Michael Crummey - Sweetland

He heard the visitors stop at the new cemetery, their voices echoing off the hills like they were shouting to one another from opposite sides of the cove. Something had unsettled them and Sweetland wondered if that fresh grave over Jesse’s plot was showing through the snow up there. They started back down toward the water and Sweetland took a seat at the kitchen table. Expecting they’d find him there eventually and happy enough to wait.

It occurred to him they might have food with them. Something store-bought and fresh. He hadn’t eaten since the morning he left the cove in Loveless’s dory and he had no notion of how long ago that was. Days now. He felt the hunger from a ways off, it almost seemed to be afflicting someone else altogether. A mild curiosity that he was of two minds about satisfying.

The voices made their way to the back of the house. The side door of the shed creaked, the conversation disappearing as they went inside. Moments later they came out into the open and Sweetland heard a voice say, “That’s almost a winter’s worth of wood gone through.”

The latch on the storm door clattered and from his chair Sweetland saw daylight flood the porch.

“Hello, the house,” someone called from the doorway.

“Go on in, for fuck sakes,” the second voice said.

“You go in, you’re so goddamn keen.”

“You’re such a fucken woman, you know that?”

Sweetland smiling to hear them at each other, even if he was only dreaming the brothers on the island with him. The Priddles came through the porch together, tentative, backlit by sunlight. Stared at him from the doorway.

“B’ys,” Sweetland said.

“Lord fuck,” Keith said.

Barry pushed his brother so hard that Keith almost fell on his ass in the porch. “I fucken told you!” Barry shouted. “What did I fucken tell you?” He jumped across the kitchen so that all the joists in the floor bowed under him, the teacups swinging on their hooks, tinkling like wind chimes. “Motherfucking Sweetland!” he shouted. “I fucken told you, Keith,” he said, shaking his truncated finger at his brother.

Keith was still standing in the doorway, all the blood gone from his face. Sweetland nodded across to him in a way he hoped was reassuring.

“Jesus, Mose,” Keith said. “You looks like shit.”

Keith came back up from the boat where he’d gone to radio the Coast Guard on the VHF. He’d requested assistance with a medical emergency and was shunted from a call centre in Halifax to a contract outfit in Italy. Keith explaining the circumstances to a doctor speaking broken English, a severely injured man on an abandoned island off the south coast of Newfoundland, he said. Where? the doctor asked. Where is this?

The doctor’s grasp of English seemed marginal at best and Keith’s accent completely dismantled the language for him. He needed every sentence repeated three or four times and the two men shouted back and forth at one another for fifteen minutes before the situation finally began to come clear. What do you want me to do? the doctor demanded. I am in Rome.

“What is it, the Coast Guard got everything shut down for the Easter holidays?” Barry asked.

“It’s got nothing to do with the holidays,” Keith said. “That’s saving taxpayers’ money, that is.”

“It’s Easter?” Sweetland said.

The brothers stared at him and then looked at one another. They talked about loading Sweetland into the boat, driving the four or five hours to Burgeo. But it was already getting on to dark with a westerly wind rising and they decided to wait the night.

They set Sweetland up against a raft of pillows on the daybed, put a fire in the stove, lit lamps against the evening coming on. They argued the merits of the various pills Keith produced from an inside pocket, ecstasy and Percocet and half a dozen others in a single plastic bottle. Settled on OxyContin and Sweetland swallowed them down.

Barry sat beside him on the daybed, spooning soup into his mouth. It was Keith who made the cross for him while Sweetland was hiding out in the valley, Barry said. Dug the hole and mixed the cement in a beef bucket and set the marker in place. Hand-lettered the name and dates. Wouldn’t even let Barry lend a hand.

“You’re a miserable prick, you know that?” Keith said. “Making us think you was drowned.” He was sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of rye, watching Sweetland with a skeptical eye. As if he was still unsure Sweetland was the man he claimed to be.

“He spent days out jigging for you before the last ferry,” Barry said.

“Who, Keith?” He was adrift on the effects of the pills he’d taken and was feeling no pain, though he was finding it hard to follow the bread crumbs of the conversation.

“Yes, fucken Keith. Out before daylight, going to all the shoal grounds, jigging until after dark. Hoping to strike you as you floated past. He’d of got some fright now, he brought you up with a hook through your eyeball.”

“That cunt there wouldn’t even get in the boat with me,” Keith said.

“I knew you wouldn’t down there, that’s why. Never believed you was drowned, first nor last. Loveless said you had your pack and some kind of duffle bag aboard when you left the cove that morning and there was nothing on the boat when they found it.”

“Fucken Loveless,” Sweetland said and he shook his head.

“They had the hardest time getting Loveless to leave,” Barry said. “That little dog of his took off the night before the ferry come. He had half the crew up on the mash calling for the goddamn thing. Delayed the ferry six hours. There was a constable out from the RCMP, he had to threaten to arrest him to get Loveless aboard.”

“You didn’t see the dog, did you?” Keith asked.

Sweetland shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

The brothers were home in Newfoundland after a six-week stint in Fort Mac. They’d purchased the new rig with their government relocation money, Barry told him, and decided to take it for a spin, look over the cove, maybe spend a night or two at the cabin in the valley.

“I burnt the ladder to the loft out there,” Sweetland said.

“Out where?”

“The cabin,” he said. “I went along for a visit the winter. You never had enough wood put up to last a night. Had to burn something.”

“Fair enough,” Barry said.

“And I took the bit of gas you had out there for the generator. And drunk the vodka. And you had some dope tucked away that I got into.”

Barry turned to look at his brother. “This fucker belongs in Her Majesty’s Penitentiary,” he said.

“Anything else?” Keith called.

“No,” Sweetland said, and then he corrected himself. “Yes. That map you had on the wall out there.”

“What map?”

“The Come Home Year thing,” Sweetland said. “It’s around here somewhere.” He waved vaguely and then he said, “I burnt the keeper’s house to the ground a few days ago.”

The brothers exchanged a look and he could see them silently dismiss the claim as the drugs talking. “It’s a fucken wonder you’re alive at all,” Barry said. He offered another spoonful of soup and Sweetland raised a hand to hold it off.

“Come on, old man,” Barry said. “You’re nothing but skin and grief.”

He shook his head. “I’m all right,” he said. He had no appetite for anything but company and he spent a while asking after the people he’d known his years in the cove, where they’d wound up and how they were doing off the island. Occasionally bringing up names of people who had died decades before Barry and Keith were born. Dozing at times as the brothers offered what they knew, so the news came to him in fragments, as though it was washing up on the beach like flotsam from a wreck.