Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  He did not want to have sex with the woman. He was worried about making her pregnant, about catching some mortifying French disease. He’d never used a condom and was afraid of looking like an idiot trying to put one on in front of a stranger. He made an effort to back out of the arrangement, which he hadn’t gone looking for to begin with.

  Already paid for, Duke said. Ask for a blowjob, it’s better than screwing anyway.

  He was so hard when she went down on him that he couldn’t feel a thing other than pressure, an insistent discomfort, as though it was a medical procedure of some kind being performed on him. He had both hands on her head, trying to release his cock, and he came in spite of himself, suffering through a grating convulsion that was completely devoid of pleasure. He rolled onto his side, curling up in a defensive position.

  What the Christ was that? he asked.

  I know, she said. Tell your friends. And she winked at him. Marion, her name was. She was still wearing the mustard-yellow polyester uniform from the lunch counter, a blue name tag pinned above her breast.

  Nothing more then before Effie Burden fumbling at his fly in Bob-Sam’s wagon on the way to the light at the Mackerel Cliffs.

  And that was the end of such things for him.

  He still walked as far as the lighthouse on Sundays if the weather was anywhere shy of miserable. It was a slow trip out, an hour longer than walking in summer. He didn’t bother trying to break into the light tower at Burnt Head, built a small fire in the lee of the keeper’s house and boiled snow-water for tea, sitting on his coat, feeding the dog stale Purity crackers and salt fish and slivers of bottled beet.

  Before starting back he walked down past the house to look out at the Fever Rocks and beyond them to the busy grey-blue of the ocean. He thought he might catch a glimpse of a container ship swinging wide for the eastern seaboard of the States, some evidence of the world rumoured beyond the island’s ark. But there was only the endless conveyor belt of the waves ticking toward the shoreline.

  He never went down as far as the cliffs, not since the night he’d watched the crowd assemble there in their echoing cathedral silence. A lunatic’s vision, he expected, though something about it seemed beyond his capacity for fabrication, even drunk as he was. And he felt it would be a trespass to walk where those strangers had been standing, hushed and oddly expectant. He couldn’t recall a single detail of those faces in the light of day but it still niggled at him, the sense that he’d known them in another lifetime, that their names were adrift below the surface and just about to come to him. But he never managed to hook a single one.

  Since the first snow of the fall he’d been taking the short detour to the new cemetery on his way back down into the cove. He walked through the rows to spend a few minutes with the dead lying there. His closest blood lined off near the back fence, his mother and Ruthie, Uncle Clar and Jesse.

  Jesse had liked to follow Sweetland up to the cemetery when he cut the grass or spent a morning painting the fence. It was the only time Sweetland actively discouraged the boy’s company, knowing it would lead to questions about Hollis’s absent marker. Clara thought that might be the reason Jesse fixated on him—the lack of definition to the loss, the absence of a clear resting place. The thought that Hollis was somewhere out there still.

  It makes Hollis sad, Jesse said one afternoon. Not having a headstone with the others.

  Is that right? Sweetland said.

  It makes him feel lonely.

  Well, boo-fucken-hoo. Tell him when he stops wandering around the cove with you, maybe we’ll put one up for him.

  And Jesse had carried on a dialogue with Sweetland’s dead brother then, walking through the graveyard to discuss the size and colour and style of headstone Hollis might prefer. It made Sweetland nearly mental at the time, listening to that one-sided conversation, and he told Jesse to shut up or bugger off home out of it. But he had less and less room to judge the youngster. He knelt to clear the fresh fall of snow from the names and dates on the stones, Jesse’s and Uncle Clar’s and Ruthie’s and his mother’s. Queenie Coffin’s and Effie Priddle’s. Old Mr. Vatcher and Sara Loveless. Saying hello to each of them aloud and telling them the weather and what he planned to cook for his supper. Like a Jesus idiot.

  The flour he’d bought in Miquelon was brown and had no preservatives and he lost most of it to mould and weevils by the new year. He’d known there wasn’t enough salt meat to see him through the winter, even rationing it as he did. The rabbit and occasional brown trout and cured cod he lived on was so lean he couldn’t keep the flesh on his bones. His clothes began to hang off his frame in unfamiliar ways, sloughing at his shoulders and hips. He added an extra hole in his belt with a hammer and four-inch nail, to keep his pants from slipping around his arse. He ran out of store-bought liquor and salt beef halfway through January month. He had a final meal of rabbit stew the first week of February and he cut the last morsels of meat on his plate into bite-sized chunks, sharing them out with the dog. He put the plate on the floor to be licked clean of gravy and when the dog looked up again he showed his empty hands. “All gone, Mr. Fox,” he said.

  The snow in the woods on the mash was too deep and rotten to allow for setting snares and, with the exception of a single partridge he’d managed to shoot on a walk to the lighthouse, he subsisted on homebrew and root vegetables and the cod he’d put up in the fall. He had eaten through the fish that was properly cured. All that was left to him was under-salted and slimy, the stacked layers of flesh gone green at the edges. He soaked the brine from the fish overnight and boiled it most of an afternoon, adding fresh water every hour, just to make it palatable. He put down a bowl for the dog, who nosed it awhile and walked away to lie three or four feet distant with its head on its paws. Sometimes the maggoty fish sat there a full day before the dog gave in to its hunger, chewing at the sour meat with an obvious distaste Sweetland wouldn’t have thought an animal capable of.

  “Go catch your own goddamn dinner, you don’t like it,” he said.

  On occasion the dog did just that, carrying home bones it discovered up on the mash or dug out of someone’s backyard garbage pile, and it lay near Diesel’s house, grinding at a long-discarded T-bone or the jaw of a sheep or a young cow.

  Sweetland saw the animal trotting up from the waterfront one afternoon with its head held high, some flaccid creature in its mouth. He stood at the kitchen window as the dog came closer, watching it stop now and then to drop its cargo and walk around it, until it had found a more manageable way to carry the awkward load. It was a bullbird the dog had gotten hold of, the black and white creature about the same size as the dog’s head. Dovekies they were called elsewhere in the world, according to Jesse.

  It was an unlikely catch. Sweetland hadn’t often seen bullbirds west of Cape Race and they were usually gone out to sea by the first of February. He knelt over the dog, who growled to have him so close to his prize. “All right there, Mr. Fox,” he said, and he gave the dog a flick with the back of his hand. He picked up the bird and turned it over. It wasn’t oiled that he could tell, and there was no obvious injury to explain the dog’s luck. Sweetland ran a thumb along the breastbone and then stood to look out at the harbour, shading his eyes to see the water against the sun’s glare.

  He went into the shed for a dip net stored in the rafters and walked down the path. Before he was halfway to the shoreline he could see them rolling in on the tidal surge. Dozens of bullbirds dead in the water, the corpses like tiny buoys off their moorings and drifting in past the breakwater. More again already grounded on the beach. Sweetland scooped up eight or ten and he walked back to the house with the loaded dip net on his shoulder, seawater dripping behind him.

  He sat them in a row on the counter and leaned there a minute to look them over. He picked one up, turned it one side and the other, admiring the symmetry of the face. Beautiful creatures, he’d always thought. Sleek and delicate looking, plush as a child’s toy. Hard to imagine them spending months out
on the winter Atlantic without ever coming ashore.

  The bird’s breastbone jutted against his thumb beneath the down. They were all in the same emaciated condition, which likely meant they had starved. So little flesh on their bones he didn’t know if it would be worth the effort of cleaning them. But the thought of a single morsel of fresh meat was making his legs shake. He put on a pot of water to scald the birds, to make them easier to pluck. And while he waited for the pot to boil, he went back to the shoreline to gather more.

  He cleaned them outside the porch door and he had to light a lamp to finish the tedious work, the naked bodies stippled and scrawny and unhealthy looking against the snow where he laid them. There wasn’t enough meat on the carcasses to roast and he made soup instead, with potatoes and turnip and carrot, a couple of whole onions for flavour. He boiled the pot long enough to kill anything organic and he set down a bowl for the dog before sitting to his own. They ate in the same greedy silence then, Sweetland gnawing every morsel off the bones and sucking out the marrow. The dog licking its bowl the length of the kitchen floor. It was awful food, gamey and scant, but Sweetland finished four of the birds before he pushed away from the table. Already looking forward to the meal he’d make of the others.

  In the morning he walked down to the shoreline where the gulls had made a mess of the bullbirds on the beach and were still working over the remains. He walked out as far as the incinerator with the dog running alongside or in the tuck above the path. Stopped short a little ways past the metal bell. Hundreds more of them on the surface beyond the breakwater, floating dead. The birds so delicately calibrated they’d starved within hours of each other, the organs shutting down one at a time.

  Sweetland had never seen the like before, though he’d heard rumours of similar things. Gannets at Cape St. Mary’s disappearing from Bird Rock by the tens of thousands on the same day last summer, travelling north after food. Tinkers showing up in the Florida Keys over the winter months, foraging hundreds of miles beyond their southern range.

  There was a new world being built around him. Sweetland had heard them talking about it for years on the Fisheries Broadcast—apocalyptic weather, rising sea levels, alterations in the seasons, in ocean temperatures. Fish migrating north in search of colder water and the dovekies lost in the landscape they were made for. The generations of instinct they’d relied on to survive here suddenly useless. The birds and their habits were being rendered obsolete, Sweetland thought, like the VHS machines and analog televisions dumped on the slope beyond the incinerator. Relics of another time and on their way out.

  It was just days after the dog brought up its bullbird that the light at Queenie Coffin’s window reappeared.

  Sweetland saw it as he walked back in the arm from the incinerator or through the window over the sink when he washed up the evening’s dishes. He did what he could to ignore its intermittent presence, staring into the dishwater while he finished scrubbing the pots, reminding himself to keep his eyes from the windows the rest of the evening. Or walking the long way across to Church Side and up by Duke’s barbershop, so he could pass Queenie’s house opposite her window. Even during the day he stayed as far from it as his house’s proximity allowed.

  But the light appeared earlier and for longer stretches of the evening, as if it was being fed by his lack of attention. Eventually he talked himself into walking past the light, keeping himself as far clear as the path would let him and not ever looking directly inside the illuminated room. Even out of the corner of his eye he could see there was someone at the window and he battered the rest of the way to his house in the dark, the dog running after him. Shut the door and stood with his back to it. His rubbery legs quivering and he started to giggle there in the black, like someone stoned out of their mind. The dog jumping at his thighs and barking in its confusion. “Jesus fuck!” he shouted and fell back to giggling hysterically. Caught his breath finally and he went shakily into the kitchen to peek through the window over the sink. But the light was gone.

  He made the same walk each of the next three nights, trying to guess who it was he glimpsed as he hurried past. It seemed sometimes to be a pale figure standing behind the glass, at others he thought it was someone in black sitting to one side. Could be there was more than one person in the room. Or no one at all and he was imagining the whole thing, but for the light which was too insistently present not to be real.

  He went to the window one morning and stood looking into the room, hoping it might give him some clue. He pressed his face to the glass, shading his eyes with his hands. Half expecting a buffalo to walk into the living room from the kitchen, or something equally unlikely. But it was just the furniture sitting where it had always been, Queenie’s chair and the chesterfield near the stairs, the five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle shellacked and framed and hung on the far wall as a painting. All of it inert and poker-faced.

  He made up his mind then to stop outside the window after dark and settle the question, for better or worse. He ate his supper like it was his last, chewing slowly and deliberately, tasting nothing. He washed the dishes, waiting for the full of night’s darkness to fall, and when the light appeared he walked around the front of his house and down toward Queenie’s. Stopped well away from the window and he took his time as he stood there, staring at the yellow oblong cast onto the snow by the light, and then the window frame itself, studying each peeling board. There was no one inside the room when he finally worked up the nerve to look. Queenie’s empty chair turned out toward him. Sweetland had been holding his breath without knowing it and he let the air out in a rush, lifted his face to the cold stars.

  He watched the room awhile then, thinking something might happen in there, but nothing did. It was a bitter night to be standing still and eventually he turned to walk home, throwing one last glance over his shoulder. Saw the child standing near the glass. He let out a whimper with the shock of it, and then covered his mouth to stop himself making another sound.

  The girl was naked and stared out at the night with the same brazen look she had sixty years ago, her hair cropped short as a boy’s. Her child’s body stripling and oddly beautiful and distressing, just as he remembered. It took him a moment to register the fact she wasn’t alone in the room, that there was a woman seated in the chair at the window. Her hair in curlers and her head bowed toward a book in her lap. They were holding hands, the girl and the old woman beside her, though they each seemed oblivious to the other’s presence. “Queenie,” Sweetland said aloud. He raised a hand tentatively, as a greeting. But neither acknowledged him or seemed to know he was there. The woman in the chair turned a page with her free hand, a lit cigarette between the fingers.

  He stood watching the two until he heard his teeth chattering with the cold. And he stayed a long while afterwards, not wanting to give them up, thinking they might meet his eyes eventually. When he couldn’t stand still a moment longer, he headed toward his place, walking backwards until he lost sight of the girl. Shuffle-ran to his porch to haul another coat overtop of the one he was wearing. By the time he turned the corner on his way back to Queenie’s the light was out.

  He watched for it every evening afterwards, at the sink and during his walks, and always one last time before he turned in for the night. But he never saw the light or the child or the old woman again.

  March came in like a lamb. There was a warm spell in the lead-up to St. Patrick’s Day that Sweetland didn’t trust for a second. Waiting for the storm that followed the holiday. Sheila’s Brush it was called, arriving in the wake of St. Paddy and usually heralding a full-on return to late-winter misery.

  He took advantage of the mild temperatures to work outside, though he stuck close to home. He left the stove cold one morning and climbed up on the roof with the chimney brush. He’d improvised a pole by duct-taping broom handles to either end of an old stair rail salvaged from Loveless’s house, worked it hand over hand into the chimney, pushing the metal bristle down the flue. Hauled the brush up by its st
ring and repeated the manoeuvre half a dozen times to scrub out the soot. Sweating in the sun’s fickle heat. The mythical storm was like a letter he half expected in the mail, and each day it didn’t show he was almost disappointed.

  He looked up at the hills surrounding the cove, sunlight making them ring with meltwater. He’d always loved that sound, waited for it each spring. Hearing it made him certain of the place he came from. He’d always felt it was more than enough to wake up here, to look out on these hills. As if he’d long ago been measured and made to the island’s exact specifications.

  The dog appeared to take the beautiful weather at face value, wandering further and further afield during the days, sometimes not coming back to the house until Sweetland was long asleep. It barked outside to be let in and Sweetland shuffled across the kitchen in the dark. He stood the door open and the dog ran straight for the dish by the stove where its food had been sitting all day. Sweetland stood listening to the porcelain scrape of it in the darkness, waiting for the dog to finish. It jumped onto the daybed then, turning circles among the quilts to settle in. Sweetland all the while complaining about being woken up and the mess it was making of his bed with its filthy paws. “You got a perfectly good doghouse out there to use,” he said. He drifted off listening to the dog grooming itself, the lap of its tongue as calm and insistent as water dripping from a tap.

  He woke with a start, later than he was used to getting up, sunlight in the kitchen. The day already underway and he lay there nursing a centreless sense of dread. He’d forgotten to do something important was the feeling, but he couldn’t place the thing. He was up and had lit the fire and was walking to the door to piss into the snow when it struck him the dog hadn’t woken him in the night, coming back to the house. That it had been out wandering since the morning before.