Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  “How’s Mr. Sweetland?” Barry said.

  He glanced across to Keith and nodded. “The Golden Priddles,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.”

  “Been spending most of our downtime in St. John’s.”

  “What is it going on in St. John’s is so goddamned important?”

  “Just life,” Barry said. “You should look into it sometime.”

  “Send me the brochure, why don’t you.”

  “Where you off to this time of day?”

  “Got a few rabbit slips out past the keeper’s house,” Sweetland said.

  Barry leaned back on his seat. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said to his brother, “but I believe Mr. Sweetland here is engaged in poaching activity.”

  “The fucker belongs in Her Majesty’s Penitentiary,” Keith said.

  “Perhaps we should give the wildlife officer a call.”

  “Oh kiss my arse,” Sweetland said, which got a laugh from the brothers.

  Keith leaned across and tapped Sweetland’s arm with his index finger. He said, “Father tells us you still haven’t signed on to the package.”

  “Can’t deny it.”

  Keith shook his head, solemn. “The old man says he’s going to cut off your nuts with a fish knife, you don’t sign.”

  “Is that a fact,” Sweetland said.

  “I told him I’d be happy to do it for him, if it came to that.”

  “Jesus, Keith,” Barry said. “Don’t mind Keith,” he said to Sweetland. “He’s just being a fucker.”

  “I’m just being a fucker,” Keith agreed. The two men smiling, enjoying the moment. Though they were both considered residents of the island and had voted for the move.

  Barry started up his quad. “We’ll drop by for a drink some night before we goes.”

  “Whatever you like,” Sweetland said and he kicked into gear, drove off over the field of marsh grass and moss.

  At the lighthouse he grabbed the canvas backpack and the .22 from the quad without looking up at the keeper’s house. The Coast Guard had just finished refurbishing the place a year before it was decommissioned. Spent a small fortune roofing and painting it, installing a skirt around the foundation to box in the three-hundred-gallon cistern that collected rainwater in the crawl space beneath the floor. The house fitted out with new furniture and appliances, dishes, cutlery. Sweetland was living alone out there at the time and he tried to refuse most of the upgrades. But some budget line was allocated and had to be spent before the end of the fiscal year.

  People in Chance Cove waited until the shingles on the ocean side were stripped off by the wind, and weather seeped in through the bare boards, before they touched it. Everything of any use came out then—fridge and stove, beds, toilet and bathtub, countertops, highboys and dressers, cupboards—the building like a wrecked vessel being stripped for salvage. Sweetland kept clear of the pilfering for fear of losing his tiny pension, though he didn’t begrudge anyone what they managed to put to use.

  He started along the trail heading north. It was half a mile to where he’d tailed his rabbit slips and it looked like he’d wasted the trip early on. Nothing in the first half-dozen, though one had been taken and managed to twist free. He would have taken up the snares altogether without Jesse to keep him company but for Clara’s self-righteousness. He reset the wire slip out of bald spite, settled the spruce branches he’d cut snug to either side on the run. The day was lightening and Sweetland shucked his rain jacket, stuffed it away in his pack. Took a mouthful of water from the Mason jar. Headed on to the next snare.

  At first glance he thought a fox or weasel had gotten at the creature in the slip, some savage thing eating ugly, making a bloody mess. It crossed his mind it might have been Loveless’s little lapdog to blame. That he might be forced to shoot the pup, to keep him clear of the snares.

  He pushed his cap high and knelt to clear the ruined thing from the run. Froze there on his knees. The animal decapitated, the guts and entrails pulled out through a knife’s incision in the stomach. Hind feet chopped off. He looked away from the mess and the rabbit’s dead eyes were staring at him. The head set in the branches of the tree above the snare, one brown ear nailed to the trunk to hold it in place.

  He stood the .22 on its stock and hauled himself to his feet. “Jesus fuck,” he said. He took up the packsack and walked fifty feet back along the trail to sit against a boulder. It was too early for lunch but he took out the sandwich, chewing on the tasteless bread and washing it down with water. A shower of rain started to fall and he glanced up, trying to guess how long it might last. He put his rain gear on and made his way back along the path to the snare. He took the grocery bag that had held his sandwich and scooped the ruined game into it. The smear of viscera dark through the white plastic. He worked the fabric of the rabbit’s ear over the nail’s hold and placed the head in the bag as well.

  There were two other rabbits in the snares, both of them violated in a similar fashion. He looked for their heads in the nearby trees but there was no sign that he could see. He filled the plastic bag with the bodies and tied it off and carried it with him, taking up each of his snares as he backtracked along the trail to the quad. He tied the .22 on the rack and walked down past the keeper’s house, out to the helicopter pad. It was raining steadily and the wind had come up, his slicker cracking in each gust. He walked to the far end of the platform and flung the foul bag into the sea.

  The Priddles didn’t come by until their last evening on the island. He’d begun to think they wouldn’t show their faces at all. It was an awkward fit they’d made at the best of times and, sometime soon, whatever held them in the same orbit was likely going to wear through. There’d always been a current of animosity buried in their connection to him, as if they resented the fact he was all they had to turn to when they were boys. And some small corner of his heart suspected it was the brothers who’d mutilated the animals in his snares, just to fuck with him. It was well within the compass of their twisted sense of entertainment. And it would have been a relief to Sweetland if that were the truth.

  He heard them coming along the path, shouting and laughing their fool heads off. The night so still they sounded like a carnival driving through town, a truckload of drunken clowns with megaphones. It struck Sweetland what an unfamiliar racket it was, people out for a good time, raising hell for the fun of it. It almost made him feel nostalgic the minute or two it took them to come barrelling through the door.

  They were too loud for the tiny space and low ceilings. They shouted for homebrew, Keith heading into the pantry to help himself. They could be heard halfway out Church Side, Sweetland guessed. Keith reappeared with beers clutched between all his fingers. The bottle caps setting off the words H*O*P*E and F*E*A*R on the knuckles. My prison tats, Keith explained the first time Sweetland noticed them there, after they’d been released from Her Majesty’s Pen in St. John’s.

  Where’s yours? Sweetland had asked Barry.

  He got a heart with the word MOTHER stamped across his arse, Keith said.

  Keith flicked the caps off the bottles with the base of a Bic lighter as Sweetland took down glasses from the cupboard and set about pouring a share to each. Keith took a mouthful and shook his head like a dog climbing out of a pond. “Jesus,” he said. “That’s still the worst brew ever I tasted. Remember what we used to call this, Barr?”

  “Piss & Boots.”

  “Piss & Boots,” Keith repeated and they fell over themselves laughing. They were both stoned out of their heads, eyes glassy as marbles.

  “We could make a fortune off this stuff in Alberta,” Barry said. “What is it they calls it? Boutique breweries? They’re all the rage up there.”

  “But it tastes like shit.”

  “They all tastes like shit, Keith. It’s just a question of marketing.”

  “Well no one’s going to buy something called Piss & Boots.”

  “We could call it Scarface. That would sell. Scarface Lager.�
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  “It’s an ale,” Sweetland said uselessly.

  “Whatever the fuck,” Barry said. “Scarface Ale. Scarface Pilsner.”

  “Scarface Dark,” Keith said.

  “Fuck, yes. Scarface Dark. Skull and crossbones on the label.”

  “That’s money, that is,” Keith said. “Hey, tell Moses here about the cove idea.”

  “What idea is that?” Sweetland asked while Barry waved the suggestion away.

  “Come on,” Keith said. “Out with it.” He turned to Sweetland. “This is real money we’re talking about now,” he said. “We could make a killing on it.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Well,” Barry said, “the idea is we buys up the cove after everyone shifts out.”

  “I’m not moving anywhere.”

  “Hypothetical, Scarface,” Keith shouted. “Speculation is all we’re doing.”

  “All right then,” Sweetland said.

  “So, houses and sheds and wharves and whatnot. I figure we could get the works for ten or fifteen thousand.”

  “Hypothetically,” Sweetland said, “wouldn’t this place be reverted to Crown land once people leaves?”

  “So we leases it or some such. We’ll let the lawyers worry about that. Then we comes in here and rips out all the vinyl siding.”

  “Get rid of it all,” Keith said with an elaborate swing of his arm.

  “Paints the whole place up with ochre and whitewash, puts out a couple of dories behind the breakwater. And we sells package tours to a vintage Newfoundland outport. It’ll be like one of them Pioneer Villages on the mainland. Only, you know—”

  “Authentic,” Keith said.

  “That’s exactly right. The real McCoy. We could have people out here dressed up in oilskins, take the tourists fishing, show them how to split and salt the cod.”

  “No one knows how to salt cod anymore,” Sweetland said.

  “Shut up there, Eeyore,” Keith said.

  “Whatever the fuck,” Barry said. “Feed them a bit of Jiggs’ dinner. Get someone to play the accordion, put on a dance.”

  “We could do weekend packages,” Keith said. “Week-long, ten days. People would pay a fortune for that kind of time.”

  They were always chasing after money when they were high. Sweetland had heard them spin a thousand get-rich-quick schemes, each more unlikely than the last. Bootlegging out of St. Pierre, smuggling drugs up from Mexico by sailboat. Shipping seal penises to the Chinese as aphrodisiacs.

  “I got the advertising for this thing all figured out,” Barry said and he raised both hands like he was displaying a banner. “Experience Life in Sweetland.”

  “No, no,” Keith said. “Experience the Sweet Life in Sweetland.”

  “That’s a fucking gold mine,” Barry said. He pointed across the table with his truncated index finger. “All we got to do is get rid of this old fucker.”

  “From what I been hearing,” Keith said, “someone else is likely to look after that end of things.”

  Sweetland straightened in his chair. “What is it you been hearing?”

  “Be a shame to lose him, you ask me,” Keith said. “We could fit him out in a sou’wester, put him on display for the tourists.”

  “The last Sweetlander, like?”

  “The genuine article.”

  “Jesus in the Garden,” Sweetland whispered.

  The rest of the evening carried on in the same coke-addled vein, the brothers riffing back and forth on one topic or other. Sweetland thought several times to ask the brothers what exactly they’d been hearing about him and from who. But he knew it would come out a useless muddle, half of it exaggerated or misremembered, the other half made up, and he let them go their own way. Keith talking about a woman he was screwing in Fort Mac, reaching into the bedside table for the lubricant he kept there, grabbing a tube of muscle cream by mistake. “That A535 shit,” he said, his arms across his guts for laughing. “Lathered her up good and the burn kicked in. And she starts yelling, What the fuck did you do to me? What the fuck did you do? Wasted half the night into Emergency with her.”

  “Only Keith could make a woman that hot,” Barry said.

  “Jesus, Barr, tell Mose about the sixty-nine thing.”

  “Fuck off, he don’t want to hear about that.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” Sweetland confirmed.

  “He don’t even know what sixty-nine means,” Barry said.

  “He’ve got the internet, tell the goddamn story.”

  “Oh fuck,” Barry said. He straightened in his seat, hauling his jean jacket tight at the waist, like someone about to give testimony in court. “I was with this girl,” he said. “Nice girl, I liked her. And we were, you know, doing the sixty-nine. And it was pretty goddamn slippery down there. Anyway, I’m face and eyes into her—”

  “He really liked her,” Keith said.

  “I practically needs a snorkel to breathe is the fact of the matter. And I’m just about to go off when she rams a finger up my ass. And I snorts in, you know, just automatically. And I inhaled her—her—” he said, struggling to hold off the laughter or find the word he was after. “Her labia,” he said.

  “Fuck,” Keith said, already pounding the table. “Moses don’t know what labia means.”

  “Cunt lips,” Barry shouted. “Right up my nostrils. And she got her legs clamped around my ears. And fuck if I don’t start laughing. And I’m choking and cumming and laughing like a Jesus idiot.”

  “Cunt lips up his nose,” Keith roared. His face cherry red, his eyes bulging.

  “I almost fucken drowned,” Barry said.

  “Man Asphyxiated by Woman’s Labia,” Keith said, which set both men off on another helpless round.

  “Best fuck I had in years,” Barry said when he’d finally settled down.

  Sweetland didn’t mind the Priddles once upon a time, it was true. But he was too old for their bullshit now, the relentless, senseless surge of it. It was like being out in a storm too rough to make for shelter, all you could do was keep face on to the wind and ride it out. He sipped at a glass of warm homebrew and waited for the barrage to end.

  “We’re keeping you up,” Barry said an hour later, “we should go. Catching the ferry tomorrow.”

  “Heading back to Alberta?”

  “St. John’s,” Keith said, and he slapped Barry’s shoulder. “Got Fucknuts here an appointment with that shrink Jesse’s been talking to. See if we can’t straighten him out.”

  Barry turned his backside toward his brother, slapped the cheek of his arse. “Kiss yer mudder good night,” he said.

  They spent fifteen minutes more yammering at each other before they finally went out the door, and Sweetland stood there after he latched it closed, listening to them head down the path. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, he thought, that their mother wasn’t around to see the lives they were leading as men.

  BOB-SAM LAVALLEE MADE THE TREK in from the lighthouse to look the lifeboat survivors over. They were all suffering from exposure and dehydration, though none of them appeared to be in serious danger. No solid food, Bob-Sam said, just soup broth and water and clear tea.

  Any word on the Coast Guard? Sweetland asked.

  It’ll be tomorrow sometime before they can get a vessel out here, Bob-Sam said. They wants to know what ship these fellows come off of.

  There was a name on the lifeboat, he said, but someone scraped it away.

  The men were divided up among the houses in the cove and taken off to be stripped of their filthy clothes and bathed and put to bed.

  Sweetland’s mother was only nine months dead at the time and he was still adjusting to the house without her. The tiny rooms echoing like vaulted spaces. He spent most of his free time with his sister and Pilgrim, eating his meals there and occasionally kipping down on the daybed in the kitchen when he’d had too much to drink to face the two-minute walk up the hill.

  He hadn’t volunteered to take any of the refugees in a
nd no one would have allowed them to suffer a house without a woman to look after them. He went down to Pilgrim’s that evening to see how they were making out and to glean whatever gossip might be making the rounds about their ordeal. Pilgrim was in the rocker beside the stove in the kitchen, a cigarette burning in the ashtray on the table.

  Where’s the missus? Sweetland asked.

  Gone down to sit with the dead one at the church.

  She left you alone with those two upstairs?

  They’re sound up there now, Pilgrim said. They won’t stir this night, I imagine.

  Well that one down to the church idn’t about to stir, I guarantee.

  You knows what she’s like, Moses. You’ll have a drink, he said. I got a fresh batch of shine ready.

  Pilgrim was no use in a boat and had never worked a steady job, but he was a dab hand at brewing. Sold bottles of his moonshine door to door through the cove and to the deckhands on the ferry. He tended bar at the Fisherman’s Hall during bingo games and dances, the younger men getting a laugh passing off ones and twos as tens or twenties.

  He was an “exhaustion product” as the women used to call it, his mother with a grown family and thinking she was through the change of life when she found herself unexpectedly pregnant. Pilgrim’s two eyes sightless from birth. She kept him on a tether until he was old enough to untie the knots himself and he became a ward of the community then, wandering from house to house. Every sighted person taking it upon themselves to steer him clear of the flakes, the wharves, the water. His blindness made even the smallest accomplishment seem a kind of magic trick—buttering a slice of bread, reciting Bible verses from memory, cutting cod tongues. The women clapped their hands and fed him raisins and sweet tea and kissed the crown of his head after he’d performed his most recent beguiling trick. There was nowhere in the cove he wasn’t welcomed like a son. Pilgrim treated Sweetland’s house as his own, staying for meals, spending half his nights sleeping head to foot between Sweetland and Hollis.