Sweetland (29 page)

Sweetland woke to a disturbance he couldn’t place at first, an agitation in the air that he thought was part of the hangover he’d spent the previous night concocting. He climbed out of bed too quickly and had to steady himself with a hand to the headboard and before the dizziness
passed he recognized the sound. A chopper in the distance, the wet whup whup whup approaching the island.

Sweetland pulled on his pants and the filthy shirt he’d worn the night before, stumbled out to the window at the end of the hall which faced the island’s north end. The Coast Guard helicopter was miles off when he caught sight of it, a speck in the blue, moving toward Burnt Head. A crew coming out for fall maintenance on the light. It disappeared behind the height of land as it descended and Sweetland made for the stairs, hands on the walls to keep his feet.

He pulled on his coat and boots in the porch, stepped back into the kitchen long enough to grab the rabbit’s head from the sink where he’d left it. He opened the main doors of the shed, pulled the tarp off the quad. Set the choke and turned the ignition, the motor rolling and falling flat, rolling and falling flat. Weeks since he’d used the machine and he flooded the engine in his panic to start it up, he could smell the fuel wafting up from the motor. He set off on foot instead, not sure there was enough gas to get him there regardless, not wanting to waste time. He went up the steep slope toward the mash, carrying the creature’s head by the strap of its ears. He stopped at the King’s Seat to catch his breath. A cold morning but he unzipped his coat, already sweating under the layers.

He walked past the remains of his bonfire, the thick coils of wire from the tractor tires orange with rust. He went through the gate to cut across Glad Vatcher’s meadow and before he made the other side it came clear to him he’d have been better to take out the ATV’s plugs and wipe them dry with a rag, tried the engine again. The Coast Guard had an hour’s work on the light at most. Even if there was some maintenance on the helipad or the ladder, he doubted it would keep them out there long enough. He swore up at the sky and then he swore at his boots.

Beyond the moss and tuckamore of the mash the trail moved into a rolling moonscape of granite where it skewed out toward the flat ground on the headlands, and for long stretches it ravelled within an arm’s length of that sheer drop. Sweetland was still feeling a slight
vertigo hangover and he hugged the inner edge of the path, keeping his eyes on the cairns placed to show the way until he heard the helicopter start up, the static whine of the ignition. The tower of the old lighthouse was in sight when he raised his head, the slow beat of the blades making their first tentative revolutions beyond it.

He came over the rise and went down the path with his arms in the air, shouting uselessly into the racket. The chopper already airborne and over the open ocean when he rounded the corner of the keeper’s house, the air around him buffeted by the mechanical storm. He chased after it stupidly, stumbling down to the helipad. He stood at the centre of the platform, like the needle on a sundial, watching the helicopter until it had disappeared in the blue.

The wind faffered around him, picking at his clothes. He was suddenly hungry and cold, his shirt soaked through with sweat. He looked down at the rabbit’s head in his hand, curious as to why he’d carried it out here. It was meant to convince the Coast Guard crew of something, he knew, though it seemed a ridiculous prop now. He thought of how he would have looked to them, waving the foul thing, raving on about the mutilation of rabbits on his line, the head he’d found nailed to his stage door. The voice leading him out of the fog and the phantom chess game underway at Duke’s abandoned barbershop. He patted at his pockets distractedly, like he was looking for reading glasses or cigarettes. Almost relieved to have missed the crew. He walked to the edge of the pad and threw the rabbit’s head back into the ocean that had briefly surrendered it.

He turned to the lighthouse and the island then, started slowly up the rise. Sweetland walked along the front of the building where the plywood near the cistern had been reset with screws. All his materials, the dry clothes and food that he’d stored in the dark beneath the house locked away now, or confiscated. He thought to stop in at the tower to dry himself in the greenhouse warmth of the glass room but the door didn’t budge when he tried to open it. There was no lock on the latch
and he stood looking at the closed door with his hands at his sides. Saw the fresh welts along the seams where the Coast Guard crew had torched it shut. A dozen spot welds around the frame. Sweetland ran his hand along the edge, the bump of each weld still warm from the acetylene.

The crew would make a report about the broken lock on the tower and the board removed from the skirting when they got back to St. John’s. Kids out from Fortune Bay on a weekend drinking spree, they’d put it down to. Vandalism and mischief. Cokeheads home from the Alberta oil fields, looking for trouble.

Not some lunatic geriatric holed up on his own out here. Losing his frigging mind.

He checked his slips on the way back along the mash, out of habit more than intention. There was a single animal in the snares and he carried it home by the feet, the animal’s ears brushing the ground as he went.

The dog was waiting near Diesel’s house and ran out to meet him as he came through the back of his property. “Now, Mr. Fox,” Sweetland said. “Where have you been hiding.” It waddled along on its back legs awhile, nosing the rabbit in Sweetland’s hand.

He went into the porch and paused there, looking back to see if the dog would follow. It stared at him, its head cocked, but didn’t come any closer. He left the door wide behind him, thinking the dog might change its mind eventually. He walked through the porch and stopped two steps into the kitchen. The butchered fish lay in its own gore on the counter, the muck of it running down the cupboard doors to the floor, bloody streaks dried to the wood. The black-and-white picture of his grandfather propped on the daybed.

Sweetland crossed to the stove and lit a fire, waited for the flame to take hold in the splits. Then he filled the woodbox until it was roaring. He set a pot of water on the stove and dug out a bucket from beneath the sink,
splashed half a cup of Javex into the bottom. He scooped the remains of the codfish into two plastic bags, carried them out behind the shed. The dog following him and watching as Sweetland dug a hole to bury the mess, and he tamped the dirt down firm. Then he went back inside and sat beside the portrait of Uncle Clar to wait for the water to boil.

He spent what was left of the daylight hours scouring the kitchen. He scrubbed the floor with a brush and then mopped it, standing in the porch while he waited for it to dry. He stood on a chair to empty the shelves and wipe them down, and then he set about cleaning out the cupboard drawers. Lifted out the cutlery tray and stopped still when he saw the folded sheet of paper beneath it.

He could see the line of letters glued to the inside and his hands were shaking when he laid it flat on the counter. YOU GET OUT, it said, OR YOULL BE SOME SORRY. Sweetland leaned on the counter, rubbed his face across his shoulder. A feeling like bugs crawling beneath his clothes. No telling how long it had been sitting there, waiting for him to come across it, but the threat had a biblical air about it now, something irrefutable and final. He balled the sheet and turned to the stove, threw it into the fire. Set the damper back without waiting to see it catch.

He scrubbed his hands clean and then he set the rabbit in the gleaming sink to dress it, the naked carcass inching free of the fur. He scooped the head and feet and the entrails into a silver bowl that he set aside as he quartered the rabbit. He went out to the root cellar for potatoes and carrot and turnip and when he came back to the kitchen the dog was lying near the stove, sniffing at the blood in the air. Sweetland stopped in the porch doorway and they stared at one another.

“I hope you wiped your feet before you come in,” he said finally.

He lit the two lamps and made a pastry for his stew and set the crock-pot in the oven. He picked the heart and liver from the silver bowl and he fried them up with a little meat he’d set aside and when it had cooled he put it down for the dog. He watched the animal push the bowl across the floor with its muzzle, licking the dish clean. Sweetland
filled the empty bowl with water and when the dog had its fill of that it stretched out in the heat beneath the daybed.

Sweetland changed out of his filthy clothes while his supper was cooking, boiled them in a metal tub, rinsed and wrung them in the sink, hung them on a line above the stove. He sat to the table with the rabbit stew and as he lifted the first spoonful he caught sight of Uncle Clar leaning against the wall across the room, eyes averted, pretending to pay Sweetland no mind.

He went to the daybed and hefted the weight of the picture frame. Considered setting it back in the hallway where it had been. But he carried it into the porch instead, hung it on a nail kitty-corner to the door. So Uncle Clar would have at least that much company when he came and went.

T
HEY FOUND WORK
building split-level bungalows among crews of Italians and Hungarians and Caribbeans. They were so far outside the city that it was only Saturday evenings they could make the trek into Toronto. They drank at the Caribou Club, a new bar catering to the expats who’d left Newfoundland to work in Ontario’s packing plants and factories, in the auto sector, on road gangs. Economic refugees mourning the anachronistic little world they’d abandoned, the squat saltboxes that housed three generations, the brawling weather, the root cellars and fish flakes and outhouses, the rabbit warren of bloodlines knitting the tiny outports into impossible tangles. Old Sam and Dominion Ale and cod liver oil, Tibb’s Eve and Candlemas Day and Sheila’s Brush and Radway’s Ready Relief, Jackie tars and colcannon and breakfast fish. A weakness for superstition and singing and tribal politics. An antediluvian vocabulary spoken in accents so inbred and misshapen they felt like foreigners everywhere else in the city.

The club was on College Street in the heart of Little Italy. A yearly membership fee of two-fifty. They drank with familiar strangers from Conception Bay and the Codroy Valley and Placentia, from the French Shore, the Bay of Islands, the Burin. Men who made twice their wages packing meat or watching bottles trundle along conveyor belts or marking time on assembly lines of one description or other. The crowd
drunken and good-naturedly nostalgic, arguing the merits of punts and skiffs and dories, talking Joey Smallwood or the Newfie Bullet or Churchill Falls or whether beer mixed with ginger ale was a fit drink for a lady. The Caribou Show Band packing the dance floor, dressed in their red polyester sport jackets.

They stayed until the club closed its doors and then moved on to house parties, sometimes winding up in a city park or a cemetery where they slept under trees or between the graves. Woke on damp grass in the open air, their clothes and hair wet with dew. They took their all-day hangovers to a restaurant on College with a bottomless cup of coffee, then to the movies at the Odeon or to wrestling shows at Maple Leaf Gardens, before hitching a ride back out to the worksite in the evening. Talking all the time about when they might be able to jack up and move home.

There were letters from Effie telling Sweetland the weather and how the fish were running, and she rated the minister’s Sunday sermons as though she was grading a student’s exam. Ned Priddle came home to Chance Cove from the mines in Buchans, he wasn’t twenty-five, she wrote, and almost bald. She took the ferry back to her parents’ house in Fortune that July and the letters arrived less frequently as the summer passed. Sweetland felt less obligated to answer in turn, relieved to be free of the chore. He’d never had call to write much down and was surprised by the work of it, by how little he could make of words on a page. There wasn’t much to be said besides the drudgery of the job and the relentless heat. Mostly he talked about what was happening in his absence (“The capelin must be all but done by this time.” “I imagine you’re up after the partridgeberries with Mother these days”). And he closed each letter with the promise he’d be home before Christmas.

4

T
HE SNOW FELL AND STAYED ON
the ground by the beginning of December, as it used to when he was a boy. The days closed in to dusk by mid-afternoon, settling to a coal-black pitch by four thirty with only the lamps to work by. Sweetland hadn’t relied on lamps since the first generators came to the island in the late sixties. Glad Vatcher’s father bought them second-hand out of the
Family Herald
, from farmers on the prairies who had no need of them after their electrical service came through. Old Mr. Vatcher ran power to two dozen houses from four in the afternoon until he was ready for bed. He’d flash the lights three times before shutting it all down for the night, to give people a chance to find their oil lamps or bank their fires and get to bed themselves.

Sweetland couldn’t top up the lamps without thinking about Loveless. Nine-year-old Sara refilling the family’s lamps on the front bridge, leaving Loveless alone for all of two minutes when she stepped into the house on some forgotten errand. The pint glass of kerosene empty when she came back outside and no idea what might have happened to it before she smelled the oil on the toddler’s breath. She stink bad, Sara said, waving a hand to clear the memory of those fumes.

It was months before a doctor had a look at him and he pronounced Loveless fit and healthy. It was the hiccups that saved the child from the
worst of it, he said, keeping him awake a full twenty-four hours. He’d likely have suffered brain damage if he’d slept, the doctor said.

Didn’t sleep when she drink the oil, Sara used to say as explanation for her brother’s peculiar ways, but she have a lot of catnaps.

Sweetland was burning through the kerosene more quickly than he remembered it going and he allowed himself only a couple hours of light in the evenings as he cooked and ate his supper. He sat in the dark with his tea, listening to the radio for the news and weather, a damper on the stove lifted half off, the fire adding shadow to the blackness.