Michael Crummey - Sweetland

“We should let you sleep,” Barry said finally. “We’ll bunk upstairs.”

Sweetland shook his head. “Don’t leave me down here alone.”

“I’ll stay with him,” Keith said.

“How’s them pills holding out? You need another hit?”

“I’m the best kind,” Sweetland said.

Barry stood up and set the bowl on the counter. Leaned over him with an arm on either side of his shoulders, his face almost close enough to kiss. Sweetland said something to him then, his voice so weak it was inaudible.

“What is it?”

He worked his mouth a few seconds. “You crowd is real, is you?” he said.

Barry put his hand to the old man’s chest. “Real as you are.”

Sweetland nodded. “The Golden Priddles,” he said.

“Moses fucken Sweetland,” Barry said. “I swear to Christ.”

Sweetland flickered out then and didn’t come to himself until the pain needled through the narcotic, pricking him awake. He glanced across to the table where Keith was sitting up with a kerosene lamp.

“Keith,” he said.

The younger man looked up, startled. “What were you on when you did this?” Keith asked. He tapped at the tabletop with a knuckle.

“What is it?”

“The map from the cabin,” he said. “You must have been stoned out of your mind.”

“You got any more of them pills on you?” Sweetland said.

“Yes, b’y.” He came across the room, shaking the contents of the bottle into his palm. Sat beside Sweetland while he picked through the lot. Even in the gloom Sweetland could see the crude letters tattooed on the man’s knuckles, F*E*A*R and H*O*P*E. “These’ll see you through the rest of the night,” Keith said, and he reached to place them on Sweetland’s tongue.

Sweetland shook his head. “Other hand,” he said.

Keith looked at him. “What’s that now?”

“Use the other hand for me.”

Keith looked down a second, shifted the pills as he was told. And Sweetland opened his mouth.

“You’re some Jesus sook,” Keith said.

Sweetland looked up at his face and Keith stared back, unself-conscious in the night’s quiet, in the dim light. Barry’s snoring overhead almost a peaceful sound through the ceiling. Sweetland reached for the hand that he’d requested, and the two men sat like that for what felt to him a long time.

Keith shook his head. “You got some mess made of yourself, Mose.”

“If you scalds your arse,” Sweetland said and he smiled weakly. “I got what I was after and then some.” He squeezed the hand he was holding. “I wanted to say thanks,” he said. “For the cross you put up.”

Keith shrugged. “Owed you that much. After all the beer and skin mags you give us.”

Sweetland almost asked then about the mutilated rabbits, about the fire that burned his stage, whether the brothers had anything to do with that business. But it seemed too far off. A gauzy, edgeless dream that was bleeding coherence and meaning as he lay there. “I think I’m ready to sleep now,” he said. “You go on upstairs, get some rest.”

“You sure you’re all right?”

“Best kind,” Sweetland said. He squeezed Keith’s hand once more and let it loose of his own. And before he knew it, he was gone.

It was still dark when he woke, feeling rested and ready to start the day. He sat up carefully, lifting his legs to the floor, surprised how little discomfort the movement caused him. Blessed the wonders of the Golden Priddles’ magic pills. Keith had left the kerosene lamp burning on the kitchen table, the light twinned in the windowpane. Even from across the room he could see the soot clouding the glass and he went over to turn back the wick. Noticed the map there, spread across the table’s surface, the paper kinked along the rough creases where it had been folded in his knapsack. Stay Home Year scrawled across the top. Sweetland shook his head at that now, at the long list of fanciful harbours and coves and islands and straits he’d pencilled around the coast. Along the entire length of Newfoundland’s south coast were the words Here Be Monsters with a shaky emoticon happy face drawn beside it. His handwriting, though he couldn’t for the life of him remember setting them there. Stoned out of his mind, like Keith said.

Sweetland traced his finger down the Avalon Peninsula where he’d crossed out St. John’s and renamed the capital city Loveless Town , then along the southern shore, across Placentia Bay to the boot of the Burin. Keith had drawn in the leg and high-heeled shoe of Italy there, a dot handy about Italy’s knee with Rome written beside it. He smiled over that as he glanced past St. Pierre and Miquelon toward Sweetland. And he stood away from the table then, a hand raised to his mouth.

He had to work up the nerve to look closer, bringing the lamp down across the map for the light. Where he expected to see Sweetland there was nothing but blue water. And Little Sweetland beside it the same. The names he’d written across the islands were gone. He thought Keith might have erased them, but even the ink outlines the names had been printed over were missing from the map. As if he’d only imagined seeing them there.

He looked up at the window and his one-eyed reflection stared back at him from that black well. He turned for the door and started along the hall, wanting to wake the Priddles, to make them sit up with him until daylight, but he stopped at the foot of the stairs. Listening for the rattle of Barry snoring or the sound of bedsprings, of the brothers turning in their sleep. But there was only a breathless stillness. And he knew he was alone in the house.

He went back to the kitchen and set a hand to the stove. The fire was out and the metal was cold, like it had been sitting idle a long time. There was no wind in the flue, no habitual creak or settle in the walls of the house. Sweetland crossed the floor to the table and turned the map in quarters as he considered the absence there. So insignificant it would go unnoticed by anyone not looking for it.

He folded the map along the creases and set it in the cold firebox of the stove. He struck a match and dropped it in, watched as the paper curled in the heat, the edges charring black and disappearing in the travelling flame. He set the damper back and took the lamp into the porch to find his coat. Caught sight of Uncle Clar as he slipped into the sleeves and Sweetland nodded goodbye to the young face before he blew out the lamp beside the storm door. Stepped into the still air, into the cavernous silence of the cove. He walked along the back of his property and up beyond the new cemetery, away from all he’d ever known or wanted or wished for. At the King’s Seat he turned to look down on the water and there was nothing below but a featureless black, as if the ocean was rising behind him and had already swallowed the cove and everything in it.

“Now, Mr. Fox,” he said.

He carried on across Vatcher’s Meadow and over the mash toward the light at Burnt Head, following the cairns along the headlands. He was watching for the outline of figures on the rise above the keeper’s house and saw them moving toward the light, all travelling at the same methodical pace, with the same lack of urgency. Sweetland fell in with them as he crested the rise, the walkers so close he could feel the cold rising off their coats, a scoured smell in the air around them, linseed and raw salt and spruce. They didn’t acknowledge Sweetland or show the slightest concern that he was there. A squat form in rubber boots just ahead of him, a shapeless gansey sweater swaying almost to the woman’s knees. He could have reached a hand and traced the pattern in the wool, she was that close to him.

His companions looked to be numberless in the dark and strangers every one of them. But he was grateful for their presence just the same. He followed the procession down to the ruins of the keeper’s house and they filed past it without taking any notice, calm and all in silence. He stopped there, not certain he was meant to go on to the cliffs. A boy brushed past him as he hesitated and Sweetland almost called out, thinking he recognized the child by the seashell whorls of a double crown, a rogue lick of hair. But the feeling passed before he made a sound.