Michael Crummey - Sweetland

After he’d scoured the sink, Sweetland went out the back porch door and walked around to the front of the house. Looked east and west like someone deciding on a route before he ambled down through the cove. He went by Pilgrim’s house, but he didn’t so much as glance in the windows, scurried past with his eyes averted.

Sweetland carried on to Duke Fewer’s barbershop, a one-room shed next to Duke’s house. There was a barber’s chair as old as Buckley’s goat screwed into the bare plywood floor. One wall mostly mirror, the other pasted with faded photos and newspaper clippings yellowed with age. A buzzing neon light fixture, a coat stand, a sink in one corner, a wood stove opposite to heat the room through the winters. Two wooden chairs along the wall below the photos, and, on a low table between them, a chessboard beside a stack of magazines —National Geographic and Time, Sports Illustrated and Maclean’s —that dated from thirty years before and hadn’t been touched in nearly that long.

Duke was sitting in the barber’s chair with the three-day-old paper arrived on yesterday’s ferry. His praying mantis legs crossed in a fashion that seemed barely human. Didn’t glance up when Sweetland came in and looked to have dozed off with his heavy-lidded eyes half-open, but for the habitual tremor in his hands that made the paper shake. “Be done in a minute,” he said finally, and Sweetland took a seat, stared down at the game in progress on the chessboard.

Duke bought the barber’s chair from a second-hand building supply in St. John’s when the cod stocks collapsed and the government ended the inshore fishery in ’92. Sweetland had tried to talk him out of it. To begin with, there were only ninety-odd people living in Chance Cove in those days and every one of them got their hair cut in Reet Verge’s kitchen, but for Ned Priddle who was bald as a cue ball. And Duke had never cut hair in his life, regardless. Man nor woman was willing to sit in that chair and let Duke at them with the clippers.

Duke rustled the paper. “Pilgrim was by earlier. Said you and Jesse was out checking slips.”

“Got a couple brace on the backside, above the Priddles’ cabin.”

“Pilgrim says Clara wouldn’t very happy about it.”

“I don’t imagine,” Sweetland said quietly.

Duke had a straight razor and a shaving cup and offered shaves for a dollar fifty. As far as Sweetland knew, he had no takers on that offer either. A tax write-off, Duke called it when he put out his shingle. Though it was anyone’s guess what exactly he was writing off. Twenty-odd years he’d been spending six afternoons a week out here, sweeping the floor and reading the paper, watching passersby through the tiny window beside the door. His ex-wife had abandoned the island twenty-five years ago, his children all shifted off to one part of the mainland or other. He gossiped with the men who dropped in for a cup of tea, a gander at the chessboard, moving a piece here or there. Duke played the white and never lost.

“Who’ve been at this board?” Sweetland asked.

Duke craned to look over his shoulder. “There’s been seven or eight had a go since you was here last.”

“You didn’t let Loveless touch anything.”

“You’re in check there,” he said and he shook out the paper. “If you hadn’t noticed.”

“Loveless still thinks it’s a goddamn checkerboard.”

“He means well.”

Sweetland grunted. “So does the fucken government.”

Duke nodded, which was as close as he came to laughter. “Didn’t see you at the meeting yesterday.”

“You was taking attendance, was you?”

“Just Loveless and yourself and Queenie missing. Hard not to notice. Hayward thinks you and Queenie must be having a little something on the side.”

“He’s not worried about Loveless?”

“Hayward’s paranoid,” Duke said. “He’s not an idiot.”

“Well,” Sweetland said, as if there was some doubt about the fact.

“You heard he signed up for the package after all,” Duke said.

“I heard.”

“Just you and Loveless, then.”

He glanced over at the man in the chair. Sweetland knew where he stood on the matter, but Duke Fewer was the only person on the island who’d never once tried to sway him, one way or the other. The barbershop felt like the only safe place he had left. “Don’t start,” he said.

“Makes no odds to me. I’m leaving, government package or no. Laura’s crowd have got a room waiting for me.”

“Jesus,” Sweetland said. “Who’s going to take over the barbershop once you goes?”

“You can kiss my arse,” Duke said.

“A rake like you got neither arse to kiss.”

Sweetland moved his king out of check and Duke folded the paper, climbed down from the chair. An elaborate process, uncrossing those long limbs, setting them upright on the floor. He walked across to the board and lifted his rook, setting it down shakily. “Check,” he said.

Sweetland sat back in disgust. “Fucken Loveless,” he said.

Duke eased into the empty chair across from Sweetland. Both men stared at the board, like they expected one of those wooden figures to move of its own accord and were determined not to miss it. Duke cleared his throat. “There’s some saying they’ll burn you out if you don’t take that package.”

“Some who?”

“It was just talk.”

“You heard someone saying they was going to burn me out?”

“Not direct, like,” Duke said. “There’s people have heard it spoke of.”

“Well, they can all kiss my arse.”

“People are getting worked up, Mose. A hundred grand is a lot of money.”

Sweetland stared at Duke, trying to read what he was saying exactly. If there was a message from someone being passed on second-hand. He said, “You think I should take the package?”

Duke raised his eyes. “You remember what come of the last bit of advice I offered you.” He let out a breath of air and gestured toward the board. “You got a move or you just going to stare?”

Sweetland stood up. “Needs to have a think on it,” he said.

“I got plenty of newspaper to get through yet.”

Sweetland turned back at the door. “Don’t you let Loveless touch that board,” he said.

ONCE HE’D TIED ON TO THE LIFEBOAT, it occurred to Sweetland he had about a fifty-fifty chance of finding his way in through the fog. He stayed clear of the horn on Burnt Head and jogged west by the compass once he guessed he was well beyond the Fever Rocks. The engine echoing faintly back to him now and then from the invisible cliffs to starboard.

He was crawling, staring through the murk for any sign of land. Even the lifeboat was barely visible when he looked behind.

He carried on, keeping to deep water, trying to estimate how far along the island he’d travelled. He passed a depression in the steep face of the cliffs, a hollow space in the engine’s echo coming back to him that he hoped was Lunin Cove. He cut the engine and put out a jigger, letting the line run until it touched bottom eighteen fathom down. He was over the Offer Ledge which meant three miles to the breakwater. He travelled blind another half an hour, the fog thickening as he stared. He stopped the engine and dropped the jigger and it came up on the Tom Cod Rocks less than a fathom underneath him.

The first hint of it came through the white mist as he was bringing up the line — a low droning that seemed as placeless and dispersed as the fog. The men in the lifeboat standing when they heard it, looking around aimlessly. Sweetland sailed west a ways, stopped again. A voice this time, ahead and well off his port side. He made three or four more stops before he recognized it, Tennessee Ernie Ford singing “The Old Rugged Cross” from the church steeple. There was never a bell up there, just a PA system that played hymns out over Chance Cove for an hour before Sunday-morning services. You could hear it miles away on the water on a clear day, and even now Ford’s industrial-strength baritone managed to carry through the heavy drapes of fog to where they inched along the shore. “Softly and Tenderly.” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” “Whispering Hope.” Sweetland humming along even when the engine drowned out the sound of the recording.