Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  Music was the only vocation anyone had ever heard of for a blind child, and the church took up a collection of pennies and nickels to buy Pilgrim a fiddle. The toy violin made of pressboard and lacquer, strung with plastic strings. The church’s minister offered a handful of ineffectual lessons and Pilgrim spent hours at a time in a chair by the kitchen window, sawing out approximations of “Turkey in the Straw,” “The Lark in the Clear Air,” a few local jigs. He had so little aptitude for the music, he didn’t know how bad he was. Kept at it until his mother broke down in tears of frustration one evening and his father threw the contraption into the stove.

  It wasn’t the end of his musical career. Pilgrim had a prodigious memory for the old labyrinthine ballads about murder and shipwreck and star-crossed love. He had no voice to speak of, but he was still called on at weddings and wakes and Christmas concerts to make his tuneless, inexorable way through one disaster or other.

  Ruthie worked as custodian at the school and Pilgrim added a disability pension to the pot, along with whatever he made peddling his brew. And they muddled along, like everyone else on the island.

  He and Sweetland sat at the table with glasses of shine and their smokes and the rumours already circulating about the men asleep in the town’s beds. Mongolian, some said. Trinidadian. Tibetan. Sri Lankan, according to the Reverend. Sweetland was shocked to learn the language they were speaking was English. He hadn’t understood a word that came out of their mouths.

  Where did they think they were going, I wonder.

  Somewhere in the States is where they were told, Pilgrim said.

  The Promised Land.

  The very same.

  They sat in silence a few moments then, until they were startled by a commotion above them, a voice through the ceiling.

  Sounds like they might be stirring, Sweetland said.

  They could hear someone throwing up and Pilgrim rose from his seat, heading for the stairs. You might want to go get Ruthie, he said.

  Sweetland went out the door and down the path at a clip. It was only the thought of the strangers asleep in the houses around him, and the dead boy laid out in the church, that kept him from screaming Ruth’s name as he pelted along.

  The front door of the church was open and he checked himself as he came up to it. There were candles lit at the front near the body, the pale light just enough to add a little gloom to the dark inside. He whispered Ruth’s name as he walked up the aisle but there was no sign of her. He stopped well short of the dead boy under his sheet near the altar. He guessed she was in the minister’s room at the back but he couldn’t bring himself to walk past the corpse to reach the door, or to call loud enough to be heard. “Ruthie,” he said, hissing the word.

  He backed up the aisle until he was outside. Turned and started toward the side entrance they had used to carry the body inside earlier in the day. The door swung open as he approached it and the Reverend came through. Sweetland was about to call out to him, but something in the man’s demeanour wouldn’t allow it. A hunch to his gait, his eyes on his feet. A rushed quiet about the man. The Reverend turned away from the path at the foot of the stairs and skulked through the long grass at the back of the church.

  Sweetland looked up at the door. Ruthie still inside there, he knew.

  4

  SWEETLAND WOKE TO THE SOUND of Loveless’s cow bawling, a hollow moaning complaint carrying through the mauzy dark. He lifted himself up on an elbow to look out the window, down past Queenie’s house, but there was no sign of lights at Loveless’s place. He lay back and did his best to ignore it, but the lowing went on endlessly, a sound so full of helpless misery it made his stomach knot.

  Fucken Loveless.

  He pushed up out of bed, dressed awkwardly in the black. Dug around for a flashlight in the porch, walked down through the cove. Sweetland went along the path beside Loveless’s house to the barn where the miserable creature was calling, unhooked the door and stepped in. The building rank with the smell of shit and rotting hay. He played the light along the barn’s length to the spot where the cow stood with her head pushed into the corner. Her back legs wide and the haunches quivering as though she were plugged into an electrical outlet. The calf was hanging halfway to the ground, its nose swaying six inches off the ground. One foreleg still caught up inside the mother. The pink tongue hanging lifeless out of the mouth.

  Sweetland walked across the dirt floor, placed a hand to the cow’s haunch. The animal’s head swung toward him and Sweetland glanced up at the motion, caught sight of a shadow darting further along the wall. He flicked the light across it, picked out the little lapdog skulking through the straw. “Hello, Smut,” he said and the dog sat down five feet from the cow. Ears cocked high.

  Sweetland reached down to cup the calf’s muzzle, the nose wet and cold. He straightened stiffly and wiped the hand on the ass of his pants. “I’ll be back the once,” he said, to the cow or to the dog or the fetid room itself.

  He turned on the porch light in the house and called up the hall. “Loveless!” he shouted. “You got a dead calf out there.” He waited a minute, heard the sound of bedsprings shifting. “You’re going to lose that cow if you don’t get your arse down here,” he said.

  He went back along the path to the barn. Cast the light around a moment, the dog in the same spot though it was lying down and watching, attentive. Sweetland took off his coat and rolled it into a ball on the ground, propping the flashlight there so it shone on the cow’s hind end. He rolled the sleeves of his shirt above his elbows and knelt behind her. “Now, missus,” he said.

  The dead calf was slick with birthing fluid, gelatinous and cold in the chill. No telling how long it had been hanging like that. The cow was fair gone herself. Sweetland pushed a hand into her, reaching to get his fingers around the foreleg caught up back there. It was tucked at an angle so unnatural he couldn’t find a decent grip. He wrapped an arm around the calf’s neck and leaned his weight against it, hauling at the leg as best he could. The cow lifted her head to bawl and the dog barked along. Nothing budged.

  Loveless came into the barn with a storm lamp in his hand. He had a coat on over his bare torso, a pair of striped pyjama bottoms tucked into his boots.

  “The fuck have you got done here now,” Sweetland said.

  Loveless peered in at the scene a moment and turned around in a panicky circle. “That goddamned animal, Sara,” he said to the ceiling, as if the dead woman was watching them from the rafters. “She haven’t been nothing but trouble to me.”

  “It’s not the bloody cow’s fault,” Sweetland said. “What were you doing asleep in bed?”

  “I was out with her till almost midnight,” he said. “I didn’t think she was going to go tonight.”

  Sweetland gave the man a look. “Well everything’s locked up in there now. You should go get Glad.”

  “I don’t want nothing to do with Glad Vatcher.”

  “Don’t be a goddamned idiot.”

  “You got to do something, Moses.”

  “Well Christ,” Sweetland whispered.

  “I can’t lose Sara’s cow.”

  “Shut up a minute,” he said. Sweetland looked into the black of the vaulted roof, considering. He picked up the flashlight and headed for the door.

  “Moses?”

  “Don’t you touch that animal before I gets back,” he said.

  He went up to his shed, rifled through a tool chest below the workbench. Collected a pair of canvas gloves, wire cutters, electrical tape. Hung near the door there was a length of thin cable once used to secure lobster traps on the stage and Sweetland slipped it across his shoulder on the way outside.

  Loveless stared at the cable when Sweetland came back into the barn. “Jesus, Mose,” he said.

  “You want to lose Sara’s cow?”

  He took a moment to consider the possibility, shook his head.

  “Bring that light in,” Sweetland said. He taped one end of the cable, worked it inside the cow, pushing f
or the calf’s shoulder joint. He forced his second hand in below the first and reached for the taped end blindly, his face against a quivering flank, grunting with the effort. The cow had gone eerily silent and was slowly shaking her head back and forth. “Come on now,” Sweetland said, “come on.” When he’d hooked the cable around the foreleg he sat back, both hands sliding free at once, drawing the taped end out. He shook the mess from his hands, shucked his forearms and fingers clean with straw, and put on the gloves. He cut the wire to leave himself with an even length top and bottom. “You hold her head,” he said to Loveless. “Don’t let her come back to me.” He wrapped the cable around his palms and once Loveless had a grip on the animal’s neck he started in pulling left under right, a steady jigging rhythm, the wire singing with the strain.

  After fifteen minutes he stopped to shake the blood back into his hands. He took off one glove and reached inside to check on the cable’s progress. He looked up at Loveless who hadn’t spoken a word since he started. “You want to take a spell at this?” he asked, but Loveless shook his head.

  It was half an hour longer before the cable gnawed all the way through the joint. Sweetland wrapped an arm around the calf’s neck again and put his weight into it, shouldering toward the dirt floor as it inched loose and then came free in a sluice of blood and afterbirth. The cow stumbled sideways, leaning her full weight against the barn wall, and Sweetland hauled the corpse out from under her. The amputated foreleg hadn’t come free with the body and Sweetland reached back inside to find it. Laid it beside the calf near about where it would have been if it was still attached. Knelt there with his hands on his thighs to catch his breath.

  “Will she be all right, you think?” Loveless asked.

  Sweetland glanced up at the cow. She was shaking along her length, her head bowed almost to the dirt floor. “How does she look to you?”

  The dog crept out of the darkness and sniffed at the calf, at the dead eye staring into the rafters. It took one tentative lick at the snout and backed away. Sat there and looked up at Sweetland. A little blaze of white on its black chest. A tuxedo dog, Loveless said it was called. The man probably paid extra for that, Sweetland thought.

  “You got to get this mess cleaned up,” Sweetland said as he got to his feet. His clothes were soaked through with the filth, the material dank and cold against his skin. “And if that cow needs anything else, you go get Glad Vatcher, you hear me?”

  Loveless was staring down at the slick corpse. “What do I do with this?”

  Sweetland started for the door. “Dig a hole somewhere and bury it,” he said.

  It was light when he left the barn and Queenie Coffin was standing just inside her doorway as he walked by, cradling her elbow, her cigarette held high. She shook her head at the sight of him. She said, “You looks like the tail end of a good time, Moses Sweetland.”

  “Loveless lost his calf,” he said. “As like he’ll lose the cow along with it.”

  Queenie took a slow drag. “I heard her bawling,” she said.

  “I don’t know why he bothered bringing her over to Vatcher’s bull this year. He knows as much about animals as I knows about Saudi fucken Arabia.”

  “He was just missing Sara.”

  “That’s a hell of a way to show it, killing her cow.”

  “Be a mercy if she goes, probably. And one less creature to have to take off the island.”

  Sweetland stared at her, standing one step above him in her nightdress and housecoat, the curlers still in her hair. The bright red lipstick making her face look strangely lifeless in the early light, as though it was a mask she was wearing over her real face.

  When Queenie was just shy of twelve, her older sister came down with typhoid fever. Glad Vatcher’s father ferried out a doctor from Burgeo who quarantined the entire family inside the house. They were kept fed by their neighbours, and Sweetland’s mother would occasionally send him over with a pot of soup or a meal of salt beef and cabbage that he left on the front bridge. It was the only time he’d ever knocked on a door in the cove, to let them know their dinner was there. He’d back away from the house then, twenty or thirty feet, watching to see Queenie or one of her younger sisters lean out to take it in.

  It was Uncle Clar who framed out the girl’s coffin in his shop after she died. Sweetland was with him as Queenie’s father shouted the child’s height and her breadth at the shoulder through a window, Uncle Clar jotting the measurements on a scrap of wood. Queenie was standing against the far wall behind her father, though he couldn’t see her face for shadow and she wouldn’t lift her head to look his way.

  Poor little lamb, Clar repeated a hundred times as he sawed and planed the boards, as he nailed and sanded and varnished. Sweetland helped the old man carry the finished coffin down and they left it on the front bridge, as he did the family’s meals. Queenie’s father opening the door to drag it inside. The funeral was held later that morning, the coffin sitting on the bridge again with the dead girl inside. Every soul in Chance Cove standing below it to sing a few hymns and bow their heads as the minister said his prayers. The family watching it all from the parlour windows, the sisters bawling behind the glass. Waving goodbye as the coffin was hefted and carried up to the old graveyard.

  Sweetland spent the entire service watching Queenie. She had hidden herself away at one corner of the window, almost out of sight altogether, and she never once looked up at the funeral congregation, never caught his eye, and he was relieved in some obscure way not to have to bear it.

  For the life of him now he couldn’t remember the dead sister’s name.

  Queenie raised her cigarette to the gaudy red lips, dragged the smoke into her chest. She looked past him, down to the water. “The Priddles is on their way.”

  He turned toward the dock where the ferry was already in and tied up. He saw the Priddles heading over from Church Side with their duffle bags on their shoulders and he thought to walk down to see them off. But it was too much to take on. He went up to his house instead and stripped out of his filthy clothes in the porch, left them in a heap on the floor. Fell asleep on the daybed in the kitchen.

  Jesse was at the table when he woke, the laptop open in front of him.

  “Shouldn’t you be into the school?” Sweetland asked.

  “It’s dinnertime.”

  Sweetland could see the boy had helped himself to two tins of peaches. “You put in a fire.”

  “It was cold in here,” Jesse said. “You looked cold.”

  “Put the kettle on for me, would you?”

  Jesse crossed to the stove, added a junk of wood to the firebox, pushed the kettle full over the heat. “What happened to your clothes?” he asked.

  “Forgot to wear a napkin at supper last night.”

  “Ha,” Jesse said.

  It was a recent thing, his ability to separate a person’s tone into categories, to pick out a joke for what it was and acknowledge it. Sweetland’s role as court jester paying off finally. Or the Reverend’s work with him. Or just the boy catching up with life.

  “Your mother know you’re over here?”

  “Poppy knows.”

  “That don’t mean your mother is going to be happy about it.”

  “Loveless’s calf was born dead last night.”

  Sweetland sat up in his underwear and socks, raked his fingers through his hair before he thought better of it. Looked at his hands, crusted black and red. “Where’d you hear that, now.”

  “Poppy told me.”

  He walked to the sink and ran the water until it was scalding, scrubbed at his skin with a brush. Scoured at the blood under the nails. “Did your pop say how the cow was doing?”

  “She’s lying down,” Jesse said. “Won’t get up out of it.”

  Sweetland turned off the taps, shook the water from his hands and forearms, wiped them down with a cup towel. He’d have to burn the clothes he was wearing, he figured. “You’re not playing poker over there, I hope.”

  “Angry
Birds,” Jesse said.

  “Well,” Sweetland said. “That’s all right, I spose.”

  What was it about the youngster? It was his seriousness, maybe, that made him seem distant. He was doggedly loyal and affectionate in a standoffish way that a body could confuse for the opposite of affection and loyalty. He had a cat’s self-centred indifference to the world as others saw it, a cat’s inscrutable motivations. He took odd notions, running off now and again for no obvious reason, disappearing up on the mash or hiding out at the lighthouse or as far as the Priddles’ cabin in the valley. He never tried to explain himself after the fact or was incapable of it. He couldn’t be trusted altogether because you couldn’t guess with any certainty what he was thinking.

  When Sweetland moved back into the cove from the keeper’s house, he spent most of his evenings at Pilgrim’s, eating his supper there and watching an hour or two of television with Jesse. America’s Funniest Home Videos. Wipeout. Two and a Half Men. Then Jesse would begin the first of the many elaborate stages required to get him to bed. Clara and Wince took turns saying their good-nights and bringing the boy a glass of water and adjusting the pillows to his satisfaction, and then he’d call for Sweetland. Lying in the dark with Jesse to answer endless questions about hockey and fishing and wrestling, about the saucy rooster Sweetland killed when it went after Ruthie, about the boatload of Sri Lankans he’d happened on near Burnt Head.

  It was impossible to say what Jesse made of these stories, why he returned to them so obsessively, insisting they be told in the same manner each time. He seemed to be constantly checking the world at large against the one in his head, making sure they were one and the same. Though at night, in his bedroom, it seemed just another ploy to delay the inevitable. Jesse clinging to wakefulness like a drowning man, rousing himself out of near sleep to ask one more thing.

  Tell me about the coat, he would say.