Michael Crummey - Sweetland

They’d show up after school and sit, incongruously, to episodes of The Care Bears, The Smurfs . They came over Sunday nights for the television wrestling and he’d give them a glass of homebrew to drink. They had christened themselves with wrestling names — Tidal Wave and Rip Tide — the two brothers beating hell out of each other on the floor during commercials. Sweetland called them Pancake and Over Easy, the Golden Priddles, a reference they didn’t get but were insulted by nonetheless. Keith was the bigger of the two and Sweetland had to wade into the fray to save Barry from the worst of it on occasion. They’d trade insults from opposite chairs awhile then, crybaby and cocksucker being the favourites.

The brothers would bring him a brace of rabbit now and then, helped dig his potatoes in the fall. They’d go across with him after wood and they were sluts for the work, they cut and sawed and hauled with the same gleeful abandon he saw in them as they inflicted pile-drivers and sleeper holds on each other in his living room. He’d pay them for the help with a dozen beer and a couple of skin mags, and they considered themselves well compensated.

Six years now they’d been working a see-saw contract in Fort McMurray, three or four weeks on the job, two weeks off to fly home and drink and smoke and snort all the money they’d made. It was a way of life that had done nothing to make them less trouble. They settled on cocaine as their recreational drug of choice, and the manic high added a nasty flavour to their recklessness. Barry lost the tip of his index finger the afternoon they’d taken turns putting out a lit match with a.22, one brother at a time holding the little flame at arm’s length, thirty paces off. Barry so high he felt no real pain. Wrapped the finger in a handkerchief and took another shot at his brother’s match.

They showed up on Sweetland less often as time went on, preferring somewhere with easier access to drugs and women. But everyone was on edge when they came home. It was like setting a couple of wild dogs loose in a hotel room. The place wasn’t half big enough or particularly suited to the life they wanted to live in it, and there was always some damage in their wake. Sweetland tried to keep his distance, though it was impossible to avoid them altogether.

He raised the glass of rye to his mouth but didn’t taste it. The weather was too miserable for even the Priddles to venture out, he guessed. When the last of the day’s light was well and truly gone he passed into the living room to flick off the television and went out through the hall in the dark.

Sweetland woke before light, turned heavily in his bed. Drifted off another hour or so. It was nearly eight by the time he got up, walking out to the bathroom in his jockeys and undershirt. He ran the tub while he shaved the uninjured side of his face, where the whisker still grew. Soaked in the scalding water then, as long as he could stand the idleness. He took his “good clothes” from the wardrobe in the bedroom, a thirty-year-old pair of dress pants and a white button-down shirt he’d bought to wear to his mother’s funeral. Ran a comb through the oily weave of his hair before he went downstairs.

He refrained from all forms of labour on Sunday. He didn’t cut wood or go fishing or weed the garden or check his slips. He wouldn’t even go out to the shed to putter at the dozen odd jobs that were only halfways done. He sat in the living room to watch the televangelists for an hour or two in the morning, a habit he picked up from his mother in her later years. What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world? they thundered, before imploring the sick and the lame to sign over their meagre savings, their disability benefits. His mother wrote a twenty-five-dollar cheque every week that she entrusted to Sweetland for mailing. He burned each one in the stove, knowing she hadn’t looked at her bank balance in the years since her old-age pension kicked in.

Sweetland paid no attention to what the preachers were on about, though he enjoyed watching them pace and throw their arms around and froth at the mouth. They looked like professional wrestlers trying to get a rise from a crowd at Maple Leaf Gardens. He watched the shows for the hymns the choirs performed between the readings and sermons. He was never much for singing himself, but he knew the tunes and he hummed along under his breath.

He had an early lunch of tuna fish on white bread and a tin of peaches for dessert, then spent the first half of the afternoon online, playing poker. Even that caused him a twinge of guilt. Games of chance were the devil’s tool according to his mother, and she hadn’t allowed so much as a hand of 120s on the Lord’s Day when they were youngsters. They sat around in their Sunday best, listening to the eight-day clock tick away the endless seconds. Uncle Clar asleep upright in his chair. A body was allowed to cook food and wash dishes, but the remainder of the day was given over to enforced rest and contemplation, which to Sweetland had always seemed a form of torture.

In his years at the lighthouse there were duties that couldn’t be left and he polished the mirrors and watched the horizon to note the ships that passed and made entries about the day’s weather and wind in the keeper’s journal, he checked the back-up generators or repainted the light tower or tended the garden like it was any other day of the week. He thought the job might have cured him of the Sabbath habit, but it settled on him as soon as he moved back into Chance Cove. As if it wasn’t his mother but the house itself that imposed the ritual observance.

Before supper he went for a stroll through the cove, the clouds in rags overhead. He went by Loveless’s place, taking the path toward the barn, calling out to Loveless as he passed below the living room windows. The cow was standing in the tiny strip of field alongside the leaning barn, gnawing at the grass she’d already cropped down to the dirt. Sweetland placed a hand against the heat of her belly and the cow shook her head without raising her muzzle from the ground. She looked about ready to drop her calf where she stood.

“She’s going to burst she don’t have that calf soon,” Loveless said, coming up behind them.

“You got neither bit of hay to put out for her?” Sweetland asked. “There’s not enough grass left here to feed a rabbit.”

“She eat up all the hay I set aside over the winter.”

“Well can’t you get some from Glad?”

Loveless looked away a moment, chewing at the unlit pipe. “He wants to take that cow away from me, Glad Vatcher do.”

“Jesus, Loveless. Why would he want to take your cow?”

“Tried to buy her off me when I brought her over to the bull last fall. Wouldn’t hardly take no for an answer.”

“He was just trying to keep the old girl from starving to death.”

“She got plenty there,” Loveless said.

“You should have him come look at her.”

“Who, Glad?”

“Yes, fucken Glad. Just to give her a once-over. Before the calf comes.”

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” Loveless said and he looked around himself, one hand picking at his pant leg. He walked close enough to put a hand on the cow’s flank. “He was after me to take the package, Moses.”

“Well, let him talk,” Sweetland said. “Don’t pay no mind.”

“He was hard about it. He said some things.”

“What kind of things?”

“He wouldn’t say nothing the like of it to Sara.”

Sweetland watched the man a moment. He said, “You haven’t been getting any notes, have you?”

“Notes?”

“Ransom notes, like. With letters cut out of magazines.”

Loveless stared at Sweetland like he was being made fun of somehow.