Sweetland (38 page)

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.

He worked off his jacket and sweater, but couldn’t get his shirt over his injured shoulder. He tore it along the seams, dressed himself again in the soaking gansey and coat before wringing as much water as he could from the torn fabric. It was still too wet to soak up the little gasoline in the tank and Sweetland tipped the machine onto its side. Rested against it as the waves of pain pulsed through him. Removed the gas cap and hauled the machine all the way over onto its back, holding the shirt underneath to catch whatever might leak out. Shaking the quad back and forth to get every drop. He could smell gas on the cloth when he was done, but couldn’t even say if it was enough to burn.

He walked back over the rise and down toward the light and he stood considering the pathetic pyre of scrap wood. Glanced across at the keeper’s house, took in the wasted length of the place that was slowly rotting into the ground. He moved what he’d gathered against the house’s foundation with the shirt balled underneath it. Flicked the lighter. The material so wet that the flame burned blue a few seconds, before the wood caught hold. Sweetland stepped away when the fire got going, but only far enough to stop himself scorching his skin. The heat so feral and delicious he almost wept.

The building’s skirt scorched black behind the fire, but for a while it looked like the house would survive his attempt at arson with the smallest of scars to show. He wandered further afield looking for fuel, piled every knuckle of driftwood, every twisted branch of tuckamore he could find against the foundation. Within an hour the place was alight, the boarded windows belching smoke. Sweetland kept moving back as the inferno grew, as it threw wider bands of heat where the flames ate through to open air. He took off his coat and laid it flat on the ground, turning it regularly, like a cut of meat he was cooking over coals. He took off his gansey sweater and pants and socks and did the same with them. It was still snowing outside the fire’s fierce circle but not a flake touched him. When his clothes had dried, he dressed and lay down to sleep in one of the outer rings. Waking now and then to shift closer as the fire collapsed and settled.

By late afternoon the walls and ceiling were down and the open flames burned off. The blackened stump of the building was still radiating enough warmth to keep him comfortable, but he expected it wouldn’t last through the night and he couldn’t risk staying out in the open. The snow coming at him in waves over the remains of the fire. The Priddles’ cabin was the closest bit of shelter but he’d cleaned out every scrap of food and firewood in the fall. And he knew he would never manage the climb out of the valley once he got down there.

He pulled his jacket slowly over his injured shoulder, pushed on the one boot left to him. His head was throbbing with a concussion or a weed hangover or a fever, or some combination of all three. He had no idea how much daylight was left to him. He started up the rise toward the mash, the charcoaled ruins of the keeper’s house smoking behind him. By the time he made the crest, the snow was steady and drifting and he could just make out the path along the headland, the intermittent cairns marking the way. The ocean in a lather against the base of the cliffs.

The back end of the storm came around as he scuffled along, the wind freshening and blowing northwest, and he walked into the blizzard,
the ground drifting over so the path was almost impossible to distinguish. He turned back on to the wind now and then to clear the ice frozen to his eyelashes, trying to guess his location from what he could see nearby. The whiteout so complete that Sweetland lost sight of the ocean and light tower and the smoulder of the keeper’s house behind him.

It was coming on to evening before he admitted to himself he was well off the path. He considered turning back to try for the Priddles’ cabin, but guessed he was closer to the cove than the lighthouse now, and an hour of daylight at best to travel in. The drifts were knee-deep and Sweetland walked with a curiously mechanical gait through the snow, all the feeling gone out of his legs, his injured arm cradling his injured ribs. Talking himself past the urge to lie down.

It was nearly dark when he walked into the fence around Vatcher’s Meadow and it took him a few moments to recognize it for what it was, standing still in the storm, turning the thing over in his head. “Now, Mr. Fox,” he said when it finally came clear to him. He was in no shape to climb the fence and he followed the line south, looking for the gate. From there he angled across the meadow until he reached the fence on the far side, using the poles as markers. At the gate he struck as straight as he could manage from the corner post. Stumbled on the King’s Seat at the top of the hill above the cove, crouching out of the wind in its shelter awhile. Startled from a snug well of sleep that was almost too narrow to climb out of. He got to his knees, lifted himself into the wind’s crosscut.

It was steeply downhill into the cove from there, and he stumbled all the way to the back of his property, his body alight with rivets and hinges and underground cables of pain as he lurched and righted himself and lurched opposite. He leaned against the shed when he reached it, catching his breath. The door of his house invisible in the dark and the blowing snow, though he knew it was only twenty steps distant. Sweetland not quite relieved to have made it back alive.

He woke on the daybed, though he had no memory of coming into the house or lying down. He was still wearing his coat and his single boot. His hands felt miles away and they seemed to expand and shrink with his pulse. He was dying for a drink of water but the sink was too far off to get to and he stared helplessly across the room. He couldn’t guess what time of day it was, or what day of the week. It was bright outside and the sunlight made his head ache.

Someone walked by the kitchen window as he lay there and he was too feverish to be startled or to wonder who it might be. There was a knock at the door and he took his time trying to fashion a response to it. “Come in,” he said finally. The knock came again and Sweetland worked himself onto an elbow, to give some heft to his voice. “Door’s open,” he called.

The knocking continued and he got to his feet, reaching with his good arm for chairs and door jambs to stay upright as he crossed the kitchen to the porch. He paused in front of Uncle Clar, out of breath, sipping at the air against the welling ache in his chest. Saw the outline of himself superimposed on the ancient picture there, a ghostly image hovering in the background, as if he was a second exposure on the same strip of film. A figure bled of detail and substance, so that all the world showed through him. Moses Sweetland.
This is he
.

The knock startled him and he turned to the door, swung it wide and lifted the latch on the storm door. His visitor standing there in a tweed jacket and tie, tan pants. Hands folded at the waist holding the inevitable briefcase. Sweetland couldn’t make out the man’s face through his one good eye, the features lost in a glare of sunlight.

“Mr. Sweetland,” a voice said from the place where the mouth should have been.

He paused a moment, waiting for the face to resolve out of the shine. He lifted a hand to shade his eyes.

“Do you mind if I come in,” the government man said.

Sweetland stood back to let the man go by, followed him into the kitchen. There was something he was meant to do for visitors and he
groped through the murk, trying to think of it. The government man took a seat beside the window and placed the briefcase flat on the table in front of him, his hands folded on top. Sweetland went toward the stove and turned back slowly. “I could boil the kettle,” he said and stopped short, staring at the man.

“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.”