Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  There were two still sitting aft when the boat was emptied out, younger than the rest, Sweetland thought. The larger of the two with an arm around the other’s shoulders, a blue windbreaker spread over top of them. They looked like they had no intention of moving from where they were sitting.

  Sweetland called out to Duke without looking away from them. Go get the Reverend, he said.

  The younger of the two was dead and had been for some time. The one still living tried to fend them off with his free hand when they came toward him.

  Leave them be a minute, the Reverend said.

  That young one won’t be any less dead a minute from now, Duke said.

  Hand me a blanket, would you, Moses?

  The Reverend covered the two where they sat in the boat and settled beside them. I’ll call when I need you, he said. He held a bottle of water to the lips of the man still alive and wiped his face with a handkerchief and spoke to him in a low voice. Praying, Sweetland supposed, though it likely wasn’t the kind of prayer they were accustomed to. The man didn’t take his eyes from the Reverend’s face. After a while the Reverend stood and called up to Sweetland on the dock.

  They had to shift the dead boy out of the way and it was awkward work. There was almost no weight to him, but rigour had set in, the body like an elaborate piece of furniture. The living man almost as stiff and ungainly, hunched and stepping gingerly, like he was walking over broken glass.

  Bring the other one up to the church, the Reverend said to Sweetland. I’ll be along in a minute.

  He and Duke waited until they were out of sight before lifting the corpse onto the dock. They carted it to the church, still in its sitting pose, the knees bent almost to the chest. Sweetland had the corpse under the arms, its head craned to one side so it almost seemed the face was lifted to look up at him and he kept his eyes straight ahead to avoid the sight of it. Without discussing it, they went past the main entrance of the church to the side door near the back, into the room where the Reverend kept a desk and hung his vestments alongside the purple choir gowns on a piece of pipe. They couldn’t see setting the dead boy on the Reverend’s desk and placed him on the floor instead. But they both felt it was an indignity to leave him there and Sweetland went to get the table in the vestibule used for laying out the Sunday bulletins.

  The Reverend came in the door with Ruthie right behind him then, and they all trooped up the centre aisle to the back where they lifted the corpse onto the tabletop. The Reverend turned to Ruth. Have we got a sheet or anything? he asked.

  She was one of the church women who came in early on Sundays and stayed after the service to tidy and spent two evenings a week in the sanctuary to sweep the floor and wash the windows and polish the candle holders on the altar. She went to a cupboard crowded with Christmas wreaths and blank bulletins and mimeograph fluid and dug around at the back until she found a yellowed altar cloth. Pregnant with Clara then, though no one in the cove knew it yet. She helped the Reverend cover the dead boy with the sheet and they stood around him with their hands crossed in front of themselves.

  Don’t seem right to leave him back here on he’s own, Ruth said.

  We’ll bring him out into the sanctuary once we’ve found beds for the rest of them. Have someone sit with him.

  Ruth turned to the minister, placed a hand on his arm. Could we say the Lord’s Prayer?

  He hesitated a moment, as if there was something in the notion that made him uncomfortable. I don’t see the harm in it, he said finally.

  3

  THE FERRY SAILED BY THE BREAKWATER through a blear of rain. The ocean beyond in an uproar. The deckhands hunched in neon-yellow slickers as they threw down the hawsers and winched the gangplank to the government wharf.

  All of it slightly out of focus from where Sweetland sat watching at his kitchen table, edges and colours blurred by the drifting rain. Two passengers disembarked, men in jean jackets and ball caps, carting duffle bags. They paused halfway down the steps, craning their necks toward the deckhands leaning over the rail above them. They seemed oblivious to the weather, their gestures expansive, unhurried. The man standing behind pushed the other forward finally and they skittered down to the dock.

  Sweetland glanced up at the calendar thumbtacked to the wall near the phone, trying to guess how long it had been since the Priddle brothers had come home from Alberta. Before Christmas sometime. The two men hefted their duffle bags and started toward their father’s house, over on Church Side. Heads bent against the angle of the climb and the pelting rain.

  Batten down the hatches, Sweetland thought.

  He opened the laptop to play some poker, hoping the rain might let up before he went out to the shed. Heard the door three hands in, looked up to see Reet Verge come through the porch. She was sausaged into a pink Bench sweater, the sleeves down over her hands against the chill, the hoodie high on her head. The pink material was blood red where it had gotten wet across the crown and shoulders and the expanse of her massive breasts. She looked like a parody of the Grim Reaper, making her rounds.

  She leaned against the door frame. “You aren’t watching porn over there, are you, Moses?”

  “Girl on girl,” he said. “How’s Your Worship this morning?”

  “When are you going to let me clean up that head of yours?”

  He hadn’t spoken to Reet since his last haircut, eight months ago. She’d used the opportunity to lobby for the package and berate him for being so goddamn stubborn. It was unfair practice, he thought, waylaying him there under the silver cape with his hair only half cut. Waving those scissors at his face. He swore never to go back to her and he was in desperate shape by now. He was tempted to let Duke have a go at his hair, just to avoid the woman.

  “I’m growing it out,” he said. “Willie Nelson braids, I was thinking.”

  They watched each other awkwardly a moment. Sweetland trying to guess her age. Fifty? Fifty-five, more like. Old enough to be partying with the smatter of reporters and photographers who showed up on the island when the Sri Lankan boat people passed through. Doing shots of peach schnapps at the Fisherman’s Hall with the last straggler from Saturday Night, who’d come out to do a follow-up that October, its effect on the people in the community, what they made of it all. He got stranded in an early rage of snow and wind that kept the ferry docked in Hermitage three days. The power went out the first night of the storm and they fell back on kerosene lamps, on arias of static drifting from battery-powered radios. The reporter drinking all day to deal with the boredom, the creeping claustrophobia.

  Good God, he said, it can’t keep going like this, can it?

  Out here, Reet said, a snowstorm is like getting your skin. You never knows how many inches you’re going to get. Or how long it’s going to last.

  She was a hard ticket, Rita. Raised two boys on her own after her man moved out west for work and hooked up with a missus from Catalina. Both of her children through school and long gone to the Canadian mainland. She made half a living in her kitchen, cutting hair. Started up the museum with a make-work grant from the feds. She’d been the town’s mayor for three years, a position she didn’t want and held by acclamation since Glad Vatcher washed his hands of it. All the negotiations on resettling the community went through her. She managed to use Sweetland’s recalcitrance as a bargaining chip to double the government’s offer, the extra money enough to bring most of the last holdouts onside—an irony Sweetland was aware of though Reet was smart enough not to bring it up in his company.

  “You know I’d rather be staying,” she said finally. “If it was up to me.”

  “The will of the masses,” he said.

  “Oh kiss my arse.”

  “Careful now, Reet,” he said. “I’m all worked up watching the porn over here.”

  “It would take more than a bit of porn,” she said, “to work up an old fucker like you.”

  He almost asked her to sit down then. He’d never spent more than the length of a haircut alone with h
er but he’d always enjoyed the razor wire of her company—her epically foul mouth, her gumption, her raw savvy. She walked across to the table and sat before he offered, though she left the soaked hood up.

  “I been elected to have a talk with you,” she said.

  “Who did you beat out for that job?”

  “Acclamation,” she said with a rueful smile.

  “Democracy in action.” Sweetland spread his hands on the tabletop.

  “You know Loveless is going to give in,” she said. “Sooner or later.”

  He shrugged and looked away. “There’s still Queenie,” he said.

  “She’ve never showed her face at the Hall to say she’s against this. And Hayward have signed the papers. So it’s all coming down to you, Moses.”

  He spread his hands again, to say So be it.

  “The question I’m supposed to have answered is, What’s it going to take to bring you on board?”

  “You got nothing I’m interested in.”

  “No,” she said, and she shook a finger at him out of the cuff of her hoodie. “No fucking way. You are not going to hold this up because of your Christly feelings, Moses. Now you name your price and I’ll see what I can do to get it paid.”

  “Not for sale,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Jesus,” she said. “You thinks you’re doing God’s work, is that it?”

  Sweetland half smiled, thinking she was making a joke.

  “I can’t figure what else is in your mind,” she said. “To cause so much grief to the whole goddamn town and be able to sleep at night.”

  She wasn’t about to leave without having a racket, he realized, and he got up to walk by her, took his jacket down off a nail in the porch.

  “You thinks this will all go away if you ignores it long enough,” she said. “But it won’t.”

  “That’s a threat, is it?”

  “That’s a simple fact. People got too much on the line to just let it drop.”

  “Now that sounds like a threat.”

  She shook her head again but didn’t turn to him. Her face hidden by the hood. “Someone is going to end up getting hurt in all this,” she said. “And you’ll have no one but yourself and God to blame for it. You mark my words.”

  He let himself out the door and pushed it to behind him, hid out in the shed then until he was sure Reet had left. He put in a fire and opened the main doors, the air smelling of wet hay and woodsmoke. He spent the better part of the day working in the bay of the shed, replacing the floor of the trailer he’d built for the quad twenty years before. All the while turning Reet’s accusation over in his head. God’s work, she said, trying to goad him into talking. Everyone but Duke was after Sweetland to explain himself these days, to offer a rationale for his refusal to leave. He’d tried to parse out an argument in his head for awhile, but every attempt to name what he was holding onto made it seem small, almost ridiculous.

  Ruthie had always said any woman crazy enough to marry Sweetland would shoot him dead in the end. It was his reticence she was talking about, his bullheaded diffidence. He could admit to hardly knowing why he felt a particular way about anything. The stronger the feeling, the less able he was to break it down into identifiable categories, into cause and effect. But he wasn’t accustomed to being called out for the lack and it served only to make him increasingly close-mouthed and obstinate. His conviction more firmly anchored as the holdouts dwindled, as if to offset the loss in numbers with a blind certainty.

  He found himself enjoying it almost, to be the one knot they couldn’t untangle. Holding on like grim death and halfways invigorated by the effort. Twisted, Ruthie used to say of him, and Sweetland couldn’t argue her assessment. Or change his way in the world.

  He finished the job by mid-afternoon, washed up at the kitchen sink and walked the path to Duke’s shop. The rain coming down in sheets. Wince Pilgrim was sitting beside the chessboard, Duke facing him in the barber’s chair, one insect leg hooked over the arm.

  “Look what the wind blew in,” Duke said.

  Pilgrim lifted his face to the ceiling, listening. The blind eyes glaucous, murky as a fog. “That’s Moses, is it?”

  “The man himself.”

  “Jesse idn’t with you?” Sweetland asked.

  “Clara got him doing his homework up to the house,” Pilgrim said.

  Jesse used to spend an hour at the barbershop every day after school, but Clara seemed to be making an effort to wean him off his island habits. Or maybe it was meant to punish Sweetland. He’d walked down expecting to see the boy and was almost sorry to have come now. He wrestled out of his wet jacket, shook it twice before hanging it on the coat rack. He walked across to stand by the heat of the stove, Pilgrim’s head turning to follow his footsteps. There was a kettle on the floor by the woodbox and Sweetland filled it in the corner sink.

  A figure flicked past the window and the door pushed open, the weather scurrying in just ahead of the Reverend. He turned quickly and slammed the door, leaning against it like he was trying to bar a rabid animal outside. “Mercy,” he said.

  “Is that you, Reverend?” Pilgrim asked.

  “That’s some day out there now,” the Reverend said.

  Duke climbed out of the chair in sections, swiped at the worn leather with a towel. “Have a seat,” he said. “Moses just got the kettle on.”

  “I’ll sit by the board.”

  “That’s what you won’t,” Duke said. “Seat of honour.”

  “The first shall be last,” the Reverend said. “The last shall be first. You know how that goes.” And he sat in the wooden chair across the board from Pilgrim.

  “I thought you was retired of all that business,” Sweetland said.

  The Reverend laughed. “A man of the cloth,” he said. “Practising or no.”

  He was dressed in black slacks, a black suit coat, and white shirt buttoned to the throat under his jacket. He sat with his hands folded in his lap, clean-shaven and his white hair oiled back from his forehead. He looked like someone keeping a body company at a wake. The man’s business like a stain and no way on God’s earth to scour it out now it had set.

  “You’ll have a cup?” Duke asked.

  “I wouldn’t say no.”

  The Reverend was Welsh by birth and had moved to Canada as a student. He was assigned a Newfoundland parish in his early twenties and got married there, he and his wife taking on churches in half a dozen Newfoundland communities over the next forty-five years. He’d come to Sweetland in the seventies and extended his appointment two or three times over, though his wife agitated against it more publicly as time passed. The Reverend was heartbroken to leave when he did, everyone remarked on it.

  Sweetland said, “What have I got to work with there?”

  The Reverend glanced down at the chess board. He never participated in a game, but he liked to watch its progress, offering advice and suggestions.

  “Everyone but Moses have washed their hands of it,” Duke said. “They’re after me to start a new one up.”

  “I’m still thinking on it,” Sweetland said.

  “I got half a mind to put you on a clock.”

  “I could say a prayer for you,” the Reverend offered.

  “Save it for No Chance Cove,” Duke said.

  Sweetland was about to say something in response but thought better of it, for the company.

  The church on the point was closed up when the Reverend moved back to Sweetland seven years ago, widowed and retired from preaching. He bought an empty house out behind the church and spent most of his time reading and meandering along the island paths. No one knew what to make of his return or quite how to take him. In his first months back, he made a habit of stopping by Sweetland’s shed on weekday mornings. He’d sit in one of the ripped vinyl kitchen chairs against the wall and waste hours of Sweetland’s time, listening to the open-line show on the portable radio above the workbench, passing a comment on one issue or other.

  He expected th
e man was working up the nerve to ask after Ruthie, how she was at the end, and if she’d said anything at all that ought to be passed on to the Reverend. It made Sweetland feel panicked to see the man stick his head in the door, though his vocation and bearing made it impossible to send him on his way. Sweetland took to putting a fire in the wood stove, opening the vents and stoking it until the shed was stifling. The Reverend would strip down to his dress shirt, but couldn’t bring himself to undo even the top button, and he’d sit there with beads of sweat popping on his forehead.

  You don’t mind the heat.

  Likes it warm, Sweetland told him. They says it’s good for the joints. You want a cup of tea?

  Lord, no.

  The Reverend was forced to abandon the fiery pit after half an hour and eventually he gave up the visits altogether. Sweetland lost a lot of good wood in those months, but he considered it well worth the price.

  That first fall, the Reverend began volunteering at the school, where he took on Jesse as a pet project, developing a remedial program to help the boy do his sums and to curtail his outbursts and his spells of mindless rocking and chanting. It was the Reverend who’d found the doctor the boy was seeing in St. John’s and made the arrangements for his appointments. He hired Clara Pilgrim to come to his house two mornings a week to sweep the floor and wash his three changes of identical clothes. He could be prevailed upon to open the old church to officiate at the occasional wedding or christening or funeral but refused to consider regular Sunday services. To all appearances he’d settled in to live out the rest of his days as a semi-private citizen on the island, before the talk of resettlement.

  The Reverend turned to Sweetland. “Has Jesse said anything to you about his time with the doctor?”

  “Not so much, no.”

  Sweetland thought he caught the briefest moment of skepticism or annoyance passing over the clergyman’s face. But it disappeared so quickly he might have imagined it.

  “They’re saying the more structure we can give him, the better,” the Reverend said. “I was thinking of having him come to the house for sessions during the summer. Three times a week or so.”