Michael Crummey - Sweetland

He used a stick of driftwood to pick through the mound, pushing offal and ruined carcasses left and right. Uncovered the prize beneath the garbage, like something deliberately hidden there, to keep it out of harm’s way. Sweetland reached to grab the tail, as thick around as his calf, hauled it onto a clean patch of beach. It was covered in blood and slime, but the body was untouched by the scavengers. Even the eye still in its socket, staring up at him.

He walked over to the dory beneath its canvas shroud, knelt near the bow and fished under the gunwale for the bailer. Untied it and went to the water’s edge to dip it full. He sluiced the big fish clean, went for more water and turned the creature over to wash down the opposite side. It had been out of the ocean so long it wouldn’t be fit to eat, but he hefted it in both his arms and started up off the beach, stopping now and then to rest along the path to the house. “You fucken cow,” he said.

“Uncle Clar!” he shouted when he was within hailing distance. “You should see this thing! Clar!”

He unlatched the door with his shoulder and worked it open with his elbow, kicked in the door to the kitchen.

“Look at this fucker!” he shouted as he crossed the room, and he bent in close to the framed photograph to present it. “Jesus,” he said. He turned and dropped the fish on the counter, the tail lolling into the sink. He took off his coat and pushed his shirt sleeves to his elbows, rinsed his hands and forearms with cold water from the tap. He opened a cupboard and took down a bottle of rye, poured himself a tumbler.

It was nearly dark in the kitchen and he lit two lamps, added wood to the fire. He stood at the counter, looking down at the magnificent thing. Leaned closer a moment, looking for the stink of rot. Brought his nose near enough he could feel the cold coming off it on his face. Breathed in the clean smell of salt.

He sat at the table with his drink awhile. His face twinned in the black panes of the kitchen window. When he was good and drunk he went to the porch after his splitting knife. He brought a lamp close for the light, worked the point into the throat under the gills, sawing through cartilage. Turned the blade to slit the belly, the sound of the tight skin letting go like a zipper being undone. He leaned his weight forward to take off the head, throwing it into the sink. Reached inside the opened torso for the intestines and stomach, closed his fingers on something solid in there. About the size of a baseball. He stepped back, his knife and bloody hands in the air like a surgeon over an operating table. He glanced across at the photograph, Uncle Clar’s eyes askance, refusing to watch the proceedings. Sweetland reached back into the cavity and closed his hand on the object, pulled it free with the viscera. He picked the stomach clear of the blood and offal. Slit a hole in the membrane and shook the contents into the sink.

“Jesus fuck,” he said.

A rabbit’s decapitated head gazed up out of the basin. The silky ears limp and bedraggled, the black eyes wide and staring back at Sweetland.

“Now, Uncle Clar,” he said. He wiped his filthy forearm across his mouth. “What would thee make of it?”

He went to bed blind drunk, crawling up the last few steps and along the hall to the bedroom, and he dreamt drunkenly of his mother in his arms, of carrying her up the narrow stairs of the house, the steps moving under his feet like an escalator, the landing above them rising further away even as he climbed toward it.

His mother lived to eighty-four and died of congestive heart failure after a long decline. Sweetland had carried her up and down those stairs for weeks before she took to her bed for good. She was almost weightless by then, her head tucked into his shoulder, one hand picking mindlessly at a button on his shirt. She’d baked fresh bread every day while she was able, for the salve and relief of burying her hands in the warm dough. But it had been years since she’d made her last batch. Her fingers so twisted with arthritis they looked like claws of driftwood.

He set her under the sheets at night, sitting beside her as she said her prayers, her hands held childishly over her nose. Before he left her for the night she said, Don’t have me die among strangers, Moses.

Go to sleep now, he said.

When his mother couldn’t leave the bed any longer, Ruth moved back into the room across the hall and Sweetland slept on the daybed in the kitchen. They took turns sitting with her, staring out the window as she slept. Sweetland had never seen his mother in a state of undress and he left the room when Ruthie bathed the woman in the morning. Pacing the upstairs hallway until his sister called him back in to help change the sheets.

The public health nurse came out on the ferry twice a month and she left a stack of adult diapers and medicated ointment for the bedsores on the old woman’s back and buttocks. Are you in any pain? she asked, and his mother shook her head no. The nurse inserted a catheter and gave them instructions on changing the bags and keeping the equipment clean.

Your mother should be in a hospital, she said. You know that.

We can look out to her, Sweetland said.

If the catheter causes an infection, the nurse said, she’ll have to be admitted.

How will we know? Ruth asked.

The nurse touched her nose with one finger. You’ll know, she said.

The Reverend was a regular visitor to the sickroom in those last months. He read the old woman Bible verses and they prayed together before he left. Ruthie stayed with them, but it was another intimacy that was too much for Sweetland. He paced the hall or sat outside while the Reverend ministered to her, their voices through the door a muffle that rarely surfaced into coherence.

I’m some disappointed in the both of them, he heard his mother say, and the Reverend’s voice answered in an indecipherable monotone. Not one grandchild, she said sharply, dismissing whatever platitude he’d offered up. Talking as if Ruth wasn’t sitting next to her in the room. Not one youngster between the two of them, she said.

Uncle Clar sat upright in Sweetland’s head then. Blood of a bitch of a woman, the old man said.

His mother’s mind began leaving her as her body did, a slow fitful decline. She spent more and more of her waking life among the people she’d grown up with, talking to Ruth like she was her own mother or a young Queenie Coffin, taking Sweetland and the Reverend for her father or one of her brothers. Even when she saw her son for who he was, she misplaced most of his history.

Whatever happened to your face? she asked.

Cut myself shaving.

His mother watched him doubtfully. You’re not old enough to be shaving, she said.

It was comical at first, a harmless diversion, and the old woman seemed more or less content lost in her youth and her childhood. But in her last weeks alive the confusion turned sour, an undertone of panic settling in. She was tormented by the wet weather ruining a phantom load of fish spread to dry on the long-gone flakes. She asked to see her dead son and couldn’t be comforted with lies.

Hollis is down to the stage, Sweetland told her, he’ll be up the once.

He’s not well enough to be out at the fish, she said. Don’t you be torturing him.

Mother, he said.

You’ll be the death of that youngster, you keeps torturing him.

Hollis is the best kind, he said, don’t you worry about Hollis.

Why won’t you tell him I wants to see him? she said. She was angry enough to chew nails.

He’ll be along the once, don’t you worry.

His mother turned her face toward the wall. You always hated me, she said.

He looked away from her then and saw Ruth watching from the doorway.

She’s not well, Ruth told him.