Michael Crummey - Sweetland

“No, no,” Keith said. “Experience the Sweet Life in Sweetland.”

“That’s a fucking gold mine,” Barry said. He pointed across the table with his truncated index finger. “All we got to do is get rid of this old fucker.”

“From what I been hearing,” Keith said, “someone else is likely to look after that end of things.”

Sweetland straightened in his chair. “What is it you been hearing?”

“Be a shame to lose him, you ask me,” Keith said. “We could fit him out in a sou’wester, put him on display for the tourists.”

“The last Sweetlander, like?”

“The genuine article.”

“Jesus in the Garden,” Sweetland whispered.

The rest of the evening carried on in the same coke-addled vein, the brothers riffing back and forth on one topic or other. Sweetland thought several times to ask the brothers what exactly they’d been hearing about him and from who. But he knew it would come out a useless muddle, half of it exaggerated or misremembered, the other half made up, and he let them go their own way. Keith talking about a woman he was screwing in Fort Mac, reaching into the bedside table for the lubricant he kept there, grabbing a tube of muscle cream by mistake. “That A535 shit,” he said, his arms across his guts for laughing. “Lathered her up good and the burn kicked in. And she starts yelling, What the fuck did you do to me? What the fuck did you do? Wasted half the night into Emergency with her.”

“Only Keith could make a woman that hot,” Barry said.

“Jesus, Barr, tell Mose about the sixty-nine thing.”

“Fuck off, he don’t want to hear about that.”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” Sweetland confirmed.

“He don’t even know what sixty-nine means,” Barry said.

“He’ve got the internet, tell the goddamn story.”

“Oh fuck,” Barry said. He straightened in his seat, hauling his jean jacket tight at the waist, like someone about to give testimony in court. “I was with this girl,” he said. “Nice girl, I liked her. And we were, you know, doing the sixty-nine. And it was pretty goddamn slippery down there. Anyway, I’m face and eyes into her—”

“He really liked her,” Keith said.

“I practically needs a snorkel to breathe is the fact of the matter. And I’m just about to go off when she rams a finger up my ass. And I snorts in, you know, just automatically. And I inhaled her — her—” he said, struggling to hold off the laughter or find the word he was after. “Her labia ,” he said.

“Fuck,” Keith said, already pounding the table. “Moses don’t know what labia means.”

“Cunt lips,” Barry shouted. “Right up my nostrils. And she got her legs clamped around my ears. And fuck if I don’t start laughing. And I’m choking and cumming and laughing like a Jesus idiot.”

“Cunt lips up his nose,” Keith roared. His face cherry red, his eyes bulging.

“I almost fucken drowned,” Barry said.

“Man Asphyxiated by Woman’s Labia,” Keith said, which set both men off on another helpless round.

“Best fuck I had in years,” Barry said when he’d finally settled down.

Sweetland didn’t mind the Priddles once upon a time, it was true. But he was too old for their bullshit now, the relentless, senseless surge of it. It was like being out in a storm too rough to make for shelter, all you could do was keep face on to the wind and ride it out. He sipped at a glass of warm homebrew and waited for the barrage to end.

“We’re keeping you up,” Barry said an hour later, “we should go. Catching the ferry tomorrow.”

“Heading back to Alberta?”

“St. John’s,” Keith said, and he slapped Barry’s shoulder. “Got Fucknuts here an appointment with that shrink Jesse’s been talking to. See if we can’t straighten him out.”

Barry turned his backside toward his brother, slapped the cheek of his arse. “Kiss yer mudder good night,” he said.

They spent fifteen minutes more yammering at each other before they finally went out the door, and Sweetland stood there after he latched it closed, listening to them head down the path. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, he thought, that their mother wasn’t around to see the lives they were leading as men.

BOB-SAM LAVALLEE MADE THE TREK in from the lighthouse to look the lifeboat survivors over. They were all suffering from exposure and dehydration, though none of them appeared to be in serious danger. No solid food, Bob-Sam said, just soup broth and water and clear tea.

Any word on the Coast Guard? Sweetland asked.

It’ll be tomorrow sometime before they can get a vessel out here, Bob-Sam said. They wants to know what ship these fellows come off of.

There was a name on the lifeboat, he said, but someone scraped it away.

The men were divided up among the houses in the cove and taken off to be stripped of their filthy clothes and bathed and put to bed.

Sweetland’s mother was only nine months dead at the time and he was still adjusting to the house without her. The tiny rooms echoing like vaulted spaces. He spent most of his free time with his sister and Pilgrim, eating his meals there and occasionally kipping down on the daybed in the kitchen when he’d had too much to drink to face the two-minute walk up the hill.

He hadn’t volunteered to take any of the refugees in and no one would have allowed them to suffer a house without a woman to look after them. He went down to Pilgrim’s that evening to see how they were making out and to glean whatever gossip might be making the rounds about their ordeal. Pilgrim was in the rocker beside the stove in the kitchen, a cigarette burning in the ashtray on the table.

Where’s the missus? Sweetland asked.

Gone down to sit with the dead one at the church.

She left you alone with those two upstairs?

They’re sound up there now, Pilgrim said. They won’t stir this night, I imagine.

Well that one down to the church idn’t about to stir, I guarantee.

You knows what she’s like, Moses. You’ll have a drink, he said. I got a fresh batch of shine ready.

Pilgrim was no use in a boat and had never worked a steady job, but he was a dab hand at brewing. Sold bottles of his moonshine door to door through the cove and to the deckhands on the ferry. He tended bar at the Fisherman’s Hall during bingo games and dances, the younger men getting a laugh passing off ones and twos as tens or twenties.

He was an “exhaustion product” as the women used to call it, his mother with a grown family and thinking she was through the change of life when she found herself unexpectedly pregnant. Pilgrim’s two eyes sightless from birth. She kept him on a tether until he was old enough to untie the knots himself and he became a ward of the community then, wandering from house to house. Every sighted person taking it upon themselves to steer him clear of the flakes, the wharves, the water. His blindness made even the smallest accomplishment seem a kind of magic trick — buttering a slice of bread, reciting Bible verses from memory, cutting cod tongues. The women clapped their hands and fed him raisins and sweet tea and kissed the crown of his head after he’d performed his most recent beguiling trick. There was nowhere in the cove he wasn’t welcomed like a son. Pilgrim treated Sweetland’s house as his own, staying for meals, spending half his nights sleeping head to foot between Sweetland and Hollis.

Music was the only vocation anyone had ever heard of for a blind child, and the church took up a collection of pennies and nickels to buy Pilgrim a fiddle. The toy violin made of pressboard and lacquer, strung with plastic strings. The church’s minister offered a handful of ineffectual lessons and Pilgrim spent hours at a time in a chair by the kitchen window, sawing out approximations of “Turkey in the Straw,” “The Lark in the Clear Air,” a few local jigs. He had so little aptitude for the music, he didn’t know how bad he was. Kept at it until his mother broke down in tears of frustration one evening and his father threw the contraption into the stove.