Michael Crummey - Sweetland

“Might do.”

Loveless chewed his pipe back and forth awhile. “You’ll just have to leave all the wood behind come this time next year, won’t you?”

“Kiss my arse,” Sweetland said, and he stepped down into the boat, started up the engine. He hated to see Loveless making sense. It made him think the world was coming apart at the seams altogether.

He had no heart for the work and didn’t even bother going all the way across to the mainland, stopping in at Little Sweetland again to wander around the abandoned cove, feeling idle and solitary and anxious. He went by the cabins and shaded his eyes to look in the windows. Metal bunks and Formica tables, an incongruous flat-screen television in both. Gas generators stored beside top-of-the-line wood stoves. Someone working out in Fort McMurray or at the nickel mine in Labrador, he’d heard. Money to burn and two weeks a year to get away from it all. Others said it was eccentrics from the Canadian mainland or the States, people who wouldn’t show their faces years at a time. Just enjoyed being able to say they owned an exotic bit of property in a corner of the world no one else had heard of. Sweetland had half a mind to set a match to the buildings, out of spite.

He walked up onto the barrens, toward the headlands where he and Duke had spotted the bison. The path across the swale had all but disappeared and he had to force a trail through the tuckamore. He stood at the edge of the cliffs, the wind up there rifling through his clothes. He could make out Sweetland in the distance, the long hump of it on the horizon. Even in the full light of day, he could see the intermittent flash of the light on Burnt Head, warning away traffic.

Late afternoon by the time he came back down to the wharf and he started for home, travelling slow. There was a low bank of fog sitting on the horizon, the north end of Sweetland already buried, Burnt Head swallowed in the mist. He took the long way around, past the south-end light on the Mackerel Cliffs where the day was still bright and cloudless. He steamed in close to the island, the rocks to starboard so sheer they looked like something CGId in a Hollywood studio. The sky above the boat confettied with wheeling seabirds, turrs and murrs and puffins and tinkers, their endless chatter echoing off the cliff face. The acrid stink of shit like a single fiddle note that held and held and held in the air. Every ledge up there occupied by birds who nested all summer on the bare rock.

A bald eagle drifted out of the lowering sun, making a lazy sweep above the headlands, and Sweetland watched the entire colony leave their ledges in a rush as the predatory shadow passed over. It was like a waterfall coming down the rock face, thousands of birds in a sudden raucous descent that seemed almost enough to swamp the boat as they clattered past. The cliffs above him suddenly bare.

He came around at the government wharf and docked in the space vacated by the ferry. Glanced up the hill as he tied on and hauled the boat back out on the collar. The hills that loomed over the cove muffled in the crawling sheets of fog.

He’d expected to find the place quiet, everyone inside at their supper, but there was an eerie busyness about the harbour. People standing in small clusters outside their houses, men gassing up ATVs. Everyone strangely focused, like passengers preparing for an evacuation order.

Loveless came down the path from the Fisherman’s Hall in a slovenly run, trying desperately to keep his feet. “He’ve gone missing,” Loveless shouted. “We can’t find him.”

“Who?” Sweetland said. “The little dog?”

“No,” Loveless said, and then he looked around in a panic, noticing for the first time that the dog wasn’t with him.

“Loveless, who the hell is it gone missing?”

“Jesse,” he said. “He’ve run off somewhere. There’s no one can find him.”

Sweetland went straight to Pilgrim’s house with Loveless on his heels. Pilgrim sitting in a rocker at the window. “We told Jesse you was signed up for the package,” he said.

“At the meeting?”

“We thought it might be better in a crowd. Everyone going together, you know. Something he could be part of.”

“That was Clara’s idea, was it?”

“The Reverend’s.”

“Well fuck,” Sweetland said. “Why’d you let him leave the hall in that state?”

“He wanted to hear it from yourself you was signed on. He was only going over to your place.”

“You didn’t hear my boat going out?”

Pilgrim lifted his face to the ceiling. “I spose so,” he said. “Yes, I heard it.”

“Well who the hell did you think it was? Loveless?”

“I never put it together.”

Sweetland set both hands on his hips.

“He wouldn’t upset, Mose, not like he gets. He was calm as could be. Even the Reverend thought he was fine.” Pilgrim shook his head. “Clara figured it might be good for him to talk to you on his own.”

“Where’s Clara and the Reverend now?”

“Up on the mash, looking for him.”

Sweetland threw a jar of water and a few tins of peaches and a flashlight into his canvas pack at the house, drove his ATV out the back of his property. He went up as far as the King’s Seat, stopped there to look down over the cove. The barrens east and west shrouded in fog. It seemed a big island all of a sudden. He headed for the keeper’s house, stopping to chat with the searchers he passed on the way, people walking in twos and threes along the trails.

There was no real panic among them. Everyone in the cove had taken a turn in an afternoon search party when Jesse had gone missing over the years. They’d spent the better part of a day tracking him down one October Sunday. Duke Fewer found him just before dark, singing “The Cliffs of Baccalieu” in the crawl space that held the cistern beneath the keeper’s house. Dry and content there. Sweetland reminded himself of that incident as he drove over the mash. But it didn’t offer him a moment’s comfort.

He pulled up beside two other quads parked below the keeper’s house. The Priddles’ machines. He touched a hand to the engine covers, but they were cold. Called out a hello that died in the fog and he did a turn around the house. Peeked into the crawl space, listening to the dank stillness that surrounded the cistern. He went up the steps and forced the front door open, pushing it past the debris that had fallen from the ceiling. An air of galloping neglect about the empty shell. Broken glass and sagging plaster and bare studs where the cupboards and sink had been ripped out. He covered his nose and mouth against the chemical stink of sodden insulation, the pestilential hum of rot. No one had been inside that space in a long time but he walked through anyway, to be sure.

He took the pack off the quad on his way past, headed along the trail where he set his snares. Heard someone coming up out of the valley, called hello. The Priddles came into view then and he waited as they walked the fifty yards up to him.

“Any sign down there?”

“Not a thing,” Barry said.

Sweetland looked over the trees in the valley. “He could be anywhere out here if he don’t want to be found.”

“Coming on duckish now,” Keith said. “He’ll get spooked when dark settles in.”

“He’ll be looking for us now the once,” Barry said. “Don’t worry.”

“I’ll carry on down. He was wanting to talk to me earlier on. Might be he’ll show himself if he hears me calling.”

“Everyone’s meeting back at the hall if there’s no news by ten,” Keith said. “Just to do a head count. Figure next steps.”

“He’ll be home before then,” Barry said.

Sweetland made his way as far down as the Priddles’ cabin in the valley as darkness fell. The brothers had been by there not an hour before, but it was possible Jesse had snuck in between times, with night coming on. Curled up in the loft. Sweetland stood the cabin door open and waited there a second. “Jesse,” he said. Nearly pitch inside and he threw the beam of his flashlight across the furniture, the ladder to the loft under the eaves. Out on the water he could hear a boat inching along the shoreline. Glad Vatcher swinging a searchlight up on the hills, the beam edgeless and diffuse in the fog. He stepped into the room and stood in the black quiet. Trying not to think the boy was lying dead somewhere in the woods.