Michael Crummey - Sweetland

It wasn’t the end of his musical career. Pilgrim had a prodigious memory for the old labyrinthine ballads about murder and shipwreck and star-crossed love. He had no voice to speak of, but he was still called on at weddings and wakes and Christmas concerts to make his tuneless, inexorable way through one disaster or other.

Ruthie worked as custodian at the school and Pilgrim added a disability pension to the pot, along with whatever he made peddling his brew. And they muddled along, like everyone else on the island.

He and Sweetland sat at the table with glasses of shine and their smokes and the rumours already circulating about the men asleep in the town’s beds. Mongolian, some said. Trinidadian. Tibetan. Sri Lankan, according to the Reverend. Sweetland was shocked to learn the language they were speaking was English. He hadn’t understood a word that came out of their mouths.

Where did they think they were going, I wonder.

Somewhere in the States is where they were told, Pilgrim said.

The Promised Land.

The very same.

They sat in silence a few moments then, until they were startled by a commotion above them, a voice through the ceiling.

Sounds like they might be stirring, Sweetland said.

They could hear someone throwing up and Pilgrim rose from his seat, heading for the stairs. You might want to go get Ruthie, he said.

Sweetland went out the door and down the path at a clip. It was only the thought of the strangers asleep in the houses around him, and the dead boy laid out in the church, that kept him from screaming Ruth’s name as he pelted along.

The front door of the church was open and he checked himself as he came up to it. There were candles lit at the front near the body, the pale light just enough to add a little gloom to the dark inside. He whispered Ruth’s name as he walked up the aisle but there was no sign of her. He stopped well short of the dead boy under his sheet near the altar. He guessed she was in the minister’s room at the back but he couldn’t bring himself to walk past the corpse to reach the door, or to call loud enough to be heard. “Ruthie,” he said, hissing the word.

He backed up the aisle until he was outside. Turned and started toward the side entrance they had used to carry the body inside earlier in the day. The door swung open as he approached it and the Reverend came through. Sweetland was about to call out to him, but something in the man’s demeanour wouldn’t allow it. A hunch to his gait, his eyes on his feet. A rushed quiet about the man. The Reverend turned away from the path at the foot of the stairs and skulked through the long grass at the back of the church.

Sweetland looked up at the door. Ruthie still inside there, he knew.

SWEETLAND WOKE TO THE SOUND of Loveless’s cow bawling, a hollow moaning complaint carrying through the mauzy dark. He lifted himself up on an elbow to look out the window, down past Queenie’s house, but there was no sign of lights at Loveless’s place. He lay back and did his best to ignore it, but the lowing went on endlessly, a sound so full of helpless misery it made his stomach knot.

Fucken Loveless.

He pushed up out of bed, dressed awkwardly in the black. Dug around for a flashlight in the porch, walked down through the cove. Sweetland went along the path beside Loveless’s house to the barn where the miserable creature was calling, unhooked the door and stepped in. The building rank with the smell of shit and rotting hay. He played the light along the barn’s length to the spot where the cow stood with her head pushed into the corner. Her back legs wide and the haunches quivering as though she were plugged into an electrical outlet. The calf was hanging halfway to the ground, its nose swaying six inches off the ground. One foreleg still caught up inside the mother. The pink tongue hanging lifeless out of the mouth.

Sweetland walked across the dirt floor, placed a hand to the cow’s haunch. The animal’s head swung toward him and Sweetland glanced up at the motion, caught sight of a shadow darting further along the wall. He flicked the light across it, picked out the little lapdog skulking through the straw. “Hello, Smut,” he said and the dog sat down five feet from the cow. Ears cocked high.

Sweetland reached down to cup the calf’s muzzle, the nose wet and cold. He straightened stiffly and wiped the hand on the ass of his pants. “I’ll be back the once,” he said, to the cow or to the dog or the fetid room itself.

He turned on the porch light in the house and called up the hall. “Loveless!” he shouted. “You got a dead calf out there.” He waited a minute, heard the sound of bedsprings shifting. “You’re going to lose that cow if you don’t get your arse down here,” he said.

He went back along the path to the barn. Cast the light around a moment, the dog in the same spot though it was lying down and watching, attentive. Sweetland took off his coat and rolled it into a ball on the ground, propping the flashlight there so it shone on the cow’s hind end. He rolled the sleeves of his shirt above his elbows and knelt behind her. “Now, missus,” he said.

The dead calf was slick with birthing fluid, gelatinous and cold in the chill. No telling how long it had been hanging like that. The cow was fair gone herself. Sweetland pushed a hand into her, reaching to get his fingers around the foreleg caught up back there. It was tucked at an angle so unnatural he couldn’t find a decent grip. He wrapped an arm around the calf’s neck and leaned his weight against it, hauling at the leg as best he could. The cow lifted her head to bawl and the dog barked along. Nothing budged.

Loveless came into the barn with a storm lamp in his hand. He had a coat on over his bare torso, a pair of striped pyjama bottoms tucked into his boots.

“The fuck have you got done here now,” Sweetland said.

Loveless peered in at the scene a moment and turned around in a panicky circle. “That goddamned animal, Sara,” he said to the ceiling, as if the dead woman was watching them from the rafters. “She haven’t been nothing but trouble to me.”

“It’s not the bloody cow’s fault,” Sweetland said. “What were you doing asleep in bed?”

“I was out with her till almost midnight,” he said. “I didn’t think she was going to go tonight.”

Sweetland gave the man a look. “Well everything’s locked up in there now. You should go get Glad.”

“I don’t want nothing to do with Glad Vatcher.”

“Don’t be a goddamned idiot.”

“You got to do something, Moses.”

“Well Christ,” Sweetland whispered.

“I can’t lose Sara’s cow.”

“Shut up a minute,” he said. Sweetland looked into the black of the vaulted roof, considering. He picked up the flashlight and headed for the door.

“Moses?”

“Don’t you touch that animal before I gets back,” he said.

He went up to his shed, rifled through a tool chest below the workbench. Collected a pair of canvas gloves, wire cutters, electrical tape. Hung near the door there was a length of thin cable once used to secure lobster traps on the stage and Sweetland slipped it across his shoulder on the way outside.

Loveless stared at the cable when Sweetland came back into the barn. “Jesus, Mose,” he said.

“You want to lose Sara’s cow?”

He took a moment to consider the possibility, shook his head.

“Bring that light in,” Sweetland said. He taped one end of the cable, worked it inside the cow, pushing for the calf’s shoulder joint. He forced his second hand in below the first and reached for the taped end blindly, his face against a quivering flank, grunting with the effort. The cow had gone eerily silent and was slowly shaking her head back and forth. “Come on now,” Sweetland said, “come on.” When he’d hooked the cable around the foreleg he sat back, both hands sliding free at once, drawing the taped end out. He shook the mess from his hands, shucked his forearms and fingers clean with straw, and put on the gloves. He cut the wire to leave himself with an even length top and bottom. “You hold her head,” he said to Loveless. “Don’t let her come back to me.” He wrapped the cable around his palms and once Loveless had a grip on the animal’s neck he started in pulling left under right, a steady jigging rhythm, the wire singing with the strain.