Michael Crummey - Sweetland

After fifteen minutes he stopped to shake the blood back into his hands. He took off one glove and reached inside to check on the cable’s progress. He looked up at Loveless who hadn’t spoken a word since he started. “You want to take a spell at this?” he asked, but Loveless shook his head.

It was half an hour longer before the cable gnawed all the way through the joint. Sweetland wrapped an arm around the calf’s neck again and put his weight into it, shouldering toward the dirt floor as it inched loose and then came free in a sluice of blood and afterbirth. The cow stumbled sideways, leaning her full weight against the barn wall, and Sweetland hauled the corpse out from under her. The amputated foreleg hadn’t come free with the body and Sweetland reached back inside to find it. Laid it beside the calf near about where it would have been if it was still attached. Knelt there with his hands on his thighs to catch his breath.

“Will she be all right, you think?” Loveless asked.

Sweetland glanced up at the cow. She was shaking along her length, her head bowed almost to the dirt floor. “How does she look to you?”

The dog crept out of the darkness and sniffed at the calf, at the dead eye staring into the rafters. It took one tentative lick at the snout and backed away. Sat there and looked up at Sweetland. A little blaze of white on its black chest. A tuxedo dog, Loveless said it was called. The man probably paid extra for that, Sweetland thought.

“You got to get this mess cleaned up,” Sweetland said as he got to his feet. His clothes were soaked through with the filth, the material dank and cold against his skin. “And if that cow needs anything else, you go get Glad Vatcher, you hear me?”

Loveless was staring down at the slick corpse. “What do I do with this?”

Sweetland started for the door. “Dig a hole somewhere and bury it,” he said.

It was light when he left the barn and Queenie Coffin was standing just inside her doorway as he walked by, cradling her elbow, her cigarette held high. She shook her head at the sight of him. She said, “You looks like the tail end of a good time, Moses Sweetland.”

“Loveless lost his calf,” he said. “As like he’ll lose the cow along with it.”

Queenie took a slow drag. “I heard her bawling,” she said.

“I don’t know why he bothered bringing her over to Vatcher’s bull this year. He knows as much about animals as I knows about Saudi fucken Arabia.”

“He was just missing Sara.”

“That’s a hell of a way to show it, killing her cow.”

“Be a mercy if she goes, probably. And one less creature to have to take off the island.”

Sweetland stared at her, standing one step above him in her nightdress and housecoat, the curlers still in her hair. The bright red lipstick making her face look strangely lifeless in the early light, as though it was a mask she was wearing over her real face.

When Queenie was just shy of twelve, her older sister came down with typhoid fever. Glad Vatcher’s father ferried out a doctor from Burgeo who quarantined the entire family inside the house. They were kept fed by their neighbours, and Sweetland’s mother would occasionally send him over with a pot of soup or a meal of salt beef and cabbage that he left on the front bridge. It was the only time he’d ever knocked on a door in the cove, to let them know their dinner was there. He’d back away from the house then, twenty or thirty feet, watching to see Queenie or one of her younger sisters lean out to take it in.

It was Uncle Clar who framed out the girl’s coffin in his shop after she died. Sweetland was with him as Queenie’s father shouted the child’s height and her breadth at the shoulder through a window, Uncle Clar jotting the measurements on a scrap of wood. Queenie was standing against the far wall behind her father, though he couldn’t see her face for shadow and she wouldn’t lift her head to look his way.

Poor little lamb, Clar repeated a hundred times as he sawed and planed the boards, as he nailed and sanded and varnished. Sweetland helped the old man carry the finished coffin down and they left it on the front bridge, as he did the family’s meals. Queenie’s father opening the door to drag it inside. The funeral was held later that morning, the coffin sitting on the bridge again with the dead girl inside. Every soul in Chance Cove standing below it to sing a few hymns and bow their heads as the minister said his prayers. The family watching it all from the parlour windows, the sisters bawling behind the glass. Waving goodbye as the coffin was hefted and carried up to the old graveyard.

Sweetland spent the entire service watching Queenie. She had hidden herself away at one corner of the window, almost out of sight altogether, and she never once looked up at the funeral congregation, never caught his eye, and he was relieved in some obscure way not to have to bear it.

For the life of him now he couldn’t remember the dead sister’s name.

Queenie raised her cigarette to the gaudy red lips, dragged the smoke into her chest. She looked past him, down to the water. “The Priddles is on their way.”

He turned toward the dock where the ferry was already in and tied up. He saw the Priddles heading over from Church Side with their duffle bags on their shoulders and he thought to walk down to see them off. But it was too much to take on. He went up to his house instead and stripped out of his filthy clothes in the porch, left them in a heap on the floor. Fell asleep on the daybed in the kitchen.

Jesse was at the table when he woke, the laptop open in front of him.

“Shouldn’t you be into the school?” Sweetland asked.

“It’s dinnertime.”

Sweetland could see the boy had helped himself to two tins of peaches. “You put in a fire.”

“It was cold in here,” Jesse said. “You looked cold.”

“Put the kettle on for me, would you?”

Jesse crossed to the stove, added a junk of wood to the firebox, pushed the kettle full over the heat. “What happened to your clothes?” he asked.

“Forgot to wear a napkin at supper last night.”

“Ha,” Jesse said.

It was a recent thing, his ability to separate a person’s tone into categories, to pick out a joke for what it was and acknowledge it. Sweetland’s role as court jester paying off finally. Or the Reverend’s work with him. Or just the boy catching up with life.

“Your mother know you’re over here?”

“Poppy knows.”

“That don’t mean your mother is going to be happy about it.”

“Loveless’s calf was born dead last night.”

Sweetland sat up in his underwear and socks, raked his fingers through his hair before he thought better of it. Looked at his hands, crusted black and red. “Where’d you hear that, now.”

“Poppy told me.”

He walked to the sink and ran the water until it was scalding, scrubbed at his skin with a brush. Scoured at the blood under the nails. “Did your pop say how the cow was doing?”

“She’s lying down,” Jesse said. “Won’t get up out of it.”

Sweetland turned off the taps, shook the water from his hands and forearms, wiped them down with a cup towel. He’d have to burn the clothes he was wearing, he figured. “You’re not playing poker over there, I hope.”

“Angry Birds,” Jesse said.

“Well,” Sweetland said. “That’s all right, I spose.”

What was it about the youngster? It was his seriousness, maybe, that made him seem distant. He was doggedly loyal and affectionate in a standoffish way that a body could confuse for the opposite of affection and loyalty. He had a cat’s self-centred indifference to the world as others saw it, a cat’s inscrutable motivations. He took odd notions, running off now and again for no obvious reason, disappearing up on the mash or hiding out at the lighthouse or as far as the Priddles’ cabin in the valley. He never tried to explain himself after the fact or was incapable of it. He couldn’t be trusted altogether because you couldn’t guess with any certainty what he was thinking.