Michael Crummey - Sweetland

“Two?” Sweetland said.

The government man paused there, to let the information sink in. He stirred his tea slowly, the clink of the spoon like a broken lever inside a mechanical doll.

“It’s just me and Loveless?”

“That’s where things stand,” he said.

Sweetland rubbed absently at the tabletop a moment and then excused himself. He went out through the hall and up the narrow stairs to the bathroom. He put the toilet seat down and sat there a few minutes, leaning an elbow on the windowsill. He could see the back of Loveless’s property from there, the ancient barn, the single gaunt cow with its head to the grass. Loveless famously drank a pint of kerosene when he was a toddler, which to Sweetland’s mind told you everything you needed to know about the man. He’d suffered a twenty-four-hour attack of hiccups while he passed the fuel, his diapers reeking of oil and shit. No one was allowed to light a match near the youngster for a week.

And it was all down now to him and fucken Loveless.

“Sorry,” Sweetland said when he came back into the kitchen.

The government man waved the interruption away. He said, “I have to admit I’m curious, Mr. Sweetland.”

“About what?”

“I don’t mean to pry,” he said, which Sweetland took to mean he was about to pry. “But you’re turning down a substantial cash payout. Practically the whole town is against you.”

“And?”

“I’m just wondering what your story is exactly.”

He didn’t like the little fucker, Sweetland decided. Not one bit. He gestured toward the briefcase with his mug. “I imagine you got everything you needs to know about me in that bag of yours.”

The government man watched him a second, then pulled a folder from the case. “Moses Louis Sweetland,” he read. “Born November fourteenth, 1942. Which makes you—” He glanced up.

“Sixty-nine this fall.”

“Math isn’t my strong suit,” he said. “Next of kin: none.”

“Christ,” Sweetland said. “I’m related to half the people in Chance Cove.”

“No immediate next of kin, I think is what that means. Parents deceased. Brother and sister?”

“Both dead.”

“Marital status: single.” He looked up again. “Never married, is that right?”

Sweetland shrugged and said, “Look at this face,” which made the younger man turn back to his papers.

“Occupation,” he said. “Lightkeeper, retired.”

“I was let go when they automated the light ten years back.”

“You were a fisherman before that?”

“Right up until the moratorium in ’92.”

“So you’ve never lived anywhere else?”

“A couple of trips to Toronto for work,” he said, “when I was about your age.”

The government man made a motion toward his own face, afraid of pointing directly at Sweetland’s scars. “Is that where?”

“What else is it you got in there?”

He closed the folder and sat back. “That’s everything,” he said.

“Not much when you lays it out like that.”

“Not enough to tell me why you’re so set against this move.”

“Just contrary, I guess.”

“You’d rather stay here with the dead, is that it?”

“A body could do worse for company.”

The government man brushed his fingers lightly back and forth across the edge of the table, as if he were at a piano and not wanting to strike a note. “How long is it your people have lived out here, Mr. Sweetland?”

“Time before time,” Sweetland said and then smiled at himself. “People been fishing here two hundred years or more. I expect my crowd was the first ones on the island.”

“Because it’s eponymous, you mean?”

Sweetland stared blankly.

“It’s named after them. Your family and the island have the same name.”

“Yes,” Sweetland said. “That’s what I mean.”

They stared at one another then and Sweetland could see the youngster was casting about in his mind for some other tack to take. He put his chin in one hand and tapped his nose with the index finger. Then he leaned to one side to put the folder back into his briefcase. “As you are aware,” he said, “the government is offering a package to the residents of Sweetland to move anywhere in the province they like. A minimum of one hundred thousand dollars per household, up to one hundred and fifty thousand, depending on the size of the family and other considerations. Plus adjustment assistance and help looking for work or retraining or returning to school.”

“Jesus,” Sweetland said, “I thought the government was broke.”

The younger man ignored him. “But we will not move a soul out of here unless we have a commitment from everyone to the package.”

Sweetland nodded. “Same old bullshit.”

“This is not the 1960s, Mr. Sweetland. This move isn’t being forced on the town. We will pay to resettle the residents, as we’ve been asked to do. But we will not be responsible for some lunatic alone in the middle of the Atlantic once everyone else is gone.”

“Me being the lunatic.”

“There won’t be any ferry service after the move. Which means no supplies coming in. There will be no phone service. No online banking, no poker. No electricity. By definition, I’d think anyone out here on their own would have to be certifiable.” The government man glanced at his watch. “You’ve been made aware of the September deadline.”

“I been made aware.”

“There are people hoping to make the move across as early as this fall, which means everyone would have to sign by the first.”

“I am aware,” Sweetland said again.

The government man reached into an inside pocket of his coat. “My email address is on there, my cell number, you can contact me anytime.”

Sweetland set the card on a shelf above the counter and followed his guest along the hall, to let him out the door he came in. Placing a hand to the back of a chair and then the wall as he went, the room tilting under his feet.

The light blared in through the open door and Sweetland came out as far as the doorstep. He shaded his eyes to gaze down toward the water. Folks in their yards or on the paths or at the wharf, all busy not looking his way.

The government man was staring down to the harbour as well, and Sweetland couldn’t help taking the place in through the stranger’s eyes. A straggle of vinyl-sided bungalows, half of them sitting empty. Saddle-roofed sheds and propane tanks and ATVs and old lumber in untidy piles, like trash dumped on the slope by some natural disaster. The white church on the point, the Fisherman’s Hall with Rita Verge’s hand-lettered MUSEUM sign at the side entrance. A handful of geriatric boats moored off in the cove.

“That’s a beautiful view,” the government man said. “I can see why you don’t want to leave it.”

“You didn’t strike me,” Sweetland said, “as an ass-kisser.”

“I work for the government,” the youngster said and he shrugged good-naturedly. “It’s just part of the job.”

He didn’t like the fucker, it was true. Not one bit.

He levered the door into the frame and leaned back against the wall. Stared across at an oval black-and-white portrait of his grandfather hung by the door. A young man from another age — a high starched collar, a waistcoat, the chain of a pocket watch, an elaborate waxed moustache.

“Now Uncle Clar,” he said. “It’s just me and Loveless.”

The eyes of the man in the picture looking off to one side, as if to avoid the issue altogether.

Sweetland went out to his root cellar for the last of his seed potatoes, spent an hour setting spuds in the garden. He hosed the rake and spade clean when he was done and set them away in the shed. He washed his hands in the kitchen and through the tiny window over the sink he caught sight of Queenie Coffin next door, scattering a packet of seeds through her window onto the patch of ground below it. Which meant the summer — what passed for summer — was well and truly started.