Sweetland (26 page)

He opened the flaps and took out a handful of paperbacks. He didn’t know what he was looking for. Something not too thick, he was thinking, something without the tiny print that made every page a torture to get through. Something that might have a bit of dirt in it—he wouldn’t put it past Queenie to enjoy a bit of dirt in her reading material. He shucked through the box, romances all from what he could tell by the flowery cover art, by the breathless titles. The cheap paper was effective in the bathroom, but he didn’t think he could stand to read the goddamn stuff. He went through the second box and was all but ready to abandon the notion when he happened on the book she was reading at her window the last time he spoke to her there. There was a bookmark just past the halfway point, which was as far as Queenie made it, he guessed. And there was something in the notion of finishing it for her that appealed to him. The way Sandra had soldiered through Queenie’s final pack of cigarettes.

“Well, maid,” he said aloud. He flipped through the first pages, turned it over in his hands, hefted it like he was trying to guess the weight. It was no small thing for Sweetland to sit at the kitchen table in the last light of the afternoon, to open the cover and iron it flat with the broadside of his hand. On the title page there was an encouraging note from Sandra to her mother that Sweetland turned past without reading. He took a breath before he started, as though he was about to jump face and eyes into a cold pool of water.

Half an hour later he was ready to throw the bloody thing in the stove. Three afternoons in a row he sat in the day’s last light with the book, feeling like a man sentenced to dragging beach stones up the face of the Mackerel Cliffs. He looked at the cover each time he quit reading, flipped it to inspect the back. A quote from a Toronto paper about “authentic Newfoundland.” Whoever wrote the book didn’t know his arse from a dory, Sweetland figured, and had never caught or cleaned a fish in his life. “Jesus fuck,” he whispered.

Queenie would never have gotten all the way through the thing, he
guessed, even if she’d lived. He considered adding it to the paperbacks sitting beside the toilet upstairs, flushing it one soiled page at a time. But the book seemed to require another kind of send-off altogether. He took it with him on his walk the evening of the third day, out past the ruins of his stage and on to the incinerator at the head of the cove. He walked beyond the wooden rail that circled the bell and clambered a little ways down toward the water and he threw the book into the ocean. The pages made a small fluttering explosion as he let it go, like a partridge flushed out of underbrush. It was too dark to see it land, but he heard it strike the water’s surface.

He didn’t feel anything like the satisfaction he expected and thought maybe he should have done something more practical with it after all. He started back toward the dark ring of houses and was startled by the moon rising over the hills, the pocked face a livid red and nearly full, as clear as an object set under a magnifying glass. Unnaturally close on the horizon and spooky as hell. Sweetland kept his eyes on it as he made his way along the path and was almost among the houses before he saw the light in Queenie Coffin’s window. He stopped still, watching the glow of that dull yellow square. He blinked quickly three or four times. He scanned along the Church Side hills, out as far as the point where he saw nothing but the habitual black. And when he turned his eyes back to Queenie’s house the window was dark.

T
HEY DIDN
’
T SPEAK
the rest of the way to the south-end light after Sweetland buttoned his fly. Effie sat with the soiled handkerchief in her fist, not knowing where else to put it. They stopped and tied up at the light, walking on in the darkness to the Mackerel Cliffs. Sweetland reached to hold the back of Effie’s dress as they came near the sheer drop and they stood looking out at the ocean. Close to one another, but not touching.

Effie talked for awhile about going home to stay with her parents over the summer, about the worst of her students at the school and how she liked boarding at old Mrs. Priddle’s house. Sweetland quiet in the dark. He’d brought Effie out to the light to tell her about his plans to go to Toronto with Duke Fewer in the fall, but he was shy to bring it up after what happened between them in the cart and decided he would do it another time.

Sweetland was almost twenty-six years old and he had nothing against the notion of marriage on principle. It was something he’d always expected to come to, though it never seemed more concrete or more urgent to him than that. And nothing in particular had happened between him and Effie to suggest she was anxious to move things along, before she brought it up after their dinner one Sunday afternoon. He’d just finished describing the buffalo sinking into the black water at Tilt
Cove, the bubbles streaming from those great nostrils. It might have been his third or fourth time telling the story for all he knew, he was new to the art of entertaining female company. She’d been looking into her lap and he thought she’d stopped listening some time ago. She turned her head toward the clatter his mother and sister were making at the dishes in the pantry and stood to go help, touching one finger to his shoulder on her way past.

I might marry you, she told him, if you asked me.

He watched Effie disappear into the pantry then, his ears ringing like she’d struck him with a hammer. Perhaps I will, he said, though he couldn’t tell if she caught the words or not. He glanced across at Uncle Clar to see if he’d overheard the exchange, but the old man was sound asleep. The cat on his chest looking in Sweetland’s direction, giving him that solemn, witchy stare, seeming to say,
Now, that’s done
. Months passed and neither of them had breathed the word
marriage
since, though it followed them around like a dog on a leash.

The lighthouse flashed its beam out beyond them in a slow, steady strobe that gave depth and definition to the height they stood at, the breadth of the ocean below. The wind rolling up the cliff face and gusting above the ledge to push at their shoulders. Effie mentioned getting cold standing out in the open, but she didn’t move when he suggested going back to the cart. She knew they’d come all this way for a reason and he could see she wasn’t about to leave without hearing what it was. She was quiet after he told her about going up to Toronto to look for work. She stared out across the water and he couldn’t tell what she made of the notion.

I’ll be back before Christmas, I expect, he said.

That’s all right, she said.

She turned toward the light and he followed her back to the cart. They rode all the way to Vatcher’s Meadow in silence. The memory of the trip out made Sweetland hard again, though he knew enough about women not to expect her hand on the inside of his leg. He glanced
across now and then but she was staring straight ahead, her arms folded over her stomach.

Sweetland tied the horse to the fence at the meadow and Effie was out of her seat before he could offer a hand to help. I’ll walk you down, he said.

You got to sluice out that cart before you brings it back to Bob-Sam, she said.

I’ll look after it, he said.

They went by the King’s Seat and down into the cove, walking on as far as the church and up to old Mrs. Priddle’s house without passing another soul out in the night. Before they reached the front door Effie stopped and turned to him. Too dark to tell her features. He reached for her hand but she was still holding the soiled handkerchief and they both pulled away when he touched it. He turned halfways to go, but hesitated there.

You won’t be too lonely? he said.

I can look out to myself.

He left her then, walking up on the mash to drive the horse and cart out to Bob-Sam Lavallee at the lighthouse. Trying to interpret her response all the way there and home again.

3

T
HROUGH THE END OF OCTOBER
and the first days of November, Sweetland spent his afternoons gathering brush and deadfall on the mash above the cove. He carted a rubbish pile of lumber that was stacked and going to rot beside Loveless’s barn these twenty years or more. He lugged up three worn-out tractor tires left behind by Glad Vatcher, using the quad to haul them one at a time, despite the fact he was nearly through his gasoline. Wanting to make something spectacular of the bonfire for the boy.

He rifled through the closets of the cove’s empty houses to find a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of pants he could stuff with hay. Sweetland was a youngster the last time anyone bothered burning an effigy on Bonfire Night. It was decades since anyone even called it Guy Fawkes’ Night. He’d never known who Guy Fawkes was before Jesse looked him up on the internet and made his report, spelling the man’s last name and offering a thumbnail sketch of his claim to infamy. A radical from another time, a man involved in a plot to blow up the Parliament Buildings in London.

Sweetland had already forgotten what Guy Fawkes’s grievance was and how the plot came undone. There was nothing in the story to make him wish ill on the man’s memory. It was just a bit of mindless sport when he was a youngster, watching the vague shape of a person lifted
over the conflagration. Like seeing the aftermath of suicide bombings on the news, or watching people ruin themselves in biking mishaps on YouTube. A vicarious thrill, to be horrified and somehow comforted at the one time. The crowd gathered close to the fire and shouting as the flames caught hold in the clothes.

He made the head out of a brin bag, also stuffed with straw, and he drew on the eyes and mouth with the last dribs of the yellow oil paint. Hung the figure on a hook in the shed, stepped back to consider it. That’s what’s left of you, Mr. Fawkes, he thought, for all your scheming. A few rags stuffed with straw.

It was pouring rain and cold on the morning of the fifth and it was only the thought of disappointing Jesse that kept him from skipping the event altogether. The weather cleared some in the late afternoon and he walked up the path at dusk with a yogourt container of kerosene and the straw effigy under his arm. His pockets jangling with half a dozen bottles of homebrew. Four potatoes wrapped in tinfoil stuffed among the beers. His breath white in the chill, the air smelling like snow.

The mound of scrap wood and brush was Sweetland’s height, with the tractor tires thrown on top. He made a torch with a rag on a stick of driftwood and soaked the rag in kerosene. Then he walked around the mound, pushing the flame into the wet underbrush until the fire caught in half a dozen spots and took up through the centre. By the time the early dark had fallen, the mash was alight with the blaze, so hot Sweetland had to stand twenty feet clear, and still he could feel his face burning. The bonfire made the blackness beyond its circle seem complete, as if the houses below and the ocean beyond it had disappeared into the void.

He waited until the fire had burned back a little and tied the effigy to a pole he’d cut for the purpose, holding it over the height of flame and the dirty rags of smoke from the tires. It was a full minute before the pants ignited and the figure seemed almost to explode then. Sweetland shouting into the darkness above the bonfire as the clothes shrivelled and fell away in burning strips.

He dropped the pole onto the mound and crouched in close to the fire, shielding his face with one hand as he placed the potatoes into the coals nearest the edge. He stepped back to where he’d left the homebrew and stood there in the heat. Raised a bottle to the flames. “Now, Mr. Fawkes,” he said.

There were half a dozen fires this size along the mash when he was a youngster. People gathered in clusters, or wandering back and forth from one to another. The men half-loaded on whiskey or shine, women trying to keep track of the youngest children. The night crackling with voices. Every year someone’s outhouse was dragged up the path and thrown onto a burning pyre, the dark erupting with flankers. The crowd cheering. He and Duke would take a run at them after the initial inferno had burned back, coming down in the coals on the far side of the largest fires, sending up a shower of sparks, occasionally setting their pant cuffs alight.

The tradition had all but died out on the island before Jesse arrived. The last few years the boy had helped Sweetland collect scrap wood and spruce branches near the Mackerel Cliffs. They weren’t allowed to set the fire anywhere near Vatcher’s Meadow or to burn tires or any other “hazardous waste” according to the letter from Rita Verge. Municipal regulations, she said they were. It wasn’t much above a glorified campfire they put together, but Jesse counted down the days to Bonfire Night the same as he did for Christmases and birthdays. He scorched marshmallows and wieners on alder sticks while Sweetland described the fires they had one time, the days and weeks they spent building the pyres, the mash lit up like a carnival midway till the small hours of the night. Promising the boy next year they’d haul his old outhouse up the path and burn it. Or steal a few tires or stuff an old shirt with straw. Next year, he offered every November. Next year.

Sweetland fished the potatoes out of the coals and let them cool a few minutes at his feet. Opened the tinfoil gingerly, using his pocketknife to break the skin, steam snaking into the cold air. The roasted flesh dry and sweet and he ate three of the plain spuds, one after the other. He’d
finished four bottles of the homebrew and he stepped away from the heat to piss into the blackness. The silence roaring out there beyond the fire’s chatter and he listened awhile after he was done, feeling the chill creep into his clothes. And something moved in the pitch, a scuffle near his feet that raised the hair at the back of his neck. The something slipped past him and Sweetland staggered to one side, turning in time to see the creature disappear around the bonfire. “Jesus fuck,” he said.

He crouched down and waited a few moments. Not quite able to credit what he’d seen. “Smut,” he said. He pursed his lips and kissed at the air.

The little dog appeared at the opposite side of the fire, peering at Sweetland warily. He called again but the animal lay down where it was, the head held high. He stood up straight and the dog got to its feet, backing away.