Michael Crummey - Sweetland

Sweetland paused at the top of the path, beside the King’s Seat. It was buried in drifts of snow, just one cold stone arm visible, but the mash beyond it looked to have been scoured clean by the wind. He stood holding the handlebars as he lurched over the frozen trail around Vatcher’s Meadow, driving slow and calling as he went. He couldn’t see much beyond the headlight’s reach and he stopped occasionally, shutting the engine off to shout the dog’s name and listen.

He left the quad on the far side of the meadow and started walking, afraid the noise of the machine might be driving the animal further away. Now and then he stopped, thinking he’d heard some motion ahead or behind him. But it was just the nylon whiff of his own pants as he walked, the toggle on his jacket zipper knocking in the wind. Near noises made strange in the dark.

He was close enough to Burnt Head he could see the light over the rise, an intermittent glim like photographs being taken, away in the distance. The wind had dropped while he wasn’t paying attention and a calm that felt otherworldly had settled on the night. He was about to call for the dog again when he saw the first of them moving on the rise. Dark figures outlined in flashes against the horizon, heading toward the lighthouse.

Sweetland stopped still where he was, flicking off the flashlight. Watched without moving, to be sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him. Another, and then another, following the same path down toward the keeper’s house. He’d left the box of ammunition in the carryall on the quad and he considered going back for it now. But he was afraid to look away, thinking it might all disappear if he did. He watched the silent procession swell above him, dozens more trailing in from the blackness and disappearing down the ridge toward the Fever Rocks.

When the last of the figures passed out of his sight he made his way up toward them, moving slow in the unearthly quiet. He could see the keeper’s house over the rise but there was no sign of the walkers. He waited until the building’s details came clearer to him in the dark before he went down toward it, stayed close to the side of the house, edging up to the far corner. Allowing one cautious eye beyond it.

There were hundreds of them standing on the headlands. All clustered close to the cliffs of the Fever Rocks, as many people as ever lived in the cove, he guessed, and not a sound among them. All facing the ocean where the intermittent light stirred the blackness. A pale glow about the unlikely congregation though the moon was down, each figure silhouetted against the night sky. An air of waiting about them so palpable that Sweetland held his breath as he watched.

He felt exposed there, as if he was spying on some secret ceremony and bound to be found out. He turned to sneak off the way he’d come when someone brushed past him, a hunchback in a black overcoat, limping toward the rest. Sweetland fell back against the lighthouse to keep his feet, holding out the barrel of the.22 in both hands to fend off the night. They were still walking down from the rise in a steady trickle, he saw, their faces blank and unhurried. They went past without showing the slightest concern to have him there. Strangers every one of them, though he felt they knew him. That he was known to them somehow. A woman in a headscarf turned her head as she went by and smiled blankly. An eerie incongruity to the expression on her face. The teeth in her head too small for her mouth.

The cold woke him. Light outside when he opened his eyes, mid-morning already. He could hear the trickle of water running in the sink, though the stove was long dead and the room ticked with frost. A heated beach rock at the small of his back the only hint of warmth in the world. He reached behind himself, touched a hand to a matted tangle of fur. The dog licking at his bare fingers. He shifted carefully to get a look at the animal, the head coming up to greet him.

“Now, Mr. Fox,” he said. He scratched underneath the dog’s ears and it leaned its weight into his hand. There was a streak of white fur on its black chin, like a soul patch, and Sweetland stroked it between his fingers. “I hope you had a better night than I did.”

The dog jumped to the floor and shook itself and Sweetland pushed himself upright. His head two sizes too small for all it carried. He was still wearing his coat and boots, the.22 leaning against the foot of the daybed. He spent a few minutes trying to separate out the night, to set what was real from what he might have dreamt lying there on the daybed. The dog ran up to nip at his pants and then clattered across the painted wood to the door, scratching to be let out. “Hold your horses,” Sweetland said.

He opened the storm door and the dog ran into the cold air, cocked a leg against the clothesline pole. Sweetland keeping a close eye, not wanting to let the creature out of his sight again. He was about to call it in when he looked across at the shed doors and the mad trip up on the mash came back to him, the walkers parading to the light. He went to the side door and listened a moment before he went in, expecting he didn’t know what. Found the quad there, trussed underneath the canvas tarp, with no sign the machine had been moved in weeks.

He was oddly crestfallen to see it. A symptom of too much time alone, he guessed, to have felt almost grateful for the company of the nameless dead filing out past the light. To be disappointed seeing he’d dreamt or imagined the entire thing.

The dog had followed him in to nose around the room and Sweetland called it from the side door as he was leaving. “Mr. Fox,” he said, and it came out from behind the red gas cans under the workbench, sitting at the door to be let out. Sweetland staring at those three containers. He went across the room and picked them up in turn. All of them empty. He lifted the tarp off the back of the quad and opened the carryall, took out the blanket he’d packed there and the box of ammunition. He put the shells back in the cupboard over the workbench and turned to leave, but had to catch himself against a rising spell of dizziness.

He lifted his head to the rafters once it passed. His eyes coming to rest on the white wooden cross directly above him, his name hand-lettered there in black. And he nodded a simple hello.

THE FIRST WEEKS AFTER the accident Sweetland drifted through porous layers of pain and narcotic relief. Duke quit the job at the steel mill to be closer to the hospital and he spent all of his time there, scavenging meals off trays left in the hallways, finding an empty bed to sleep in at night or kipping down in the abandoned television room.

Sweetland was barely capable of carrying on a conversation those early days and Duke talked up the revolving cast of men in the other beds on the ward instead. Wanting to know where they were from and what they did for a living and how many youngsters they had. Half the people in the hospital were from elsewhere in the world, it seemed, from Italy or Greece or some Balkan country they’d never heard of. He ran errands for patients who needed cigarettes or chewing gum or a letter posted. An elderly man from Spain admitted for bypass surgery spent the long hours of his convalescence teaching Duke to play chess. After the Spaniard was discharged, Duke tried to pass on what he’d learned to Sweetland, using a checkerboard borrowed from the television room, improvising chess pieces out of beer caps, paper clips, pennies, empty syringes. The nurses and custodial staff stopping to check on the progress of the latest game, laying wagers on the outcome.

When Sweetland was too tired or stoned on medication for chess, Duke wandered the hospital aimlessly, flirting with the nurses at the desk. He mopped the floors on the ward if he found a bucket unattended, just to have something to do with his time.