Michael Crummey - Sweetland

He looked up at the hills surrounding the cove, sunlight making them ring with meltwater. He’d always loved that sound, waited for it each spring. Hearing it made him certain of the place he came from. He’d always felt it was more than enough to wake up here, to look out on these hills. As if he’d long ago been measured and made to the island’s exact specifications.

The dog appeared to take the beautiful weather at face value, wandering further and further afield during the days, sometimes not coming back to the house until Sweetland was long asleep. It barked outside to be let in and Sweetland shuffled across the kitchen in the dark. He stood the door open and the dog ran straight for the dish by the stove where its food had been sitting all day. Sweetland stood listening to the porcelain scrape of it in the darkness, waiting for the dog to finish. It jumped onto the daybed then, turning circles among the quilts to settle in. Sweetland all the while complaining about being woken up and the mess it was making of his bed with its filthy paws. “You got a perfectly good doghouse out there to use,” he said. He drifted off listening to the dog grooming itself, the lap of its tongue as calm and insistent as water dripping from a tap.

He woke with a start, later than he was used to getting up, sunlight in the kitchen. The day already underway and he lay there nursing a centreless sense of dread. He’d forgotten to do something important was the feeling, but he couldn’t place the thing. He was up and had lit the fire and was walking to the door to piss into the snow when it struck him the dog hadn’t woken him in the night, coming back to the house. That it had been out wandering since the morning before.

The weather was mild enough that the animal might have kipped down in the bush or just meandered up on the mash all night, as it used to do when it was Loveless’s dog. Sweetland listened awhile to the runoff rattling down into the cove from the hills, thinking it was almost time to move back into the upstairs bedroom. Thinking he might be able to tail some rabbit slips on the mash before long. The morning still cool but already warming in the sunlight. And he knew it a certainty as he stood there that he would never see the dog alive again.

He didn’t leave the cove to go looking, not wanting to admit by his actions what his heart knew to be true. He puttered around the property, to be close by if the dog came back. Mid-morning he took a bucket of tar onto the roof and patched around the chimney flashing. It was a chore that didn’t need doing strictly, but he could keep an eye on most of the cove from up there and into the hills. He stayed on the roof until it was time to eat. Before he climbed down the ladder he put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, and he stood listening as the echoes swung across the hills. Watching for any sign of movement in that world of endless stillness.

In the afternoon he walked along the paths with a bit of salt fish in his shirt pocket. Not much to tempt the animal with, but he had nothing better to offer. He felt sure it was nowhere close, but he couldn’t stop himself going through the motions regardless. Most of the houses in the cove were built on shores or rock foundations and he kept an eye for cubbyholes the dog might have crawled into, kneeling at the likeliest spots and calling its name. He went out Church Side to the meadow and then backtracked around the harbour, walking all the way to the incinerator. He stopped there, leaned a little ways into the iron darkness, waited for his eyes to adjust. Dirty snow drifted against the far wall. Black lumps of unidentifiable refuse. Loveless’s calf just inside the entrance, the bare skeleton collapsed and so jumbled by scavengers it would be almost impossible now to identify the creature for what it was.

After he finished his supper that evening he took up the dog’s bowl and threw the two-day-old food into the stove. Washed it along with his own dishes and refilled it with the leftover potato and fish he’d cooked for himself. Set the bowl back beside the stove.

He sat at the kitchen window, looking out at Diesel’s doghouse in the failing light, listening for the weather on the radio. He went to the door every half-hour to whistle up to the hills. And again when he woke to take a piss in the middle of the night, standing on the doorsill in his small clothes, the chill licking at his ankles. Decided as he stood there that he would go up on the mash in the morning and set a few snares, see if he couldn’t get a bit of fresh craft to eat.

He hadn’t slept much before he woke to piss and didn’t sleep at all afterwards, staring at the kitchen window for the first sign of light. Getting up now and then to set a junk of wood in the stove. There was no rush, he knew that for a fact. And he was anxious to start out all the same.

He lit a lamp and warmed a panful of salt fish and French-fried potato for his breakfast. He packed a jar of water and a lunch of cod slathered in partridgeberry jam, to spare himself one more meal of plain salt fish. Put two cans of peaches and the last of the box of ammunition in the pack, half a dozen snares to keep up the charade he was going after rabbits. Tied a set of snowshoes to the leather fastener. Overcast, the wind steady out of the south and the morning looked for rain, so he packed his yellow slicker as well. Drove the quad on the last dregs of his fuel past the new cemetery and out of the cove. It was barely light by the time he reached the King’s Seat and he turned the machine off there, balanced himself up on the stone arm of the Seat. Facing inland, trying to guess which direction to set out in.

He put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, the sound falling quick and hard. The mash beyond him still black and featureless. “That’s a big fucken island, Sweetland,” he said. He sat back on the quad and waited there until it was light enough to pick out the orange tire wire and charcoaled wood of his bonfire pushing up through the snow. Sweetland started up the quad then. He drove around Vatcher’s Meadow, moving slow. Looking and pretending not to look.

He’d almost reached the rise ahead of the north-end light when the engine began falling off, gurgling along ten feet or so and spinning out before kicking in another few seconds. Sweetland turned the machine off and took his pack from the carryall. Walked over the rise, down to the keeper’s house. He went beyond it to the cliffs above the Fever Rocks for the first time since the night he’d witnessed the gathering out there, turning a circle to take in the headlands. Felt the first drops of rain strike his face. He pulled on his slicker and started along the path toward the Priddles’ cabin. Winter a mess in the trees, the snowpack melting underneath. He went through to his thigh in the rotten snow and spent ten minutes working his leg free, using the butt of the.22 to shovel, wrenching his foot back to the surface. Lay there catching his breath while the rain pocked his jacket. “Break a fucken hip,” he said aloud. “Where will you be then.”

The dog was light enough to trot along on the surface of the snowpack, and Sweetland strapped into his snowshoes, trudged a mile past the cabin turnoff, setting his snares haphazardly as he went. Wasting his time on a fool’s errand and angrier with every miserable step he took. So poisoned he felt ready to shoot the dog himself if he found the bastard thing alive.

He walked the length of the island from the Fever Rocks to the south-end light in the rain. Ate his lunch as he walked so as not to waste daylight. His pants and boots soaked through. He made his way along the lip of the Mackerel Cliffs, thinking the dog might have come foraging through the detritus of last year’s breeding season. Broken eggshells and the occasional puffin’s bill scattered like sand dollars in the bare moss nearest the cliff edge, a tinker’s wing snagged in a bit of gorse.