Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  Keith was still standing in the doorway, all the blood gone from his face. Sweetland nodded across to him in a way he hoped was reassuring.

  “Jesus, Mose,” Keith said. “You looks like shit.”

  Keith came back up from the boat where he’d gone to radio the Coast Guard on the VHF. He’d requested assistance with a medical emergency and was shunted from a call centre in Halifax to a contract outfit in Italy. Keith explaining the circumstances to a doctor speaking broken English, a severely injured man on an abandoned island off the south coast of Newfoundland, he said. Where? the doctor asked. Where is this?

  The doctor’s grasp of English seemed marginal at best and Keith’s accent completely dismantled the language for him. He needed every sentence repeated three or four times and the two men shouted back and forth at one another for fifteen minutes before the situation finally began to come clear. What do you want me to do? the doctor demanded. I am in Rome.

  “What is it, the Coast Guard got everything shut down for the Easter holidays?” Barry asked.

  “It’s got nothing to do with the holidays,” Keith said. “That’s saving taxpayers’ money, that is.”

  “It’s Easter?” Sweetland said.

  The brothers stared at him and then looked at one another. They talked about loading Sweetland into the boat, driving the four or five hours to Burgeo. But it was already getting on to dark with a westerly wind rising and they decided to wait the night.

  They set Sweetland up against a raft of pillows on the daybed, put a fire in the stove, lit lamps against the evening coming on. They argued the merits of the various pills Keith produced from an inside pocket, ecstasy and Percocet and half a dozen others in a single plastic bottle. Settled on OxyContin and Sweetland swallowed them down.

  Barry sat beside him on the daybed, spooning soup into his mouth. It was Keith who made the cross for him while Sweetland was hiding out in the valley, Barry said. Dug the hole and mixed the cement in a beef bucket and set the marker in place. Hand-lettered the name and dates. Wouldn’t even let Barry lend a hand.

  “You’re a miserable prick, you know that?” Keith said. “Making us think you was drowned.” He was sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of rye, watching Sweetland with a skeptical eye. As if he was still unsure Sweetland was the man he claimed to be.

  “He spent days out jigging for you before the last ferry,” Barry said.

  “Who, Keith?” He was adrift on the effects of the pills he’d taken and was feeling no pain, though he was finding it hard to follow the bread crumbs of the conversation.

  “Yes, fucken Keith. Out before daylight, going to all the shoal grounds, jigging until after dark. Hoping to strike you as you floated past. He’d of got some fright now, he brought you up with a hook through your eyeball.”

  “That cunt there wouldn’t even get in the boat with me,” Keith said.

  “I knew you wouldn’t down there, that’s why. Never believed you was drowned, first nor last. Loveless said you had your pack and some kind of duffle bag aboard when you left the cove that morning and there was nothing on the boat when they found it.”

  “Fucken Loveless,” Sweetland said and he shook his head.

  “They had the hardest time getting Loveless to leave,” Barry said. “That little dog of his took off the night before the ferry come. He had half the crew up on the mash calling for the goddamn thing. Delayed the ferry six hours. There was a constable out from the RCMP, he had to threaten to arrest him to get Loveless aboard.”

  “You didn’t see the dog, did you?” Keith asked.

  Sweetland shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  The brothers were home in Newfoundland after a six-week stint in Fort Mac. They’d purchased the new rig with their government relocation money, Barry told him, and decided to take it for a spin, look over the cove, maybe spend a night or two at the cabin in the valley.

  “I burnt the ladder to the loft out there,” Sweetland said.

  “Out where?”

  “The cabin,” he said. “I went along for a visit the winter. You never had enough wood put up to last a night. Had to burn something.”

  “Fair enough,” Barry said.

  “And I took the bit of gas you had out there for the generator. And drunk the vodka. And you had some dope tucked away that I got into.”

  Barry turned to look at his brother. “This fucker belongs in Her Majesty’s Penitentiary,” he said.

  “Anything else?” Keith called.

  “No,” Sweetland said, and then he corrected himself. “Yes. That map you had on the wall out there.”

  “What map?”

  “The Come Home Year thing,” Sweetland said. “It’s around here somewhere.” He waved vaguely and then he said, “I burnt the keeper’s house to the ground a few days ago.”

  The brothers exchanged a look and he could see them silently dismiss the claim as the drugs talking. “It’s a fucken wonder you’re alive at all,” Barry said. He offered another spoonful of soup and Sweetland raised a hand to hold it off.

  “Come on, old man,” Barry said. “You’re nothing but skin and grief.”

  He shook his head. “I’m all right,” he said. He had no appetite for anything but company and he spent a while asking after the people he’d known his years in the cove, where they’d wound up and how they were doing off the island. Occasionally bringing up names of people who had died decades before Barry and Keith were born. Dozing at times as the brothers offered what they knew, so the news came to him in fragments, as though it was washing up on the beach like flotsam from a wreck.

  “We should let you sleep,” Barry said finally. “We’ll bunk upstairs.”

  Sweetland shook his head. “Don’t leave me down here alone.”

  “I’ll stay with him,” Keith said.

  “How’s them pills holding out? You need another hit?”

  “I’m the best kind,” Sweetland said.

  Barry stood up and set the bowl on the counter. Leaned over him with an arm on either side of his shoulders, his face almost close enough to kiss. Sweetland said something to him then, his voice so weak it was inaudible.

  “What is it?”

  He worked his mouth a few seconds. “You crowd is real, is you?” he said.

  Barry put his hand to the old man’s chest. “Real as you are.”

  Sweetland nodded. “The Golden Priddles,” he said.

  “Moses fucken Sweetland,” Barry said. “I swear to Christ.”

  Sweetland flickered out then and didn’t come to himself until the pain needled through the narcotic, pricking him awake. He glanced across to the table where Keith was sitting up with a kerosene lamp.

  “Keith,” he said.

  The younger man looked up, startled. “What were you on when you did this?” Keith asked. He tapped at the tabletop with a knuckle.

  “What is it?”

  “The map from the cabin,” he said. “You must have been stoned out of your mind.”

  “You got any more of them pills on you?” Sweetland said.

  “Yes, b’y.” He came across the room, shaking the contents of the bottle into his palm. Sat beside Sweetland while he picked through the lot. Even in the gloom Sweetland could see the crude letters tattooed on the man’s knuckles, F*E*A*R and H*O*P*E. “These’ll see you through the rest of the night,” Keith said, and he reached to place them on Sweetland’s tongue.

  Sweetland shook his head. “Other hand,” he said.

  Keith looked at him. “What’s that now?”

  “Use the other hand for me.”

  Keith looked down a second, shifted the pills as he was told. And Sweetland opened his mouth.

  “You’re some Jesus sook,” Keith said.

  Sweetland looked up at his face and Keith stared back, unself-conscious in the night’s quiet, in the dim light. Barry’s snoring overhead almost a peaceful sound through the ceiling. Sweetland reached for the hand that he’d requested, and the t
wo men sat like that for what felt to him a long time.

  Keith shook his head. “You got some mess made of yourself, Mose.”

  “If you scalds your arse,” Sweetland said and he smiled weakly. “I got what I was after and then some.” He squeezed the hand he was holding. “I wanted to say thanks,” he said. “For the cross you put up.”

  Keith shrugged. “Owed you that much. After all the beer and skin mags you give us.”

  Sweetland almost asked then about the mutilated rabbits, about the fire that burned his stage, whether the brothers had anything to do with that business. But it seemed too far off. A gauzy, edgeless dream that was bleeding coherence and meaning as he lay there. “I think I’m ready to sleep now,” he said. “You go on upstairs, get some rest.”

  “You sure you’re all right?”

  “Best kind,” Sweetland said. He squeezed Keith’s hand once more and let it loose of his own. And before he knew it, he was gone.

  It was still dark when he woke, feeling rested and ready to start the day. He sat up carefully, lifting his legs to the floor, surprised how little discomfort the movement caused him. Blessed the wonders of the Golden Priddles’ magic pills. Keith had left the kerosene lamp burning on the kitchen table, the light twinned in the windowpane. Even from across the room he could see the soot clouding the glass and he went over to turn back the wick. Noticed the map there, spread across the table’s surface, the paper kinked along the rough creases where it had been folded in his knapsack. Stay Home Year scrawled across the top. Sweetland shook his head at that now, at the long list of fanciful harbours and coves and islands and straits he’d pencilled around the coast. Along the entire length of Newfoundland’s south coast were the words Here Be Monsters with a shaky emoticon happy face drawn beside it. His handwriting, though he couldn’t for the life of him remember setting them there. Stoned out of his mind, like Keith said.

  Sweetland traced his finger down the Avalon Peninsula where he’d crossed out St. John’s and renamed the capital city Loveless Town, then along the southern shore, across Placentia Bay to the boot of the Burin. Keith had drawn in the leg and high-heeled shoe of Italy there, a dot handy about Italy’s knee with Rome written beside it. He smiled over that as he glanced past St. Pierre and Miquelon toward Sweetland. And he stood away from the table then, a hand raised to his mouth.

  He had to work up the nerve to look closer, bringing the lamp down across the map for the light. Where he expected to see Sweetland there was nothing but blue water. And Little Sweetland beside it the same. The names he’d written across the islands were gone. He thought Keith might have erased them, but even the ink outlines the names had been printed over were missing from the map. As if he’d only imagined seeing them there.

  He looked up at the window and his one-eyed reflection stared back at him from that black well. He turned for the door and started along the hall, wanting to wake the Priddles, to make them sit up with him until daylight, but he stopped at the foot of the stairs. Listening for the rattle of Barry snoring or the sound of bedsprings, of the brothers turning in their sleep. But there was only a breathless stillness. And he knew he was alone in the house.

  He went back to the kitchen and set a hand to the stove. The fire was out and the metal was cold, like it had been sitting idle a long time. There was no wind in the flue, no habitual creak or settle in the walls of the house. Sweetland crossed the floor to the table and turned the map in quarters as he considered the absence there. So insignificant it would go unnoticed by anyone not looking for it.

  He folded the map along the creases and set it in the cold firebox of the stove. He struck a match and dropped it in, watched as the paper curled in the heat, the edges charring black and disappearing in the travelling flame. He set the damper back and took the lamp into the porch to find his coat. Caught sight of Uncle Clar as he slipped into the sleeves and Sweetland nodded goodbye to the young face before he blew out the lamp beside the storm door. Stepped into the still air, into the cavernous silence of the cove. He walked along the back of his property and up beyond the new cemetery, away from all he’d ever known or wanted or wished for. At the King’s Seat he turned to look down on the water and there was nothing below but a featureless black, as if the ocean was rising behind him and had already swallowed the cove and everything in it.

  “Now, Mr. Fox,” he said.

  He carried on across Vatcher’s Meadow and over the mash toward the light at Burnt Head, following the cairns along the headlands. He was watching for the outline of figures on the rise above the keeper’s house and saw them moving toward the light, all travelling at the same methodical pace, with the same lack of urgency. Sweetland fell in with them as he crested the rise, the walkers so close he could feel the cold rising off their coats, a scoured smell in the air around them, linseed and raw salt and spruce. They didn’t acknowledge Sweetland or show the slightest concern that he was there. A squat form in rubber boots just ahead of him, a shapeless gansey sweater swaying almost to the woman’s knees. He could have reached a hand and traced the pattern in the wool, she was that close to him.

  His companions looked to be numberless in the dark and strangers every one of them. But he was grateful for their presence just the same. He followed the procession down to the ruins of the keeper’s house and they filed past it without taking any notice, calm and all in silence. He stopped there, not certain he was meant to go on to the cliffs. A boy brushed past him as he hesitated and Sweetland almost called out, thinking he recognized the child by the seashell whorls of a double crown, a rogue lick of hair. But the feeling passed before he made a sound.

  The boy disappeared in the crowd and Sweetland carried on in his wake, past the light tower to the cliffs of the Fever Rocks where he lined along the headland beside the others. A press of silent figures with their faces turned to the open sea. They seemed resigned and expectant standing there, their eyes on the fathomless black of the ocean. Sweetland anonymous among that congregation.

  He felt of a sudden like singing.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  AS ALWAYS, I’m grateful for the company of Martha Kanya-Forstner.

  Thanks to MKF and to Katie Adams for the conversations that helped shape the novel. And to Holly Hogan, Stan Dragland, Martha Webb and Shawn Oakey for commenting at various stages.

  For stories and details that I’ve worked to my own purposes, I’m indebted to Art Crummey, Mazie Crummey, John and Mary Fitzgerald, Paul Dean, Dave Paddon, Helen Crummey, Mark Ferguson, Mrs. Abbie Whiffen (née Ellis), Justin Simms, Beth Follett, Gerry Squires, Sean McCann and Annette Clarke. A number of settings and incidents were suggested by Carl Sharpe’s Memories in the Life of a Twillingate Man, Harold Paddon’s Green Woods and Blue Waters, and David McFarlane’s The Danger Tree.

  Thanks to Holly Hogan for letting me borrow Baccalieu Island, and for wildlife intel; the Family Swan and unrelated staff at Adventure Canada; the communities of Francois, Ramea, and Western Bay.

  Sara Loveless’s cow arrived via Miguel Invierno. Paul Dean quaffed the kerosene. HH delivered the tuxedo dog. Jeff Anderson loaned the oversized coat. The buffalo are compliments of JR Smallwood and a Martin Connelly article in the Spring 2012 issue of The Newfoundland Quarterly. The community of boat engines was lifted (along with countless other details) from Arctic Twilight by Leonard Budgell.

  Thanks to Martha Webb, Anne McDermid et al @ McDermid & Associates. To Julie Barer @ Barer Literary. To Kristin Cochrane, Scott Sellers, Martha Leonard and company @ Doubleday Canada.

  I’m grateful for the Canada Council for the Arts in general. And in particular for a Council grant that came at a crucial point in the writing of this novel.

  Thanks to Arielle, Robin and Ben for bearing with me.

  And to Holly Ann, for everything else.

 

 

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