Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  He walked on to the lighthouse as the storm descended, a soft, steady fall of snow settling on his shoulders as the sun disappeared. By the time he crested the rise above the keeper’s house the wind had shifted to the east and was blowing hard, catching him broadside. The snow suddenly wet and heavy and driving and Sweetland kept his head down to protect his face, to be able to take a breath without choking on the drift. He carried on past the lighthouse for the shelter of the path through the tuckamore, the trees offering some protection from the weather. The snow blowing overhead in fierce sheets but it was surprisingly warm and quiet out of the wind, and Sweetland opened his coat as he went, making his way toward the valley. He was fifteen minutes into that descent when the dog burst past him on the trail, bounding ahead. The black coat barely visible under the spray of white in the fur.

  “And where the fuck were you?” Sweetland shouted. Relieved to see the animal.

  He’d caught sight of the cabin’s peak at the head of the valley, but it disappeared again as he moved down into the trees. He was at the door before he knew he was close. There was a drift of snow across the front of the building and he kicked it clear, stepped inside behind the dog. The cabin backed right into the eastern ridge and out of the wind. Sweetland shut the door behind him and listened to the silence. Except for the occasional rattle in the chimney, there was nothing to say a storm was on. He looked down at the dog, its breath coming in plumes. It was colder inside than out, a chill the room had been storing up for months.

  The brothers spent no time at the cabin over the winter and the woodbox by the stove was nearly empty. A bit of kindling, a pile of sawed-up two-by-four scavenged from the remains of the deck at the keeper’s house. A Bic lighter beside the flue. Sweetland set about making a fire, leaving the stove door open an inch to let the draft take up through the dry kindling. Looked around the room as he waited for the heat. The cabin was a storey and a half, with bunks in a loft built under the eaves. A window over the sink against one wall. A square table beneath the loft, a loveseat the brothers had sawed in half to make it easier carrying out from the cove. It was stuck together with nails and duct tape, a predominant slump across the middle. There was a poster-sized outline of Newfoundland tacked on the opposite side of the room. It was a commemorative map produced in 1966, Come Home Year in a faux-antique script across the top.

  Hardly the cornucopia of delights he’d been dreaming about. Sweetland was familiar enough with the cabin that none of it was a surprise. It was hard to believe he’d made so much of it in his mind, lying alone at three and four in the morning.

  When it was warm enough inside to take off his coat, he poked through the cupboards over the sink. Two plates, two bowls, a mismatch of glasses and mugs. A plastic baggie of Tetley, a tin of Maxwell House instant. An unopened kilo of sugar, one of the few things he had plenty of. Half a dozen boxes of Kraft Dinner, three Styrofoam containers of Cup-a-Soup. A half-empty jar of peanuts, a flask of vodka. A pack of rolling papers. One lonely tin of Flakes of Ham. Sweetland dug through the cutlery drawer for a can opener and he set half the gelatinous meat on a plate for the dog. He ate the rest of it from the tin, savouring every salty mouthful. Thinking it was enough on its own to have made the trip worthwhile.

  He carried the kettle outside and filled it with fresh snow, set it on the stovetop where it spat and hissed. Then he walked to the lean- to built against the waterside wall of the cabin where they kept the generator. Hoping for more firewood, hoping for several gallons of gasoline. The room was padlocked shut and Sweetland took the screws off the lockset in the door jamb, pushed the door as wide as it would go. The generator sitting in shadows at the back of the narrow space, one gas can beside it. Sweetland reached to touch it with his boot and the container shifted where it sat. Not half full. Enough to get the quad back to the cove, and a trip to the lighthouse from there if he ever needed it. But no more than that.

  There was nothing else of any use to him. A couple of paint cans, a stack of roofing shingles. A shovel with a broken handle. A coffee can full of roofing nails, screws, a dozen cigarette butts. Sweetland picked through the can to collect the butts and he took them back inside the cabin. He brought in more snow to add to the meltwater in the kettle and then he sat at the table with the flask of vodka, poured himself a shot in a coffee cup. He’d never cared much for vodka and he let it sit there while he straightened the smashed butts and scraped the tobacco from the paper tubes onto the tabletop. There was enough to roll three cigarettes with the papers in the cupboard. He tore strips of the thin cardboard from the cover and rolled them tight to make a crude filter for each one.

  “Now, Mr. Fox,” he said. The dog was curled on the loveseat and lifted its head to look at him. “Who’s got it better than this?”

  There were moments, he had to admit, when he sounded slightly unhinged. He’d had plenty of quiet time since missing his chance to escape with the Coast Guard to consider whether he was losing his grip on reality and he found it hard to argue otherwise. But he couldn’t make himself believe it. And he was surprised to find he was more or less content with his predicament now, with his place on the abandoned island with Loveless’s little dog and Jesse’s grave. He held to what he’d chosen and managed to make a sort of peace with the bizarre incidents that had become a feature of his days, accepted the fact that some of the world he lived in couldn’t be found on a map. A crazy person wouldn’t be capable of separating the strangeness from the rest of his life, he thought, of settling in the midst of it. But he allowed it was possible that all crazy people thought that way.

  He lit one of the hand-rolled and took a slow drag on the butt. His first taste of a cigarette in twenty-five years and he held the stale smoke in his lungs a long time.

  Halfway through the flask of vodka he was feeling sick to his stomach. The foul alcohol or the shot of nicotine, or a combination of the two. He was drunk enough to push on, regardless, poured the cup full and lit the second of his three smokes. His head buzzing like a neon light. He’d almost forgotten how much he loved the cigarettes, what a poisonous comfort they were.

  The one night the Sri Lankan refugees stayed in Chance Cove he’d spent most of the evening alone in his kitchen, chain-smoking to tamp down the thought of Ruthie and the Reverend in the office behind the altar. He barely slept, waking before light and picking up the Rothmans on the nightstand. He smoked one on the side of the bed, tapping the ash into his palm. Smoked a second in his underwear before he dressed and walked down through the cove, a handful of stars clinging to the darkest edges of the morning.

  No sign of life but for the front doors of the church standing open and he gravitated toward them without intending to step inside. The candles were lit at the front and he could see the silhouette of people sitting in the pew next to the boy’s body. His first thought was of Ruthie and the Reverend, meeting up again while the rest of the town slept. He turned away and stood outside the doors, facing the cove. He lit up a smoke against the rush in his chest, stared out at the water, considering whether it was his place to go in there and say something. He felt like setting a match to the church, burning the goddamn thing to the ground.

  He was almost finished his smoke when he was startled by the sound of a voice behind him, a single indecipherable syllable. Spun around to see one of the Sri Lankans in the open doorway. It was the fellow he’d thrown the line to at the bow of the lifeboat, who had gestured to ask for water. He was dressed in a flannel work shirt three sizes too big, a pair of oversized pants cinched to his hipless frame with a belt, the cuffs turned halfway up his shins. He looked like a youngster wearing a costume of grown-up’s clothes for a Sunday School play. He nodded at Sweetland and gestured to his mouth again.

  Sweetland shook a cigarette from the pack and passed the man a book of matches, but the Sri Lankan’s hands were too shaky to strike one. Sweetland lit the smoke and lit one for himself as well. He waved a hand toward the door. Sorry for your loss, he said, and the Sri Lankan mutt
ered something unintelligible and sorrowful. And then they smoked in silence awhile.

  Sweetland kept glancing into the church over the man’s shoulder, thinking of Ruthie and Pilgrim exchanging vows up at that altar. Ruth had bawled the whole night before the ceremony, seventeen and set to ruin her life on Sweetland’s say-so. The girl’s hand trembling as Pilgrim slipped the ring on her finger, her face raw and swollen under the wedding veil. She did not love the man in any fashion, that was plain enough, but she soldiered through it. And Sweetland never saw his sister cry another tear in the years that followed, never heard her utter a word of complaint about her marriage or the husband she’d been tied to. He had taken a false comfort in those facts and was gutted now to see how wrong he’d been about it all.

  There was a rustle of movement inside the church and he watched the brother of the dead boy limp out of the shadows, dressed just as strangely, and leaning all his weight on Ruthie’s shoulder. She looked steadily at Sweetland as she approached, her face set. Defiant. And Sweetland dropped his cigarette, crushed it out under his shoe so he wouldn’t have to hold her eye. The Sri Lankan he’d been smoking with reached for the young man’s free arm and Sweetland made a move to take Ruth’s place, but she shook her head. We’re fine here, she said.

  He watched them make their slow way up the path. Sorry for your loss, he said again.

  He had no inkling how long he would drag those peculiar men in his wake. He almost resented having found them out there for a time, thinking he’d never have discovered the truth about Ruthie otherwise and would have been happier not knowing.

  Impossible to say now when it changed for him, when he started to see himself and his sister’s life mirrored darkly in that story—forcing the girl into a marriage she didn’t ask for or want, setting her adrift on that ocean without so much as a drop of water to drink. He might have been speaking to Ruthie and not the Sri Lankans as they left the church that morning. And for years he would have to fight the urge to whisper the phrase in every private moment they had before she died: Sorry for your loss.

  The wind turned sometime during the night and he woke to the sound of weather against the front of the cabin, sleet slashing across the door and the window beside it. Pitch-black. The frigid cold in the room enough to tell him the temperature had dropped when the wind shifted.

  He’d burned through every bit of firewood in the cabin during the day, and after he’d finished the flask of vodka he had taken the axe to the firebox and the ladder to the loft and burned those as well. All that was left for him now was a small pile of green wood he’d cut while there was still daylight. He tried to light a fire with it, but the wind whistling in the chimney wouldn’t allow the draft to take, pushing smoke back into the cabin. The flame sputtered anemic and heatless and went out altogether while Sweetland nodded off. He’d been too drunk to think of retrieving blankets from the loft bunks before he burned the ladder and he lay cramped on the loveseat under his coat the whole night. The dog curled in his lap was the only bit of heat in all the wide world. His two feet gone to ice.

  The morning was a long time coming, the day’s first grey light shrouded by the storm’s weight. Sweetland went out to piss on the lee side of the cabin and he took the axe down into the valley, looking for deadfall that would be dry enough to burn. Wind whipping the snow so he couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. After half an hour of scrabbling blind he had an armful of dry sticks and he managed to light a fire to boil meltwater for tea. He hung his jacket over the heat and he had a breakfast of freeze-dried soup that he shared with the dog. When the dead wood was roaring he put a junk of green spruce in the stove where it spit and burned blue and gave almost no heat. He looked down at the dog where it was still lying on the loveseat.

  “What about you?” he said. “You look like you’d burn.”

  He spent a lot of time staring at the commemorative map of Newfoundland. Even from across the room he could see how badly detailed it was. Only the largest communities and bays and islands were identified. He walked over to look closer. Little Sweetland was there, and Sweetland lying in the open Atlantic beyond it, but neither warranted a name.

  He went across to the cupboards and picked through them a second time, moving every item on the shelves, lifting the cutlery tray, looking for a pen of some sort, a marker. His search rewarded with a stub of pencil and a tightly wound baggie of marijuana. “Well now, Mr. Fox,” Sweetland said. He still had one hand-rolled cigarette that he was saving for a special occasion and he considered that this qualified. He broke it open and mixed the tobacco with the weed, rolled himself two joints. The marijuana dry as dust, an ancient stash the brothers had probably forgotten. Sweetland wet one of the joints in his mouth to keep it from burning too quickly. He smoked half the reefer, choking on the ragged draw and fighting to keep it down. He pinched out the flame to save the second half for later and then he sharpened the pencil stub with a knife, waiting for the stone to hit him.

  Nothing to it, not that he could say. He felt completely straight.

  He sat in front of the map of Newfoundland and wrote Sweetland across the irregular yellow oblong where he had spent almost his entire existence. Wrote Little Sweetland across the smaller island two inches above it. And he spent the better part of an hour then, adding missing names along the coastline, drawing in small islands that had been inexplicably left out. Folded his arms when he’d run through the inventory he carried in his head, considering the place. On a whim he reached up to draw a circle in the centre of Fortune Bay. Wrote Queenie’s Island across the face of it. He carried on then, dotting the shoreline with islands and communities and features that didn’t exist, naming them all after people he knew. Bob-Sam’s Island. Jesse’s Head. Priddle’s Point. Pilgrim’s Arm. Vatcher’s Tickle.

  He stepped away when he thought he was done, admiring his handiwork. Reached up to draw a line through the faux-antique Come Home Year. Wrote Stay Home Year above it. Giggled aloud then and felt immediately self-conscious. Stoned out of his head, he realized.

  He glanced across at the dog. “Some clever, hey?”

  The animal turned a few circles on the loveseat, then flopped down with a sigh.

  “Oh fuck off,” Sweetland said. He lit up what was left of the joint and smoked it down to the cardboard filter.

  The weather moderated while he was at work on the map. Cold still, the wind blowing strong, but there was nothing falling. It was going to be a bitter night at the Priddles’ cabin with no wood to burn and Sweetland decided to make a run for the ATV. He put the lighter he carried with him and the Bic he found at the cabin in the baggie with the second joint and the rolling papers, tucked the package away in the inside pocket of his coat. He packed up his few things with the Kraft Dinner and Cup-a-Soups and then took a look around the room to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. He went across to the map of Newfoundland, nipped the push-pins from the wall. Folded the paper in four, stuffed it into his backpack.

  “Let’s go,” he said to the dog, and it came as far as the door but balked there. “Come on,” Sweetland said. “We got to move we wants to get home out of this.” And he pushed the dog out with the toe of his boot. Grabbed the gas can from where it sat beside the generator in the shed.

  It was a steep climb out of the valley and he was breathing heavy by the time they reached level ground. He set the gas can at his feet before they left the trees altogether, shook out the numbness in his arms. The dog sitting beside him, waiting. The temperature had somersaulted above freezing again, but the wind was going to be full on in their faces when they turned inland at the lighthouse. “Gird up your loins, Mr. Fox,” he said. He was still stoned, he knew, which accounted for the lightness in his tone. He had a mind to turn back for the cabin suddenly, thinking he wasn’t in any shape to know sense. But the notion went astray just as quickly. “Hup, two,” he said and he hefted the gas can.

  It had started to rain by the time the keeper’s house was in sight, a stea
dy fall that soaked through the shoulders of his jacket and his pants. The dog’s hybrid fur useless in the rain, sopping and pasted to the scrawny frame. Sweetland struck by just how little there was to the creature beneath the wild coat. Before they topped the rise the rain had turned to sleet and he could see the dog was shivering, not enough meat on its bones to keep warm. It kept glancing back at Sweetland mournfully. He called the shaking dog over, setting it inside his coat and bringing up the zipper so it was just the animal’s head exposed to the air. A steady quiver vibrating against his chest as he went on, the wet soaking through his shirt.

  He was on the stretch of path over bald rock that ravelled out within a few feet of the headlands, the ocean roiling black below. Not hard to imagine Jesse losing his way here in the fog. The wind whipped at the gas can Sweetland carried, wrenching his shoulder with every gust, threatening to take him over the edge. He stopped long enough to tie a length of string to the handle and hauled the red container over the ground behind him like a sledge. He guessed he was half an hour’s trudge from the ATV and he carried on with his head down against the driving sleet, stopping now and then to turn his back to the wind. He couldn’t feel the skin on the good side of his face and he winced and chewed and yawned, hoping the motion would bring some life back into the flesh.

  He was two hundred yards past the ATV before he knew it, his eyes at his feet and nearly closed against the sleet. Turned his back to the wind to catch his breath, spotted the lonely machine behind him. Another fifty yards on he would have missed it altogether.

  His hands were numb with the cold and he had trouble fitting the finicky nozzle on the gas container. The dog had disappeared into his coat where it had shivered itself to sleep and he kept an arm across his stomach to support its weight. Spilled a tumbler’s worth of gas trying to set the nozzle in the tank’s opening one-handed, swearing under his breath. After he filled the tank he tied the rest of the gas onto the carryall and started up the machine.