Michael Crummey - Sweetland

There was a rustle of movement inside the church and he watched the brother of the dead boy limp out of the shadows, dressed just as strangely, and leaning all his weight on Ruthie’s shoulder. She looked steadily at Sweetland as she approached, her face set. Defiant. And Sweetland dropped his cigarette, crushed it out under his shoe so he wouldn’t have to hold her eye. The Sri Lankan he’d been smoking with reached for the young man’s free arm and Sweetland made a move to take Ruth’s place, but she shook her head. We’re fine here, she said.

He watched them make their slow way up the path. Sorry for your loss, he said again.

He had no inkling how long he would drag those peculiar men in his wake. He almost resented having found them out there for a time, thinking he’d never have discovered the truth about Ruthie otherwise and would have been happier not knowing.

Impossible to say now when it changed for him, when he started to see himself and his sister’s life mirrored darkly in that story — forcing the girl into a marriage she didn’t ask for or want, setting her adrift on that ocean without so much as a drop of water to drink. He might have been speaking to Ruthie and not the Sri Lankans as they left the church that morning. And for years he would have to fight the urge to whisper the phrase in every private moment they had before she died: Sorry for your loss.

The wind turned sometime during the night and he woke to the sound of weather against the front of the cabin, sleet slashing across the door and the window beside it. Pitch-black. The frigid cold in the room enough to tell him the temperature had dropped when the wind shifted.

He’d burned through every bit of firewood in the cabin during the day, and after he’d finished the flask of vodka he had taken the axe to the firebox and the ladder to the loft and burned those as well. All that was left for him now was a small pile of green wood he’d cut while there was still daylight. He tried to light a fire with it, but the wind whistling in the chimney wouldn’t allow the draft to take, pushing smoke back into the cabin. The flame sputtered anemic and heatless and went out altogether while Sweetland nodded off. He’d been too drunk to think of retrieving blankets from the loft bunks before he burned the ladder and he lay cramped on the loveseat under his coat the whole night. The dog curled in his lap was the only bit of heat in all the wide world. His two feet gone to ice.

The morning was a long time coming, the day’s first grey light shrouded by the storm’s weight. Sweetland went out to piss on the lee side of the cabin and he took the axe down into the valley, looking for deadfall that would be dry enough to burn. Wind whipping the snow so he couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. After half an hour of scrabbling blind he had an armful of dry sticks and he managed to light a fire to boil meltwater for tea. He hung his jacket over the heat and he had a breakfast of freeze-dried soup that he shared with the dog. When the dead wood was roaring he put a junk of green spruce in the stove where it spit and burned blue and gave almost no heat. He looked down at the dog where it was still lying on the loveseat.

“What about you?” he said. “You look like you’d burn.”

He spent a lot of time staring at the commemorative map of Newfoundland. Even from across the room he could see how badly detailed it was. Only the largest communities and bays and islands were identified. He walked over to look closer. Little Sweetland was there, and Sweetland lying in the open Atlantic beyond it, but neither warranted a name.

He went across to the cupboards and picked through them a second time, moving every item on the shelves, lifting the cutlery tray, looking for a pen of some sort, a marker. His search rewarded with a stub of pencil and a tightly wound baggie of marijuana. “Well now, Mr. Fox,” Sweetland said. He still had one hand-rolled cigarette that he was saving for a special occasion and he considered that this qualified. He broke it open and mixed the tobacco with the weed, rolled himself two joints. The marijuana dry as dust, an ancient stash the brothers had probably forgotten. Sweetland wet one of the joints in his mouth to keep it from burning too quickly. He smoked half the reefer, choking on the ragged draw and fighting to keep it down. He pinched out the flame to save the second half for later and then he sharpened the pencil stub with a knife, waiting for the stone to hit him.

Nothing to it, not that he could say. He felt completely straight.

He sat in front of the map of Newfoundland and wrote Sweetland across the irregular yellow oblong where he had spent almost his entire existence. Wrote Little Sweetland across the smaller island two inches above it. And he spent the better part of an hour then, adding missing names along the coastline, drawing in small islands that had been inexplicably left out. Folded his arms when he’d run through the inventory he carried in his head, considering the place. On a whim he reached up to draw a circle in the centre of Fortune Bay. Wrote Queenie’s Island across the face of it. He carried on then, dotting the shoreline with islands and communities and features that didn’t exist, naming them all after people he knew. Bob-Sam’s Island. Jesse’s Head. Priddle’s Point. Pilgrim’s Arm. Vatcher’s Tickle .

He stepped away when he thought he was done, admiring his handiwork. Reached up to draw a line through the faux-antique Come Home Year . Wrote Stay Home Year above it. Giggled aloud then and felt immediately self-conscious. Stoned out of his head, he realized.

He glanced across at the dog. “Some clever, hey?”

The animal turned a few circles on the loveseat, then flopped down with a sigh.

“Oh fuck off,” Sweetland said. He lit up what was left of the joint and smoked it down to the cardboard filter.

The weather moderated while he was at work on the map. Cold still, the wind blowing strong, but there was nothing falling. It was going to be a bitter night at the Priddles’ cabin with no wood to burn and Sweetland decided to make a run for the ATV. He put the lighter he carried with him and the Bic he found at the cabin in the baggie with the second joint and the rolling papers, tucked the package away in the inside pocket of his coat. He packed up his few things with the Kraft Dinner and Cup-a-Soups and then took a look around the room to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. He went across to the map of Newfoundland, nipped the push-pins from the wall. Folded the paper in four, stuffed it into his backpack.

“Let’s go,” he said to the dog, and it came as far as the door but balked there. “Come on,” Sweetland said. “We got to move we wants to get home out of this.” And he pushed the dog out with the toe of his boot. Grabbed the gas can from where it sat beside the generator in the shed.

It was a steep climb out of the valley and he was breathing heavy by the time they reached level ground. He set the gas can at his feet before they left the trees altogether, shook out the numbness in his arms. The dog sitting beside him, waiting. The temperature had somersaulted above freezing again, but the wind was going to be full on in their faces when they turned inland at the lighthouse. “Gird up your loins, Mr. Fox,” he said. He was still stoned, he knew, which accounted for the lightness in his tone. He had a mind to turn back for the cabin suddenly, thinking he wasn’t in any shape to know sense. But the notion went astray just as quickly. “Hup, two,” he said and he hefted the gas can.

It had started to rain by the time the keeper’s house was in sight, a steady fall that soaked through the shoulders of his jacket and his pants. The dog’s hybrid fur useless in the rain, sopping and pasted to the scrawny frame. Sweetland struck by just how little there was to the creature beneath the wild coat. Before they topped the rise the rain had turned to sleet and he could see the dog was shivering, not enough meat on its bones to keep warm. It kept glancing back at Sweetland mournfully. He called the shaking dog over, setting it inside his coat and bringing up the zipper so it was just the animal’s head exposed to the air. A steady quiver vibrating against his chest as he went on, the wet soaking through his shirt.