Michael Crummey - Sweetland

“Never mind,” Sweetland said. “You look out to that cow.”

Loveless slapped the animal’s flank. “She’s fine, this one,” he said. “She’ll be all right.”

Sweetland was back at the virtual tables early that evening when the Skype icon started jumping for his attention. He clicked it open to answer the call, Jesse sitting at a desk in his bedroom down over the hill. His pale face looming white in the screen’s illumination.

“What are ya at, Jesse?”

“Homework,” he said.

“Good man.”

“What are you doing?” The boy’s image was jerky, the voice slightly out of sync with his mouth. There was something sinister in the disconnect, Sweetland thought. He’d always hated that about Skype, preferred talking on the telephone. Though he had no time for the phone, besides.

“Not much,” Sweetland said. “Playing a bit of poker.”

“Winning or losing?”

“What do you think?”

“Losing.”

“Ah kiss my arse,” he said.

Sweetland had never gone near a computer before Queenie’s youngest daughter packed up and moved to Edmonton five years back. He’d trundled down to her house with his wheelbarrow to collect the desktop he’d bought from her, walked out with the hard drive in his arms. Welcome to the twenty-first century, Sandra said to him. He set the plastic tower down in the bed of his wheelbarrow and came back to the door for the monitor. Don’t worry, he’d said, I’m only visiting.

Sweetland never expected to touch the thing himself. He bought it for Jesse, thinking to occupy the boy’s attention and save himself the endless interrogation he made of his visits. Clara came to the house with Jesse that evening to help set up the machine, the youngster explaining each individual component to Sweetland as they went.

This is your mouse, Jesse said, pointing to the plastic doohickey beside the keyboard. You uses that to move the cursor.

The what?

This thing, Jesse said, pointing to nothing Sweetland could identify on the screen. Go ahead, he said, move the mouse.

And Sweetland had poked at it with his index finger, like he was prodding a sleeping animal.

It won’t bite you, Moses, Clara said to him, grab ahold.

Jesus loves the little children, he sighed.

Jesse spent the weeks that followed walking him through the basics, and he surrendered to the boy’s insistence, thinking it would be less trouble than resisting. Sweetland had never so much as used a telephone before his first trip to the mainland with Duke in 1962, and no one on the island had phone service before the electricity arrived in the early seventies. It seemed a minor miracle now to find himself in the house where he was born, Skyping with a twelve-year-old. He heard a voice offstage and Jesse leaned in close to the screen. “Check your Facebook account,” he said before the square went black.

Sweetland had lied to the government man about not being on Facebook. Jesse had badgered him into joining, but Sweetland had only one friend. He signed in, clicked on the link Jesse had sent. A YouTube video began loading and he opened it full screen. A two-minute clip of Jesse “The Body” Ventura pile-driving a series of hapless opponents in the ring. It was as though the boy knew how Sweetland felt about his name and was working to alter his opinion.

Sweetland had forgotten about the professional wrestler and was surprised to see him in his prime on the internet. The web was like the ocean, Sweetland thought, there was no telling what lived in the murkiest depths. He allowed it might be possible, if a body knew where and how to look, that everything he’d known in his life and since forgotten could be found drifting down there, in grainy two-minute clips.

He clicked to replay the video, turned up the volume. The floor of the ring pulsing with the impact of those massive bodies, the crowd on its feet. People said it wasn’t real, the wrestling, that it was just a pageant of sham fighting, shadowboxing. Jesse Ventura flung himself across the chest of his opponent from the height of the corner ropes, slamming the man backwards onto the mat beneath his weight. Any idiot could see it was choreographed, that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. But that fall looked real enough from where Sweetland was sitting.

The sky was still threatening in the morning, low, patchy fog on the hills. Almost too wet to go up on the mash, but he hadn’t been out to check the slips in two days. He packed a sandwich, his.22, his rain gear. Jesse was likely watching the house from his bedroom window and Sweetland wouldn’t look that way when he went outside. A look would be all the invitation the boy needed. He drove the ATV up behind his property and climbed slowly out of the cove.

He’d crested the rise and started around Vatcher’s Meadow when he saw the quads bombing toward him. He pulled off the trail and waited there. The Priddles whistled past in their army camouflage and ball hats and then spun around to come back up to him. Sat their machines to either side so Sweetland had to turn his head shoulder to shoulder to look at one and then the other. Early for them to be about, though there was no telling their hours when they were on a bender. “B’ys,” he said.

“How’s Mr. Sweetland?” Barry said.

He glanced across to Keith and nodded. “The Golden Priddles,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.”

“Been spending most of our downtime in St. John’s.”

“What is it going on in St. John’s is so goddamned important?”

“Just life,” Barry said. “You should look into it sometime.”

“Send me the brochure, why don’t you.”

“Where you off to this time of day?”

“Got a few rabbit slips out past the keeper’s house,” Sweetland said.

Barry leaned back on his seat. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said to his brother, “but I believe Mr. Sweetland here is engaged in poaching activity.”

“The fucker belongs in Her Majesty’s Penitentiary,” Keith said.

“Perhaps we should give the wildlife officer a call.”

“Oh kiss my arse,” Sweetland said, which got a laugh from the brothers.

Keith leaned across and tapped Sweetland’s arm with his index finger. He said, “Father tells us you still haven’t signed on to the package.”

“Can’t deny it.”

Keith shook his head, solemn. “The old man says he’s going to cut off your nuts with a fish knife, you don’t sign.”

“Is that a fact,” Sweetland said.

“I told him I’d be happy to do it for him, if it came to that.”

“Jesus, Keith,” Barry said. “Don’t mind Keith,” he said to Sweetland. “He’s just being a fucker.”

“I’m just being a fucker,” Keith agreed. The two men smiling, enjoying the moment. Though they were both considered residents of the island and had voted for the move.

Barry started up his quad. “We’ll drop by for a drink some night before we goes.”

“Whatever you like,” Sweetland said and he kicked into gear, drove off over the field of marsh grass and moss.

At the lighthouse he grabbed the canvas backpack and the.22 from the quad without looking up at the keeper’s house. The Coast Guard had just finished refurbishing the place a year before it was decommissioned. Spent a small fortune roofing and painting it, installing a skirt around the foundation to box in the three-hundred-gallon cistern that collected rainwater in the crawl space beneath the floor. The house fitted out with new furniture and appliances, dishes, cutlery. Sweetland was living alone out there at the time and he tried to refuse most of the upgrades. But some budget line was allocated and had to be spent before the end of the fiscal year.

People in Chance Cove waited until the shingles on the ocean side were stripped off by the wind, and weather seeped in through the bare boards, before they touched it. Everything of any use came out then — fridge and stove, beds, toilet and bathtub, countertops, highboys and dressers, cupboards — the building like a wrecked vessel being stripped for salvage. Sweetland kept clear of the pilfering for fear of losing his tiny pension, though he didn’t begrudge anyone what they managed to put to use.