Sweetland (18 page)

Sweetland staring into the gloom as he pissed, nearly dark inside. The kitchen empty of furniture, the wallpaper stained and peeling. The floor littered with what looked to Sweetland to be buffalo patties, the animals using the building as a shelter to get out of the weather. He leaned to look through into the living room and his water went dry.

They had nine youngsters, Duke was saying, before Eunice had the hysterectomy into St. John’s.

Duke, Sweetland whispered. He was tucking himself in but never glanced away, afraid the creature would disappear if he did. He reached
for the rifle where he’d leaned it against the house, nosed the barrel into the frame to let it rest on the sill. The animal shifted on its feet, the hooves against the wood floor drumming in the hollow space.

What in the Jesus was that? Duke asked just as Sweetland fired. The rifle shot echoed in the empty room like a cannon, knocking the last pane of glass from the window. Duke was shouting but Sweetland couldn’t hear anything over the ringing in his ears.

They tried to haul the buffalo out of the house before they dressed it, but there was no way to get the dead animal through the doorway. Duke brought up a storm lamp from the boat and they butchered the buffalo where it lay, the stink mushrooming in the enclosed space. They carried the quarters down to the water, the thigh bones like a stick over their shoulders, the massive parcel of meat lying pelt side down against their backs. Duke wanted to leave the rest of the carcass where it was but Sweetland wouldn’t have it.

Those wildlife officers is out here two or three times a season, he said. I don’t want anyone coming around Sweetland looking for poachers.

They dragged the head and spine across the threshold and down to the shoreline, throwing it into a fathom of water. They gathered up the shin bones and the mess of the internal organs in the bloody cloak of the pelt and tossed that into the cove as well, but for the heart and liver that they wrapped in a square of cloth and tucked away in Duke’s pack. Sluiced the blood and offal out the door of the house with buckets of water. They crouched in the landwash then to clean the blood off their hands and forearms in the bitter cold of the ocean.

Dark now the once, Duke said. Maybe we should overnight here.

Sweetland shook his head. Darker the better, he said, given what we’re carting.

I hope it don’t taste like bear meat.

Sweetland glanced across at the man beside him. When have you ever tasted bear?

I haven’t, he said. Just don’t think I’d like it.

Duke stood and dried his arms on the wet sweater under his jacket, the burnished wedding ring glinting in the day’s last light.

Maybe I’ll come with you, Sweetland said then. Up to the mainland.

Duke watched him a few seconds, still drying his arms. I thought you hated fucken old Toronto?

Buck fifty an hour, like you says.

Sweetland couldn’t say what possessed him to make that decision, any more than he could explain why he’d called the government man to take the package when he did. There was no saying how things might have turned out if he’d stayed at home instead of going to Toronto. But it all went sideways there on Little Sweetland, the buffalo’s blood still under his nails, his hands numb with the ocean’s cold.

A life was no goddamn thing in the end, he thought. Bits and pieces of make-believe cobbled together to look halfways human, like some stick-and-rag doll meant to scare crows out of the garden. No goddamn thing at all.

T
HREE MONTHS AFTER
the Sri Lankans passed through Chance Cove, the Reverend announced he was leaving Sweetland for another parish. Telling the congregation during a Sunday morning service.

This will come as a shock to you, he said, and I apologize for that.

He and his wife were shipping out within the month, moving to a church closer to her parents, who were aged and ailing and had no one else to watch out to them. Half the women were in tears to hear it. Digging crumpled tissues from dress sleeves to dab at their rheumy eyes. Sweetland glancing at Ruthie where she sat with Pilgrim, one row ahead of him. Stone-faced. As though the news was no surprise to her.

Ruthie’s pregnancy was just beginning to show by then and it was an endless source of amusement in the cove. It had taken the blind man that long to find his way into his wife’s drawers, people said. Pilgrim had finally figured out which lock his key was meant for. Men stood him drinks at the Fisherman’s Hall. Thought you was going to be firing blanks your whole life, they said. Must have been one of them dark fellas off the lifeboat, they said, Ruthie must have took special care of them. Those reporters was out here, they said, she charmed the pants off them.

It was too much for Sweetland to sit through. Go fuck yourselves, he told the tormentors.

Never mind now, Pilgrim said.

Christ, Sweetland said. You just sits there and takes it, that’s the worst of it. Makes me sick.

Pilgrim picked aimlessly at the label on his bottle. You’re not going to stop them having their fun, he said.

I want to talk to you today, the Reverend said from the pulpit, about our recent unexpected visitors to Sweetland. He read a few verses from the Psalms. He wanted the congregation to imagine themselves in the position of those unfortunates in the lifeboat, he said. To be set adrift without warning or explanation, with nothing to say if they would ever be found. Or if anyone was even looking for them. Orphaned on an ocean that seems endless.

Sweetland had to credit the man for gall, standing up there in his robes with a straight face. In front of his own wife and Ruthie.

We could see it as a metaphor, the Reverend said, for our own place in the universe, for the questions we ask about our own lives.

Ruthie got up as he spoke and she crabbed her way past the others in her pew, whispering apologies, walking for the entrance with a hand to her mouth. People watching her go, nodding or shaking their heads. The morning sickness, they were all thinking. How it was about time the couple had a child in the house. How they had all stopped expecting it to happen and how God works in mysterious ways.

The Reverend droning on about hope and faith, like he hadn’t noticed her leaving.

7

A
WEEK AFTER HE MADE THE CALL
to the government man, Sweetland received a slender stack of forms in the mail. Clara came up to witness his signature, to fold the papers into the self-addressed envelope provided.

“That’s it, then,” she said. “You sending them on the ferry this week?”

“You take them,” he told her. “Be sure they gets out.”

She ironed the envelope flat on the table with the palm of her hand. “I guess I owe you a thank-you for this,” she said.

He jerked his head back, the motion barely perceptible but enough to stop her following through. He said, “You going to tell the boy now?”

Clara had asked Sweetland not to say anything to Jesse until all the papers were signed. Thinking he might back out and not wanting to risk the upheaval for nothing. “Not just yet,” she said. “Want to pick the right moment. He’s going to hate my guts for awhile, I imagine,” she said, and she tried to laugh at the notion.

“I should be the one to break the news,” Sweetland said. “He’ll likely blame me for it all anyways.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I told him I wouldn’t going anywhere. He was counting on me sticking it out.”

Clara shook her head. “I’ll tell him,” she said.

She pushed a clutch of loose papers across the table, information on relocation and retraining and various government assistance programs. “Have you decided?” she said. “Where you’re going to shift to?”

“Haven’t give it much thought.”

Clara stared down at her hands. “You know you’d be welcome to come into St. John’s with us,” she said.

Sweetland made a noise in his throat to say he’d as likely live on the moon as in St. John’s. He shifted in his chair to turn halfways away from her.

Clara tapped the papers with an index finger. “You should hang onto these.”

“All right,” he said, though he didn’t so much as glance at them.

“Jesse will come around,” she said.

The first week of August there was a town meeting at the Fisherman’s Hall, the government man in on the ferry. Sweetland waited at the kitchen window, watching as people made their way over, Ned Priddle, Glad and Alice Vatcher, Rita Verge, Duke Fewer. He saw Clara heading out with Pilgrim on her elbow, Jesse straggling behind, looking despondent. Maybe the news had finally trickled down to the boy, he thought.

Sweetland gave the crowd a few minutes to get settled into the Fisherman’s Hall before he gathered up his chainsaw and gas can and walked down to the government wharf. Diesel barking and lunging at the end of her chain as he went by. The ferry was still docked at the wharf, adding an extra hour and a half to its stop in order to take the government man back to the mainland after the meeting. Sweetland waved up at the crewmen on deck as he walked past. He had his own boat out on the collar and was bringing it in hand over hand when Loveless spoke to him. “Going for a bit a wood?” he said.

Sweetland looked behind to where Loveless was sitting on a lobster pot in the shade of the ATM. He had his little dog on its length of string, sitting between his feet.

“You’re not going up to the meeting?”

“Don’t like meetings,” Loveless said. “Sitting still that long.”

Sweetland smiled at the objection. “Sure all you does all day long is sit, idn’t it?”

“On my own schedule,” Loveless said. “I can get up to take a leak whenever the urge strikes.”

“Fair enough.”

“You going for a bit a wood?” he asked again.

“Thought I might.”

“Late to start across. You’ll have to spend the night.”

“Might do.”

Loveless chewed his pipe back and forth awhile. “You’ll just have to leave all the wood behind come this time next year, won’t you?”

“Kiss my arse,” Sweetland said, and he stepped down into the boat, started up the engine. He hated to see Loveless making sense. It made him think the world was coming apart at the seams altogether.

He had no heart for the work and didn’t even bother going all the way across to the mainland, stopping in at Little Sweetland again to wander around the abandoned cove, feeling idle and solitary and anxious. He went by the cabins and shaded his eyes to look in the windows. Metal bunks and Formica tables, an incongruous flat-screen television in both. Gas generators stored beside top-of-the-line wood stoves. Someone working out in Fort McMurray or at the nickel mine in Labrador, he’d heard. Money to burn and two weeks a year to get away from it all. Others said it was eccentrics from the Canadian mainland or the States, people who wouldn’t show their faces years at a time. Just enjoyed being able to say they owned an exotic bit of property in a corner of the world no one else had heard of. Sweetland had half a mind to set a match to the buildings, out of spite.

He walked up onto the barrens, toward the headlands where he and
Duke had spotted the bison. The path across the swale had all but disappeared and he had to force a trail through the tuckamore. He stood at the edge of the cliffs, the wind up there rifling through his clothes. He could make out Sweetland in the distance, the long hump of it on the horizon. Even in the full light of day, he could see the intermittent flash of the light on Burnt Head, warning away traffic.

Late afternoon by the time he came back down to the wharf and he started for home, travelling slow. There was a low bank of fog sitting on the horizon, the north end of Sweetland already buried, Burnt Head swallowed in the mist. He took the long way around, past the south-end light on the Mackerel Cliffs where the day was still bright and cloudless. He steamed in close to the island, the rocks to starboard so sheer they looked like something CGId in a Hollywood studio. The sky above the boat confettied with wheeling seabirds, turrs and murrs and puffins and tinkers, their endless chatter echoing off the cliff face. The acrid stink of shit like a single fiddle note that held and held and held in the air. Every ledge up there occupied by birds who nested all summer on the bare rock.

A bald eagle drifted out of the lowering sun, making a lazy sweep above the headlands, and Sweetland watched the entire colony leave their ledges in a rush as the predatory shadow passed over. It was like a waterfall coming down the rock face, thousands of birds in a sudden raucous descent that seemed almost enough to swamp the boat as they clattered past. The cliffs above him suddenly bare.

He came around at the government wharf and docked in the space vacated by the ferry. Glanced up the hill as he tied on and hauled the boat back out on the collar. The hills that loomed over the cove muffled in the crawling sheets of fog.

He’d expected to find the place quiet, everyone inside at their supper, but there was an eerie busyness about the harbour. People standing
in small clusters outside their houses, men gassing up ATVs. Everyone strangely focused, like passengers preparing for an evacuation order.

Loveless came down the path from the Fisherman’s Hall in a slovenly run, trying desperately to keep his feet. “He’ve gone missing,” Loveless shouted. “We can’t find him.”

“Who?” Sweetland said. “The little dog?”

“No,” Loveless said, and then he looked around in a panic, noticing for the first time that the dog wasn’t with him.

“Loveless, who the hell is it gone missing?”

“Jesse,” he said. “He’ve run off somewhere. There’s no one can find him.”

Sweetland went straight to Pilgrim’s house with Loveless on his heels. Pilgrim sitting in a rocker at the window. “We told Jesse you was signed up for the package,” he said.

“At the meeting?”

“We thought it might be better in a crowd. Everyone going together, you know. Something he could be part of.”

“That was Clara’s idea, was it?”

“The Reverend’s.”

“Well fuck,” Sweetland said. “Why’d you let him leave the hall in that state?”

“He wanted to hear it from yourself you was signed on. He was only going over to your place.”