Michael Crummey - Sweetland

“We got about thirty feet of slack to work with,” Barry said.

“Tie on the end so we don’t lose the works.”

The surf surge came up as high as Sweetland’s chest and the fierce cold of it slapped the breath from his lungs. Jesse’s body rolling in the same swell, his hair wet and plastered to his dead face. Sweetland pitched the grapple toward him underhanded as the sea receded and he came up short. He hauled the grapple in and pitched and fell short a second and a third time between the surges.

“I needs both hands,” he said.

“Jesus, Mose.”

“Grab my jacket,” he said, and he slipped his arm free of the ladder.

Barry braced his knees under the metal rails on both sides and twisted the neck of Sweetland’s collar in one hand, held fast to a rung with the other. Sweetland leaned out as far as he could against that halter and swung the line two-handed, landing it five or six feet beyond the body. He dragged it back then, hoping to hook the boy’s clothing as it passed over him. The sea coming in above his shoulders, sluicing icy down the back of his coat.

The grapple snagged and let go half a dozen times before he caught something that held. He managed to drag Jesse ten feet along the rocks until the hook came loose and the body floated free. The boy’s defenceless head knocking against the cliffs as the waves rose and fell.

“I needs a second,” Barry shouted and the two men stopped to catch their breath, climbing up a few yards to get Sweetland out of the ocean. He’d lost the feeling in his legs and had trouble lifting his feet to the rungs.

“We’ll never get him up this ladder,” Barry said, “even if you manages to hook him over.”

“I’m not leaving him there.”

“Moses fucken Sweetland,” he said, “I swear to Christ.”

“One more try,” Sweetland insisted. “He’s halfways over to us.”

He gimped back down into the ocean, waited for Barry to get a grip on his collar, and flung the grapple. Finally brought the boy in his ripped and sodden clothing close enough to grab by hand. He turned face on to the ladder, hooking his free arm through a rung. Barry was after him to step up out of the water but he was too exhausted even to answer. The younger man spidered down beside him, reached around his waist to take the weight of the corpse. His face at Sweetland’s ear.

“We got to move up out of this,” he said, shouting against the surf.

Sweetland nodded, breathing heavy. “You got Jesse?”

“I got him. We’re going to take a step up. You ready?”

The ladder was too narrow for them all and it was a slow, awkward climb above the reach of the ocean. Seawater pouring from their clothes as they went. Barry braced the boy’s deadweight between them when they stopped to rest and both men kept their eyes averted from the ruined face, the flesh there shredded and torn, the busted nose misshapen. The left ear shorn from the side of the head.

“We’re never going to make it up this ladder,” Barry said. “We got to tie him on and go for a boat.”

“You go on,” Sweetland said. “I’ll hold him here till you can send someone around.”

“There’s nothing worse can happen to that youngster, Mose.”

Sweetland swung his hand blindly for the rope and grapple where it was dangling below them, lifted it toward Barry. “Tie us on,” he said.

“It’ll be a couple of hours before a boat gets out here.”

Sweetland stared at him over the boy’s mutilated head. “I’ll never make it up those stairs,” he said.

Barry looked away and shook his head. “You miserable cunt,” he said. He swore up at the ladder rising above them. A moment later he hooked the grapple to the rung beside Sweetland’s head and threaded the rope under his arms. “You get a good grip on him there,” he said and he built a cat’s cradle around the two figures and the ladder rails, cursing as he worked. He started up the rungs then, leaving Sweetland with the lost boy in his arms.

“Don’t be too long,” Sweetland called after him.

“I expects you’ll be dead before I gets back,” Barry said.

Sweetland glanced down at Jesse, at the pale coins of scalp showing through on the double crown of his head. “I don’t doubt but I will be,” he said.

HE BROUGHT THE BOAT AROUND to the lee side of Sweetland, to the alcove below Music House. The noise of the engine coming along the rock face setting the gannets to wing over the headlands, the sky above him like a snow globe after it’s shaken — a raucous swirl of white. He coasted alongside a ledge of granite that sloped into the ocean, turned from the wheel to toss his food pack above the waterline, and then stared over the gunwale to see how much draft he had to work with.

He brought her around a second time along the echoing cliffs, reversing the engine to make the sharp U-turn in the bowl of the alcove. It was the only spot outside Chance Cove that a body could get onto the island, but it was never any practical use as a landfall. Sweetland throttled the motor low and set the tiller level, crouched on the gunwale as she crawled by the ledge, so close to the slab that the fibreglass scraped the rock below. He lifted his legs out over the side, letting the gunwale slide under his hand as he found his feet. Leaned into the stern as it passed, shoving the vessel into open ocean, and she putt-putted toward the horizon. She had enough gas to make it as far as St. Pierre or into open ocean somewhere beyond the Burin if the wheel kept steady and no one intercepted her in the meantime. He stood watching until the boat had all but disappeared. Thinking it was a mistake to have let her go.

There was a steep grassy climb up from the water, and he stashed the food pack out of sight among the rocks, planning to come back for it once he’d settled on a site. Above that first rise he walked half an hour across a swale crowded with petrel burrows, toward the valley’s climb where the ground turned suddenly marshy and wet. He could hear the brook running down from the top of the island, though it was impossible to see it under the maze of alder and larch and silvery deadfall that clogged the valley’s heart. You could drag a trawler into that mess and no one would ever guess it was there.

He turned to look back the way he’d come. The ocean out there flat calm, blue as new denim. Already there was no sign of his boat and he tried to put it from his mind. Looked up the gnarly length of the valley. He could see the peak of the Priddles’ cabin three-quarters of the way up the rise, just where the trees began to thin out. The brothers were there, he knew, come to the island for one last blowout before the final ferry, and he wanted to keep well below that height. He tried to fix on a landmark, but there was nothing particular or distinguishable to shoot for. Everything above him disappeared as soon as he started picking his way into the tangle regardless, and he made his way blindly, stepping over deadfall logs, the bog sucking at his boots.

He had a hatchet to hack through the worst of it, his pack and jacket and pants snagging on brittle fingers of bush as he pushed through. He tripped and scraped his neck raw on a claw of tuckamore. Lost his footing and fell backwards onto his pack, his crown clipping hard off a rock.

He was facing down the slope when he came to and he tried desperately to sit up, then to turn over, lay trapped there like a turtle on its shell, winded and panicky, blood pooling in his head. Blue sky beyond the angry criss-cross of branches above him.

He hadn’t thought any of this through clearly enough.