Michael Crummey - Sweetland

Before the sun rose the sky was overcast and threatening, a scudding wind kicking a lop on the water high enough to spit over the gunwale. Sweetland leaning forward to bail every few minutes, trying to hold the dory steady with a single oar lodged under his arm. Soaked with ocean spray, his face rimed with salt. He could feel the temperature drop as the wind funnelled out of the coming storm and he didn’t think for a moment about turning back. He sculled further off the land to give himself plenty of leeway around the Fever Rocks, thinking if he managed to clear the north-end he would row into the lee of the island, pull up in the alcove below Music House until the weather blew itself out.

The wind shifted easterly and bore down as he cleared the point, a spiralling squall of snow shearing in. The seas rising around him so he lost sight of horizon and sky in the troughs, the island steaming closer every time the boat roller-coastered aloft. The north-end light flashing uselessly through the storm. Sweetland gave up any pretension of strategy or course, rowing all he was worth for open ocean to keep off the cliffs, the Fever Rocks looming black above him through the drift. The boat riding low and heavy, so much water aboard it was all Sweetland could do to hold her face on to the gale. She slewed sideways and slammed and tossed her head like a horse spooked and trying to throw a rider. The wind and the rolling chain of waves driving him onto the island and he could see he had no chance of staying clear.

He was too close to shore now to see the light. Only the edge of the helipad and the square outline of the winchhouse above him made any impression in the dirty blur of the storm and he gave up fighting the sway of things, rowing only to keep upright and abreast of the waves, trying to angle the boat toward those marks as he was hurled shoreward. The crests rising higher as he approached the island, the boat levered almost to ninety degrees and he lay flat to keep from being pitched across the stern. Just making the peak before slamming into the trough. She flipped arse over kettle finally and landed face down on top of Sweetland as he went under in the surf. Flailing mad in the black and roar and sudden icy choking, the boat smashing against the rocks and coming apart around him. Sweetland scraped across the ragged granite as the wave retreated until he was lifted and thrown bodily against the rocks by the next wave steaming in. Scraped and lifted and thrown with the stern board and the oars and scraps of wood. He tried to find a handhold each time, something to stop the relentless pistoning, came up hard against metal finally, wrapped a forearm around a rung of the Coast Guard ladder riveted to the Fever Rocks.

He was buried in each successive wave as he clung there, the weight almost enough to rip him loose. He crawled up one rung at a time between the battering avalanches of water that fell over him with a pendulum’s steady rhythm, until he was out of the ocean’s reach. Stopped to catch his breath then, to make the world slow down. His head had struck the cliffs each time he was thrown and he couldn’t see out of his right eye. A knife working at the same shoulder. He’d lost one boot in the undertow’s suck and the other was filled to the lip with seawater.

He glanced up the height of stairs above him and then rested his forehead against a metal rung. His winter coat sopping, the drag on him like an animal tied across his shoulders, but he wouldn’t chance removing it for fear of falling. He started up the ladder with his useless arm and blinded eye, his legs quivering helplessly. His one good arm going numb as he went and he held a rung between his teeth to rest it, to shake the blood back into his fingers. The taste of metal and rust in his mouth.

He refused to look up or down once he started, refused to think in terms of progress. There was a rung to climb and a rung that came after it, he ticked the purgatorial steps off without counting or measuring, and he didn’t know quite what to make of it when his head crested the rock face at the top of the ladder. He touched a hand to the winchhouse to satisfy himself he was where he appeared to be on the headland, then crawled along the path to the flat surface of the helipad, and across that toward the lighthouse, not trusting himself to stand, the wind blowing wild in the open air.

He stopped in the lee of the keeper’s house, sitting back against the skirt around the foundation. He kicked off his one remaining boot, tipped out the water and worked it back over the dripping sock. He touched his face gingerly, the right eye swollen shut. Thick strands of ice in his wet hair.

There was the sway of things, Sweetland knew. There was fighting the sway of things or improvising some fashion of riding it out. And then there was the sway of things beyond fighting and improvisation. It was almost impossible to know the difference between one and the other, but he felt close to making a call on the line. He was soaked and hypothermic and the cold was likely going to kill him. Even if he survived, Loveless’s boat was gone and he had no way off the island now.

The snow was falling thick in the wind. Sweetland stood and hobbled around the keeper’s house and at each window he tried to pry off the board fastened over the glass, without so much as loosening a nail. He sat back in the lee, tucked his hands inside his jacket to try and warm them under his armpits. Fumbled at something unexpected in the inside pocket and drew it out. A plastic baggie containing two Bic lighters, the joint and rolling papers he’d taken from the Priddles’ cabin in the fall. The bag intact and everything inside, miraculously, still dry. He shook the contents onto the ground between his legs, wet the joint in his mouth. Hid his head in his coat out of the wind to light up. The smoke as foul as he remembered and it tipped him into a coughing fit, his chest seizing up with a crushed-glass agony that told him he must have cracked ribs against the cliff face as well.

He choked down the rest of the joint and then waited for the stone to take the edge off of something, the pain or the cold or the miserable caul of dread that threatened to suffocate him. He managed to drop off eventually, waking every few minutes and drifting away again into a mangled facsimile of sleep. Stayed there in that fitful state until the wind dropped off, snow falling steady and soft.

Sweetland scavenged awhile for firewood, but there was hardly a stick about to burn. Most of the decking at the front of the house had been hauled away by the Priddles after easy firewood, and he’d used most of the remainder himself to boil tea on his Sunday visits. He kicked the last few boards free and added them to his meagre pile. Not nearly enough to dry his clothes or touch the chill at the core. A fire to make him feel the cold all the worse when it was done. He looked up at the barred windows of the keeper’s house, thinking of the remaining chairs and the desk and table, the bed frames and bureaus inside. And no way to get at any of it.

He had nothing in the way of kindling or tinder and he crumpled the last half-dozen rolling papers into a ball, cracked one of the lighters with a rock to soak the paper with fluid. Pushed it among the scraps of wood and set it alight. The flame immediate and fragile and Sweetland cozied near with his jacket held wide to protect it from the wind and snow, adding bits of moss to coax the fire along, waiting for something solid to take. Blowing on the embered heart awhile before it all went black and dead.

He sat back from the failure, slapping a hand against his thigh. Not conscious of thinking a thing, as if the little light of his mind had guttered out as well. He reached to pull the longest piece of wood off the pile, pushed himself from the ground and started up the rise, leaning on the three-foot stick for a cane. He walked past the cairns near the cliffs and the quad where it had been abandoned. He was thirty feet beyond the machine when he stopped and limped back to it. Opened the gas cap and moved his head left and right to peer inside. Caught sight of his own reflection in the last skim of gasoline at the bottom.