Michael Crummey - Sweetland

Sweetland could see Pilgrim sitting at his own kitchen table as he walked by. He went around to the back door and poked his head inside.

Is herself about? he asked.

She’s not up yet, Pilgrim said. I’ll get you a cup of tea.

No, no, Sweetland said. He took the envelope from his back pocket and laid it on the table. I’m just heading down to the wharf. Thought I might go poach a few cod.

What’s that? Pilgrim asked.

What’s what?

Whatever you put on the table there.

That’s for Clara, Sweetland said.

You should have supper with us tonight, Pilgrim said. You’re spending too much time alone up there.

If I’m back in time, Sweetland said, I’ll come down.

He went out the door and stopped to let Diesel nuzzle his crotch and whip her tail against his legs as she squirmed. Leaned down to whisper into her ears. Bye, Diesel, he said.

Loveless was at the wharf when he got there, looking harried and distracted.

You haven’t seen my dog, have you?

Not today.

The frigger’s been out the whole night.

Sweetland climbed down into the boat, started up the engine.

Loveless walked to the dock’s edge to be heard over the motor. What was it the cop wanted with you when he come out?

He’s still trying to figure who burnt my stage. Untie that rope for me, would you?

Loveless leaned down to the capstan. Have he got any suspects?

He was asking a lot of questions about you.

Loveless took the pipe from his mouth, stood gaping a minute as the boat drifted off the dock.

I told him I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw you.

You’re a miserable cunt, Moses.

Sweetland laughed. I spose I am, he said.

Where is it you’re heading now?

Thought I might go poach a few cod.

What have you got in the bag?

Mind your own goddamn business, Sweetland said. He turned the nose of the boat to open water, sailing out past the breakwater without glancing back.

A MONTH BEFORE HE PLANNED to leave for Toronto with Duke Fewer, Sweetland walked out as far as the north-end lighthouse and borrowed Bob-Sam Lavallee’s horse and cart. He drove it back to Vatcher’s Meadow where he tied the horse to the fence and walked down into the cove. He had his supper at the house with his mother and Effie and Uncle Clar. It was coming on duckish when they were done and Sweetland walked Effie up past the King’s Seat.

What’s this? she asked when she saw the horse and cart.

Thought we might take a little drive, he said.

She wasn’t from Sweetland, Effie Burden. Come over from Fortune to teach at the school. Seventeen and never out from under her father’s roof before she went into St. John’s to do her eight-month teaching certificate. All the teachers on Sweetland were the same, young girls mostly, in their first school. Two dozen youngsters in the one room, staring up at the terrified child at the front. The oldest students were the same age as the teacher, all of them boys who had failed grade 9 once or twice, or left before final exams to fish each spring and were sent back each fall by their mothers. Most of them suffered the time in the classroom just to make a play for the new girl who was away from home and family for the first time. It was a sport to get the teacher on her back up on the mash, or out behind the church. Hardly a one lasted beyond their first year, and there were some who went away with unexpected company, wearing loose clothes to hide the fact during the last months of school. A select few married into the island and stayed on, Effie being the last. Though no one managed to get her small things around her ankles out in the meadow between times, Sweetland could tell you that for a fact.

He was long done with school when Effie arrived. Home from his first stint in Toronto, but away from Chance Cove working the schooner, and he knew her mostly by reputation. Tough as nails, was what he heard. The mouth on her like the edge of a ruler across the knuckles. No one gave her any trouble she couldn’t take the seams out of, no one left school to fish before exams were done. No one so much as laid a finger on her sleeve.

She sat in the church pew behind his mother and Ruthie and Uncle Clar every Sunday and the women got to talking. Effie invited back to the house for Sunday dinner whenever Sweetland was off the schooner. It was design on his mother’s part, he knew, putting the girl in his way. A sensible child with a bit of education, who wasn’t afraid of work. She refused to let Effie help clear the table. Me and Ruthie got hands enough to manage this, she said before leaving them alone with their tea. Uncle Clar dozing on the daybed next the stove, the cat settling on the old man’s chest to bat at the handlebars of his moustache.

Effie never spoke about herself, asking instead about Toronto, about Maple Leaf Gardens and Lake Ontario and Yonge Street, about his work on the Ceciliene Marie . Sitting across from him in her old-lady cardigan and woollen skirt. Tiny set of teeth in her head. They were her baby teeth, she told him, which had never fallen out and the adult set never come in. There was something eerie in the incongruity, and it made her oddly intimidating. Though she sometimes covered her mouth with her hand when she smiled, the only mark of shyness he’d ever seen in her.

It was a surprisingly warm evening for April. They drove out the path to the south-end light, sitting close enough in the seat that their legs touched. There was no moon and the night fell on them so black they couldn’t see more than the vague outline of the horse, the animal walking the familiar path by memory or smell or some other animal instinct. Half an hour along, Effie leaned heavy into his shoulder as they tipped through a rut and she made no effort to move away. She placed her hand on the inside of Sweetland’s thigh. They had never so much as kissed, had never touched one another in any but the most inadvertent way, and the weight of her hand on his leg was making his head ring.

He didn’t speak or glance in her direction, for fear she’d lose her nerve and pull away. They stared into the dark ahead as Effie unbuttoned his fly, Sweetland keeping both hands on the reins. She seemed not to know the first thing about what she was doing, squeezing and tugging like she was trying to milk a goat, and Sweetland came in streams across his knees and the boards at his feet. It was all he could do to sit upright as the spasms coursed through him.

They were both mortified in the aftermath and for a while pretended nothing at all had happened between them. Effie left her hand where it was until Sweetland finally reached down to button his fly. She shifted to one side, taking a handkerchief from her sleeve to wipe at her fingers, and then scrubbed ineffectually at his pant legs.

Sorry, he said.

Shut up, Moses, she said.

THERE WERE NO LIGHTS IN CHANCE COVE after the living cleared out, but there was still fresh water in the pipes, pressure-fed from Lunin Pond up on the mash. It came down from such a height that even the upstairs toilet still flushed.

Someone had been through and emptied the fridge and freezer to spare the house the indignity of flowering rot once the power went off, Clara he assumed that was. He’d lost all his fresh craft and all but two buckets of salt beef tucked away in the pantry. But no one had touched his effects, out of respect or because there was nothing obvious to be done with them. The kitchen cupboards were stacked with dishes and canned goods, the last of Jesse’s hoard of tinned peaches occupying a shelf to themselves. His good clothes hanging in the wardrobe upstairs. Rows of bottled beets and jam on the pantry shelves. The early harvest of spuds still in their bins in the root cellar. The shed just as he left it, the tools in their rows above the workbench, the quad sitting under a tarp in one corner. Two red plastic containers of gasoline beneath the workbench. He hefted them one at a time, to see how much he had to work with — one half-full, the other less so. He shook his head at the stupidity of it, of how little he’d worked out in his head.