Michael Crummey - Sweetland

The younger of the two was dead and had been for some time. The one still living tried to fend them off with his free hand when they came toward him.

Leave them be a minute, the Reverend said.

That young one won’t be any less dead a minute from now, Duke said.

Hand me a blanket, would you, Moses?

The Reverend covered the two where they sat in the boat and settled beside them. I’ll call when I need you, he said. He held a bottle of water to the lips of the man still alive and wiped his face with a handkerchief and spoke to him in a low voice. Praying, Sweetland supposed, though it likely wasn’t the kind of prayer they were accustomed to. The man didn’t take his eyes from the Reverend’s face. After a while the Reverend stood and called up to Sweetland on the dock.

They had to shift the dead boy out of the way and it was awkward work. There was almost no weight to him, but rigour had set in, the body like an elaborate piece of furniture. The living man almost as stiff and ungainly, hunched and stepping gingerly, like he was walking over broken glass.

Bring the other one up to the church, the Reverend said to Sweetland. I’ll be along in a minute.

He and Duke waited until they were out of sight before lifting the corpse onto the dock. They carted it to the church, still in its sitting pose, the knees bent almost to the chest. Sweetland had the corpse under the arms, its head craned to one side so it almost seemed the face was lifted to look up at him and he kept his eyes straight ahead to avoid the sight of it. Without discussing it, they went past the main entrance of the church to the side door near the back, into the room where the Reverend kept a desk and hung his vestments alongside the purple choir gowns on a piece of pipe. They couldn’t see setting the dead boy on the Reverend’s desk and placed him on the floor instead. But they both felt it was an indignity to leave him there and Sweetland went to get the table in the vestibule used for laying out the Sunday bulletins.

The Reverend came in the door with Ruthie right behind him then, and they all trooped up the centre aisle to the back where they lifted the corpse onto the tabletop. The Reverend turned to Ruth. Have we got a sheet or anything? he asked.

She was one of the church women who came in early on Sundays and stayed after the service to tidy and spent two evenings a week in the sanctuary to sweep the floor and wash the windows and polish the candle holders on the altar. She went to a cupboard crowded with Christmas wreaths and blank bulletins and mimeograph fluid and dug around at the back until she found a yellowed altar cloth. Pregnant with Clara then, though no one in the cove knew it yet. She helped the Reverend cover the dead boy with the sheet and they stood around him with their hands crossed in front of themselves.

Don’t seem right to leave him back here on he’s own, Ruth said.

We’ll bring him out into the sanctuary once we’ve found beds for the rest of them. Have someone sit with him.

Ruth turned to the minister, placed a hand on his arm. Could we say the Lord’s Prayer?

He hesitated a moment, as if there was something in the notion that made him uncomfortable. I don’t see the harm in it, he said finally.

THE FERRY SAILED BY THE BREAKWATER through a blear of rain. The ocean beyond in an uproar. The deckhands hunched in neon-yellow slickers as they threw down the hawsers and winched the gangplank to the government wharf.

All of it slightly out of focus from where Sweetland sat watching at his kitchen table, edges and colours blurred by the drifting rain. Two passengers disembarked, men in jean jackets and ball caps, carting duffle bags. They paused halfway down the steps, craning their necks toward the deckhands leaning over the rail above them. They seemed oblivious to the weather, their gestures expansive, unhurried. The man standing behind pushed the other forward finally and they skittered down to the dock.

Sweetland glanced up at the calendar thumbtacked to the wall near the phone, trying to guess how long it had been since the Priddle brothers had come home from Alberta. Before Christmas sometime. The two men hefted their duffle bags and started toward their father’s house, over on Church Side. Heads bent against the angle of the climb and the pelting rain.

Batten down the hatches, Sweetland thought.

He opened the laptop to play some poker, hoping the rain might let up before he went out to the shed. Heard the door three hands in, looked up to see Reet Verge come through the porch. She was sausaged into a pink Bench sweater, the sleeves down over her hands against the chill, the hoodie high on her head. The pink material was blood red where it had gotten wet across the crown and shoulders and the expanse of her massive breasts. She looked like a parody of the Grim Reaper, making her rounds.

She leaned against the door frame. “You aren’t watching porn over there, are you, Moses?”

“Girl on girl,” he said. “How’s Your Worship this morning?”

“When are you going to let me clean up that head of yours?”

He hadn’t spoken to Reet since his last haircut, eight months ago. She’d used the opportunity to lobby for the package and berate him for being so goddamn stubborn. It was unfair practice, he thought, waylaying him there under the silver cape with his hair only half cut. Waving those scissors at his face. He swore never to go back to her and he was in desperate shape by now. He was tempted to let Duke have a go at his hair, just to avoid the woman.

“I’m growing it out,” he said. “Willie Nelson braids, I was thinking.”

They watched each other awkwardly a moment. Sweetland trying to guess her age. Fifty? Fifty-five, more like. Old enough to be partying with the smatter of reporters and photographers who showed up on the island when the Sri Lankan boat people passed through. Doing shots of peach schnapps at the Fisherman’s Hall with the last straggler from Saturday Night , who’d come out to do a follow-up that October, its effect on the people in the community, what they made of it all. He got stranded in an early rage of snow and wind that kept the ferry docked in Hermitage three days. The power went out the first night of the storm and they fell back on kerosene lamps, on arias of static drifting from battery-powered radios. The reporter drinking all day to deal with the boredom, the creeping claustrophobia.

Good God, he said, it can’t keep going like this, can it?

Out here, Reet said, a snowstorm is like getting your skin. You never knows how many inches you’re going to get. Or how long it’s going to last.

She was a hard ticket, Rita. Raised two boys on her own after her man moved out west for work and hooked up with a missus from Catalina. Both of her children through school and long gone to the Canadian mainland. She made half a living in her kitchen, cutting hair. Started up the museum with a make-work grant from the feds. She’d been the town’s mayor for three years, a position she didn’t want and held by acclamation since Glad Vatcher washed his hands of it. All the negotiations on resettling the community went through her. She managed to use Sweetland’s recalcitrance as a bargaining chip to double the government’s offer, the extra money enough to bring most of the last holdouts onside — an irony Sweetland was aware of though Reet was smart enough not to bring it up in his company.

“You know I’d rather be staying,” she said finally. “If it was up to me.”

“The will of the masses,” he said.

“Oh kiss my arse.”

“Careful now, Reet,” he said. “I’m all worked up watching the porn over here.”

“It would take more than a bit of porn,” she said, “to work up an old fucker like you.”