross to bear, he thought, ha ha. He propped it against the back wall of the house while he laid a fire in the stove and boiled the kettle. Briefly considered sawing it up and burning it, though there was something in the notion that seemed sacrilegious. After his breakfast he dragged the cross into the shed, angling it awkwardly among the copper pipe and door trim and two-by-fours and dip nets stored above the rafters. Then he took his scythe up to the graveyard and finished mowing the long grass.

  There was a fall of snow the last week of October, a wet slurry that came down through the morning. Sweetland sat at the table longer than usual. Dealt himself a hand of solitaire and drank a bare-legged cup of tea. The snow covered the roofs of buildings and the packed earth along the paths and showed no sign of letting up. It would likely be gone by next morning, he knew, but it made him think about the winter he was about to sail into, how much of it he’d be forced to spend at the kitchen table with little enough to fill the time. No television, no online poker, no visitors. He’d have to find something to occupy himself besides solitaire if he didn’t want to lose his mind altogether.

  There were two boxes of Queenie’s books in the porch and he brought the top one into the kitchen, set it on the table. Newspapers were as much as he’d read in his adult lifetime, the odd “Laughter, the Best Medicine” column in a Reader’s Digest at the barbershop as he waited for Duke to make a move. All the years at the lighthouse he never wanted for distraction, the job kept him busy most of the daylight hours and through part of the night as well. He’d never cracked the cover of a book.

  He opened the flaps and took out a handful of paperbacks. He didn’t know what he was looking for. Something not too thick, he was thinking, something without the tiny print that made every page a torture to get through. Something that might have a bit of dirt in it—he wouldn’t put it past Queenie to enjoy a bit of dirt in her reading material. He shucked through the box, romances all from what he could tell by the flowery cover art, by the breathless titles. The cheap paper was effective in the bathroom, but he didn’t think he could stand to read the goddamn stuff. He went through the second box and was all but ready to abandon the notion when he happened on the book she was reading at her window the last time he spoke to her there. There was a bookmark just past the halfway point, which was as far as Queenie made it, he guessed. And there was something in the notion of finishing it for her that appealed to him. The way Sandra had soldiered through Queenie’s final pack of cigarettes.

  “Well, maid,” he said aloud. He flipped through the first pages, turned it over in his hands, hefted it like he was trying to guess the weight. It was no small thing for Sweetland to sit at the kitchen table in the last light of the afternoon, to open the cover and iron it flat with the broadside of his hand. On the title page there was an encouraging note from Sandra to her mother that Sweetland turned past without reading. He took a breath before he started, as though he was about to jump face and eyes into a cold pool of water.

  Half an hour later he was ready to throw the bloody thing in the stove. Three afternoons in a row he sat in the day’s last light with the book, feeling like a man sentenced to dragging beach stones up the face of the Mackerel Cliffs. He looked at the cover each time he quit reading, flipped it to inspect the back. A quote from a Toronto paper about “authentic Newfoundland.” Whoever wrote the book didn’t know his arse from a dory, Sweetland figured, and had never caught or cleaned a fish in his life. “Jesus fuck,” he whispered.

  Queenie would never have gotten all the way through the thing, he guessed, even if she’d lived. He considered adding it to the paperbacks sitting beside the toilet upstairs, flushing it one soiled page at a time. But the book seemed to require another kind of send-off altogether. He took it with him on his walk the evening of the third day, out past the ruins of his stage and on to the incinerator at the head of the cove. He walked beyond the wooden rail that circled the bell and clambered a little ways down toward the water and he threw the book into the ocean. The pages made a small fluttering explosion as he let it go, like a partridge flushed out of underbrush. It was too dark to see it land, but he heard it strike the water’s surface.

  He didn’t feel anything like the satisfaction he expected and thought maybe he should have done something more practical with it after all. He started back toward the dark ring of houses and was startled by the moon rising over the hills, the pocked face a livid red and nearly full, as clear as an object set under a magnifying glass. Unnaturally close on the horizon and spooky as hell. Sweetland kept his eyes on it as he made his way along the path and was almost among the houses before he saw the light in Queenie Coffin’s window. He stopped still, watching the glow of that dull yellow square. He blinked quickly three or four times. He scanned along the Church Side hills, out as far as the point where he saw nothing but the habitual black. And when he turned his eyes back to Queenie’s house the window was dark.

  THEY DIDN’T SPEAK the rest of the way to the south-end light after Sweetland buttoned his fly. Effie sat with the soiled handkerchief in her fist, not knowing where else to put it. They stopped and tied up at the light, walking on in the darkness to the Mackerel Cliffs. Sweetland reached to hold the back of Effie’s dress as they came near the sheer drop and they stood looking out at the ocean. Close to one another, but not touching.

  Effie talked for awhile about going home to stay with her parents over the summer, about the worst of her students at the school and how she liked boarding at old Mrs. Priddle’s house. Sweetland quiet in the dark. He’d brought Effie out to the light to tell her about his plans to go to Toronto with Duke Fewer in the fall, but he was shy to bring it up after what happened between them in the cart and decided he would do it another time.

  Sweetland was almost twenty-six years old and he had nothing against the notion of marriage on principle. It was something he’d always expected to come to, though it never seemed more concrete or more urgent to him than that. And nothing in particular had happened between him and Effie to suggest she was anxious to move things along, before she brought it up after their dinner one Sunday afternoon. He’d just finished describing the buffalo sinking into the black water at Tilt Cove, the bubbles streaming from those great nostrils. It might have been his third or fourth time telling the story for all he knew, he was new to the art of entertaining female company. She’d been looking into her lap and he thought she’d stopped listening some time ago. She turned her head toward the clatter his mother and sister were making at the dishes in the pantry and stood to go help, touching one finger to his shoulder on her way past.

  I might marry you, she told him, if you asked me.

  He watched Effie disappear into the pantry then, his ears ringing like she’d struck him with a hammer. Perhaps I will, he said, though he couldn’t tell if she caught the words or not. He glanced across at Uncle Clar to see if he’d overheard the exchange, but the old man was sound asleep. The cat on his chest looking in Sweetland’s direction, giving him that solemn, witchy stare, seeming to say, Now, that’s done. Months passed and neither of them had breathed the word marriage since, though it followed them around like a dog on a leash.

  The lighthouse flashed its beam out beyond them in a slow, steady strobe that gave depth and definition to the height they stood at, the breadth of the ocean below. The wind rolling up the cliff face and gusting above the ledge to push at their shoulders. Effie mentioned getting cold standing out in the open, but she didn’t move when he suggested going back to the cart. She knew they’d come all this way for a reason and he could see she wasn’t about to leave without hearing what it was. She was quiet after he t
old her about going up to Toronto to look for work. She stared out across the water and he couldn’t tell what she made of the notion.

  I’ll be back before Christmas, I expect, he said.

  That’s all right, she said.

  She turned toward the light and he followed her back to the cart. They rode all the way to Vatcher’s Meadow in silence. The memory of the trip out made Sweetland hard again, though he knew enough about women not to expect her hand on the inside of his leg. He glanced across now and then but she was staring straight ahead, her arms folded over her stomach.

  Sweetland tied the horse to the fence at the meadow and Effie was out of her seat before he could offer a hand to help. I’ll walk you down, he said.

  You got to sluice out that cart before you brings it back to Bob-Sam, she said.

  I’ll look after it, he said.

  They went by the King’s Seat and down into the cove, walking on as far as the church and up to old Mrs. Priddle’s house without passing another soul out in the night. Before they reached the front door Effie stopped and turned to him. Too dark to tell her features. He reached for her hand but she was still holding the soiled handkerchief and they both pulled away when he touched it. He turned halfways to go, but hesitated there.

  You won’t be too lonely? he said.

  I can look out to myself.

  He left her then, walking up on the mash to drive the horse and cart out to Bob-Sam Lavallee at the lighthouse. Trying to interpret her response all the way there and home again.

  3

  THROUGH THE END OF OCTOBER and the first days of November, Sweetland spent his afternoons gathering brush and deadfall on the mash above the cove. He carted a rubbish pile of lumber that was stacked and going to rot beside Loveless’s barn these twenty years or more. He lugged up three worn-out tractor tires left behind by Glad Vatcher, using the quad to haul them one at a time, despite the fact he was nearly through his gasoline. Wanting to make something spectacular of the bonfire for the boy.