Michael Crummey - Sweetland

He expected the man was working up the nerve to ask after Ruthie, how she was at the end, and if she’d said anything at all that ought to be passed on to the Reverend. It made Sweetland feel panicked to see the man stick his head in the door, though his vocation and bearing made it impossible to send him on his way. Sweetland took to putting a fire in the wood stove, opening the vents and stoking it until the shed was stifling. The Reverend would strip down to his dress shirt, but couldn’t bring himself to undo even the top button, and he’d sit there with beads of sweat popping on his forehead.

You don’t mind the heat.

Likes it warm, Sweetland told him. They says it’s good for the joints. You want a cup of tea?

Lord, no.

The Reverend was forced to abandon the fiery pit after half an hour and eventually he gave up the visits altogether. Sweetland lost a lot of good wood in those months, but he considered it well worth the price.

That first fall, the Reverend began volunteering at the school, where he took on Jesse as a pet project, developing a remedial program to help the boy do his sums and to curtail his outbursts and his spells of mindless rocking and chanting. It was the Reverend who’d found the doctor the boy was seeing in St. John’s and made the arrangements for his appointments. He hired Clara Pilgrim to come to his house two mornings a week to sweep the floor and wash his three changes of identical clothes. He could be prevailed upon to open the old church to officiate at the occasional wedding or christening or funeral but refused to consider regular Sunday services. To all appearances he’d settled in to live out the rest of his days as a semi-private citizen on the island, before the talk of resettlement.

The Reverend turned to Sweetland. “Has Jesse said anything to you about his time with the doctor?”

“Not so much, no.”

Sweetland thought he caught the briefest moment of skepticism or annoyance passing over the clergyman’s face. But it disappeared so quickly he might have imagined it.

“They’re saying the more structure we can give him, the better,” the Reverend said. “I was thinking of having him come to the house for sessions during the summer. Three times a week or so.”

“That’ll sound like more school to Jesse.”

“That’s what Clara thinks,” he said. He raised his free hand and smoothed the silver hair down around his ears, like he was massaging a question free in there. He said, “Do you think you might be able to talk to him about it?”

Sweetland smiled uneasily. “I’d rather stay clear of that business, if it’s all the same to you.”

“He thinks a lot of your opinion.”

“More than his mother does, for damn sure.”

“Between us now,” the Reverend said, “it was Clara’s idea to ask for your help with this.”

“Was it her idea to have you do the asking?”

“That was my idea,” Pilgrim said. His face turned away from the room, sheepish.

“I volunteered,” the Reverend said, “to bring it up with you.”

Sweetland shifted where he stood. Exhausted suddenly and wanting to be left alone. It was all he could do to hold off telling them to go fuck themselves, the works of them.

“It would mean a lot to Clara,” the Reverend said. “And to me.”

“I’ll have to sit with it a bit,” Sweetland said, and the Reverend raised his mug to say that was as much as he could ask.

The men bantered back and forth awhile longer then about the Priddle brothers arriving on the ferry that morning, about the hockey playoffs and the weather, talking in the polite, stilted fashion of near-strangers. When the Reverend finished his tea, he went on his way.

“I always feels like that cocksucker is spying on us,” Duke said after the door pulled to.

“He’s just lonely,” Pilgrim said.

“If he didn’t want to be lonely he should have gone to St. John’s somewhere. Moved into a home for retired clergy.”

“There’s no such place, is there?”

“Jesus Christ, Mose,” Duke said. “Would you slap some sense into that one.”

“Can’t be done. God knows I’ve tried.”

Pilgrim stood up and set his mug on the seat behind him. “I can get this kind of treatment at home,” he said. He stopped at the door. “You going to talk to Jesse like he asked?”

“Go on the fuck home out of it,” Sweetland said.

Duke stood at the window to watch Pilgrim make his blind way up the hill in the driving rain, waiting until he’d seen him in through his door. Turned back to the room. “He’ve got an unnatural interest in that youngster,” he said.

“Who?” Sweetland asked, though he’d heard Duke make the accusation a hundred times over.

“The Reverend.”

“Jesus, Duke.”

“It’s not normal, is all I’m saying. Trying to get him alone down to the house all summer.”

“I imagine he thinks he’s doing God’s work.”

Duke shook his head. “What’s-his-name Bin Laden thought he was doing that, for chrissakes.”

It was too miserable to go out in the evening and Sweetland tried to pass the time with a hand of poker. He poured himself a glass of rye but didn’t touch it, barely looked at the cards as they flashed up and he lost his stake within an hour. He sat turning his drink in circles on the table. The old house creaked in each gust, the wind throwing buckets of rain against the windows. One of the last hockey games of the season grinding on in the living room, the noise of the crowd rising and falling like a weather of its own. He half expected the Priddle boys to show up, barrelling into the house shit-faced and demanding a drink, going on about the cost of housing in Fort Mac, the money they make working overtime, the skin you could get in the bars up there.

The Priddles were Irish twins, the second born ten months after the first, and they had never done a solitary thing in their lives. They swam and fished and set fires, they drank and poached moose and gambled together. They co-owned a boat and took over their father’s crab licence a few seasons until they jacked up to work on the mainland. Disappearing for six or eight months during construction season in Nova Scotia or Ontario, spending the winter months at home, collecting their pogey and making a general nuisance of themselves. They were arrested in Burin for possession with intent to traffic, pleading down to simple possession and a four-month sentence at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary in St. John’s. In their forties now, and neither had married or shown the slightest inclination to settle down. They were hard men, the two of them, and the other’s company seemed to push each to be harder and more reckless than he might have been on his own.

Ned Priddle never quite recovered after Effie died giving birth to Keith. Ned didn’t say as much, but he acted as if he blamed the infant boys equally for the loss of his wife and resented their subsequent claims on him. They were left to their own devices as they grew older, more so after their father remarried. They spent most of their time on the water or in the woods. They built a ten-by-ten shed in the valley on the far side of Sweetland, the logs chinked with moss, a single tiny window salvaged from an old wheelhouse, and they more or less lived out there, going feral like cats in an abandoned barn. Over the years the boys had built and rebuilt the cabin in stages, dragging building materials over by quad. It was where they went to get away from it all, they said, when life in Chance Cove got too hectic for their liking.

The Priddles were too wild for most people to take, growing up. Sweetland was one of the few who would have them over the threshold and he saw more of them than their own father through their teens. He lived alone and there was nothing he owned that couldn’t be pasted together if it was broken. And he felt he was making something up to Effie by watching out to the boys. Though it wasn’t in him to settle on or name exactly what that was.