Michael Crummey - Sweetland

Whoever cleaned out the fridge had put the kitchen to rights, his jacket hung up and the can of tuna gone, the drainboard placed under the sink. The countertops clear but for his laptop and he was surprised to see it there. He’d paid a lot of money for the thing, almost enough for a wood stove or a second-hand outboard. Only Jesse could have talked him into the ridiculous extravagance. A body could probably get seven or eight hundred for it in the Buy & Sell . But no one wanted to mess with a dead man’s belongings, it seemed.

He opened the lid and held the power button down, waited for the machine to boot up. There was still a fair charge in the battery and the browser automatically tried to open his poker home page. No network available , it informed him.

“No shit, Sherlock,” he said. And then made a mental note to stop talking aloud to himself.

Sweetland had gone to Jesse’s Facebook page months after the boy died. A flutter in his chest when it occurred to him it would still be there, available to anyone who cared to look. He didn’t know what he expected to find, some scrap of the youngster clinging among the profile pics and Titanic bric-a-brac and pro wrestling video clips. There were plenty of postings on the newsfeed, but there was nothing recent on his wall. The last messages were all from around the time they lost him, youngsters from the school writing in to say how much they were going to miss him. Small remembrances from Sandra Coffin and a handful of others who’d left Chance Cove long ago. It struck Sweetland how they were all addressed directly to the dead boy. As if the world he created on Facebook was eternal, a kind of afterlife where he could read the messages himself. One from Jesse’s mother that Sweetland couldn’t bring himself to finish. For a while, he came back to the page every few days, as though something might have changed in the meantime. Jesse’s status or his profile picture. A message from Jesse himself appearing from the other world. There was something crudely voyeuristic in the practice and Sweetland was mortified to have given in to the impulse. Eventually he forced himself to keep clear of it.

He powered off the laptop and sat a long time at the kitchen table. He stared out at the abandoned buildings, at the empty cove behind the breakwater, thinking not much. He considered putting water on to boil for tea or to scrub the ten days of dirt off himself, but he didn’t move from his seat. The afternoon’s light dwindling steady and he watched it go, a rattling brook of panic running through him. There was an eeriness to the kitchen’s silence that he couldn’t dismiss, a subtle absence it took him hours to place — the hum of the fridge that had underlined the quiet in the house for decades. He shook his head when he finally recognized it. “You’re a goddamned idiot,” he said and his own voice startled him. He was up out of the chair to start a fire then, to light a candle, to find something to eat.

He walked out through the hall on his way to bed. Not even the second-hand glim of the light over the shed coming through the windows to lessen the pitch. The space made strange by that blackness and he kept a hand to the walls to find his way.

It was a doll’s house Sweetland lived in, built for the dimensions of people stunted by a diet of salt fish and root vegetables. The upstairs hallway as snug to his shoulders as a coffin. He took a last piss in the bathroom, which had been Uncle Clar’s bedroom when he was a youngster, long before the electric lights and the indoor plumbing. Sweetland’s mother slept with Ruthie in those days, Sweetland and Hollis across the hall in a room about the size of their bed. On the coldest nights of the winter his mother would send him or Hollis to sleep with the old man, for the extra warmth. Uncle Clar in his long underwear turning toward the wall as Sweetland crawled under the covers, an oven-heated beach rock at their feet. Night now, the old man said, God keep thee.

It never struck him, the strangeness of that archaic word. Thee . It was Effie pointed it out to him. A petrified holdout from another age. He’d known a handful of elderly Sweetlanders who made use of it when he was a youngster, as if it was something a person grew into as they aged.

Clar was ninety-three when he died, a wizened leprechaun of a man by then, his toothless face caved in by age, a hump on his back from an accident in Sydney mines when he was in his thirties. He was too crippled to be any use on the water. He had a wood-shop out back where he spent every day but Sunday, building chairs and trunks, boats and window frames. Though Sweetland could only remember him puttering mindlessly in latter days, muttering to himself or snatch-singing under his breath.

The portrait of Clar beside the front door used to hang in the parlour before he died. Who’s that good-looking young fellow in that picture? Sweetland’s mother would ask the doddering old man.

That’s me, Uncle Clar said.

Go on, she told him. You was never that handsome.

That’s me , he insisted, indignant.

They’d never really gotten along, his mother and Uncle Clar. They bickered as a matter of course and cursed one another on occasion, though it was so ritualized it seemed nearly affectionate. Blood of a bitch of a woman, Uncle Clar would say in the heat of their arguments and he would turn to Sweetland, looking for confirmation.

Sweetland lived in the house alone after his mother passed, and again after he moved back from the keeper’s house when the light was automated. He slept in what had been her bedroom, the same floral-patterned wallpaper, the same grey battleship linoleum on the floor. A double bed with a wooden trunk at the foot, a highboy. The door caught on the bed frame before it could swing all the way open and he had to turn inside the room and close the door in order to lie down. It was a delicate dance step he’d watched his mother perform a thousand times before it became his own, and he managed it blind now, without thinking. Stripped out of his clothes, hung them on the wall hooks beside the bed. Crawled under the covers and fell immediately asleep.

He didn’t dream or stir through the night. He could tell it was late when he woke by the way the light fell in the room, and he hung his legs over the side of the bed, pushed himself upright. There were a few habitual moments of vertigo and he waited until they passed, then walked down the hall in his socks and undershirt to the bathroom.

He caught a glimpse of himself as he passed the mirror and started. Turned to the glass, his hands braced against the sink. He looked like the psycho in one of the slasher flicks the Priddle boys rented from Vatcher’s store in their teens. A grizzle of white beard on the uninjured side of his face. His hair shaved close to the scalp. Sweetland raised a hand from the sink, swiped it across the quarter inch of fierce white bristle. His head like something you’d use to scrub a toilet. “Jesus in the Garden,” he whispered.

He’d stopped into the barbershop the day before Duke left for good in July, took a seat in the leather chair. He threw a ten-dollar bill up on the counter. Let’s see what you got, he’d said.

What are you talking about now, Duke asked.

Last chance at a paying customer.

Duke held his arm out to show off the extravagant tremor he’d been living with for years. You don’t want this hand at your head with scissors, Mose.

Use the clippers.

For Christ’s sake.

Is this a barbershop or not?

I got everything packed away.

Sweetland got down from the chair to poke through the cupboard below the counter. It was all stacked there neatly, where it had been since the shop opened. Three nylon capes and a handful of scissors and combs. Two straight razors, a mug holding a pristine shaving brush. The clipper still in its box. Sweetland slid the machine free and plugged it in. He shook out one of the nylon capes and sat back in the chair, securing the Velcro around his neck.