Michael Crummey - Sweetland

“No tea for me,” the government man said, his face still missing behind a sourceless swarm of light, the voice rising out of that mouthless glitter.

“All right.”

“Maybe you should sit down, Mr. Sweetland.”

“All right.”

“Before I start,” he said, “I wanted to offer my condolences. For the loss of Jesse.”

Sweetland eased himself into a chair without looking directly at the figure across the table, stung by the sound of the boy’s name.

“And the awful business with the dog,” the government man said, “I’m very sorry about that.”

“This is a sympathy call, is it?”

The government man opened the briefcase and took out a sheaf of papers. “No,” he said. “Strictly professional. Some paperwork to get through.”

Sweetland swung the enormous weight of his head around to stare directly at the government man. Squinting to try and push past the blur for some hint of the man’s eyes or nose or mouth. Anything human at all. “Can you get me out of here?” he said. “Is that what you come for?”

The government man lifted his arms. “I’m afraid that ship has sailed,” he said. “This is simply a routine follow-up. I’ll be out of your hair in no time.”

Sweetland nodded dumbly.

“On a scale of one to five,” he said, holding a pen over a virgin form, “with one being completely satisfied and five being completely dissatisfied, how would you rate your living circumstances at the moment?”

Sweetland didn’t answer. There was something in the whole set-up that was wrong and he could almost lay his finger on it.

“Would I be right in thinking a five for this, Mr. Sweetland?” He made a mark on the sheet in front of him. “We’ll say five. On a scale of one to five, one being satisfactory and five being certifiable, how would you rate your current mental status?”

Sweetland shook his head, still trying to get his hands around it, the something he knew was wrong and could almost name.

“A five, then,” the government man said, and he made another mark on the paper.

Sweetland looked out toward the porch. “You come in the wrong door,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Last time you was here, you come to the front.”

“We’re splitting hairs now, Mr. Sweetland.”

“How’d you know about the dog?”

“On a scale of one to five,” the faceless voice said, the pen poised again.

“Who was it told you what happened to the dog?”

The government man set his hands on the folder in front of him. “No one told me,” he said.

“No one told you,” Sweetland whispered. He glanced one more time at the suit across the table, at the face missing behind a shapeless welter of light. He pushed himself out of his chair to reach for the man, but the dark folded in on him like a black comber rolling over and it swallowed the room whole.

The world was askew when he came to himself. He recognized the room, the kitchen of the old house, but couldn’t place the pieces where they belonged. All the angles wrong.

He shifted slightly and everything complained against the motion, shoulder and ribs, hips and knees, his back. He was flat out on the floor, his face against the bare wood. He tried to lift his head, but had to settle for flicking his eyes around the room. Daybed, stove. Silver legs of the chairs. Black boots facing him under the table. Someone sitting beside the window. Rough woollen trousers dripping wet. A pool gathering on the floor beneath the feet, the raw smell of salt water in the room.

Sweetland closed his eyes again. “Is Jesse with you?” he said and he waited a long time for a reply before he glanced around again. Still just the one pair of boots under the table. He felt too vulnerable suddenly to stay where he was and he forced himself to his knees, hefted his fractured weight into the chair he’d been sitting in before he passed out. Looked across at his brother in the chair opposite. The young face so pale it glowed like the underside of sea ice. The kelpy hair streaming, his dead eyes glassy and expressionless.

Sweetland was shaking helplessly again, the tremors stirring the scattered territories of his body that were occupied by pain. “I thought Jesse might be with you,” he said, clenching to stop his teeth chattering long enough to speak. “Being as you two was friends.”

He waited then, expecting something from the figure across the table. “Hollis,” he said, to see if the name might wake the thing. But it sat there in the same silence, without so much as glancing his way. He had never felt so cold, not in all his life, not when he was being drowned in the ocean’s arctic currents, not when he was soaked to the bone and climbing the lighthouse ladder in the knifing wind. Sweetland bent double over his legs, holding his chest against the fever’s palsy as it shook through him. It was a cold he thought would never end. He looked over at his brother again. “You must be some sick of this fucken place by now,” he said.

Hollis turned his head then and nodded in a distracted fashion that might have been a response to those words. Sweetland saw his living brother in that expression, the look that came over him when he was buried in some story in the old school reader or hauling at the oars beside him on their way to check the traps in their father’s coat. Blank but animate. Hollis absent even as he sat in the company of others, seeming to live elsewhere half the time.

Sweetland thought he might offer some sort of apology then, but even in his addled state he could tell they were beyond apologies. He clenched his teeth against the chattering. “It’s good to see you,” he said.

And the figure nodded again in the same distracted fashion.

“Say me to Jesse if you sees him,” Sweetland said. “And Ruthie.”

He had a longer list of names in his head that he wanted to offer his hellos to, but his throat closed over and he got no further.

He woke on the daybed, lay with his eyes closed, listening to a fly buzzing at the kitchen window. Trapped and mad for the light outside.

But it wouldn’t be a fly, of course. Months too early in the spring. An outboard engine he was hearing, approaching from a long ways off. The motor geared back as it passed by the breakwater into the cove, 150 horsepower or better, he thought, Evinrude or Honda or Yamaha. All makes sounded more or less the same these days. When he was a youngster you could name a boat’s owner by the particular racket of its engine alone. The Coffins drove an old Mianus that spit and complained exactly as its name suggested it might. The Vatchers ran a six-horse-power Acadia, a newfangled jump-start that didn’t sit well in wet weather, you could hear them cranking and priming and cranking after everyone else was away and gone in the morning. Ned Priddle’s father drove a little Perfection that sent the boat along without a wake or even much of a bow wave, as if it was a magic carpet the man was riding over the surface. He stood aft with the tiller between his knees, smoking a pipe as he made for open water.

Sweetland thumbed through the catalogue of families and engines in his head as he lay there, and he forgot about the boat just arrived in the cove until the motor shut down and the quiet startled him. Voices ballooning in that stillness, two men it sounded like, expecting to find themselves alone in the cove. He ought to be interested in whoever was out there, he figured, but he couldn’t summon even that. He felt licked out, as brittle and clear as a pane of glass.

The voices were making the walk up from the government wharf, pausing along the way to bicker back and forth, a note of disbelief or uncertainty creeping into the talk though Sweetland couldn’t pick out a single word of what they said. They skirted wide of his house, taking the path up toward the mash. Sweetland eased himself to his feet, looked down toward the water from the kitchen window. A new rig tied to the wharf, a fibreglass forty-footer. Someone with money to burn by the look of it. Those phantom cabin owners from Little Sweetland, maybe, checking the abandoned cove on behalf of friends interested in purchasing their own corner of the strange and far-flung.