Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  He called to the dog when he came out the door, whistled up the hill toward the mash. Turned back to the cove, looking out as far as the white clapboard church on the point. The boarded windows. The squat finger of the steeple where the music used to play.

  Sweetland and the Reverend were almost outside after their final walk-through of the church when the Reverend put a hand to his arm.

  One more spot, he’d said.

  There was a stairway off the vestibule that led to a trap door and they climbed through that into a darkened room the size of a bathroom. They flashed their lights around the tiny space. The ceiling twenty feet above them.

  I should take these, the Reverend said, and he collected an armful of records that were stacked on the floor near the PA apparatus.

  You got plans for those? Sweetland asked him.

  Just don’t like the thought of leaving them behind, I guess.

  The Reverend went ahead of him through the trap door and Sweetland made a last sweep with his light to make sure nothing had been overlooked. When they were outside, he closed and locked the doors and handed the keys to the Reverend. Then he set the two-by-fours across the door frame and screwed them into place with the cordless.

  Sweetland watched the church a few minutes, talked himself into walking out to the point. He went around to the side door that led into the minister’s office, to see that it was still locked and nailed shut. He circled the building, checking the plywood on all the windows. He came around to the main doors finally, looking close at the two-by-fours across the width. Nothing had been touched or tampered with that he could see. Sweetland glanced up at that empty steeple and then he turned away toward the cove. The water flat calm. He looked up the hillside, scanning across the houses. They all seemed to lean down toward him with a hand at their ears, listening intently. He raised his eyes past them, toward the mash, and called out for the dog.

  On the way up the hill he stopped into Duke’s shop, took a seat on the cold red leather of the barber’s chair. Trying to calm his thoughts with the chair’s lazy twirl, the room’s lingering undertone of aftershave and conversation. He imagined telling his story to Duke as he sat there, imagined the man’s skepticism about the details. You’re dreaming, he’d have said. You been drinking bad brew. You needs to give your head a goddamn good shake.

  “That’s what I needs, all right,” Sweetland said, as if Duke was sitting across the room. He took a breath as he pushed the chair in its slow orbit about the room. “A goddamn good shake.”

  He glanced down at the chessboard as he swung by and brought both feet to the floor to brake his movement. Raised himself from the seat.

  There was a game in progress on the board. Half a dozen pieces, black and white, set off to the side. The black king in check.

  Sweetland stayed in his kitchen the rest of the afternoon, drinking homebrew and playing solitaire. He left the radio on for the comforting babble of the outside world washing up on the shore of his own. Between hands he walked aimlessly to the living room and back again. He lifted the phone and listened awhile to the nothing in the receiver before he set it carefully into its cradle. He went out to the hallway periodically to stand in front of Uncle Clar’s portrait, the man’s eyes staring endlessly off to one side, like he was listening to someone in the wings. He took the frame off the wall finally, carried it into the kitchen. He looked around the room a moment, set it down on the daybed. He took his seat at the table and raised his glass to the young old man who still refused to meet his eyes, who was still listening to a voice just offstage.

  Sweetland dealt himself another hand. He turned the cards slowly, scanning back and forth along the line, talking over the sound of the radio to his grandfather. Telling him about Loveless’s boat and fishing with Loveless’s dog who had been scavenging off his rabbit slips up on the mash. How he’d come to call him Mr. Fox, or Mr. Fawkes, as you like. About being lost in the fog that crept over them on the water, the odd absence of the foghorn on Burnt Head, and the voice that led them in past the breakwater.

  “Queerest Jesus thing,” he said. “Ruined a nice load of fish on top of it all,” he said, without raising his eyes from the cards. “Had to dump the works of them on the beach today.” He tapped an index finger on the tabletop, placed the three of clubs on the four of hearts, the ten of clubs on the jack of diamonds. “There was one,” he said, “biggest fish I seen in years. Size of a goat, he was. Had to throw him aft by himself. Could have lived on that one for weeks.”

  Sweetland tapped his finger again, glanced out the window. He couldn’t for the life of him remember seeing that fish when he flipped the dory and shook the load onto the beach. He turned back to the cards, but he’d stopped seeing them. Trying to picture the enormous cod among the slurry of water and blood and fish meat.

  He said, “It’s just a fucken old fish, Uncle Clar.”

  It was nearing dusk, the sun already touching the water somewhere out beyond the Mackerel Cliffs. He didn’t want to go down there in the dark and he wouldn’t sleep without knowing. He went to the porch and pulled on his coat. Leaned back into the kitchen and said, “Keep the fire in, would you, Clar?”

  He whistled for the dog on his way down to the water. Half drunk and unsteady on his feet. The windows of the houses he passed darkening with the day’s passing, a wind moaning mournful through the dead electrical wires strung from eave to eave overhead.

  He stumbled across the loose stone of the beach toward the pile of fish. A congregation of gulls still praying over the offering there and Sweetland waved his arms as he approached, shouting to clear them away. They hopped sullenly to one side, just out of arm’s reach. Sweetland stood over the mess they’d made, eyes pecked out, bellies razored open and the guts pulled into the air. But there was no sign of the goat-sized fish.

  He used a stick of driftwood to pick through the mound, pushing offal and ruined carcasses left and right. Uncovered the prize beneath the garbage, like something deliberately hidden there, to keep it out of harm’s way. Sweetland reached to grab the tail, as thick around as his calf, hauled it onto a clean patch of beach. It was covered in blood and slime, but the body was untouched by the scavengers. Even the eye still in its socket, staring up at him.

  He walked over to the dory beneath its canvas shroud, knelt near the bow and fished under the gunwale for the bailer. Untied it and went to the water’s edge to dip it full. He sluiced the big fish clean, went for more water and turned the creature over to wash down the opposite side. It had been out of the ocean so long it wouldn’t be fit to eat, but he hefted it in both his arms and started up off the beach, stopping now and then to rest along the path to the house. “You fucken cow,” he said.

  “Uncle Clar!” he shouted when he was within hailing distance. “You should see this thing! Clar!”

  He unlatched the door with his shoulder and worked it open with his elbow, kicked in the door to the kitchen.

  “Look at this fucker!” he shouted as he crossed the room, and he bent in close to the framed photograph to present it. “Jesus,” he said. He turned and dropped the fish on the counter, the tail lolling into the sink. He took off his coat and pushed his shirt sleeves to his elbows, rinsed his hands and forearms with cold water from the tap. He opened a cupboard and took down a bottle of rye, poured himself a tumbler.

  It was nearly dark in the kitchen and he lit two lamps, added wood to the fire. He stood at the counter, looking down at the magnificent thing. Leaned closer a moment, looking for the stink of rot. Brought his nose near enough he could feel the cold coming off it on his face. Breathed in the clean smell of salt.

  He sat at the table with his drink awhile. His face twinned in the black panes of the kitchen window. When he was good and drunk he went to the porch after his splitting knife. He brought a lamp close for the light, worked the point into the throat under the gills, sawing through cartilage. Turned the blade to slit the belly, the sound of the tight skin letting go like a zipper being undone. He
leaned his weight forward to take off the head, throwing it into the sink. Reached inside the opened torso for the intestines and stomach, closed his fingers on something solid in there. About the size of a baseball. He stepped back, his knife and bloody hands in the air like a surgeon over an operating table. He glanced across at the photograph, Uncle Clar’s eyes askance, refusing to watch the proceedings. Sweetland reached back into the cavity and closed his hand on the object, pulled it free with the viscera. He picked the stomach clear of the blood and offal. Slit a hole in the membrane and shook the contents into the sink.

  “Jesus fuck,” he said.

  A rabbit’s decapitated head gazed up out of the basin. The silky ears limp and bedraggled, the black eyes wide and staring back at Sweetland.

  “Now, Uncle Clar,” he said. He wiped his filthy forearm across his mouth. “What would thee make of it?”

  He went to bed blind drunk, crawling up the last few steps and along the hall to the bedroom, and he dreamt drunkenly of his mother in his arms, of carrying her up the narrow stairs of the house, the steps moving under his feet like an escalator, the landing above them rising further away even as he climbed toward it.

  His mother lived to eighty-four and died of congestive heart failure after a long decline. Sweetland had carried her up and down those stairs for weeks before she took to her bed for good. She was almost weightless by then, her head tucked into his shoulder, one hand picking mindlessly at a button on his shirt. She’d baked fresh bread every day while she was able, for the salve and relief of burying her hands in the warm dough. But it had been years since she’d made her last batch. Her fingers so twisted with arthritis they looked like claws of driftwood.

  He set her under the sheets at night, sitting beside her as she said her prayers, her hands held childishly over her nose. Before he left her for the night she said, Don’t have me die among strangers, Moses.

  Go to sleep now, he said.

  When his mother couldn’t leave the bed any longer, Ruth moved back into the room across the hall and Sweetland slept on the daybed in the kitchen. They took turns sitting with her, staring out the window as she slept. Sweetland had never seen his mother in a state of undress and he left the room when Ruthie bathed the woman in the morning. Pacing the upstairs hallway until his sister called him back in to help change the sheets.

  The public health nurse came out on the ferry twice a month and she left a stack of adult diapers and medicated ointment for the bedsores on the old woman’s back and buttocks. Are you in any pain? she asked, and his mother shook her head no. The nurse inserted a catheter and gave them instructions on changing the bags and keeping the equipment clean.

  Your mother should be in a hospital, she said. You know that.

  We can look out to her, Sweetland said.

  If the catheter causes an infection, the nurse said, she’ll have to be admitted.

  How will we know? Ruth asked.

  The nurse touched her nose with one finger. You’ll know, she said.

  The Reverend was a regular visitor to the sickroom in those last months. He read the old woman Bible verses and they prayed together before he left. Ruthie stayed with them, but it was another intimacy that was too much for Sweetland. He paced the hall or sat outside while the Reverend ministered to her, their voices through the door a muffle that rarely surfaced into coherence.

  I’m some disappointed in the both of them, he heard his mother say, and the Reverend’s voice answered in an indecipherable monotone. Not one grandchild, she said sharply, dismissing whatever platitude he’d offered up. Talking as if Ruth wasn’t sitting next to her in the room. Not one youngster between the two of them, she said.

  Uncle Clar sat upright in Sweetland’s head then. Blood of a bitch of a woman, the old man said.

  His mother’s mind began leaving her as her body did, a slow fitful decline. She spent more and more of her waking life among the people she’d grown up with, talking to Ruth like she was her own mother or a young Queenie Coffin, taking Sweetland and the Reverend for her father or one of her brothers. Even when she saw her son for who he was, she misplaced most of his history.

  Whatever happened to your face? she asked.

  Cut myself shaving.

  His mother watched him doubtfully. You’re not old enough to be shaving, she said.

  It was comical at first, a harmless diversion, and the old woman seemed more or less content lost in her youth and her childhood. But in her last weeks alive the confusion turned sour, an undertone of panic settling in. She was tormented by the wet weather ruining a phantom load of fish spread to dry on the long-gone flakes. She asked to see her dead son and couldn’t be comforted with lies.

  Hollis is down to the stage, Sweetland told her, he’ll be up the once.

  He’s not well enough to be out at the fish, she said. Don’t you be torturing him.

  Mother, he said.

  You’ll be the death of that youngster, you keeps torturing him.

  Hollis is the best kind, he said, don’t you worry about Hollis.

  Why won’t you tell him I wants to see him? she said. She was angry enough to chew nails.

  He’ll be along the once, don’t you worry.

  His mother turned her face toward the wall. You always hated me, she said.

  He looked away from her then and saw Ruth watching from the doorway.

  She’s not well, Ruth told him.

  I knows she idn’t.

  She don’t mean what she’s saying.

  I knows that, he said.

  The day she died his mother woke occasionally to look around herself, dropping off again without seeing anything, but for one instance when she caught and held Sweetland’s face beside her. Where am I? she asked.

  Home, maid, he said. In your bed.

  She shook her head and stared up at the ceiling. She turned to him again, the motion so laboured it was hurtful to watch. She nodded toward him gravely. Who are you?

  Moses, he said. Your son.

  She shook her head again. I don’t know you, she said, and she closed her eyes.

  He leaned in close, laying a hand over one of her twisted hands. Mother, he said, but she was already asleep. And dying among strangers, for all he tried to save her from it.

  Sweetland woke to a disturbance he couldn’t place at first, an agitation in the air that he thought was part of the hangover he’d spent the previous night concocting. He climbed out of bed too quickly and had to steady himself with a hand to the headboard and before the dizziness passed he recognized the sound. A chopper in the distance, the wet whup whup whup approaching the island.

  Sweetland pulled on his pants and the filthy shirt he’d worn the night before, stumbled out to the window at the end of the hall which faced the island’s north end. The Coast Guard helicopter was miles off when he caught sight of it, a speck in the blue, moving toward Burnt Head. A crew coming out for fall maintenance on the light. It disappeared behind the height of land as it descended and Sweetland made for the stairs, hands on the walls to keep his feet.

  He pulled on his coat and boots in the porch, stepped back into the kitchen long enough to grab the rabbit’s head from the sink where he’d left it. He opened the main doors of the shed, pulled the tarp off the quad. Set the choke and turned the ignition, the motor rolling and falling flat, rolling and falling flat. Weeks since he’d used the machine and he flooded the engine in his panic to start it up, he could smell the fuel wafting up from the motor. He set off on foot instead, not sure there was enough gas to get him there regardless, not wanting to waste time. He went up the steep slope toward the mash, carrying the creature’s head by the strap of its ears. He stopped at the King’s Seat to catch his breath. A cold morning but he unzipped his coat, already sweating under the layers.

  He walked past the remains of his bonfire, the thick coils of wire from the tractor tires orange with rust. He went through the gate to cut across Glad Vatcher’s meadow and before he made the other side it came clear
to him he’d have been better to take out the ATV’s plugs and wipe them dry with a rag, tried the engine again. The Coast Guard had an hour’s work on the light at most. Even if there was some maintenance on the helipad or the ladder, he doubted it would keep them out there long enough. He swore up at the sky and then he swore at his boots.

  Beyond the moss and tuckamore of the mash the trail moved into a rolling moonscape of granite where it skewed out toward the flat ground on the headlands, and for long stretches it ravelled within an arm’s length of that sheer drop. Sweetland was still feeling a slight vertigo hangover and he hugged the inner edge of the path, keeping his eyes on the cairns placed to show the way until he heard the helicopter start up, the static whine of the ignition. The tower of the old lighthouse was in sight when he raised his head, the slow beat of the blades making their first tentative revolutions beyond it.

  He came over the rise and went down the path with his arms in the air, shouting uselessly into the racket. The chopper already airborne and over the open ocean when he rounded the corner of the keeper’s house, the air around him buffeted by the mechanical storm. He chased after it stupidly, stumbling down to the helipad. He stood at the centre of the platform, like the needle on a sundial, watching the helicopter until it had disappeared in the blue.

  The wind faffered around him, picking at his clothes. He was suddenly hungry and cold, his shirt soaked through with sweat. He looked down at the rabbit’s head in his hand, curious as to why he’d carried it out here. It was meant to convince the Coast Guard crew of something, he knew, though it seemed a ridiculous prop now. He thought of how he would have looked to them, waving the foul thing, raving on about the mutilation of rabbits on his line, the head he’d found nailed to his stage door. The voice leading him out of the fog and the phantom chess game underway at Duke’s abandoned barbershop. He patted at his pockets distractedly, like he was looking for reading glasses or cigarettes. Almost relieved to have missed the crew. He walked to the edge of the pad and threw the rabbit’s head back into the ocean that had briefly surrendered it.