Michael Crummey - Sweetland

You’re making that up, Sweetland had said.

Am not.

There’s no such word as hellish pad .

Helipad, Jesse had repeated. Nothing insulted the youngster more than inaccuracy or invention. With the one notable exception, he was literal to a fault. He spelled helipad for Sweetland, to underline the word’s veracity. He’d always been a champion speller. Near-photographic memory, according to the Reverend. A generation ago, the Reverend said, they’d have called the boy an idiot savant.

I’d say that’s about half right, Sweetland said.

Sweetland still called it the hellish pad, over the boy’s objections. He never missed a chance to lampoon Jesse’s childish seriousness. He had hoped to goad the youngster off the beaten track of his thoughts, to make him look at the world from a slightly crooked angle, though it made no appreciable difference and he kept at it now mostly out of habit. For his part, Jesse seemed to accept Sweetland’s mockery as a fact of life, granting him special dispensation to behave like a fool, a kind of court jester in the youngster’s kingdom of the exact.

Beyond the pad was a decommissioned winchhouse, and leading down from the winch to the water was a higgledy series of ladders screwed into the cliffs, two hundred feet in length, angled awkwardly to follow the contours of the rock face. The Fever Rocks were the access point for the lightkeeper long before choppers were an option, supplies and materials hauled up by winch from boats below. The ladders were still maintained for emergency access to the light when the weather was too foggy for a helicopter to fly. They looked like something designed and built by Dr. Seuss. Generations of island youngsters had rowed out here to climb it on a dare. Sweetland had managed it once, he and Duke and Pilgrim drunk and in the dark. The sight of it still made him feel slightly nauseous, almost sixty years on.

The path led into a section of scrub forest and passed above a ravine scored into the island’s back, and from there on to its southern tip. It was how the keeper used to travel to the south-end light above the Mackerel Cliffs, a five-hour trip by horse and cart back in the day. Sweetland managed it in just over an hour on the quad. The path was rarely used anymore and was nearly overgrown, the spruce crowding in. They had to walk single file, Jesse out in front, the wet branches soaking their sleeves as they went.

Clara had gotten the boy a haircut while they were in St. John’s, cropped close at the nape and sides. Sweetland could see the seashell whorls of the double crown at the back of Jesse’s head. A lick of hair sticking up between them, a rogue pook that had gone its own way since he’d had enough hair to comb. Before Jesse learned to walk, Sweetland used to twirl it around his finger to make it stand straight, like a headdress feather in the cowboy movies he’d watched with Duke in the old Toronto theatres. Mommy’s little Indian, he called him.

The youngster couldn’t stand anyone touching his head now and Sweetland thought he might be to blame for that. He could just resist the urge to reach out and smooth the lick down.

The slips were tailed at the base of spruce trees where the runs crossed the trail. They were tied to an alder standard he’d pushed firm into the ground, the silver noose snugged around with brush. A rabbit lying in the first snare and Sweetland knelt to help Jesse work the wire free of the neck, tying a length of string around the paws so the boy could carry the animal across his shoulder.

They walked nearly two hours before they stopped for lunch, settling in a clearing beyond the valley. The peak of the Priddles’ cabin half-hidden among the spruce and birch below. The racket of gannets nesting on the Music House headlands drifting up to them where they sat. They had two brace for their efforts and Sweetland laid the rabbits in the grass at their feet, the animals fat and sleek and bug-eyed. He dug out the sandwiches and they ate in silence a few minutes. When Jesse finished his lunch he sang for a while, belting out the details of some bygone disaster, though it wasn’t a performance. The audience was irrelevant, Sweetland knew. The song part of a private landscape that surfaced now and then into the wider world.

Sweetland rooted in the bag after a tin of peaches, which was the only fruit the boy would eat. Only from a can, only Del Monte. Sweetland had a cupboardful at the house. He opened the top, passing it across when the song was done.

“Pop says it’s just you and Loveless wants to stay now,” Jesse said.

Sweetland stared across at the boy, who was focused on the tin, shovelling the fruit into his mouth with a plastic spoon. He hadn’t once mentioned that whole business before now. From what Sweetland could tell, the issue of resettlement had never registered in the peculiar peaks and valleys of the youngster’s mind, though it had been the main topic of conversation in the cove for years now. “Will I have to go?” Jesse asked. He was still staring into the tin as he ate.

“Not as long as I’m around,” Sweetland said.

The boy scooped the last of the fruit into his mouth, tipped up the tin to drink the juice. It was impossible to say what he thought of it all, one way or the other.

“So,” Sweetland said. “You just come back on the ferry yesterday, was it?”

“Mom took me to see the doctor into St. John’s,” he said. Like this was news to Sweetland.

“And what did the doctor have to say to you? You’re retarded, is it? Antisocial? Codependent? Mentally unstable? Psychopathic?”

“No,” the boy said.

“Well what are you going all the way into St. John’s to see him for then?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know.”

“Your mother’s the one should be seeing the doctor.”

“She sees him too,” Jesse said. “She goes in after me.”

Sweetland smiled. “Fat lot of fucken good it’s doing her, hey?”

“I don’t know,” the youngster said.

He’d gone too far, Sweetland thought and he said, “Never mind me.” By way of apology.

“I don’t mind.”

He let out a breath of air, stared away down the valley. Even Sweetland thought it was a lonely life for the youngster sometimes, stuck in that head of his. Surrounded by geriatrics and imaginary friends. And as if on cue, Jesse said, “Hollis went into St. John’s to see a doctor one time.”

“Where’d you hear the like of that?”

“Hollis told me.”

Sweetland’s brother, the boy was talking about. Dead fifty years or more. “Is that a fact,” Sweetland said.

“He was into St. John’s most of the winter one year.”

Sweetland got to his feet and busied himself picking up their bit of material, packing it away. “Finish up now,” he said. A feeling like bugs crawling on his skin he could only get clear of by moving. “We got better things to do than sit around here jawing.”

They cleaned the rabbits at Sweetland’s kitchen sink. Jesse on a chair to hold them aloft by the hind paws as Sweetland flicked a blade through the fur above the ankles, peeled the coats down the length of the carcasses an inch at a time. Flesh the colour of mahogany and grained like wood. The mottled guts slopping into the stainless steel bowl of the sink.

The phone rang and Jesse jumped off the chair to answer but Sweetland stopped him, afraid it might be Clara. “You wash up,” he said. “It’s time you got home to your supper.”

The boy rinsed his hands under the tap as the phone jangled on awhile. He said, “Are you going out after wood tomorrow?”

“Might be.”

“I could help.”

“Take one of these down to your pop,” Sweetland said, and he slipped a naked carcass into a clear plastic bag. Jesse waiting with his freshly washed hands held out, as if he was about to receive a ceremonial sword.