Michael Crummey - Sweetland

Ruthie thought the sun shone out of Sweetland’s arse in those days. She had always looked to his opinion, over even her mother’s. They had never spoken a cross word, she had never refused him a request. Pilgrim was practically family already, he told her, and he had to watch out for them both anyway. It was only a bit of math, he said.

The sick man upstairs was still urging helplessly. There seemed no end of foulness to spew from his guts. Sweetland walked up the stairs with the materials Pilgrim had asked for, placed them in his arms at the landing. He could hear Ruthie’s voice speaking low in the room where the refugees were lying. Everything all right? he asked.

Ruthie’s here, Pilgrim said. She’ll look out to him.

I’ll go on, then, he said. Sweetland couldn’t look at him, even though the man was blind.

Wince, Ruth called, I needs those rags.

We’re all right here, Pilgrim said to Sweetland and he headed steadily along the hallway, turning sharply into the sickroom like a man with eyes to see.

ON THE FIRST OF JULY, Hayward Coffin came downstairs to find Queenie dead in her chair by the window, a half-smoked cigarette guttered in her hand. Her book face down on her lap.

The funeral was delayed a day to give Queenie’s children time to make the trip back from the mainland. Most were travelling from the oil sands in Alberta, her oldest boy coming from Oregon where he ran a deck and fencing company. All of them forced to wait on the ferry schedule after their flights. The coffin had to be shipped over on the ferry as well, from a funeral home in Fortune, and meantime they waked Queenie on a bare table in the parlour. Clara had washed and laid Queenie out in a purple dress she’d found in her wardrobe, but couldn’t dig up a pair of shoes to put on her feet.

“She haven’t wore shoes since 1977,” Hayward told her. “Put on her slippers,” he said, “she might as well be comfortable.”

The coffin was heavy as a dory and too wide to be carried through the door where Queenie used to stand smoking and talking to passersby. They had to take out the window above her chair to bring it into the house, and again to lift the dead woman out a day later, half a dozen men reaching their hands to catch her as she crossed into the open air for the first time in forty-odd years. Being careful not to trample the straggle of flowers that had come up from the seed she’d tossed outside.

The Reverend opened up the old church and aired it out the day before the funeral. Clara and Reet Verge and Queenie’s daughter swept out the vestibule and polished the dark wooden pews and set out vases of fresh-cut wildflowers. The weather hadn’t improved much through the month of June and was still wet and cold into the first week of July. Everyone wearing coats over their mourning clothes. They set Queenie on a trailer behind an ATV and the funeral train followed her down to the church. Sweetland bringing up the rear with Duke and Pilgrim and Loveless.

“Queenie Coffin,” Loveless said, “in her coffin.”

“She told me she wouldn’t going to be around the fall,” Sweetland said.

“She been saying that this twenty year,” Duke said. “She was bound to be right about it sooner or later.”

“A sin to take her out of it,” Pilgrim whispered. He had his face lifted high, uncertain about his footing on the dirt path, his left hand inside Sweetland’s elbow. “Should have buried the poor woman under the kitchen floor.”

“She’s dead,” Duke said. “It don’t matter a goddamn to her where she goes now.”

At the church Sweetland guided Pilgrim into the pew beside Clara and Jesse, but the boy swung out a hand to hold the blind man off.

“Jesse,” Clara whispered, trying to bring his arm down, but he wouldn’t relent.

“What’s wrong now?” Sweetland asked him.

“That’s Hollis’ spot,” he said, his eyes toward the front of the church.

“I can make room,” Pilgrim said, and he sat two feet from Jesse to leave the space free.

“Well Christ,” Sweetland sighed. He sat beside Pilgrim and took out a mouldy hymn book, flipping aimlessly through the pages. “I don’t know which one of you is worse.”

“It’s not like we don’t have the room to spare,” Pilgrim said.

The sparse congregation murdered a handful of Queenie’s favourite hymns without accompaniment, the Reverend playing the first note on a soggy-sounding electric organ. They were all out of the habit and subdued by the occasion. Jesse’s was the only clear voice in the church. He had perfect pitch, according to the Reverend, and he showed an unlikely capacity for recalling lyrics. He sometimes forced Sweetland to sit through twenty or thirty impeccably rendered verses of the morose ballads he’d learned from Pilgrim. But he had no patience for the musical limitations of others.

Don’t sing, he’d say to Pilgrim, waving his hands and jumping foot to foot like someone standing on hot coals. Don’t sing, just say the words.

The wounded sound of the congregation was too much for Jesse and halfway through the second hymn he surrendered, sitting and covering his ears. He rocked back and forth and moaned softly while Clara tried to soothe him, running a hand across his shoulders.

Duke turned to Sweetland from the pew ahead. “I’m with Jesse,” he whispered.

The coffin was loaded back onto the trailer for the trip to the new cemetery, a fenced square of hillside that had been ordained to its current purpose only fifty years ago. The old cemetery was tucked away in a droke of trees above the incinerator, up a trail so steep coffins were tied on a sledge and dragged to their final resting place with a rope.

Sweetland lined up behind the family to throw his handful of dirt onto the polished lid and then took up a shovel to help fill the grave, alongside Glad Vatcher and young Hayward Coffin. He was afraid Jesse would stay to watch the morbid proceeding but Clara led him away with the mourners, the boy glancing over his shoulder as he went. The other Coffin boys had gone down to Queenie’s house as well and Glad tried to send Hayward after them. “You don’t have to be at this now,” Glad said, but Hayward shook his head. He was nearly the same age as Glad and the two had fished together a few seasons as younger men. The spade rang against the rocks in the soil with every shovelful as young Hayward stooped and threw the clay down onto his mother, his mouth working fiercely. And they finished the job together without speaking another word.

They made their way down to the reception when they were done, warm enough from the work to carry their jackets. Halfway along Glad and young Hayward began talking back and forth about the weather in Oregon and work, about Loveless losing his calf and the job they had getting the cow on her feet.

“Never gave her a snowball’s chance,” Glad said. “And she seems right as rain there now.”

“Just goes to show, I guess,” young Hayward told him.

“You planning to stay for a visit at all?”

“High season,” young Hayward said. “Can’t afford to miss the work.” He looked around and shook his head. It was his first trip home since he left, long before the cod fishery was shut down. “To be honest,” he said, “my skin’s already starting to crawl being stuck out here. No offence,” he added quickly.

At Queenie’s house, old Hayward sat against the wall with a grandson on his knee. The Reverend and Jesse staring at the tiny screen of an iPod, sharing a set of headphones to watch that goddamn Titanic movie. Pilgrim and Duke and a few others nursed drinks or cups of tea in their chairs while the rest of the crowd milled aimlessly around the cramped rooms that had been Queenie’s only weather for most of her adult life. A handful of people lined up to shake old Hayward’s hand and offer their final condolences when they saw Sweetland come in, making a public point of their departures that Sweetland ignored.