Sweetland (7 page)

“Clara got him doing his homework up to the house,” Pilgrim said.

Jesse used to spend an hour at the barbershop every day after school, but Clara seemed to be making an effort to wean him off his island habits.
Or maybe it was meant to punish Sweetland. He’d walked down expecting to see the boy and was almost sorry to have come now. He wrestled out of his wet jacket, shook it twice before hanging it on the coat rack. He walked across to stand by the heat of the stove, Pilgrim’s head turning to follow his footsteps. There was a kettle on the floor by the woodbox and Sweetland filled it in the corner sink.

A figure flicked past the window and the door pushed open, the weather scurrying in just ahead of the Reverend. He turned quickly and slammed the door, leaning against it like he was trying to bar a rabid animal outside. “Mercy,” he said.

“Is that you, Reverend?” Pilgrim asked.

“That’s some day out there now,” the Reverend said.

Duke climbed out of the chair in sections, swiped at the worn leather with a towel. “Have a seat,” he said. “Moses just got the kettle on.”

“I’ll sit by the board.”

“That’s what you won’t,” Duke said. “Seat of honour.”

“The first shall be last,” the Reverend said. “The last shall be first. You know how that goes.” And he sat in the wooden chair across the board from Pilgrim.

“I thought you was retired of all that business,” Sweetland said.

The Reverend laughed. “A man of the cloth,” he said. “Practising or no.”

He was dressed in black slacks, a black suit coat, and white shirt buttoned to the throat under his jacket. He sat with his hands folded in his lap, clean-shaven and his white hair oiled back from his forehead. He looked like someone keeping a body company at a wake. The man’s business like a stain and no way on God’s earth to scour it out now it had set.

“You’ll have a cup?” Duke asked.

“I wouldn’t say no.”

The Reverend was Welsh by birth and had moved to Canada as a student. He was assigned a Newfoundland parish in his early twenties
and got married there, he and his wife taking on churches in half a dozen Newfoundland communities over the next forty-five years. He’d come to Sweetland in the seventies and extended his appointment two or three times over, though his wife agitated against it more publicly as time passed. The Reverend was heartbroken to leave when he did, everyone remarked on it.

Sweetland said, “What have I got to work with there?”

The Reverend glanced down at the chess board. He never participated in a game, but he liked to watch its progress, offering advice and suggestions.

“Everyone but Moses have washed their hands of it,” Duke said. “They’re after me to start a new one up.”

“I’m still thinking on it,” Sweetland said.

“I got half a mind to put you on a clock.”

“I could say a prayer for you,” the Reverend offered.

“Save it for No Chance Cove,” Duke said.

Sweetland was about to say something in response but thought better of it, for the company.

The church on the point was closed up when the Reverend moved back to Sweetland seven years ago, widowed and retired from preaching. He bought an empty house out behind the church and spent most of his time reading and meandering along the island paths. No one knew what to make of his return or quite how to take him. In his first months back, he made a habit of stopping by Sweetland’s shed on weekday mornings. He’d sit in one of the ripped vinyl kitchen chairs against the wall and waste hours of Sweetland’s time, listening to the open-line show on the portable radio above the workbench, passing a comment on one issue or other.

He expected the man was working up the nerve to ask after Ruthie, how she was at the end, and if she’d said anything at all that ought to be passed on to the Reverend. It made Sweetland feel panicked to see the man stick his head in the door, though his vocation and bearing made it impossible to send him on his way. Sweetland took to putting a fire in
the wood stove, opening the vents and stoking it until the shed was stifling. The Reverend would strip down to his dress shirt, but couldn’t bring himself to undo even the top button, and he’d sit there with beads of sweat popping on his forehead.

You don’t mind the heat.

Likes it warm, Sweetland told him. They says it’s good for the joints. You want a cup of tea?

Lord, no.

The Reverend was forced to abandon the fiery pit after half an hour and eventually he gave up the visits altogether. Sweetland lost a lot of good wood in those months, but he considered it well worth the price.

That first fall, the Reverend began volunteering at the school, where he took on Jesse as a pet project, developing a remedial program to help the boy do his sums and to curtail his outbursts and his spells of mindless rocking and chanting. It was the Reverend who’d found the doctor the boy was seeing in St. John’s and made the arrangements for his appointments. He hired Clara Pilgrim to come to his house two mornings a week to sweep the floor and wash his three changes of identical clothes. He could be prevailed upon to open the old church to officiate at the occasional wedding or christening or funeral but refused to consider regular Sunday services. To all appearances he’d settled in to live out the rest of his days as a semi-private citizen on the island, before the talk of resettlement.

The Reverend turned to Sweetland. “Has Jesse said anything to you about his time with the doctor?”

“Not so much, no.”

Sweetland thought he caught the briefest moment of skepticism or annoyance passing over the clergyman’s face. But it disappeared so quickly he might have imagined it.

“They’re saying the more structure we can give him, the better,” the Reverend said. “I was thinking of having him come to the house for sessions during the summer. Three times a week or so.”

“That’ll sound like more school to Jesse.”

“That’s what Clara thinks,” he said. He raised his free hand and smoothed the silver hair down around his ears, like he was massaging a question free in there. He said, “Do you think you might be able to talk to him about it?”

Sweetland smiled uneasily. “I’d rather stay clear of that business, if it’s all the same to you.”

“He thinks a lot of your opinion.”

“More than his mother does, for damn sure.”

“Between us now,” the Reverend said, “it was Clara’s idea to ask for your help with this.”

“Was it her idea to have you do the asking?”

“That was my idea,” Pilgrim said. His face turned away from the room, sheepish.

“I volunteered,” the Reverend said, “to bring it up with you.”

Sweetland shifted where he stood. Exhausted suddenly and wanting to be left alone. It was all he could do to hold off telling them to go fuck themselves, the works of them.

“It would mean a lot to Clara,” the Reverend said. “And to me.”

“I’ll have to sit with it a bit,” Sweetland said, and the Reverend raised his mug to say that was as much as he could ask.

The men bantered back and forth awhile longer then about the Priddle brothers arriving on the ferry that morning, about the hockey playoffs and the weather, talking in the polite, stilted fashion of near-strangers. When the Reverend finished his tea, he went on his way.

“I always feels like that cocksucker is spying on us,” Duke said after the door pulled to.

“He’s just lonely,” Pilgrim said.

“If he didn’t want to be lonely he should have gone to St. John’s somewhere. Moved into a home for retired clergy.”

“There’s no such place, is there?”

“Jesus Christ, Mose,” Duke said. “Would you slap some sense into that one.”

“Can’t be done. God knows I’ve tried.”

Pilgrim stood up and set his mug on the seat behind him. “I can get this kind of treatment at home,” he said. He stopped at the door. “You going to talk to Jesse like he asked?”

“Go on the fuck home out of it,” Sweetland said.

Duke stood at the window to watch Pilgrim make his blind way up the hill in the driving rain, waiting until he’d seen him in through his door. Turned back to the room. “He’ve got an unnatural interest in that youngster,” he said.

“Who?” Sweetland asked, though he’d heard Duke make the accusation a hundred times over.

“The Reverend.”

“Jesus, Duke.”

“It’s not normal, is all I’m saying. Trying to get him alone down to the house all summer.”

“I imagine he thinks he’s doing God’s work.”

Duke shook his head. “What’s-his-name Bin Laden thought he was doing that, for chrissakes.”

It was too miserable to go out in the evening and Sweetland tried to pass the time with a hand of poker. He poured himself a glass of rye but didn’t touch it, barely looked at the cards as they flashed up and he lost his stake within an hour. He sat turning his drink in circles on the table. The old house creaked in each gust, the wind throwing buckets of rain against the windows. One of the last hockey games of the season grinding on in the living room, the noise of the crowd rising and falling like a weather of its own. He half expected the Priddle boys to show up, barrelling into the house shit-faced and demanding a drink, going on about the cost of housing in Fort Mac, the money they make working overtime, the skin you could get in the bars up there.

The Priddles were Irish twins, the second born ten months after
the first, and they had never done a solitary thing in their lives. They swam and fished and set fires, they drank and poached moose and gambled together. They co-owned a boat and took over their father’s crab licence a few seasons until they jacked up to work on the mainland. Disappearing for six or eight months during construction season in Nova Scotia or Ontario, spending the winter months at home, collecting their pogey and making a general nuisance of themselves. They were arrested in Burin for possession with intent to traffic, pleading down to simple possession and a four-month sentence at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary in St. John’s. In their forties now, and neither had married or shown the slightest inclination to settle down. They were hard men, the two of them, and the other’s company seemed to push each to be harder and more reckless than he might have been on his own.

Ned Priddle never quite recovered after Effie died giving birth to Keith. Ned didn’t say as much, but he acted as if he blamed the infant boys equally for the loss of his wife and resented their subsequent claims on him. They were left to their own devices as they grew older, more so after their father remarried. They spent most of their time on the water or in the woods. They built a ten-by-ten shed in the valley on the far side of Sweetland, the logs chinked with moss, a single tiny window salvaged from an old wheelhouse, and they more or less lived out there, going feral like cats in an abandoned barn. Over the years the boys had built and rebuilt the cabin in stages, dragging building materials over by quad. It was where they went to get away from it all, they said, when life in Chance Cove got too hectic for their liking.

The Priddles were too wild for most people to take, growing up. Sweetland was one of the few who would have them over the threshold and he saw more of them than their own father through their teens. He lived alone and there was nothing he owned that couldn’t be pasted together if it was broken. And he felt he was making something up to Effie by watching out to the boys. Though it wasn’t in him to settle on or name exactly what that was.

They’d show up after school and sit, incongruously, to episodes of
The Care Bears, The Smurfs
. They came over Sunday nights for the television wrestling and he’d give them a glass of homebrew to drink. They had christened themselves with wrestling names—Tidal Wave and Rip Tide—the two brothers beating hell out of each other on the floor during commercials. Sweetland called them Pancake and Over Easy, the Golden Priddles, a reference they didn’t get but were insulted by nonetheless. Keith was the bigger of the two and Sweetland had to wade into the fray to save Barry from the worst of it on occasion. They’d trade insults from opposite chairs awhile then, crybaby and cocksucker being the favourites.

The brothers would bring him a brace of rabbit now and then, helped dig his potatoes in the fall. They’d go across with him after wood and they were sluts for the work, they cut and sawed and hauled with the same gleeful abandon he saw in them as they inflicted pile-drivers and sleeper holds on each other in his living room. He’d pay them for the help with a dozen beer and a couple of skin mags, and they considered themselves well compensated.

Six years now they’d been working a see-saw contract in Fort McMurray, three or four weeks on the job, two weeks off to fly home and drink and smoke and snort all the money they’d made. It was a way of life that had done nothing to make them less trouble. They settled on cocaine as their recreational drug of choice, and the manic high added a nasty flavour to their recklessness. Barry lost the tip of his index finger the afternoon they’d taken turns putting out a lit match with a .22, one brother at a time holding the little flame at arm’s length, thirty paces off. Barry so high he felt no real pain. Wrapped the finger in a handkerchief and took another shot at his brother’s match.

They showed up on Sweetland less often as time went on, preferring somewhere with easier access to drugs and women. But everyone was on edge when they came home. It was like setting a couple of wild dogs loose in a hotel room. The place wasn’t half big enough or particularly
suited to the life they wanted to live in it, and there was always some damage in their wake. Sweetland tried to keep his distance, though it was impossible to avoid them altogether.

He raised the glass of rye to his mouth but didn’t taste it. The weather was too miserable for even the Priddles to venture out, he guessed. When the last of the day’s light was well and truly gone he passed into the living room to flick off the television and went out through the hall in the dark.

Sweetland woke before light, turned heavily in his bed. Drifted off another hour or so. It was nearly eight by the time he got up, walking out to the bathroom in his jockeys and undershirt. He ran the tub while he shaved the uninjured side of his face, where the whisker still grew. Soaked in the scalding water then, as long as he could stand the idleness. He took his “good clothes” from the wardrobe in the bedroom, a thirty-year-old pair of dress pants and a white button-down shirt he’d bought to wear to his mother’s funeral. Ran a comb through the oily weave of his hair before he went downstairs.