Sweetland (12 page)

He went through to the porch, took his coat and hat and walked down to Loveless’s, let himself into the barn. Loveless at the far end, sitting on one of the concrete blocks they’d used as a fulcrum, rubbing at a foreleg of the doomed cow with a towel. Sweetland crossed over to them, put a hand to the cow’s neck, rubbed between her ears awhile. Her breath intermittent and shallow.

“She don’t want to be up,” Loveless said. He was chewing angrily at the unlit pipe as he sat there.

“Don’t look like she do.”

“Sara wouldn’t be happy to see it.”

Sweetland straightened, put his hands in his pockets. Turned to see the little dog back in its place along the wall. “Hello, Smut,” he said.

Loveless twisted around on his concrete seat. “I had that one barred in the porch.”

“Well, that’s a regular Houdini you got there.” Sweetland bent at the waist and held a hand toward the dog, kissing the air to encourage it over, but it only stared.

“He won’t come near, you don’t have a bit of something to give him,” Loveless said.

“What do you use?”

“Steak mostly.”

“Is that why he’s so interested in your cow, I wonder?”

Loveless raised himself awkwardly off his seat and Sweetland had to reach a hand to keep him upright. “I don’t know how Sara managed all of this,” he said.

“She was a tough woman.”

“I can’t do nothing here without her.”

“Go lie down for a bit, I’ll take a spell.”

Loveless started away, but turned back to Sweetland before he reached the far end of the barn. He took the pipe from his mouth and stared at it. He said, “I’m going to take the package, Mose.”

Sweetland looked him up and down. “You’re tired,” he said. “Go lie down a while.”

“I got my mind made up,” Loveless said. “I got nothing here without Sara.”

“Go on,” Sweetland repeated quietly, and he watched the shabby figure push out the barn door. Then he dragged the concrete block to the cow’s hind leg and went at it with the towel, trying to massage blood back into the flesh. After fifteen minutes he moved to the opposite leg. He leaned his head against the cow’s flank a moment, a quiver still
discernible in the muscle. “Well now, Sara,” he said aloud, missing the woman suddenly.

Sara Loveless. As squat and solid as her cow, they used to say. And almost as simple, ha ha. It was a local sport, making fun of Sara. She had no letters and spoke in truncated phrases reduced to bare fundamentals. Every person and creature and thing was a she.
She need oil change. She got bad head. She raining now. She lazy as a cut cat
. Sara was fond of beer and brandy and went to bed half-drunk most nights. Cursed like a sailor. But laziness was the only form of stupidity Sweetland couldn’t abide and whatever else might be said about Sara, she was not a lazy woman. Kept the animals and the garden, cut and cured her winter’s hay up on the mash. Tramping around in her rubber boots and an old gansey sweater that swayed almost to her knees. She wrecked a shoulder clearing boulders from her bit of pasture, years ago. Sweetland had seen her punch at it savagely with the opposite fist when it acted up, which was the only bit of doctoring she allowed.

She had never married and seemed completely unfit for it. But she was built for the island, unlike her brother, who sailed in the wake of Sara’s industry his entire adult life. How she’d suffered living in that house with Loveless all these years, Sweetland didn’t know.

He finished a round of the cow’s legs and then stood at her head, rubbing between her ears again, before he started for the door. He thought of the dog, unsure if it was still sitting there against the wall and it was too dark inside now to say. “You coming, Smut?” he said to the place he’d last seen the pup, but there was no sound or motion there and he carried on outside.

He opened Loveless’s door on his way along. “Your shift,” he shouted into the house and he walked down through the cove, his head buzzing with the first jangly notes of a hangover. He went out as far as the incinerator, stood looking over the open ocean, letting the wind scour away at him.

The ground fell steeply toward the water on the far side of the incinerator and the slope was thick with junk that couldn’t be burned, strollers and playpens, paint cans, barrels, a freezer, a bathtub, old hockey skates, a Star Choice satellite dish, four or five computer monitors that even Sweetland recognized as archaic. It was the world’s job, it seemed, to render every made thing obsolete.

He turned to see the cove glimmer in the last light, houses and windows glowing faintly orange and red, the colours fading and winking out as he watched. There was no stopping it, he knew. Days when the weather was roaring outside his mother would say, Stall as long as you like, sooner or later a body’s got to make a run for the outhouse. The whole place was going under, and almost everyone it mattered to was already in the ground.

Definitely. He was definitely feeling sorry for himself.

He passed his stagehead on the way in the arm and barely gave it a glance in the growing dusk, walking on a few steps before the strange detail struck him. He turned back to look at the door, picked out the shadowy U of the horseshoe he’d put there for luck thirty years ago. And something moving below it, a smudge in the gloom, a little bag, he thought, hanging from a strap.

He had to work up the nerve to step toward it. Stopped when he was near enough to make out the rabbit’s severed head. The creature’s eyes wide and staring, a four-inch nail driven through the silk of one ear to hold it in place. The head swaying soundlessly in the wind.

H
E STOOD OUTSIDE
after the Reverend disappeared around the back of the church, deciding whether or not to go in after Ruthie. His head floundering, trying to piece together what he’d seen in some way other than how it seemed. There were a dozen scenarios that were completely innocuous and only one that he knew in his gut to be true. He started back up toward Pilgrim’s house, thinking he’d stop at Ned Priddle’s place to ask Effie to look in on the sick man. He came around the front of the church just as his sister scuttled out the main doors and they startled away from one another.

Jesus, Moses, she said. Her arms wrapped a cardigan tight about herself. You scared the life out of me, she said.

You left Wince alone up there with those two fellows.

They was sound asleep, the both of them.

Well one of them was puking his guts out when I left.

She skipped ahead then, half running on the path. Why did you leave him? she asked.

He told me to come get you.

But you was right there in the house.

They were having a racket to avoid talking about other things, he knew. And that suited Sweetland well enough.

He followed Ruthie inside but stayed in the kitchen as she went up
the stairs. Listened to the muffle of voices through the ceiling, the coughing and dry heaves of the sick man. Pilgrim called from the landing, asking him to put the kettle over the heat for hot water, to hand up rags from under the sink, the mop and bucket from the back porch. Sweetland went about collecting the materials he’d been asked for, but couldn’t even find it in himself to answer.

Sweetland was best man and father-giver at his sister’s wedding, handing Ruthie away when the minister asked, and he passed Pilgrim the ring for Ruthie’s finger. Pilgrim was besotted with the girl and had been for years, everyone could see that. He spent part of every day in their company, was a fixture at the Sweetland table. Talk-sang a few ballads to try and impress Ruthie as the women cleared up the dishes. And would never have laid a finger on her but for Sweetland insisting she teach him to dance.

His mother is in the ground for long ago, he said when she objected, how else is the poor frigger going to learn?

Sweetland appointed himself chaperone while Ruthie hummed a tune and wrestled Pilgrim around the tiny kitchen space. Pilgrim topped up on shine to overcome his mortal shyness before his lessons, though it did little to help his dancing.

You’re about as graceful as a cow in a dory, she told him.

Got no head for it, he said.

It’s only a bit of math, she insisted, and she counted the steps aloud, one two three, one two three.

Ruthie thought of him as a kind of hapless uncle, made fun of his awful voice, snuck up behind him to cover his sightless eyes with her hands and shout
Guess who?
Blind to how the older man felt before he proposed to her. She refused him twice, and it was only her mother’s intervention that swung things in Pilgrim’s favour.

Ruthie’s been leading that poor soul on, she said to Sweetland.

He started in his chair, glanced across at her. Sure, she was only showing him how to dance.

His mother was knitting in a rocker by the stove and her hands paused at their work. She looked directly at her son. You know how Pilgrim feels about Ruthie, she said. Dancing is leading enough for a man in his condition.

Sweetland leaned forward on his knees, his eyes on the floor. Pilgrim have got his heart set, that’s plain.

You needs to have a word, Moses.

It made sense to him that Ruthie marry the man, to formalize the relationship already cemented between Pilgrim and themselves. The dancing lessons were just a way of setting them in each other’s path. He expected the rest to follow as a matter of course, if there was more to come of it. He’d never considered he might be called on to shift things further along that road himself.

She dotes on you, his mother said. She’ll mind what you tells her.

I don’t know, he said. That’s more your place than mine.

His mother dropped her knitting in her lap, threw her head to one side in frustration. It was you started this whole business, she insisted.

He stared at the tiny woman in her horn-rimmed glasses, surprised every time by the flash of ice in her. All right then, he said.

Ruthie thought the sun shone out of Sweetland’s arse in those days. She had always looked to his opinion, over even her mother’s. They had never spoken a cross word, she had never refused him a request. Pilgrim was practically family already, he told her, and he had to watch out for them both anyway. It was only a bit of math, he said.

The sick man upstairs was still urging helplessly. There seemed no end of foulness to spew from his guts. Sweetland walked up the stairs with the materials Pilgrim had asked for, placed them in his arms at the landing. He could hear Ruthie’s voice speaking low in the room where the refugees were lying. Everything all right? he asked.

Ruthie’s here, Pilgrim said. She’ll look out to him.

I’ll go on, then, he said. Sweetland couldn’t look at him, even though the man was blind.

Wince, Ruth called, I needs those rags.

We’re all right here, Pilgrim said to Sweetland and he headed steadily along the hallway, turning sharply into the sickroom like a man with eyes to see.

5

O
N THE FIRST OF JULY
, Hayward Coffin came downstairs to find Queenie dead in her chair by the window, a half-smoked cigarette guttered in her hand. Her book face down on her lap.

The funeral was delayed a day to give Queenie’s children time to make the trip back from the mainland. Most were travelling from the oil sands in Alberta, her oldest boy coming from Oregon where he ran a deck and fencing company. All of them forced to wait on the ferry schedule after their flights. The coffin had to be shipped over on the ferry as well, from a funeral home in Fortune, and meantime they waked Queenie on a bare table in the parlour. Clara had washed and laid Queenie out in a purple dress she’d found in her wardrobe, but couldn’t dig up a pair of shoes to put on her feet.

“She haven’t wore shoes since 1977,” Hayward told her. “Put on her slippers,” he said, “she might as well be comfortable.”

The coffin was heavy as a dory and too wide to be carried through the door where Queenie used to stand smoking and talking to passersby. They had to take out the window above her chair to bring it into the house, and again to lift the dead woman out a day later, half a dozen men reaching their hands to catch her as she crossed into the open air for the first time in forty-odd years. Being careful not to trample the straggle of flowers that had come up from the seed she’d tossed outside.

The Reverend opened up the old church and aired it out the day before the funeral. Clara and Reet Verge and Queenie’s daughter swept out the vestibule and polished the dark wooden pews and set out vases of fresh-cut wildflowers. The weather hadn’t improved much through the month of June and was still wet and cold into the first week of July. Everyone wearing coats over their mourning clothes. They set Queenie on a trailer behind an ATV and the funeral train followed her down to the church. Sweetland bringing up the rear with Duke and Pilgrim and Loveless.

“Queenie Coffin,” Loveless said, “in her coffin.”

“She told me she wouldn’t going to be around the fall,” Sweetland said.

“She been saying that this twenty year,” Duke said. “She was bound to be right about it sooner or later.”

“A sin to take her out of it,” Pilgrim whispered. He had his face lifted high, uncertain about his footing on the dirt path, his left hand inside Sweetland’s elbow. “Should have buried the poor woman under the kitchen floor.”

“She’s dead,” Duke said. “It don’t matter a goddamn to her where she goes now.”

At the church Sweetland guided Pilgrim into the pew beside Clara and Jesse, but the boy swung out a hand to hold the blind man off.

“Jesse,” Clara whispered, trying to bring his arm down, but he wouldn’t relent.

“What’s wrong now?” Sweetland asked him.

“That’s Hollis’ spot,” he said, his eyes toward the front of the church.

“I can make room,” Pilgrim said, and he sat two feet from Jesse to leave the space free.

“Well Christ,” Sweetland sighed. He sat beside Pilgrim and took out a mouldy hymn book, flipping aimlessly through the pages. “I don’t know which one of you is worse.”

“It’s not like we don’t have the room to spare,” Pilgrim said.

The sparse congregation murdered a handful of Queenie’s favourite hymns without accompaniment, the Reverend playing the first note on a soggy-sounding electric organ. They were all out of the habit and subdued by the occasion. Jesse’s was the only clear voice in the church. He had perfect pitch, according to the Reverend, and he showed an unlikely capacity for recalling lyrics. He sometimes forced Sweetland to sit through twenty or thirty impeccably rendered verses of the morose ballads he’d learned from Pilgrim. But he had no patience for the musical limitations of others.