Michael Crummey - Sweetland

Late afternoon and the light already dimming when he saw it lying twenty yards ahead, black and red against a patch of snow. Stopped where he was, turned toward the cliffs. “Now, Mr. Fox,” he said. The ocean roiling a thousand miles below him.

When he was ready, he walked over to the dog. Impossible to say what had gotten into it, though it looked like the creature had been worked over by a parade of scavengers. It lay on its back, the head torqued sharply up and to one side, its milk-white teeth bared. The eye picked from the one socket he could see. The stomach was open and the cavity stripped clean. Sweetland looked beyond it a little ways, saw scattered tufts of its black fur flickering like down in the wind and wet. He shucked out of his pack and knelt beside the creature. Tried to push the lips of its cold muzzle back down around the teeth.

It was too much of a mess to carry uncovered and he hadn’t thought to bring something to wrap it up. He took off his slicker and laid it on the ground, set the dead animal on the coat and used the arms to tie the bundle tight. Started back for the cove in the cold, steady downpour with what was left of the dog tucked under his arm. The wind rising and driving across the top of the island, blowing so hard over the exposed ground he had to walk at an angle to stay upright, leaning hard to port into the gale.

He stopped shivering halfway to the King’s Seat, which he guessed was a bad sign. Most of the feeling in his legs was gone and he had trouble keeping his feet on the path down into the cove, using the stock of the.22 like a cane. He let himself into the kitchen and stood in the middle of the room, dripping rainwater on the wood floor. Realized in the quiet of the house that he was bawling helplessly and likely had been for some time. His shoulders hitching on the ragged sobs.

He changed out of his soaked clothes, peeling the material away like layers of skin. His head was pulsing and he could feel the first glimmer of a fever stoking its furnace somewhere in the body’s basement. He wanted to lie down for five minutes but knew he wouldn’t have it in him to get up. He lit the storm lamp, put on the heaviest coat in the porch, and carried the yellow slicker out to the shed for a shovel. The wind had dropped with the sun, but there was no let-up in the rain. Sweetland walked his burden up to the new cemetery and set it down in the lee of Jesse’s headstone, placing the storm lamp beside it. Then he pushed the head of the spade into the grass over the boy’s grave.

A foot below the surface the earth was still frozen solid, the shovel ringing against the flinty ground as he swung with all his weight. He carved out a shallow bowl and laid the animal there in its slicker shroud. It wasn’t deep enough by half but Sweetland was too exhausted to dig further into the frost. He placed the shovel over the open hole and walked back down to the shed for a salt beef bucket, headed on to the landwash in the gathering darkness. He filled the bucket with beach stones, carried them back up the path. He stopped every ten or twelve steps to set the weight down, moving to the opposite side of the bucket to change arms. Hefted the rocks, shuffled another ten steps along. Looking up to the glow of the kerosene lamp where he’d left it in the graveyard, working his way back to that tiny beacon.

He knelt beside the new grave, laid the rocks carefully on top of the dog’s body, to spare it any more scavenging. He shovelled the wet earth over the stones, stepping the mound flat with his foot. He sang most of an old hymn under his breath then, humming in the spots where the words escaped him, The night is dark and I am far from home, hmmm hmm hm hm . He turned away when he was done and shuffled toward the house, dragging the head of the spade in his wake.

He forgot the lamp where it sat near the headstone and it threw shadows across the boy’s name until the small hours of the morning when it dimmed and bowed and flickered and finally went out in the rain.

CLOUDS OF DOCTORS APPEARED at his bedside after each new surgery, talking back and forth in what sounded to him like Latin or some other dead language. A single nurse among the nine or ten young men. She stood beside a bearded, bespectacled chain-smoker to hold his ashtray and his files. The doctor’s accent like the Nazis Sweetland had heard in war movies at the Park Theatre or the Odeon. The doctor set his cigarette in the ashtray before he lifted the sheets and folded them down around Sweetland’s knees to display the ruined flesh in the patient’s lap.

Traumatic degloving lesion of the penile and scrotal tissue, he announced to the assembled group. The skin presenting avulsion was fixed to the penis through a pedicle formed by a flap in the coronal sulcus, and the skin at the scrotal base was preserved. We assumed the skin’s viability due to the pedicle with what appeared to be good vascularization. The left testis was covered with the remaining scrotal skin, the right testis was buried in the inguinal region until grafting could be conducted.

Sweetland all the time watching the nurse, the ashtray in the palm of her hand like a waitress’s drink tray. Her head turned to one side while the sheet was lowered, out of respect for Sweetland’s modesty. The bearded doctor took a pen from his breast pocket to point out a particular feature of the slash and burn in Sweetland’s lap and all the young men leaned in closer to see it.

We left a small area at the dorsum penis uncovered — here — as we opted to wait for healing by second intention. It all appears to be progressing satisfactorily. We expect recovery of normal sexual function within three to six months.

Sweetland looked away from the nurse, staring up at the acoustic ceiling tiles.

The extensive damage to the testes and the vas deferens, however, make recovery of fertility unlikely. Now—

Where is it you belongs to? Sweetland interrupted.

Sweetland had never spoken a word to the man or to any of the doctors in his entourage. They might have thought he was deaf and dumb, for all he knew. The doctor leaned away from the bed and glanced across at the nurse. She offered the ashtray and the doctor took up the cigarette. He said, I beg your pardon?

You’re not from around here, Sweetland said. Where do you belong?

Austria, the doctor said. I am from Austria.

I don’t know it, Sweetland said.

Near Germany.

Sweetland nodded. I knows Germany.

The doctor motioned at the sheets and the nurse set the ashtray and files down to cover Sweetland up to his chest.

Sweetland cleared his throat. Does the nurse need to be here?

The nurse?

I wanted to ask after something, he said.

I’ll just be outside, the nurse said, and she held the ashtray out long enough for the doctor to stub the butt of his cigarette. The doctor folded his hands behind his back when she was gone and rose up an inch on his toes. Now then, he said.

What you said just now, Sweetland said. And he glanced toward his waist, pointing with his eyes.

Yes.

I don’t know what any of that means.

Well, the doctor said. All indications are, you will be perfectly capable of having sexual intercourse. Once you have healed, of course. We don’t recommend it at the moment.

He turned to the young men, to allow them a moment to acknowledge the humour.

We attempted a surgical reconstruction that would allow you to produce and ejaculate sperm in a normal manner, he said. But we have not been as successful as we would have hoped.

Meaning what exactly?

Are you a father, Mr …?

Sweetland, he said.

Mr. Sweetland. Do you have children?

He shook his head. I was thinking, he said, maybe someday.

I’m afraid, the doctor said, this will not be possible. He looked steadily at Sweetland.