Michael Crummey - Sweetland

Sweetland tried to force his arm free of the pack, felt something pop in there. “Jesus fuck,” he said. He considered cutting the shoulder strap before the adjusting buckle finally came to mind. Once his arm was loose he pushed himself awkwardly upright at the waist. He had to scooch his legs downhill, like the hands ticking on a clock, before he could kneel up and climb to his feet. The back of his head pulsing where he’d smacked it. He tried to guess by the sun how long he’d been out, though it hadn’t moved perceptibly from where he remembered it. A few seconds maybe, minutes at most. He hefted his pack, readjusted the strap. Feeling like an idiot.

Ten days he’d have to camp out here in the woods, before the final few residents — Loveless and Clara and Pilgrim, the Priddles, Rita Verge — left on the last ferry run and the place was officially erased from the map. Sweetland’s ass was soaking wet. The raw patch on his neck stinging, his head and his shoulder throbbing. He supposed he could get himself killed out here in the meantime and no one would ever find the body. And wouldn’t that be a funny end to it all.

He’d thought there would be some kind of send-off to end it, a gathering in the final days at the Fisherman’s Hall where the residents would wake the cove before they left en masse on the ferry. Speeches and a few songs and maudlin reminiscence. A chance to drink the island under before surrendering it for good.

But the place emptied out in morose dribs and drabs. Most residents were gone before last winter had settled in. Everyone with school-aged children left by the Labour Day weekend, to enrol their kids elsewhere. The ring of houses growing darker and darker on his way back in the arm from his evening walks as the community was abandoned. Once or twice he fancied he saw a light winking in Queenie’s window as he came up the path, that phantom glow like an itch in an amputated limb. He remembered Jesse claiming to have seen the light just after Queenie died and he felt like a sentimental fool to be suffering the same delusion.

You needs to give your head a goddamn good shake, Duke told him when he reported the peculiar phenomenon.

Glad and Alice Vatcher and all their animals shipped out by the end of September and they took Sara Loveless’s cow with them. Alice ran the only convenience store on the island and there was nowhere to buy milk or flour or salt beef or liquor after that. Once a month Sweetland or Duke or Clara made a trip across to Burgeo while the weather held in the fall, with half a dozen grocery lists and a wad of cash. But there were months before the spring took hold when the crossing was too risky in an open boat and only what came in on the ferry kept them fed. Loveless seemed to persist solely on candy bars and potato chips from the ferry’s canteen, emptying the shelves of Big Turks and Milky Ways and Hickory Sticks every time the ship docked at the wharf.

You’re not feeding that junk to your little dog, are you? Sweetland asked.

He looks after hisself up in the woods.

Jesus, Loveless. That’s a fucken lapdog you got.

He don’t go hungry, Loveless said, never you mind.

Sweetland took to setting bits of salt meat gristle or the leavings after he cleaned his rabbits where he thought the dog might find them, though he expected he was only feeding gulls and rats in the end. Which was what the island was about to be left to.

It was a miserable winter and one household after another packed up and stacked their worldly possessions on the government wharf, ATVs and suitcases and boxes of dishes, waiting for the ferry crew to winch it all aboard, motorboats and washing machines and table saws. Shaking hands and hugging the fewer and fewer left behind. It was like watching dirty water drain from a tub. Sweetland never went down to the dock to see them off, though he could see it all from his kitchen window. The leavers invariably stood at the ferry rail to stare back into the cove and he raised his hand to wave an invisible goodbye just before they slipped out of sight.

He fashioned a lean- to on a ledge the size of a double bed, made himself a thickly needled bunk of spruce branches. It was too late in the afternoon to consider going back for the food pack and the headache he’d given himself when he fell was too fierce to face the hike regardless. He allowed himself a small fire before the dark settled in, laying it against the mossy rock face overhanging the ledge to reflect the heat into the shelter. He hung his soaking pants and jacket from the lean-to’s frame to dry. Lay out in the warmth, grateful to be off his feet.

The fire went out as he slept and he woke stiff and chilled. He reached to pull the blanket over his shoulders before he realized where he was. It was nearly dark in the valley, though he could still see a strip of blue sky above his lean-to. A single star just coming clear in the deepening evening. The ache in his head reduced to a sullen discomfort, as if he was wearing a helmet two sizes too small. He ate a cake of sweet-bread and a sliver of bottled rabbit out of his pack and washed it down with half a jar of water.

He thought of his boat again, abandoned and still travelling out there in the waning light. Years ago, he’d spotted a fishing boat from the lighthouse on a wet afternoon, an empty thirty-footer, the outboard locked in low gear. Radioed in the call letters to the Coast Guard, then phoned over to Duke Fewer to drive out and retrieve it. He followed its progress with the binoculars as it chugged past the island, two or three miles offshore. Saw Duke’s vessel motoring toward it, steadily closing the distance, corralling the empty boat and turning for home with it tied to the stern.

Sweetland had known as soon as he spotted the boat there was no reason to hurry. Duke found a few dozen cod in a plastic fish box and a lifejacket under the thwart. A pair of cotton gloves on the decking near the outboard. It was registered out of Miquelon where the French were still allowed to fish for cod, and they learned after the fact the man had been hand-lining on his own. It was anyone’s guess what had happened to send him into the sea and the body was never found. Another absence without fences or edges or boundaries. Just the boat by its eerie lonesome on the ocean’s swell.

No one watched from the lighthouses anymore. And even if someone had come across Sweetland’s boat by now, there’d be nothing in the way of organized searchers before morning and no urgency to the looking. He’d be given up for lost before the first rescue vessel turned out.

It was difficult to say, looking back, when he’d made up his mind to stay. He didn’t announce or discuss it, barely acknowledged the notion in his own head. Simply carried on with his life like it was just another summer, hauling up his seaweed and planting his garden, cutting and stockpiling firewood. People dismissed the activity as simple bloody-mindedness. Sweetland eating against his end.

As well as his own, Sweetland planted the old garden at the keeper’s house, driving out to tend it through July and August, weeding and watering and picking the cabbage bugs off by hand. It wasn’t a practical spot for a second garden, but it offered an escape from the draining misery in the cove. And saved having to explain himself to everyone and their dog.

Less than a dozen people were still resident on the island at the beginning of July. Pilgrim came up to the house occasionally to sit an hour with the radio, to report on the latest plans to move into St. John’s. Their departure date kept being pushed ahead while Clara tried to arrange a spot for Pilgrim in some kind of assisted living facility.

Assisted living? Sweetland said.