Michael Crummey - Sweetland

Tennessee Ernie Ford’s voice drifted by to starboard until it was imploring sinners to come home from somewhere off the stern, which meant Sweetland had sailed by the entrance. He came about slowly then, making way for the hidden mouth of the cove, and the island loomed out of the grey suddenly, the alien line of the breakwater straight as a ruler above the surface. He fired three shots with his.22 to try and raise someone’s attention, to let them know he was coming.

He looked back to the lifeboat, waved to the shadowy figures, all staring in his direction. They did not look altogether comforted to be in tow with him, he thought.

He fired three more shots and then eased into the cove’s calm. The white church wavering on the point, still blaring its Protestant entreaties. The wharf slowly becoming solid as he approached it. People who had been on their way to church already standing on the dock in their Sunday clothes, dozens more coming out of their houses up the hill, men and women and children with their dogs alongside, all running to meet the ghostly arrivals.

CLARA CAME TO THE HOUSE while Sweetland was in the middle of a Texas Hold ’em table. He’d been expecting her all evening and hadn’t been able to pay proper attention to the game. He was playing the short stack, sitting with two pair, jacks over nines. Going heads-up with a reckless newbie who’d signed in as Flush, almost two hundred thousand in the pot.

“You aren’t watching porn over there, are you?” she asked.

“Gave it up for Lent,” he said and waved her into the kitchen without looking away from the laptop. Clara placed the plastic bag with the rabbit carcass on the table as she sat down.

He checked on the river card and Flush bet all-in. “Ah fuck,” he said.

“It’s not real money,” Clara told him.

“Thank Christ for that.” He folded his hand and let out a long sigh, closed the laptop carefully, reluctant.

Clara reached to lift the bag holding the rabbit a foot closer to him. “That’s out of season.”

“They’re peaked out this year,” he said. “They’ll be starving in the woods come the winter.”

“I don’t want it in the house,” she said.

He looked down at the plastic bag on the table. Watery streaks of blood in the folds. “I only set a dozen slips,” he said. “The youngster loves to be out at it.”

“Jesse lost a week of school with me in St. John’s,” she said. “He don’t need to miss more.”

“It was your dog kicking up a racket that woke him this morning.”

“You couldn’t send him home out of it?”

Sweetland shrugged. “He asked his grandfather if he could go.”

Clara laid a hand across her eyes and there was her mother, Sweetland thought. Clara had almost nothing else of Ruth in her, but that subtle gesture of exhaustion or anxiety or annoyance was Sweetland’s sister to a T. He took the meat across the kitchen to the freezer, to put a little more space between himself and that eerie transformation.

Jesse was still an infant when Clara came back to Sweetland and no word of who the father was or what became of him. Clara might have stumbled on the child under a rock somewhere and brought the foundling to Chance Cove to raise as her own for all he knew. Almost ten years she’d been away, first to university in St. John’s and then itinerant work on the mainland. Her first months home she walked out to the lighthouse on Sundays with Jesse bundled in a backpack. He could see her coming if he was in the tower, the smudge of her red Gore-Tex jacket moving over the mash. He watched her inch toward him until she was close enough to make out her features, then he’d go down the spiral stairs to put on the kettle.

Sweetland never said a word about her decision to leave for school though he was against it from the start, with Ruthie dead and Pilgrim about to be left alone to fend for himself in the house. And he turned his back on Clara in small, spiteful ways. Let her have what she wants, he thought, without ever thinking it. A barely discernible coldness toward her that he would have denied if she accused him. He sat at his kitchen window as she boarded the ferry on the government wharf. The white of her face turning to look up the hill where she knew he’d be watching. Didn’t hear a word from her all the time she was elsewhere, but for what came to him second-hand through Pilgrim or Queenie.

Clara walked all the way to the light on Sundays just to avoid the expectation of going to church, he guessed. She drank tea on the chesterfield while Sweetland crawled across the floor with Jesse, lifted him by the ankles, blowing farts on his belly to make the boy laugh. He’d never encountered a child less inclined to laughter and he took it as a personal challenge to cure him of the affliction. He couldn’t say now if he’d sensed something wrong with Jesse even then, or if it was only in retrospect there seemed an unnatural distance in the infant’s eyes. The boy seeming to look out on the world from the far end of a tunnel.

Clara barely spoke a word during those visits, watching Sweetland clowning on the floor with Jesse. A pregnant silence between them, as if she was waiting to be forgiven for some offence. Or offering him the chance to ask forgiveness himself. And his failure to do one or the other was one more thing she held against him now. He dreaded talking to the woman, was the plain fact of the matter.

“Jesse is saying he’s going to stay with you here after everyone else leaves,” Clara said. She’d raised her voice and Sweetland could tell this was the real issue she’d come to talk about. That it took some effort on her part to broach the subject.

“Is that right?”

“You haven’t said anything to set the thought in his head, I hope.”

“He knows his own mind.”

“He’s not good with change, if that’s what you means.”

Sweetland turned back to her from the fridge. “Have you been telling him about Hollis spending a winter in hospital? Into St. John’s?”

“Uncle Hollis?”

“Jesse’s claiming he heard it straight from Hollis himself.”

“What was he in for, tuberculosis?”

“Jesse was talking like Hollis was sitting with us in the woods.”

Clara shrugged. “The doctor says its normal enough.”

“Normal enough ?”

“He says Jesse might grow out of it.”

“Have they got a name for it yet?” he asked.

“For what?”

“Whatever it is wrong with the youngster.”

“There’s a spectrum,” she said. She was looking down at the table, as if she was embarrassed by the word, by how lame it sounded as an explanation. “And he isn’t typical, is what they’re telling me.”

“I could’ve told you as much for free,” he said. “Saved you the trip.”

“The doctor haven’t seen enough of Jesse to be able to say more than that. If we lived in St. John’s we could get him assessed. We could get him into a school program.”

“Jesse won’t be happy nowhere else than here,” Sweetland said, “I knows that for a fact.” He moved the kettle over the heat of the stove. “He wants to come over with me when I goes for a load of wood tomorrow.”

“Oh Jesus,” Clara muttered.

“It’s Saturday anyway,” Sweetland said quietly. “You want a cup of tea?”

But she was already halfway out the door.

He went for his evening walk before dark. A nip in the air, though they were into the first week of June. The wind just beginning to drop with the sun. He went as far as his room and stage on the waterline, then past it all the way to the metal bell of the old garbage incinerator on the point. Miles out he could see a container ship on its way seaward, the lights just coming visible in the dusk. It looked like a mid-sized city on the horizon, drifting east.