Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  “That’ll sound like more school to Jesse.”

  “That’s what Clara thinks,” he said. He raised his free hand and smoothed the silver hair down around his ears, like he was massaging a question free in there. He said, “Do you think you might be able to talk to him about it?”

  Sweetland smiled uneasily. “I’d rather stay clear of that business, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “He thinks a lot of your opinion.”

  “More than his mother does, for damn sure.”

  “Between us now,” the Reverend said, “it was Clara’s idea to ask for your help with this.”

  “Was it her idea to have you do the asking?”

  “That was my idea,” Pilgrim said. His face turned away from the room, sheepish.

  “I volunteered,” the Reverend said, “to bring it up with you.”

  Sweetland shifted where he stood. Exhausted suddenly and wanting to be left alone. It was all he could do to hold off telling them to go fuck themselves, the works of them.

  “It would mean a lot to Clara,” the Reverend said. “And to me.”

  “I’ll have to sit with it a bit,” Sweetland said, and the Reverend raised his mug to say that was as much as he could ask.

  The men bantered back and forth awhile longer then about the Priddle brothers arriving on the ferry that morning, about the hockey playoffs and the weather, talking in the polite, stilted fashion of near-strangers. When the Reverend finished his tea, he went on his way.

  “I always feels like that cocksucker is spying on us,” Duke said after the door pulled to.

  “He’s just lonely,” Pilgrim said.

  “If he didn’t want to be lonely he should have gone to St. John’s somewhere. Moved into a home for retired clergy.”

  “There’s no such place, is there?”

  “Jesus Christ, Mose,” Duke said. “Would you slap some sense into that one.”

  “Can’t be done. God knows I’ve tried.”

  Pilgrim stood up and set his mug on the seat behind him. “I can get this kind of treatment at home,” he said. He stopped at the door. “You going to talk to Jesse like he asked?”

  “Go on the fuck home out of it,” Sweetland said.

  Duke stood at the window to watch Pilgrim make his blind way up the hill in the driving rain, waiting until he’d seen him in through his door. Turned back to the room. “He’ve got an unnatural interest in that youngster,” he said.

  “Who?” Sweetland asked, though he’d heard Duke make the accusation a hundred times over.

  “The Reverend.”

  “Jesus, Duke.”

  “It’s not normal, is all I’m saying. Trying to get him alone down to the house all summer.”

  “I imagine he thinks he’s doing God’s work.”

  Duke shook his head. “What’s-his-name Bin Laden thought he was doing that, for chrissakes.”

  It was too miserable to go out in the evening and Sweetland tried to pass the time with a hand of poker. He poured himself a glass of rye but didn’t touch it, barely looked at the cards as they flashed up and he lost his stake within an hour. He sat turning his drink in circles on the table. The old house creaked in each gust, the wind throwing buckets of rain against the windows. One of the last hockey games of the season grinding on in the living room, the noise of the crowd rising and falling like a weather of its own. He half expected the Priddle boys to show up, barrelling into the house shit-faced and demanding a drink, going on about the cost of housing in Fort Mac, the money they make working overtime, the skin you could get in the bars up there.

  The Priddles were Irish twins, the second born ten months after the first, and they had never done a solitary thing in their lives. They swam and fished and set fires, they drank and poached moose and gambled together. They co-owned a boat and took over their father’s crab licence a few seasons until they jacked up to work on the mainland. Disappearing for six or eight months during construction season in Nova Scotia or Ontario, spending the winter months at home, collecting their pogey and making a general nuisance of themselves. They were arrested in Burin for possession with intent to traffic, pleading down to simple possession and a four-month sentence at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary in St. John’s. In their forties now, and neither had married or shown the slightest inclination to settle down. They were hard men, the two of them, and the other’s company seemed to push each to be harder and more reckless than he might have been on his own.

  Ned Priddle never quite recovered after Effie died giving birth to Keith. Ned didn’t say as much, but he acted as if he blamed the infant boys equally for the loss of his wife and resented their subsequent claims on him. They were left to their own devices as they grew older, more so after their father remarried. They spent most of their time on the water or in the woods. They built a ten-by-ten shed in the valley on the far side of Sweetland, the logs chinked with moss, a single tiny window salvaged from an old wheelhouse, and they more or less lived out there, going feral like cats in an abandoned barn. Over the years the boys had built and rebuilt the cabin in stages, dragging building materials over by quad. It was where they went to get away from it all, they said, when life in Chance Cove got too hectic for their liking.

  The Priddles were too wild for most people to take, growing up. Sweetland was one of the few who would have them over the threshold and he saw more of them than their own father through their teens. He lived alone and there was nothing he owned that couldn’t be pasted together if it was broken. And he felt he was making something up to Effie by watching out to the boys. Though it wasn’t in him to settle on or name exactly what that was.

  They’d show up after school and sit, incongruously, to episodes of The Care Bears, The Smurfs. They came over Sunday nights for the television wrestling and he’d give them a glass of homebrew to drink. They had christened themselves with wrestling names—Tidal Wave and Rip Tide—the two brothers beating hell out of each other on the floor during commercials. Sweetland called them Pancake and Over Easy, the Golden Priddles, a reference they didn’t get but were insulted by nonetheless. Keith was the bigger of the two and Sweetland had to wade into the fray to save Barry from the worst of it on occasion. They’d trade insults from opposite chairs awhile then, crybaby and cocksucker being the favourites.

  The brothers would bring him a brace of rabbit now and then, helped dig his potatoes in the fall. They’d go across with him after wood and they were sluts for the work, they cut and sawed and hauled with the same gleeful abandon he saw in them as they inflicted pile-drivers and sleeper holds on each other in his living room. He’d pay them for the help with a dozen beer and a couple of skin mags, and they considered themselves well compensated.

  Six years now they’d been working a see-saw contract in Fort McMurray, three or four weeks on the job, two weeks off to fly home and drink and smoke and snort all the money they’d made. It was a way of life that had done nothing to make them less trouble. They settled on cocaine as their recreational drug of choice, and the manic high added a nasty flavour to their recklessness. Barry lost the tip of his index finger the afternoon they’d taken turns putting out a lit match with a .22, one brother at a time holding the little flame at arm’s length, thirty paces off. Barry so high he felt no real pain. Wrapped the finger in a handkerchief and took another shot at his brother’s match.

  They showed up on Sweetland less often as time went on, preferring somewhere with easier access to drugs and women. But everyone was on edge when they came home. It was like setting a couple of wild dogs loose in a hotel room. The place wasn’t half big enough or particularly suited to the life they wanted to live in it, and there was always some damage in their wake. Sweetland tried to keep his distance, though it was impossible to avoid them altogether.

  He raised the glass of rye to his mouth but didn’t taste it. The weather was too miserable for even the Priddles to venture out, he guessed. When the last of the day’s light was well and truly gone he passed into the livi
ng room to flick off the television and went out through the hall in the dark.

  Sweetland woke before light, turned heavily in his bed. Drifted off another hour or so. It was nearly eight by the time he got up, walking out to the bathroom in his jockeys and undershirt. He ran the tub while he shaved the uninjured side of his face, where the whisker still grew. Soaked in the scalding water then, as long as he could stand the idleness. He took his “good clothes” from the wardrobe in the bedroom, a thirty-year-old pair of dress pants and a white button-down shirt he’d bought to wear to his mother’s funeral. Ran a comb through the oily weave of his hair before he went downstairs.

  He refrained from all forms of labour on Sunday. He didn’t cut wood or go fishing or weed the garden or check his slips. He wouldn’t even go out to the shed to putter at the dozen odd jobs that were only halfways done. He sat in the living room to watch the televangelists for an hour or two in the morning, a habit he picked up from his mother in her later years. What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world? they thundered, before imploring the sick and the lame to sign over their meagre savings, their disability benefits. His mother wrote a twenty-five-dollar cheque every week that she entrusted to Sweetland for mailing. He burned each one in the stove, knowing she hadn’t looked at her bank balance in the years since her old-age pension kicked in.

  Sweetland paid no attention to what the preachers were on about, though he enjoyed watching them pace and throw their arms around and froth at the mouth. They looked like professional wrestlers trying to get a rise from a crowd at Maple Leaf Gardens. He watched the shows for the hymns the choirs performed between the readings and sermons. He was never much for singing himself, but he knew the tunes and he hummed along under his breath.

  He had an early lunch of tuna fish on white bread and a tin of peaches for dessert, then spent the first half of the afternoon online, playing poker. Even that caused him a twinge of guilt. Games of chance were the devil’s tool according to his mother, and she hadn’t allowed so much as a hand of 120s on the Lord’s Day when they were youngsters. They sat around in their Sunday best, listening to the eight-day clock tick away the endless seconds. Uncle Clar asleep upright in his chair. A body was allowed to cook food and wash dishes, but the remainder of the day was given over to enforced rest and contemplation, which to Sweetland had always seemed a form of torture.

  In his years at the lighthouse there were duties that couldn’t be left and he polished the mirrors and watched the horizon to note the ships that passed and made entries about the day’s weather and wind in the keeper’s journal, he checked the back-up generators or repainted the light tower or tended the garden like it was any other day of the week. He thought the job might have cured him of the Sabbath habit, but it settled on him as soon as he moved back into Chance Cove. As if it wasn’t his mother but the house itself that imposed the ritual observance.

  Before supper he went for a stroll through the cove, the clouds in rags overhead. He went by Loveless’s place, taking the path toward the barn, calling out to Loveless as he passed below the living room windows. The cow was standing in the tiny strip of field alongside the leaning barn, gnawing at the grass she’d already cropped down to the dirt. Sweetland placed a hand against the heat of her belly and the cow shook her head without raising her muzzle from the ground. She looked about ready to drop her calf where she stood.

  “She’s going to burst she don’t have that calf soon,” Loveless said, coming up behind them.

  “You got neither bit of hay to put out for her?” Sweetland asked. “There’s not enough grass left here to feed a rabbit.”

  “She eat up all the hay I set aside over the winter.”

  “Well can’t you get some from Glad?”

  Loveless looked away a moment, chewing at the unlit pipe. “He wants to take that cow away from me, Glad Vatcher do.”

  “Jesus, Loveless. Why would he want to take your cow?”

  “Tried to buy her off me when I brought her over to the bull last fall. Wouldn’t hardly take no for an answer.”

  “He was just trying to keep the old girl from starving to death.”

  “She got plenty there,” Loveless said.

  “You should have him come look at her.”

  “Who, Glad?”

  “Yes, fucken Glad. Just to give her a once-over. Before the calf comes.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with her,” Loveless said and he looked around himself, one hand picking at his pant leg. He walked close enough to put a hand on the cow’s flank. “He was after me to take the package, Moses.”

  “Well, let him talk,” Sweetland said. “Don’t pay no mind.”

  “He was hard about it. He said some things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “He wouldn’t say nothing the like of it to Sara.”

  Sweetland watched the man a moment. He said, “You haven’t been getting any notes, have you?”

  “Notes?”

  “Ransom notes, like. With letters cut out of magazines.”

  Loveless stared at Sweetland like he was being made fun of somehow.

  “Never mind,” Sweetland said. “You look out to that cow.”

  Loveless slapped the animal’s flank. “She’s fine, this one,” he said. “She’ll be all right.”

  Sweetland was back at the virtual tables early that evening when the Skype icon started jumping for his attention. He clicked it open to answer the call, Jesse sitting at a desk in his bedroom down over the hill. His pale face looming white in the screen’s illumination.

  “What are ya at, Jesse?”

  “Homework,” he said.

  “Good man.”

  “What are you doing?” The boy’s image was jerky, the voice slightly out of sync with his mouth. There was something sinister in the disconnect, Sweetland thought. He’d always hated that about Skype, preferred talking on the telephone. Though he had no time for the phone, besides.

  “Not much,” Sweetland said. “Playing a bit of poker.”

  “Winning or losing?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Losing.”

  “Ah kiss my arse,” he said.

  Sweetland had never gone near a computer before Queenie’s youngest daughter packed up and moved to Edmonton five years back. He’d trundled down to her house with his wheelbarrow to collect the desktop he’d bought from her, walked out with the hard drive in his arms. Welcome to the twenty-first century, Sandra said to him. He set the plastic tower down in the bed of his wheelbarrow and came back to the door for the monitor. Don’t worry, he’d said, I’m only visiting.

  Sweetland never expected to touch the thing himself. He bought it for Jesse, thinking to occupy the boy’s attention and save himself the endless interrogation he made of his visits. Clara came to the house with Jesse that evening to help set up the machine, the youngster explaining each individual component to Sweetland as they went.

  This is your mouse, Jesse said, pointing to the plastic doohickey beside the keyboard. You uses that to move the cursor.

  The what?

  This thing, Jesse said, pointing to nothing Sweetland could identify on the screen. Go ahead, he said, move the mouse.

  And Sweetland had poked at it with his index finger, like he was prodding a sleeping animal.

  It won’t bite you, Moses, Clara said to him, grab ahold.

  Jesus loves the little children, he sighed.

  Jesse spent the weeks that followed walking him through the basics, and he surrendered to the boy’s insistence, thinking it would be less trouble than resisting. Sweetland had never so much as used a telephone before his first trip to the mainland with Duke in 1962, and no one on the island had phone service before the electricity arrived in the early seventies. It seemed a minor miracle now to find himself in the house where he was born, Skyping with a twelve-year-old. He heard a voice offstage and Jesse leaned in close to the screen. “Check your Facebook account,” he said before the square went black.
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  Sweetland had lied to the government man about not being on Facebook. Jesse had badgered him into joining, but Sweetland had only one friend. He signed in, clicked on the link Jesse had sent. A YouTube video began loading and he opened it full screen. A two-minute clip of Jesse “The Body” Ventura pile-driving a series of hapless opponents in the ring. It was as though the boy knew how Sweetland felt about his name and was working to alter his opinion.

  Sweetland had forgotten about the professional wrestler and was surprised to see him in his prime on the internet. The web was like the ocean, Sweetland thought, there was no telling what lived in the murkiest depths. He allowed it might be possible, if a body knew where and how to look, that everything he’d known in his life and since forgotten could be found drifting down there, in grainy two-minute clips.

  He clicked to replay the video, turned up the volume. The floor of the ring pulsing with the impact of those massive bodies, the crowd on its feet. People said it wasn’t real, the wrestling, that it was just a pageant of sham fighting, shadowboxing. Jesse Ventura flung himself across the chest of his opponent from the height of the corner ropes, slamming the man backwards onto the mat beneath his weight. Any idiot could see it was choreographed, that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. But that fall looked real enough from where Sweetland was sitting.

  The sky was still threatening in the morning, low, patchy fog on the hills. Almost too wet to go up on the mash, but he hadn’t been out to check the slips in two days. He packed a sandwich, his .22, his rain gear. Jesse was likely watching the house from his bedroom window and Sweetland wouldn’t look that way when he went outside. A look would be all the invitation the boy needed. He drove the ATV up behind his property and climbed slowly out of the cove.

  He’d crested the rise and started around Vatcher’s Meadow when he saw the quads bombing toward him. He pulled off the trail and waited there. The Priddles whistled past in their army camouflage and ball hats and then spun around to come back up to him. Sat their machines to either side so Sweetland had to turn his head shoulder to shoulder to look at one and then the other. Early for them to be about, though there was no telling their hours when they were on a bender. “B’ys,” he said.