Sweetland (4 page)

Tennessee Ernie Ford’s voice drifted by to starboard until it was imploring sinners to come home from somewhere off the stern, which meant Sweetland had sailed by the entrance. He came about slowly then, making way for the hidden mouth of the cove, and the island loomed out of the grey suddenly, the alien line of the breakwater straight as a ruler above the surface. He fired three shots with his .22 to try and raise someone’s attention, to let them know he was coming.

He looked back to the lifeboat, waved to the shadowy figures, all staring in his direction. They did not look altogether comforted to be in tow with him, he thought.

He fired three more shots and then eased into the cove’s calm. The white church wavering on the point, still blaring its Protestant entreaties. The wharf slowly becoming solid as he approached it. People who had been on their way to church already standing on the dock in their Sunday clothes, dozens more coming out of their houses up the hill, men and women and children with their dogs alongside, all running to meet the ghostly arrivals.

2

C
LARA CAME TO THE HOUSE
while Sweetland was in the middle of a Texas Hold ’em table. He’d been expecting her all evening and hadn’t been able to pay proper attention to the game. He was playing the short stack, sitting with two pair, jacks over nines. Going heads-up with a reckless newbie who’d signed in as Flush, almost two hundred thousand in the pot.

“You aren’t watching porn over there, are you?” she asked.

“Gave it up for Lent,” he said and waved her into the kitchen without looking away from the laptop. Clara placed the plastic bag with the rabbit carcass on the table as she sat down.

He checked on the river card and Flush bet all-in. “Ah fuck,” he said.

“It’s not real money,” Clara told him.

“Thank Christ for that.” He folded his hand and let out a long sigh, closed the laptop carefully, reluctant.

Clara reached to lift the bag holding the rabbit a foot closer to him. “That’s out of season.”

“They’re peaked out this year,” he said. “They’ll be starving in the woods come the winter.”

“I don’t want it in the house,” she said.

He looked down at the plastic bag on the table. Watery streaks of
blood in the folds. “I only set a dozen slips,” he said. “The youngster loves to be out at it.”

“Jesse lost a week of school with me in St. John’s,” she said. “He don’t need to miss more.”

“It was your dog kicking up a racket that woke him this morning.”

“You couldn’t send him home out of it?”

Sweetland shrugged. “He asked his grandfather if he could go.”

Clara laid a hand across her eyes and there was her mother, Sweetland thought. Clara had almost nothing else of Ruth in her, but that subtle gesture of exhaustion or anxiety or annoyance was Sweetland’s sister to a T. He took the meat across the kitchen to the freezer, to put a little more space between himself and that eerie transformation.

Jesse was still an infant when Clara came back to Sweetland and no word of who the father was or what became of him. Clara might have stumbled on the child under a rock somewhere and brought the foundling to Chance Cove to raise as her own for all he knew. Almost ten years she’d been away, first to university in St. John’s and then itinerant work on the mainland. Her first months home she walked out to the lighthouse on Sundays with Jesse bundled in a backpack. He could see her coming if he was in the tower, the smudge of her red Gore-Tex jacket moving over the mash. He watched her inch toward him until she was close enough to make out her features, then he’d go down the spiral stairs to put on the kettle.

Sweetland never said a word about her decision to leave for school though he was against it from the start, with Ruthie dead and Pilgrim about to be left alone to fend for himself in the house. And he turned his back on Clara in small, spiteful ways. Let her have what she wants, he thought, without ever thinking it. A barely discernible coldness toward her that he would have denied if she accused him. He sat at his kitchen window as she boarded the ferry on the government wharf. The white of her face turning to look up the hill where she knew he’d be watching. Didn’t hear a word from her all the time she was elsewhere, but for what came to him second-hand through Pilgrim or Queenie.

Clara walked all the way to the light on Sundays just to avoid the expectation of going to church, he guessed. She drank tea on the chesterfield while Sweetland crawled across the floor with Jesse, lifted him by the ankles, blowing farts on his belly to make the boy laugh. He’d never encountered a child less inclined to laughter and he took it as a personal challenge to cure him of the affliction. He couldn’t say now if he’d sensed something wrong with Jesse even then, or if it was only in retrospect there seemed an unnatural distance in the infant’s eyes. The boy seeming to look out on the world from the far end of a tunnel.

Clara barely spoke a word during those visits, watching Sweetland clowning on the floor with Jesse. A pregnant silence between them, as if she was waiting to be forgiven for some offence. Or offering him the chance to ask forgiveness himself. And his failure to do one or the other was one more thing she held against him now. He dreaded talking to the woman, was the plain fact of the matter.

“Jesse is saying he’s going to stay with you here after everyone else leaves,” Clara said. She’d raised her voice and Sweetland could tell this was the real issue she’d come to talk about. That it took some effort on her part to broach the subject.

“Is that right?”

“You haven’t said anything to set the thought in his head, I hope.”

“He knows his own mind.”

“He’s not good with change, if that’s what you means.”

Sweetland turned back to her from the fridge. “Have you been telling him about Hollis spending a winter in hospital? Into St. John’s?”

“Uncle Hollis?”

“Jesse’s claiming he heard it straight from Hollis himself.”

“What was he in for, tuberculosis?”

“Jesse was talking like Hollis was sitting with us in the woods.”

Clara shrugged. “The doctor says its normal enough.”

“Normal
enough
?”

“He says Jesse might grow out of it.”

“Have they got a name for it yet?” he asked.

“For what?”

“Whatever it is wrong with the youngster.”

“There’s a spectrum,” she said. She was looking down at the table, as if she was embarrassed by the word, by how lame it sounded as an explanation. “And he isn’t typical, is what they’re telling me.”

“I could’ve told you as much for free,” he said. “Saved you the trip.”

“The doctor haven’t seen enough of Jesse to be able to say more than that. If we lived in St. John’s we could get him assessed. We could get him into a school program.”

“Jesse won’t be happy nowhere else than here,” Sweetland said, “I knows that for a fact.” He moved the kettle over the heat of the stove. “He wants to come over with me when I goes for a load of wood tomorrow.”

“Oh Jesus,” Clara muttered.

“It’s Saturday anyway,” Sweetland said quietly. “You want a cup of tea?”

But she was already halfway out the door.

He went for his evening walk before dark. A nip in the air, though they were into the first week of June. The wind just beginning to drop with the sun. He went as far as his room and stage on the waterline, then past it all the way to the metal bell of the old garbage incinerator on the point. Miles out he could see a container ship on its way seaward, the lights just coming visible in the dusk. It looked like a mid-sized city on the horizon, drifting east.

He turned back to the cove, to the white church on the opposite arm, the fenced square of the graveyard on the hillside above the houses. There were a handful of youngsters playing road hockey on the government wharf on Church Side, which was the only bit of flat ground they had access to. Pilgrim’s dog bounding back and forth with the players, sent into the harbour after the ball when a wayward shot put it over the side. Sweetland counted seven or eight kids, just about the entire
school-age population, save Jesse who had no aptitude for sports. Sweetland glanced back out to sea, the sun low on the horizon, and he waited until it touched down on the ocean before starting in.

He caught a blur of movement up off the path that he stopped to watch through the bushes. Loveless’s dog on the loose again. Some kind of miniature poodle cross Loveless found listed in the
Buy & Sell
after Sara died. He’d nagged Sweetland into making the trip across to Hermitage, carried the dog back in the pocket of his coat. Full size now and seven pounds soaking wet. Nothing but skin and grief.

Sweetland called up to the dog in the bushes and he whistled softly, but the animal ignored him, disappearing in the darkening evening. Loveless christened the dog Smut, for the coal black coat on it, though it didn’t answer to its name or to anything else, went its own wild way when it wasn’t tied to Loveless by a string. Out in the woods all night sometimes, following its nose through the tuckamore after partridge and grouse and rabbit. Showing up at Loveless’s door in the morning, filthy and bedraggled and famished. Sweetland expected the dog to disappear altogether someday, taken off by a fox or an eagle, or by coyotes if they ever made it out as far as the island.

He passed Queenie Coffin at her window on his way along, blowing smoke into the open air. She called him over and he leaned against the window frame as she finished her cigarette. She was in her quilted dressing gown, her hair done up in curlers, the old ones he remembered from his mother, held in place with bobby pins. Lipstick on the filter of her cigarette, a book sitting open in her lap. It was rare to see Queenie without a book in arm’s reach. She was a voracious reader of paint-by-number romances, of murder mysteries so predictable she could have written the endings herself fifty pages in. It was just a way to kill time, she said, to pass the afternoons, the television on with the sound on mute.

“Cool night,” she said.

“She’s brisk all right. See you planted your garden the week.”

“Yes, don’t be trampling them all,” she said.

“They’ll likely die of the cold if they comes up anyway, maid.”

Queenie laughed and coughed wetly into her fist. A voice called from upstairs and she lifted her head to answer it. “I’m just talking to my boyfriend,” she shouted.

Sweetland could hear the muffled sound of the television up there.

“Hayward says you wasn’t at the town meeting.”

“I was putting in the spuds. I’ll set aside a barrel for you the fall.”

She waved the hand holding her cigarette. “I won’t be here the fall.”

“You been saying that twenty year or more, Queenie.”

She was about to answer him but started coughing in a long, vicious round. It sounded to Sweetland like all her insides were sodden. “Time to give these up,” she said when she caught her breath. She took a drag and leaned toward the open air to exhale.

Sweetland tried to remember the last time he’d seen Queenie outside that house. When her oldest children were still youngsters, he thought, before they had the indoor plumbing installed—1969 or ’70 that was, sometime after the moon landing. Queenie flipping through the grainy pictures in a
Life
magazine, waving it at her husband. They can put a man on the moon, she told him, we can bloody well have a flush toilet. Hayward argued it was all a put-on, that the images were fakes taken in some Hollywood backlot. Half the people in Chance Cove thought as much. But Queenie got her toilet.

She hadn’t crossed the threshold of the house in all the years since. She stood just inside the open door or sat at the window, calling people over for a chat while she smoked. She’d taken in one of the lifeboat survivors when Sweetland towed them in, washed and fed the man and gave him a bed the night they stayed in the cove, but she wouldn’t walk down to see him ferried out to the Coast Guard vessel when they left. Three of her children married at the church on the point and she had waited in the kitchen in her best dress, the wedding party walking up to have their photos taken with her in the parlour. A public health
nurse came out on the ferry twice a year to have a listen to her heart, to warn her off the cigarettes. Everyone who went off the island for business or to visit family brought back two or three Harlequins to add to her library.

“How’s your book?” Sweetland asked her.

She lifted her chin like she was pointing to something across the room and sighed. “I wish she’d stop sending these things to me, it’s nothing only an aggravation.”

Her daughter was trying to rehabilitate her lowbrow taste in reading material with what Queenie called “serious” books—literary novels, prize-winners, Oprah’s picks. Sandra sent them down from Edmonton with encouraging notes scribbled inside the covers. Queenie never cracked a spine, but for the few written by Newfoundlanders or about Newfoundland. She took those on as a kind of patriotic duty, though it was a torture to get through them. They were every one depressing, she said. Or nothing happened. Or there was no point to the story. Half the books supposedly set in Newfoundland were nowhere Queenie recognized and she felt insulted by their claim on her life. They all sounds like they was written by townies, she liked to say.

She turned the open book face down on her lap. “You heard Hayward signed on to the package.”

“I been informed.”

“Leaves you in a hard spot, I imagine.”

“I still got Loveless,” Sweetland said, and they both had a laugh over that. He leaned his shoulder on the window ledge. “Never thought you’d allow Hayward to sign on, just the same.”

“It’s Sandra talked him into it,” she said. “Going to put an apartment in her downstairs for us. Can’t wait to have us up there, she says.” Queenie made the noise in her throat again, to say it was just as likely she’d set foot on the moon as in Alberta.

Sweetland didn’t give much for the possibility either. Jesse came to
visit Queenie now and then and they sat through a showing of
Titanic
on his laptop. Or the boy would ask after her favourite book or movie or song, about when the toilet was put in or where her children were living now and what they did for work. Queenie had answered the same questions ten thousand times but she had endless patience for the boy. His monotonous interrogation one more tiny room she’d chosen to close herself inside.