Michael Crummey - Sweetland

He cleaned them outside the porch door and he had to light a lamp to finish the tedious work, the naked bodies stippled and scrawny and unhealthy looking against the snow where he laid them. There wasn’t enough meat on the carcasses to roast and he made soup instead, with potatoes and turnip and carrot, a couple of whole onions for flavour. He boiled the pot long enough to kill anything organic and he set down a bowl for the dog before sitting to his own. They ate in the same greedy silence then, Sweetland gnawing every morsel off the bones and sucking out the marrow. The dog licking its bowl the length of the kitchen floor. It was awful food, gamey and scant, but Sweetland finished four of the birds before he pushed away from the table. Already looking forward to the meal he’d make of the others.

In the morning he walked down to the shoreline where the gulls had made a mess of the bullbirds on the beach and were still working over the remains. He walked out as far as the incinerator with the dog running alongside or in the tuck above the path. Stopped short a little ways past the metal bell. Hundreds more of them on the surface beyond the breakwater, floating dead. The birds so delicately calibrated they’d starved within hours of each other, the organs shutting down one at a time.

Sweetland had never seen the like before, though he’d heard rumours of similar things. Gannets at Cape St. Mary’s disappearing from Bird Rock by the tens of thousands on the same day last summer, travelling north after food. Tinkers showing up in the Florida Keys over the winter months, foraging hundreds of miles beyond their southern range.

There was a new world being built around him. Sweetland had heard them talking about it for years on the Fisheries Broadcast — apocalyptic weather, rising sea levels, alterations in the seasons, in ocean temperatures. Fish migrating north in search of colder water and the dovekies lost in the landscape they were made for. The generations of instinct they’d relied on to survive here suddenly useless. The birds and their habits were being rendered obsolete, Sweetland thought, like the VHS machines and analog televisions dumped on the slope beyond the incinerator. Relics of another time and on their way out.

It was just days after the dog brought up its bullbird that the light at Queenie Coffin’s window reappeared.

Sweetland saw it as he walked back in the arm from the incinerator or through the window over the sink when he washed up the evening’s dishes. He did what he could to ignore its intermittent presence, staring into the dishwater while he finished scrubbing the pots, reminding himself to keep his eyes from the windows the rest of the evening. Or walking the long way across to Church Side and up by Duke’s barbershop, so he could pass Queenie’s house opposite her window. Even during the day he stayed as far from it as his house’s proximity allowed.

But the light appeared earlier and for longer stretches of the evening, as if it was being fed by his lack of attention. Eventually he talked himself into walking past the light, keeping himself as far clear as the path would let him and not ever looking directly inside the illuminated room. Even out of the corner of his eye he could see there was someone at the window and he battered the rest of the way to his house in the dark, the dog running after him. Shut the door and stood with his back to it. His rubbery legs quivering and he started to giggle there in the black, like someone stoned out of their mind. The dog jumping at his thighs and barking in its confusion. “Jesus fuck!” he shouted and fell back to giggling hysterically. Caught his breath finally and he went shakily into the kitchen to peek through the window over the sink. But the light was gone.

He made the same walk each of the next three nights, trying to guess who it was he glimpsed as he hurried past. It seemed sometimes to be a pale figure standing behind the glass, at others he thought it was someone in black sitting to one side. Could be there was more than one person in the room. Or no one at all and he was imagining the whole thing, but for the light which was too insistently present not to be real.

He went to the window one morning and stood looking into the room, hoping it might give him some clue. He pressed his face to the glass, shading his eyes with his hands. Half expecting a buffalo to walk into the living room from the kitchen, or something equally unlikely. But it was just the furniture sitting where it had always been, Queenie’s chair and the chesterfield near the stairs, the five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle shellacked and framed and hung on the far wall as a painting. All of it inert and poker-faced.

He made up his mind then to stop outside the window after dark and settle the question, for better or worse. He ate his supper like it was his last, chewing slowly and deliberately, tasting nothing. He washed the dishes, waiting for the full of night’s darkness to fall, and when the light appeared he walked around the front of his house and down toward Queenie’s. Stopped well away from the window and he took his time as he stood there, staring at the yellow oblong cast onto the snow by the light, and then the window frame itself, studying each peeling board. There was no one inside the room when he finally worked up the nerve to look. Queenie’s empty chair turned out toward him. Sweetland had been holding his breath without knowing it and he let the air out in a rush, lifted his face to the cold stars.

He watched the room awhile then, thinking something might happen in there, but nothing did. It was a bitter night to be standing still and eventually he turned to walk home, throwing one last glance over his shoulder. Saw the child standing near the glass. He let out a whimper with the shock of it, and then covered his mouth to stop himself making another sound.

The girl was naked and stared out at the night with the same brazen look she had sixty years ago, her hair cropped short as a boy’s. Her child’s body stripling and oddly beautiful and distressing, just as he remembered. It took him a moment to register the fact she wasn’t alone in the room, that there was a woman seated in the chair at the window. Her hair in curlers and her head bowed toward a book in her lap. They were holding hands, the girl and the old woman beside her, though they each seemed oblivious to the other’s presence. “Queenie,” Sweetland said aloud. He raised a hand tentatively, as a greeting. But neither acknowledged him or seemed to know he was there. The woman in the chair turned a page with her free hand, a lit cigarette between the fingers.

He stood watching the two until he heard his teeth chattering with the cold. And he stayed a long while afterwards, not wanting to give them up, thinking they might meet his eyes eventually. When he couldn’t stand still a moment longer, he headed toward his place, walking backwards until he lost sight of the girl. Shuffle-ran to his porch to haul another coat overtop of the one he was wearing. By the time he turned the corner on his way back to Queenie’s the light was out.

He watched for it every evening afterwards, at the sink and during his walks, and always one last time before he turned in for the night. But he never saw the light or the child or the old woman again.

March came in like a lamb. There was a warm spell in the lead-up to St. Patrick’s Day that Sweetland didn’t trust for a second. Waiting for the storm that followed the holiday. Sheila’s Brush it was called, arriving in the wake of St. Paddy and usually heralding a full-on return to late-winter misery.

He took advantage of the mild temperatures to work outside, though he stuck close to home. He left the stove cold one morning and climbed up on the roof with the chimney brush. He’d improvised a pole by duct-taping broom handles to either end of an old stair rail salvaged from Loveless’s house, worked it hand over hand into the chimney, pushing the metal bristle down the flue. Hauled the brush up by its string and repeated the manoeuvre half a dozen times to scrub out the soot. Sweating in the sun’s fickle heat. The mythical storm was like a letter he half expected in the mail, and each day it didn’t show he was almost disappointed.