Sweetland (39 page)

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.

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.