Michael Crummey - Sweetland

Sara Loveless. As squat and solid as her cow, they used to say. And almost as simple, ha ha. It was a local sport, making fun of Sara. She had no letters and spoke in truncated phrases reduced to bare fundamentals. Every person and creature and thing was a she. She need oil change. She got bad head. She raining now. She lazy as a cut cat . Sara was fond of beer and brandy and went to bed half-drunk most nights. Cursed like a sailor. But laziness was the only form of stupidity Sweetland couldn’t abide and whatever else might be said about Sara, she was not a lazy woman. Kept the animals and the garden, cut and cured her winter’s hay up on the mash. Tramping around in her rubber boots and an old gansey sweater that swayed almost to her knees. She wrecked a shoulder clearing boulders from her bit of pasture, years ago. Sweetland had seen her punch at it savagely with the opposite fist when it acted up, which was the only bit of doctoring she allowed.

She had never married and seemed completely unfit for it. But she was built for the island, unlike her brother, who sailed in the wake of Sara’s industry his entire adult life. How she’d suffered living in that house with Loveless all these years, Sweetland didn’t know.

He finished a round of the cow’s legs and then stood at her head, rubbing between her ears again, before he started for the door. He thought of the dog, unsure if it was still sitting there against the wall and it was too dark inside now to say. “You coming, Smut?” he said to the place he’d last seen the pup, but there was no sound or motion there and he carried on outside.

He opened Loveless’s door on his way along. “Your shift,” he shouted into the house and he walked down through the cove, his head buzzing with the first jangly notes of a hangover. He went out as far as the incinerator, stood looking over the open ocean, letting the wind scour away at him.

The ground fell steeply toward the water on the far side of the incinerator and the slope was thick with junk that couldn’t be burned, strollers and playpens, paint cans, barrels, a freezer, a bathtub, old hockey skates, a Star Choice satellite dish, four or five computer monitors that even Sweetland recognized as archaic. It was the world’s job, it seemed, to render every made thing obsolete.

He turned to see the cove glimmer in the last light, houses and windows glowing faintly orange and red, the colours fading and winking out as he watched. There was no stopping it, he knew. Days when the weather was roaring outside his mother would say, Stall as long as you like, sooner or later a body’s got to make a run for the outhouse. The whole place was going under, and almost everyone it mattered to was already in the ground.

Definitely. He was definitely feeling sorry for himself.

He passed his stagehead on the way in the arm and barely gave it a glance in the growing dusk, walking on a few steps before the strange detail struck him. He turned back to look at the door, picked out the shadowy U of the horseshoe he’d put there for luck thirty years ago. And something moving below it, a smudge in the gloom, a little bag, he thought, hanging from a strap.

He had to work up the nerve to step toward it. Stopped when he was near enough to make out the rabbit’s severed head. The creature’s eyes wide and staring, a four-inch nail driven through the silk of one ear to hold it in place. The head swaying soundlessly in the wind.

HE STOOD OUTSIDE after the Reverend disappeared around the back of the church, deciding whether or not to go in after Ruthie. His head floundering, trying to piece together what he’d seen in some way other than how it seemed. There were a dozen scenarios that were completely innocuous and only one that he knew in his gut to be true. He started back up toward Pilgrim’s house, thinking he’d stop at Ned Priddle’s place to ask Effie to look in on the sick man. He came around the front of the church just as his sister scuttled out the main doors and they startled away from one another.

Jesus, Moses, she said. Her arms wrapped a cardigan tight about herself. You scared the life out of me, she said.

You left Wince alone up there with those two fellows.

They was sound asleep, the both of them.

Well one of them was puking his guts out when I left.

She skipped ahead then, half running on the path. Why did you leave him? she asked.

He told me to come get you.

But you was right there in the house.

They were having a racket to avoid talking about other things, he knew. And that suited Sweetland well enough.

He followed Ruthie inside but stayed in the kitchen as she went up the stairs. Listened to the muffle of voices through the ceiling, the coughing and dry heaves of the sick man. Pilgrim called from the landing, asking him to put the kettle over the heat for hot water, to hand up rags from under the sink, the mop and bucket from the back porch. Sweetland went about collecting the materials he’d been asked for, but couldn’t even find it in himself to answer.

Sweetland was best man and father-giver at his sister’s wedding, handing Ruthie away when the minister asked, and he passed Pilgrim the ring for Ruthie’s finger. Pilgrim was besotted with the girl and had been for years, everyone could see that. He spent part of every day in their company, was a fixture at the Sweetland table. Talk-sang a few ballads to try and impress Ruthie as the women cleared up the dishes. And would never have laid a finger on her but for Sweetland insisting she teach him to dance.

His mother is in the ground for long ago, he said when she objected, how else is the poor frigger going to learn?

Sweetland appointed himself chaperone while Ruthie hummed a tune and wrestled Pilgrim around the tiny kitchen space. Pilgrim topped up on shine to overcome his mortal shyness before his lessons, though it did little to help his dancing.

You’re about as graceful as a cow in a dory, she told him.

Got no head for it, he said.

It’s only a bit of math, she insisted, and she counted the steps aloud, one two three, one two three.

Ruthie thought of him as a kind of hapless uncle, made fun of his awful voice, snuck up behind him to cover his sightless eyes with her hands and shout Guess who? Blind to how the older man felt before he proposed to her. She refused him twice, and it was only her mother’s intervention that swung things in Pilgrim’s favour.

Ruthie’s been leading that poor soul on, she said to Sweetland.

He started in his chair, glanced across at her. Sure, she was only showing him how to dance.

His mother was knitting in a rocker by the stove and her hands paused at their work. She looked directly at her son. You know how Pilgrim feels about Ruthie, she said. Dancing is leading enough for a man in his condition.

Sweetland leaned forward on his knees, his eyes on the floor. Pilgrim have got his heart set, that’s plain.

You needs to have a word, Moses.

It made sense to him that Ruthie marry the man, to formalize the relationship already cemented between Pilgrim and themselves. The dancing lessons were just a way of setting them in each other’s path. He expected the rest to follow as a matter of course, if there was more to come of it. He’d never considered he might be called on to shift things further along that road himself.

She dotes on you, his mother said. She’ll mind what you tells her.

I don’t know, he said. That’s more your place than mine.

His mother dropped her knitting in her lap, threw her head to one side in frustration. It was you started this whole business, she insisted.

He stared at the tiny woman in her horn-rimmed glasses, surprised every time by the flash of ice in her. All right then, he said.