Sweetland (23 page)

The portrait of Clar beside the front door used to hang in the parlour before he died. Who’s that good-looking young fellow in that picture? Sweetland’s mother would ask the doddering old man.

That’s me, Uncle Clar said.

Go on, she told him. You was never that handsome.

That’s
me
, he insisted, indignant.

They’d never really gotten along, his mother and Uncle Clar. They bickered as a matter of course and cursed one another on occasion, though it was so ritualized it seemed nearly affectionate. Blood of a bitch of a woman, Uncle Clar would say in the heat of their arguments and he would turn to Sweetland, looking for confirmation.

Sweetland lived in the house alone after his mother passed, and again after he moved back from the keeper’s house when the light was automated. He slept in what had been her bedroom, the same floral-patterned wallpaper, the same grey battleship linoleum on the floor. A double bed with a wooden trunk at the foot, a highboy. The door caught on the bed frame before it could swing all the way open and he had to turn inside the room and close the door in order to lie down. It was a delicate dance step he’d watched his mother perform a thousand times before it became his own, and he managed it blind now, without thinking. Stripped out of his clothes, hung them on the wall hooks beside the bed. Crawled under the covers and fell immediately asleep.

He didn’t dream or stir through the night. He could tell it was late when he woke by the way the light fell in the room, and he hung his legs over the side of the bed, pushed himself upright. There were a few habitual moments of vertigo and he waited until they passed, then walked down the hall in his socks and undershirt to the bathroom.

He caught a glimpse of himself as he passed the mirror and started. Turned to the glass, his hands braced against the sink. He looked like the psycho in one of the slasher flicks the Priddle boys rented from Vatcher’s store in their teens. A grizzle of white beard on the uninjured side of his face. His hair shaved close to the scalp. Sweetland raised a hand from the sink, swiped it across the quarter inch of fierce white bristle. His head like something you’d use to scrub a toilet. “Jesus in the Garden,” he whispered.

He’d stopped into the barbershop the day before Duke left for good in July, took a seat in the leather chair. He threw a ten-dollar bill up on the counter. Let’s see what you got, he’d said.

What are you talking about now, Duke asked.

Last chance at a paying customer.

Duke held his arm out to show off the extravagant tremor he’d been living with for years. You don’t want this hand at your head with scissors, Mose.

Use the clippers.

For Christ’s sake.

Is this a barbershop or not?

I got everything packed away.

Sweetland got down from the chair to poke through the cupboard below the counter. It was all stacked there neatly, where it had been since the shop opened. Three nylon capes and a handful of scissors and combs. Two straight razors, a mug holding a pristine shaving brush. The clipper still in its box. Sweetland slid the machine free and plugged
it in. He shook out one of the nylon capes and sat back in the chair, securing the Velcro around his neck.

I wants it nice and tight at the back and sides, he said.

Sweetland’s face seemed to surface out of a filmy mist as he watched the hair fall away in clumps. The lank earlobes looking almost scrotal, the still-black eyebrows thick as gorse. The skin grafts on the right side of his face, even after all these years, shockingly rabid.

You coming down to the wharf tomorrow? Duke asked.

Going in to pick a few berries first thing.

Awful early for blueberries.

Been a good summer, Sweetland said. Half of them’s already ripe. They’ll go to rot on the bush someone don’t pick them soon.

Duke stepped back when he was done and the two men stared into the mirror.

You’re a natural, Sweetland told him.

Fuck you, Duke said quietly.

After he ate breakfast, Sweetland took his canvas backpack down to Duke’s shop. A CLOSED sign in the tiny window but the door was unlocked. Duke had left behind the barber’s chair and the mirror and the chessboard on its low table. His photos and newspaper clippings taped to the wall, the space above the chessboard almost completely covered.

You don’t want to take any of these with you? Sweetland had asked him.

Duke shook his head. That’s all is holding up that wall, he said, is Scotch tape.

There was a section of articles about the Sri Lankan boat people in their red lifeboat, most from the St. John’s paper, though there were five or six from the mainland. Black-and-white pictures of the cove. One or two insets of himself with captions.
Local fisherman, Moses Swietlund
.
Newfoundland fisherman rescues Sri Lankan boat people
. There was an article up there about him receiving the Coast Guard medal out at the keeper’s house, a year after the event. A couple of Polaroids of him with Bob-Sam Lavallee and two officers in their white tunics, of him wearing his medal beside Pilgrim and Ruthie and the baby.

Clara was almost three months old by then and Sweetland doted on her, feeding the girl her bottle and changing her shitty diapers and walking the floor, humming little songs to quiet her when she fussed. Holding her by the ankles and blowing farts on her belly to make her laugh. He could see how much Clara meant to Ruthie, that the wonder of the child was almost enough to redeem the road she’d travelled to have her. And Clara was Sweetland’s way back into Ruthie’s life, a place they could safely set their wounded affection for one another. They never mentioned the night at the church with the dead boy under his altar cloth. It was a sunker awash at low tide, and they rowed a wide berth around it.

Sweetland glanced down at Duke’s chessboard. The black and white pieces in their neat opposing rows, but for the one white pawn that Duke had placed ahead two spaces before he left the room for the last time. His habitual opening. For a moment Sweetland considered taking the board back to the house with him. But he was miles away yet from playing a chess match against himself. He reached down, lifted a black pawn up two spaces to meet its opposite.

“Your move,” he said.

He went to the cupboard below the mirror, taking the straight razors and the cup and three bars of shaving soap. He unscrewed the razor strop on the side of the barber’s chair, and he set all the materials into his pack.

From there he went down to the Fisherman’s Hall to pick through Reet Verge’s museum. He had to force a window at the back of the building to get inside. Mostly junk she’d collected, old stovetop irons and one of Uncle Clar’s handmade highboys, a white nightdress that belonged to Sara Loveless’s grandmother. Net-knitting needles, cod jiggers, a killick.
An antique phonograph with a horn-of-plenty amplifier that belonged to old Mr. Vatcher, a slender stack of 78s beside it. Something by Don Messer. Two survivors of an eight-record set of
The Messiah
. Sweetland wound the mechanism and released the stop, the table creaking into motion. He placed the needle on the spinning record, the sound of static giving way to “Turkey in the Straw.” Pilgrim’s standby on his toy fiddle. The machine pumped out an astonishing level of noise and Sweetland lifted the needle halfway through. Stood listening to the quiet, like someone afraid he’d woken a sleeper in another room. Let the turntable slow to a stop on its own.

He came away from the museum with a storm lamp, with the scythe and sharpening stone he’d donated out of his shed, and three kerosene lamps to light the kitchen and his bedroom. But there was nothing else of any use to him.

He scoured the cove looking for a boat. He went through sheds and fishing rooms, amazed to think every punt and skiff and motorboat had gone with the last residents. He lay awake half a night, trying to think how he might get on the water, when Loveless’s dory came to mind.

In the morning he walked to Loveless’s barn and hauled the derelict craft into the open air. It was made of rough board and weighed about as much as a small car. The bastard child of a night of tormenting they’d rained on Loveless—Sweetland and Duke and Pilgrim and the Priddles. Useless, they called him. Kerosene Head. Didn’t know his ass from a hammer. Too fucken lazy to shiver.

Loveless was suffering through one of his intermittent infatuations at the time. They were all one-sided and hopeless, though none more so than this latest fixation. He got his hair trimmed every Monday morning in Reet’s kitchen. Invited himself by to watch
Land and Sea
or reruns of
The Love Boat
in the evenings. He made a goddamn nuisance of himself, keeping tabs on her whereabouts every minute of the day, wanting to
know who she spoke with on the phone. Followed her around like a lamb after its mother.

It was a joke in the cove, Loveless in love, and abusing the man was their favourite drunken entertainment. Loverless, they called him. Couldn’t nail a woman with her legs tied open. Reet Verge wouldn’t let a man like him lick her shoes, they said.

The accusations stung Loveless into an uncharacteristic spell of industry. He squirrelled himself away in the barn for months, hauling lumber from Vatcher’s store, boxes of nails and paint and more besides. He refused to say what he was up to back there until he asked Sweetland to bring his quad and trailer to the barn.

Well Christ, Sweetland said when he saw it. Did Sara help you with this?

Not a nail, Loveless said defiantly.

Well Christ, Sweetland said again.

It was meant to be a tribute to Reet, he realized, a declaration to the world, a kind of courting. It looked more or less the way a boat ought to look, which Sweetland counted a major accomplishment. But he doubted the thing would float. They muscled it onto the trailer and brought it down to the harbour where Sweetland backed it out on the slipway. Loveless sitting up on the thwart to row her maiden voyage across the cove.

How does she feel? Sweetland asked as the dory drifted free.

Finest kind, Loveless shouted back, an edge of panic in his voice.

Even from the shoreline Sweetland could see that every seam was seeping water. What did you caulk her with? he asked.

Loveless was trying to turn her head back to the slipway before she went under altogether. Paint, he shouted.

They managed to make it seaworthy enough that youngsters could beat around the harbour in her, but it was never fit for anything more than that. The Love Boat, Sweetland called it. It hadn’t been near water in a decade when he dragged it outside. Daylight showing through half
the seams. He walked slowly around the vessel, like a man stalking an injured creature, looking for the quickest way to kill it.

He tied the dory onto his ATV trailer and rode it to the government dock where he backed it down the slipway until it was sunk to the gunwales, seawater pouring in through the cracks. He left it there on the trailer for two days and nights to let the old boards plim up. On the third morning he turned it face down on the wharf and set about raking out the seams. He found a ball of caulking cotton tucked away with Uncle Clar’s old tools in the shed, the strands on the outside as dry and hard as wood, but he pried away until he reached a layer still waxy enough to be pliable. He chinked it in with a maul and chisel, then puttied the seams tight. He had half a tin of yellow oil paint he’d used on the outhouse before it was relegated to wood storage, and he slapped a layer on the dory’s upturned hull.

He gave her a full forty-eight hours to dry before he turned her right side up. Pushed the boat back down the slipway and tied her to the dock. There was an old set of oars tucked in the shed rafters and he took those down and sanded and varnished them. He carved thole-pins by the light of the oil lamp and fashioned a bailer with the top half of a Javex bottle and then he went to bed, thinking the dory was probably at the bottom of the cove already. But she was riding high and more or less dry in the morning. He bailed out the bit of seepage before he untied her and set the oars. He hauled around the little cove two or three times, the dory moving like a cow in the water, low and heavy and awkward, and he was winded with the effort when he tied on twenty minutes later. But he had a boat to knock around in.

For two weeks in the middle of September he left the house in the dark each morning, walking to the north-end light to spare what was left of the two containers of gasoline. He spent the day out there harvesting potatoes and carrots and turnip, cabbage and onions, parsnip, storing
the vegetables in the cool beside the cistern. Planning to ship the whole load to the cove on the quad and trailer when it was ready. The Coast Guard had sent a crew out earlier in the summer to sheet up the windows and doors of the house with plywood. Even the low door that led to the cistern was barred shut and marked with a DANGER—KEEP OUT sticker. Eight-inch screws placed every ten inches, Sweetland cursing each one as he torqued them free.

He got caught out there one afternoon in a pelting storm of wind and rain. He had wet gear in his pack but the rain fell in sudden steady waves and he was soaked to the skin before he so much as lifted his face. The keeper’s house was barred shut, the door to the old light tower padlocked, and he passed a wet night in the dank crawl space while the weather howled. He laid his slicker on the ground and huddled under one of the burlap sacks he’d brought for the potatoes, shivering awake every few minutes with the chill. Making a list of materials he planned to stash at the keeper’s house if he managed to live through the night—blankets, matches, a dry change of clothes. A tent, a barbecue. Homebrew, a side of beef. Duke’s barbershop. A duffle bag of sunshine.