Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  The weather was mild enough that the animal might have kipped down in the bush or just meandered up on the mash all night, as it used to do when it was Loveless’s dog. Sweetland listened awhile to the runoff rattling down into the cove from the hills, thinking it was almost time to move back into the upstairs bedroom. Thinking he might be able to tail some rabbit slips on the mash before long. The morning still cool but already warming in the sunlight. And he knew it a certainty as he stood there that he would never see the dog alive again.

  He didn’t leave the cove to go looking, not wanting to admit by his actions what his heart knew to be true. He puttered around the property, to be close by if the dog came back. Mid-morning he took a bucket of tar onto the roof and patched around the chimney flashing. It was a chore that didn’t need doing strictly, but he could keep an eye on most of the cove from up there and into the hills. He stayed on the roof until it was time to eat. Before he climbed down the ladder he put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, and he stood listening as the echoes swung across the hills. Watching for any sign of movement in that world of endless stillness.

  In the afternoon he walked along the paths with a bit of salt fish in his shirt pocket. Not much to tempt the animal with, but he had nothing better to offer. He felt sure it was nowhere close, but he couldn’t stop himself going through the motions regardless. Most of the houses in the cove were built on shores or rock foundations and he kept an eye for cubbyholes the dog might have crawled into, kneeling at the likeliest spots and calling its name. He went out Church Side to the meadow and then backtracked around the harbour, walking all the way to the incinerator. He stopped there, leaned a little ways into the iron darkness, waited for his eyes to adjust. Dirty snow drifted against the far wall. Black lumps of unidentifiable refuse. Loveless’s calf just inside the entrance, the bare skeleton collapsed and so jumbled by scavengers it would be almost impossible now to identify the creature for what it was.

  After he finished his supper that evening he took up the dog’s bowl and threw the two-day-old food into the stove. Washed it along with his own dishes and refilled it with the leftover potato and fish he’d cooked for himself. Set the bowl back beside the stove.

  He sat at the kitchen window, looking out at Diesel’s doghouse in the failing light, listening for the weather on the radio. He went to the door every half-hour to whistle up to the hills. And again when he woke to take a piss in the middle of the night, standing on the doorsill in his small clothes, the chill licking at his ankles. Decided as he stood there that he would go up on the mash in the morning and set a few snares, see if he couldn’t get a bit of fresh craft to eat.

  He hadn’t slept much before he woke to piss and didn’t sleep at all afterwards, staring at the kitchen window for the first sign of light. Getting up now and then to set a junk of wood in the stove. There was no rush, he knew that for a fact. And he was anxious to start out all the same.

  He lit a lamp and warmed a panful of salt fish and French-fried potato for his breakfast. He packed a jar of water and a lunch of cod slathered in partridgeberry jam, to spare himself one more meal of plain salt fish. Put two cans of peaches and the last of the box of ammunition in the pack, half a dozen snares to keep up the charade he was going after rabbits. Tied a set of snowshoes to the leather fastener. Overcast, the wind steady out of the south and the morning looked for rain, so he packed his yellow slicker as well. Drove the quad on the last dregs of his fuel past the new cemetery and out of the cove. It was barely light by the time he reached the King’s Seat and he turned the machine off there, balanced himself up on the stone arm of the Seat. Facing inland, trying to guess which direction to set out in.

  He put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, the sound falling quick and hard. The mash beyond him still black and featureless. “That’s a big fucken island, Sweetland,” he said. He sat back on the quad and waited there until it was light enough to pick out the orange tire wire and charcoaled wood of his bonfire pushing up through the snow. Sweetland started up the quad then. He drove around Vatcher’s Meadow, moving slow. Looking and pretending not to look.

  He’d almost reached the rise ahead of the north-end light when the engine began falling off, gurgling along ten feet or so and spinning out before kicking in another few seconds. Sweetland turned the machine off and took his pack from the carryall. Walked over the rise, down to the keeper’s house. He went beyond it to the cliffs above the Fever Rocks for the first time since the night he’d witnessed the gathering out there, turning a circle to take in the headlands. Felt the first drops of rain strike his face. He pulled on his slicker and started along the path toward the Priddles’ cabin. Winter a mess in the trees, the snowpack melting underneath. He went through to his thigh in the rotten snow and spent ten minutes working his leg free, using the butt of the .22 to shovel, wrenching his foot back to the surface. Lay there catching his breath while the rain pocked his jacket. “Break a fucken hip,” he said aloud. “Where will you be then.”

  The dog was light enough to trot along on the surface of the snowpack, and Sweetland strapped into his snowshoes, trudged a mile past the cabin turnoff, setting his snares haphazardly as he went. Wasting his time on a fool’s errand and angrier with every miserable step he took. So poisoned he felt ready to shoot the dog himself if he found the bastard thing alive.

  He walked the length of the island from the Fever Rocks to the south-end light in the rain. Ate his lunch as he walked so as not to waste daylight. His pants and boots soaked through. He made his way along the lip of the Mackerel Cliffs, thinking the dog might have come foraging through the detritus of last year’s breeding season. Broken eggshells and the occasional puffin’s bill scattered like sand dollars in the bare moss nearest the cliff edge, a tinker’s wing snagged in a bit of gorse.

  Late afternoon and the light already dimming when he saw it lying twenty yards ahead, black and red against a patch of snow. Stopped where he was, turned toward the cliffs. “Now, Mr. Fox,” he said. The ocean roiling a thousand miles below him.

  When he was ready, he walked over to the dog. Impossible to say what had gotten into it, though it looked like the creature had been worked over by a parade of scavengers. It lay on its back, the head torqued sharply up and to one side, its milk-white teeth bared. The eye picked from the one socket he could see. The stomach was open and the cavity stripped clean. Sweetland looked beyond it a little ways, saw scattered tufts of its black fur flickering like down in the wind and wet. He shucked out of his pack and knelt beside the creature. Tried to push the lips of its cold muzzle back down around the teeth.

  It was too much of a mess to carry uncovered and he hadn’t thought to bring something to wrap it up. He took off his slicker and laid it on the ground, set the dead animal on the coat and used the arms to tie the bundle tight. Started back for the cove in the cold, steady downpour with what was left of the dog tucked under his arm. The wind rising and driving across the top of the island, blowing so hard over the exposed ground he had to walk at an angle to stay upright, leaning hard to port into the gale.

  He stopped shivering halfway to the King’s Seat, which he guessed was a bad sign. Most of the feeling in his legs was gone and he had trouble keeping his feet on the path down into the cove, using the stock of the .22 like a cane. He let himself into the kitchen and stood in the middle of the room, dripping rainwater on the wood floor. Realized in the quiet of the house that he was bawling helplessly and likely had been for some time. His shoulders hitching on the ragged sobs.

  He changed out of his soaked clothes, peeling the material away like layers of skin. His head was pulsing and he could feel the first glimmer of a fever stoking its furnace somewhere in the body’s basement. He wanted to lie down for five minutes but knew he wouldn’t have it in him to get up. He lit the storm lamp, put on the heaviest coat in the porch, and carried the yellow slicker out to the shed for a shovel. The wind had dropped with the sun, but there was no let-up in the rain. Sweetland walked his burde
n up to the new cemetery and set it down in the lee of Jesse’s headstone, placing the storm lamp beside it. Then he pushed the head of the spade into the grass over the boy’s grave.

  A foot below the surface the earth was still frozen solid, the shovel ringing against the flinty ground as he swung with all his weight. He carved out a shallow bowl and laid the animal there in its slicker shroud. It wasn’t deep enough by half but Sweetland was too exhausted to dig further into the frost. He placed the shovel over the open hole and walked back down to the shed for a salt beef bucket, headed on to the landwash in the gathering darkness. He filled the bucket with beach stones, carried them back up the path. He stopped every ten or twelve steps to set the weight down, moving to the opposite side of the bucket to change arms. Hefted the rocks, shuffled another ten steps along. Looking up to the glow of the kerosene lamp where he’d left it in the graveyard, working his way back to that tiny beacon.

  He knelt beside the new grave, laid the rocks carefully on top of the dog’s body, to spare it any more scavenging. He shovelled the wet earth over the stones, stepping the mound flat with his foot. He sang most of an old hymn under his breath then, humming in the spots where the words escaped him, The night is dark and I am far from home, hmmm hmm hm hm. He turned away when he was done and shuffled toward the house, dragging the head of the spade in his wake.

  He forgot the lamp where it sat near the headstone and it threw shadows across the boy’s name until the small hours of the morning when it dimmed and bowed and flickered and finally went out in the rain.

  CLOUDS OF DOCTORS APPEARED at his bedside after each new surgery, talking back and forth in what sounded to him like Latin or some other dead language. A single nurse among the nine or ten young men. She stood beside a bearded, bespectacled chain-smoker to hold his ashtray and his files. The doctor’s accent like the Nazis Sweetland had heard in war movies at the Park Theatre or the Odeon. The doctor set his cigarette in the ashtray before he lifted the sheets and folded them down around Sweetland’s knees to display the ruined flesh in the patient’s lap.

  Traumatic degloving lesion of the penile and scrotal tissue, he announced to the assembled group. The skin presenting avulsion was fixed to the penis through a pedicle formed by a flap in the coronal sulcus, and the skin at the scrotal base was preserved. We assumed the skin’s viability due to the pedicle with what appeared to be good vascularization. The left testis was covered with the remaining scrotal skin, the right testis was buried in the inguinal region until grafting could be conducted.

  Sweetland all the time watching the nurse, the ashtray in the palm of her hand like a waitress’s drink tray. Her head turned to one side while the sheet was lowered, out of respect for Sweetland’s modesty. The bearded doctor took a pen from his breast pocket to point out a particular feature of the slash and burn in Sweetland’s lap and all the young men leaned in closer to see it.

  We left a small area at the dorsum penis uncovered—here—as we opted to wait for healing by second intention. It all appears to be progressing satisfactorily. We expect recovery of normal sexual function within three to six months.

  Sweetland looked away from the nurse, staring up at the acoustic ceiling tiles.

  The extensive damage to the testes and the vas deferens, however, make recovery of fertility unlikely. Now—

  Where is it you belongs to? Sweetland interrupted.

  Sweetland had never spoken a word to the man or to any of the doctors in his entourage. They might have thought he was deaf and dumb, for all he knew. The doctor leaned away from the bed and glanced across at the nurse. She offered the ashtray and the doctor took up the cigarette. He said, I beg your pardon?

  You’re not from around here, Sweetland said. Where do you belong?

  Austria, the doctor said. I am from Austria.

  I don’t know it, Sweetland said.

  Near Germany.

  Sweetland nodded. I knows Germany.

  The doctor motioned at the sheets and the nurse set the ashtray and files down to cover Sweetland up to his chest.

  Sweetland cleared his throat. Does the nurse need to be here?

  The nurse?

  I wanted to ask after something, he said.

  I’ll just be outside, the nurse said, and she held the ashtray out long enough for the doctor to stub the butt of his cigarette. The doctor folded his hands behind his back when she was gone and rose up an inch on his toes. Now then, he said.

  What you said just now, Sweetland said. And he glanced toward his waist, pointing with his eyes.

  Yes.

  I don’t know what any of that means.

  Well, the doctor said. All indications are, you will be perfectly capable of having sexual intercourse. Once you have healed, of course. We don’t recommend it at the moment.

  He turned to the young men, to allow them a moment to acknowledge the humour.

  We attempted a surgical reconstruction that would allow you to produce and ejaculate sperm in a normal manner, he said. But we have not been as successful as we would have hoped.

  Meaning what exactly?

  Are you a father, Mr …?

  Sweetland, he said.

  Mr. Sweetland. Do you have children?

  He shook his head. I was thinking, he said, maybe someday.

  I’m afraid, the doctor said, this will not be possible. He looked steadily at Sweetland.

  How long before I can batter the hell out of here?

  There is one more surgery for the face and neck.

  No more surgeries, he said.

  Mr. Sweetland.

  I’m fine the way I am. I feels fine.

  The doctor rose up on his toes a second time. He turned to the assembly and said he would meet them outside. He patted his pockets, looking for his cigarettes as he waited for the last of them to file out.

  This final surgery I speak of, he said.

  No more surgeries.

  It is not necessary, the doctor said. Strictly speaking. It is largely for cosmetic purposes. To deal with the scarring and discolouration. It will help make the injury less apparent. Your face, he said and he gestured toward it. Of course, it’s up to you, he said.

  How long before I can leave?

  If everything goes well, if there are no secondary infections or other complications, I would say four to six weeks.

  A month, then, Sweetland said.

  A month, the doctor said. He opened the cigarette pack, offered it toward the bed. Sweetland took one, leaning forward as the doctor struck a match. You are anxious to get home to someone, he said. Someone is waiting for you?

  Sweetland shook his head. Not really, he said, no. He blew smoke up at the ceiling. There’s no one waiting, he said.

  7

  HE WOKE TO A GALE OF WIND and sleet and high winds that brought waves overtop of the breakwater. The house creaking on its foundation, the windowpanes bowing like sails in each gust. The tide turning and on the rise. He felt oddly glassy and disoriented and thought to keep the dog inside out of the weather until he remembered it dead and buried up in the new cemetery.

  He had a hard time travelling down to the beach, leaning into the teeth of the gale. His hat torn off his head and sailing away. Salt stinging his eyes as wind whipped the spume up the hill. The tarp over the dory was long gone and the boat swung wildly at the end of its painter, tipping on its side and over onto its belly as the sea muscled in. Sweetland waded up to his knees as the waves receded, trying to get a handle on the line to drag the boat to safety. The suck of water sieving rocks and sand from beneath his boots. Another wave flipped the dory a full rotation in the air and took Sweetland off his feet altogether, both hands on the rope to keep from being hauled body and bones into the wilderness of the cove. He scrambled up, hauling all he was worth to bring the boat close. Dragging it as far off the landwash as the length of rope allowed, the sea rising high enough around him to set it afloat. He worked to untie the painter, his hands almost too numb to manage. He leaned back on the
bow when it was free, nudging the boat inches at a time, until he wedged it into a sheltered nook above the beach where he guessed it might be safe. Loaded its belly with beach rocks and rusted lengths of iron scrap and anything else he thought might weigh the dory enough to hold it against the wind.

  He stripped out of his soaking clothes when he reached the kitchen, wrapped himself in a quilt. From the kitchen table he watched the breakwater disappear in surge after surge of white, thinking each time the entire thing might disappear. He trawled through the radio dial looking for a forecast, to see how bad things might get, but couldn’t make out more than a few words over the storm’s static. Moderate winds, he thought he heard. Flurries. Minus one.

  The massive stones placed at the mouth of the cove were shifting as he watched, the breakwater settling and coming apart like ice dissolving in a bowl of water. The ocean pouring raw into the cove for the first time in a generation, the waves lipping up over the government wharf, pounding onto the beach. The salt of the water’s spray blowing against his windows, riming the glass. If his stage hadn’t been burned, he knew, the storm would have taken it down and floated every stick out into the Atlantic.

  The feeling slowly came back to his hands as he sat there, a burning sensation in the palms that was almost pleasurable. He looked down to see the red scars of the rope where he’d grabbed and held on while the ocean tried to take him under.

  By suppertime he was burning up with a fever, too sick to move much beyond the kitchen. He was on his feet long enough to light a kindling fire to boil the kettle and to drag himself up the stairs to the bathroom so he could sit. Shivering so violently he had trouble staying on the seat. Downstairs he made himself a mug of pap, crumbling stale crackers into sweet tea, and he crawled back into the daybed before he could finish even that. The weather in a rage outside.