Michael Crummey - Sweetland

They finished Jesse’s five and Pilgrim’s, and Sweetland said he’d look after his own when he got back to the house. He leaned out into the spray to rinse his hands and forearms in the water, and he looked forward then, watching Jesse standing to one side of the wheel, his free hand moving like someone conducting an orchestra. The noise of the engine made it impossible to hear, but he knew the boy was carrying on a conversation with Sweetland’s long-dead brother.

“You want another beer?” he asked Pilgrim.

“I’m all right.”

Sweetland walked up to the wheelhouse and set the two empties at his feet.

“This is where the accident happened,” Jesse said to him.

Sweetland glanced out at the water to get his bearings. They were just passing over the Wester Shoals where he and his brother used to trawl for cod in the fall. “I spose it was Hollis told you that, was it?”

“Poppy told me.”

Sweetland looked back at Pilgrim sitting aft. “What else did Poppy tell you?”

“He said you was the only one was there, so it’s only you can tell the story.”

“What about your buddy there at the wheel? He was there, wouldn’t he?”

“He says you’ll tell the story when you’re ready.” Jesse didn’t take his eyes from the water ahead, talking in the same flat tone.

Sweetland looked away a minute as the vertigo crawled over him again.

“You don’t have to,” Jesse said.

“Just this once,” Sweetland said. “And Hollis can correct me if I gets anything wrong, how’s that?”

“Okay.”

“Okay, then.” He reached into the cooler for a beer. “We come out to do some trawling,” he said.

October month. They had the trawl baited with fresh squid and shot it out, let it fish on the bottom a couple of hours. They’d just gotten the boat that spring, a skiff with an ailing Acadia one-cylinder inboard that they’d bought from Glad Vatcher’s father. They’d been the only crowd in Chance Cove without a motor for years by then, still sculling out to the fishing grounds every day. Old Mr. Vatcher took a little cash money and a share of the summer’s fish as payment, not half what the boat was worth. A calm day but a strong tide running. Sweetland aft at the tiller, keeping the boat steady ahead of the tide, Hollis pulling in the trawl up forward.

“There was lots of fish on her,” he said. “Hollis was gaffing them aboard as they come to the surface. And there was this big one, saw him as he come near the surface, he must’ve been seventy or eighty pound. Hollis leaned out for it as the trawl come in but the thing sheared off the hook and we passed right overtop of it. So I shoved the engine in reverse, turned on the switch before the piston reached top dead centre and that sent it running opposite. A bit of a jolt, you can imagine. I turned to lean out over the water, gaffed the fish as we drove back to it. Biggest cod I ever seen just about. Hauled it in over the aft board,” Sweetland said. He took a mouthful of beer, glanced at Pilgrim in the stern. “Anyway,” he said. “Hollis fell across the trawl line when the boat shifted into reverse. He wouldn’t expecting it, I guess. And the length of trawl he’d already brought aboard started going over the side again as the boat drove aft. Hooks caught up in his clothes. He went into the water with it.”

“Hollis couldn’t swim.”

“Wouldn’t have mattered, him tangled up in the line like that. I shut off the motor soon as I saw he was over, but there was still a lot of strain on the trawl. Rushed up ahead to cut it loose.”

“You cut the line?”

Sweetland shrugged. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the boy. “Wasn’t thinking right,” he said. “I had to get him free of the strain, was what I had in my mind. Only way I could figure to do it was cut the line. Worse thing I could’ve done.”

Hollis was only a fathom under water by the time he killed the engine and got forward. He could see the white of his brother’s face looking back up to the surface. Hundreds of pounds of fish on the trawl and the weight of it pulling Hollis down and down into that black. Eighteen years old, his brother was.

“I’d have done it all different,” Sweetland said. “If I had my time back.”

Jesse was nodding his head, still staring out at the water. “He’s not mad at you,” he said.

It was like a hand out of nowhere against his chest, he almost lost his balance. “He said that, did he?”

“He wanted me to tell you,” Jesse said.

“Well then,” Sweetland said. And he turned to look out at the open ocean awhile.

They hefted the fish coolers onto the government wharf and carried them up the hill. Jesse ran ahead into Pilgrim’s house to get his mother and she came to the door, reaching a hand to help. Clara invited him in for a fry-up, but Sweetland shook his head. “Not hungry,” he said.

“Are you okay?”

“Best kind.”

“You don’t seem yourself.”

“More I don’t,” he said and he tried to smile it off, though his face felt crooked and unnatural.

He took his five fish up to the house and stood at the kitchen counter in his rubber boots to fillet them. Ripping the backbone from its trough of flesh. The layer of dark skin peeling off with a sound like lengths of Scotch tape being unspooled. The meat underneath as white as the driven snow. He packed the fillets into clear plastic bags and stowed them in the fridge.

Stood still in the middle of the kitchen then, one hand at his chest opening and closing, mimicking his own heartbeat. “Where was that,” he said into the silence. He went across to a drawer beside the sink and picked through it. There was an open shelf above the laptop with a handful of telephone directories from two decades ago, a row of Canadian Living recipe books his mother used to collect. Spare change, ancient keys for locks that no longer existed, thumbtacks, chewing gum, antacids. He shuffled his hand back and forth through the bric-a-brac, as if he was stirring up sediment in a shallow pond. Closed his hand finally on the card he was looking for. He held it out at arm’s length, turned it a little to the light from the window.

He dialled the number incorrectly three times, which was almost too much to get through. He stood with the receiver in his hand, trying to quiet his breath. Walked himself through the digits one more time on the rotary dial, listened to the ring travel.

“Hello,” the government man said.

“Yes,” Sweetland said. He tried to bring the man’s face to mind, but the features wouldn’t coalesce out of the blur of light that masked him when he’d first arrived at Sweetland’s door. He grabbed for the back of a chair and pulled it out from the table to sit down. “It’s Sweetland calling,” he said.

“Who’s that?” the voice said. “Moses Sweetland?”

“Yes,” he said. “This is he.”

Sweetland was up early the next morning and down to the wharf while the stars were still bright. He hadn’t slept and couldn’t lie still any longer. He took his chainsaw and gas can, though he had no real interest in cutting wood. He just wanted out of the cove before the news made the rounds.

He drove to Burnt Head and around the Fever Rocks, riding slow as the day’s light came up on the world, without a notion as to where he was going or why. He went into the lee of Little Sweetland and stared up at the bare hillsides as he passed Tilt Cove. Not a sign to say where the dozens of houses and flakes and outbuildings once stood. He came about, chugged into the abandoned harbour. There was a wooden wharf kept up by the mysterious owners of the two cabins on the hill, and he tied up there.

Sweetland sat on the dock with a cup of tea from the thermos, waiting for the sun to lift the cove out of shadow. Walked up onto the beach then, strolled aimlessly across the hillside. The community’s remains might have been a thousand years old for all that was left of them. There were depressions to show where the houses and root cellars had been, the overgrown outline of shale foundations. Not a board or shard of glass or shingle otherwise, all of it scavenged or rotted or blown to hell and gone. He tried to imagine the buildings in their places, tried to unearth the names of the people who’d lived in them. Dominies and Barters and Keepings.