Michael Crummey - Sweetland

Sandra was sitting beside Clara on the landing to the stairs, both women holding rum and Cokes. They had gone off to university in St. John’s together but Sandra came home as soon as she graduated, teaching at the little school before finally following the rest of her crowd up to the mainland five years ago. She came unsteadily across the room when she saw Sweetland.

“How are you holding up?” he asked, which set her to crying, and he looked away as she collected herself.

She said, “I was going through her things yesterday. Found all the books I’ve been sending her in a box under the bed. I don’t think she touched them.”

“No,” he said, “she read a few.”

“She told you that?”

“She always made a point of saying if it was a book from you she was reading,” he said and left it at that.

“I hated the thought of her wasting her time on that Harlequin junk.”

“You should know better than most,” he said, “she wouldn’t going to change to satisfy anyone.”

“I know, I know,” she said, furious suddenly. “I wasted half my life trying to get her off the smokes. And the other half trying to get her out the door of this fucking house.” She raised her glass to the faces looking her way. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry.” She swallowed half her drink in a single mouthful. “ I was born upstairs here ,” she said, her voice lowered to imitate her mother’s tobacco-mangled whisper. “ And I’ll be leaving this house in a box . If I had to listen to her say that one more time I would have choked her.”

She was on the verge of tears again and Sweetland looked down at his shoes. He said, “I think she was reading one of the books you sent, the last going off.”

“Really? Which one?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “One of the Newfoundland books you sent down.”

She nodded emphatically and blew a breath through her lips. “Mom always talked about you,” she said. “When she called. She always had a bit of news about you.”

“Well,” he said. “She had to scrounge for news around here, I imagine.”

Sandra kept staring, sizing him up. Drunk enough to be reckless. “You know,” she said, “I always thought Mom was sweet on you.”

Sweetland laughed and turned halfways away from her.

“She told me once,” Sandra said and she waved her hand. “I don’t know when this was, ages ago. Before I went off to university. She said she always had it in her head you and her would get married.”

“She was having you on,” he said. Sweetland glanced across at old Hayward, to be sure their conversation was a private one in the room’s racket.

“No. No, she wasn’t. She was talking about what it was like growing up around here. Before the lights and all of that. Said you two were thick as thieves.”

“We was just youngsters,” he said.

She could see she’d embarrassed him. “You need a drink,” she said, heading for the kitchen counter to refill her own. She handed him a full glass as he came up to her. She reached into her purse which was hanging over the back of a kitchen chair. “I’m going for a smoke,” she said.

“When did you start smoking?”

“Mom’s last pack,” she said. “Thought I’d finish it off for her. Come out with me.”

They put on their coats and walked around the side of the house. Sandra turned her back to the wind to light her cigarette.

“How many left in that pack?”

“Half a dozen or so.” She blew a plume of smoke that whipped away in the breeze. She paused then, her head cocked as if to listen, and he did the same instinctively. “Everyone says you’re set on staying here.”

“Might be I am.”

“Must be hard.”

“What’s that?”

“Sitting in the king’s seat on this whole business,” she said. “Everyone hung up on your yea or nay. Can’t imagine a lonelier spot.”

He shrugged. “Verily,” he said, aping the minister reading from Psalms at the funeral. Trying to make a joke of it.

“Clara isn’t very happy with you,” Sandra said.

“Clara was never too happy with me.”

“You know that’s not true. She thought the sun shone out of your arse when she was a girl.”

“Well,” he said. “She grew out of that notion.”

“I don’t know. You’re half the reason she came home.”

He laughed. “Not fucken likely,” he said.

“She wanted you to be around for Jesse. Same as you were for her growing up.”

“She never told you that.”

“She didn’t need to tell me,” Sandra insisted. “Why do you think she carried him out to the lighthouse every Sunday? So she wouldn’t have to go to church?”

“Never give it much thought, I guess.”

Sandra looked drunkenly at the cigarette to see how much more there was to get through. “It’s a sin you never had youngsters of your own,” she said. “You know what Mom used to say about you? She’d say, That’s a good man going to waste, that is.”

He was only half listening, still trying on the unlikely notion of why Clara had come back to the island, to see if it fit his memory of the facts.

“What was it happened between you and Effie Priddle?” Sandra asked, and Sweetland glanced across, startled. “You two were engaged once,” she said.

“We was never engaged.”

“You went off to Toronto looking to make enough money to buy her a ring.”

“Who’s after telling you that?”

“Was it what happened to your face when you were up there?”

“Sandra.”

“I don’t think it was,” she said, answering her own question. “There’s plenty of women would have had you, don’t think I don’t know.”

“We should go back inside.”

“Are you gay, Moses?”

He shook his head. “Your poor mother is just put in the ground.”

Sandra took a sip of her rum. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m half-cut.”

“I’d say you passed half-cut about three miles back.”

“Ha,” she said and she raised her glass to him. “I just want you to know,” she said. “If you were. It wouldn’t make any difference to me.”

He shook his head again, a strangled little smile on his face, and he started along the side of the house without her.

Sandra was the last of Queenie’s children to leave Sweetland after the funeral. And without giving it much apparent thought, old Hayward packed a suitcase the night before the ferry arrived and went off to live with her in Alberta. The house left exactly as it was, the sheets on the bed and all the dishes in the cupboards. Queenie’s extensive library of romances and mysteries in the cardboard boxes she used to store them. It was a decision so sudden that it felt like a second death. The storm door nailed shut. Sweetland was constantly surprised to find the place dark when he looked out his windows at night or ambled by on his walks.

He had taken to stopping in at his stagehead every evening, poking around inside, half expecting to find the last rabbit’s head nailed up or some other indignity done to the place. It could be any one of half a dozen men to blame, he knew, or some combination of the group in cahoots. Trying to put a fright into him, thinking he could be scared off. Might be it was Hayward Coffin was at it, he thought, in which case there was nothing more to worry about.

He’d been expecting to see more of Jesse with school out for the summer. But the boy had been knocked off kilter by Queenie’s funeral and further again after Hayward’s disappearance, which made even less sense to him. Sweetland had been taking him to fish for trout up at Lunin Pond, a bribe to muscle the youngster into sitting through sessions at the Reverend’s house, but Jesse lost interest in that excursion in the upheaval around him. He’d been torturing every adult in the cove with the same questions about Hayward’s departure, why he left and what he was going to do with himself in Edmonton and whether Jesse would ever see the man again. The day after Hayward left Jesse started claiming he saw a light in Queenie’s living room window. Even being told that the electricity to the house was shut off wasn’t fact enough to sway him. Sweetland set two chairs outside the window one evening and they stared at the blackened pane until Clara came looking to get him to bed.