Jesus, Moses, she said. Her arms wrapped a cardigan tight about herself. You scared the life out of me, she said.
You left Wince alone up there with those two fellows.
They was sound asleep, the both of them.
Well one of them was puking his guts out when I left.
She skipped ahead then, half running on the path. Why did you leave him? she asked.
He told me to come get you.
But you was right there in the house.
They were having a racket to avoid talking about other things, he knew. And that suited Sweetland well enough.
He followed Ruthie inside but stayed in the kitchen as she went up the stairs. Listened to the muffle of voices through the ceiling, the coughing and dry heaves of the sick man. Pilgrim called from the landing, asking him to put the kettle over the heat for hot water, to hand up rags from under the sink, the mop and bucket from the back porch. Sweetland went about collecting the materials he’d been asked for, but couldn’t even find it in himself to answer.
Sweetland was best man and father-giver at his sister’s wedding, handing Ruthie away when the minister asked, and he passed Pilgrim the ring for Ruthie’s finger. Pilgrim was besotted with the girl and had been for years, everyone could see that. He spent part of every day in their company, was a fixture at the Sweetland table. Talk-sang a few ballads to try and impress Ruthie as the women cleared up the dishes. And would never have laid a finger on her but for Sweetland insisting she teach him to dance.
His mother is in the ground for long ago, he said when she objected, how else is the poor frigger going to learn?
Sweetland appointed himself chaperone while Ruthie hummed a tune and wrestled Pilgrim around the tiny kitchen space. Pilgrim topped up on shine to overcome his mortal shyness before his lessons, though it did little to help his dancing.
You’re about as graceful as a cow in a dory, she told him.
Got no head for it, he said.
It’s only a bit of math, she insisted, and she counted the steps aloud, one two three, one two three.
Ruthie thought of him as a kind of hapless uncle, made fun of his awful voice, snuck up behind him to cover his sightless eyes with her hands and shout Guess who? Blind to how the older man felt before he proposed to her. She refused him twice, and it was only her mother’s intervention that swung things in Pilgrim’s favour.
Ruthie’s been leading that poor soul on, she said to Sweetland.
He started in his chair, glanced across at her. Sure, she was only showing him how to dance.
His mother was knitting in a rocker by the stove and her hands paused at their work. She looked directly at her son. You know how Pilgrim feels about Ruthie, she said. Dancing is leading enough for a man in his condition.
Sweetland leaned forward on his knees, his eyes on the floor. Pilgrim have got his heart set, that’s plain.
You needs to have a word, Moses.
It made sense to him that Ruthie marry the man, to formalize the relationship already cemented between Pilgrim and themselves. The dancing lessons were just a way of setting them in each other’s path. He expected the rest to follow as a matter of course, if there was more to come of it. He’d never considered he might be called on to shift things further along that road himself.
She dotes on you, his mother said. She’ll mind what you tells her.
I don’t know, he said. That’s more your place than mine.
His mother dropped her knitting in her lap, threw her head to one side in frustration. It was you started this whole business, she insisted.
He stared at the tiny woman in her horn-rimmed glasses, surprised every time by the flash of ice in her. All right then, he said.
Ruthie thought the sun shone out of Sweetland’s arse in those days. She had always looked to his opinion, over even her mother’s. They had never spoken a cross word, she had never refused him a request. Pilgrim was practically family already, he told her, and he had to watch out for them both anyway. It was only a bit of math, he said.
The sick man upstairs was still urging helplessly. There seemed no end of foulness to spew from his guts. Sweetland walked up the stairs with the materials Pilgrim had asked for, placed them in his arms at the landing. He could hear Ruthie’s voice speaking low in the room where the refugees were lying. Everything all right? he asked.
Ruthie’s here, Pilgrim said. She’ll look out to him.
I’ll go on, then, he said. Sweetland couldn’t look at him, even though the man was blind.
Wince, Ruth called, I needs those rags.
We’re all right here, Pilgrim said to Sweetland and he headed steadily along the hallway, turning sharply into the sickroom like a man with eyes to see.
5
ON THE FIRST OF JULY, Hayward Coffin came downstairs to find Queenie dead in her chair by the window, a half-smoked cigarette guttered in her hand. Her book face down on her lap.
The funeral was delayed a day to give Queenie’s children time to make the trip back from the mainland. Most were travelling from the oil sands in Alberta, her oldest boy coming from Oregon where he ran a deck and fencing company. All of them forced to wait on the ferry schedule after their flights. The coffin had to be shipped over on the ferry as well, from a funeral home in Fortune, and meantime they waked Queenie on a bare table in the parlour. Clara had washed and laid Queenie out in a purple dress she’d found in her wardrobe, but couldn’t dig up a pair of shoes to put on her feet.
“She haven’t wore shoes since 1977,” Hayward told her. “Put on her slippers,” he said, “she might as well be comfortable.”
The coffin was heavy as a dory and too wide to be carried through the door where Queenie used to stand smoking and talking to passersby. They had to take out the window above her chair to bring it into the house, and again to lift the dead woman out a day later, half a dozen men reaching their hands to catch her as she crossed into the open air for the first time in forty-odd years. Being careful not to trample the straggle of flowers that had come up from the seed she’d tossed outside.
The Reverend opened up the old church and aired it out the day before the funeral. Clara and Reet Verge and Queenie’s daughter swept out the vestibule and polished the dark wooden pews and set out vases of fresh-cut wildflowers. The weather hadn’t improved much through the month of June and was still wet and cold into the first week of July. Everyone wearing coats over their mourning clothes. They set Queenie on a trailer behind an ATV and the funeral train followed her down to the church. Sweetland bringing up the rear with Duke and Pilgrim and Loveless.
“Queenie Coffin,” Loveless said, “in her coffin.”
“She told me she wouldn’t going to be around the fall,” Sweetland said.
“She been saying that this twenty year,” Duke said. “She was bound to be right about it sooner or later.”
“A sin to take her out of it,” Pilgrim whispered. He had his face lifted high, uncertain about his footing on the dirt path, his left hand inside Sweetland’s elbow. “Should have buried the poor woman under the kitchen floor.”
“She’s dead,” Duke said. “It don’t matter a goddamn to her where she goes now.”
At the church Sweetland guided Pilgrim into the pew beside Clara and Jesse, but the boy swung out a hand to hold the blind man off.
“Jesse,” Clara whispered, trying to bring his arm down, but he wouldn’t relent.
“What’s wrong now?” Sweetland asked him.
“That’s Hollis’ spot,” he said, his eyes toward the front of the church.
“I can make room,” Pilgrim said, and he sat two feet from Jesse to leave the space free.
“Well Christ,” Sweetland sighed. He sat beside Pilgrim and took out a mouldy hymn book, flipping aimlessly through the pages. “I don’t know which one of you is worse.”
“It’s not like we don’t have the room to spare,” Pilgrim said.
The sparse congregation murdered a handful of Queenie’s favourite hymns
without accompaniment, the Reverend playing the first note on a soggy-sounding electric organ. They were all out of the habit and subdued by the occasion. Jesse’s was the only clear voice in the church. He had perfect pitch, according to the Reverend, and he showed an unlikely capacity for recalling lyrics. He sometimes forced Sweetland to sit through twenty or thirty impeccably rendered verses of the morose ballads he’d learned from Pilgrim. But he had no patience for the musical limitations of others.
Don’t sing, he’d say to Pilgrim, waving his hands and jumping foot to foot like someone standing on hot coals. Don’t sing, just say the words.
The wounded sound of the congregation was too much for Jesse and halfway through the second hymn he surrendered, sitting and covering his ears. He rocked back and forth and moaned softly while Clara tried to soothe him, running a hand across his shoulders.
Duke turned to Sweetland from the pew ahead. “I’m with Jesse,” he whispered.
The coffin was loaded back onto the trailer for the trip to the new cemetery, a fenced square of hillside that had been ordained to its current purpose only fifty years ago. The old cemetery was tucked away in a droke of trees above the incinerator, up a trail so steep coffins were tied on a sledge and dragged to their final resting place with a rope.
Sweetland lined up behind the family to throw his handful of dirt onto the polished lid and then took up a shovel to help fill the grave, alongside Glad Vatcher and young Hayward Coffin. He was afraid Jesse would stay to watch the morbid proceeding but Clara led him away with the mourners, the boy glancing over his shoulder as he went. The other Coffin boys had gone down to Queenie’s house as well and Glad tried to send Hayward after them. “You don’t have to be at this now,” Glad said, but Hayward shook his head. He was nearly the same age as Glad and the two had fished together a few seasons as younger men. The spade rang against the rocks in the soil with every shovelful as young Hayward stooped and threw the clay down onto his mother, his mouth working fiercely. And they finished the job together without speaking another word.
They made their way down to the reception when they were done, warm enough from the work to carry their jackets. Halfway along Glad and young Hayward began talking back and forth about the weather in Oregon and work, about Loveless losing his calf and the job they had getting the cow on her feet.
“Never gave her a snowball’s chance,” Glad said. “And she seems right as rain there now.”
“Just goes to show, I guess,” young Hayward told him.
“You planning to stay for a visit at all?”
“High season,” young Hayward said. “Can’t afford to miss the work.” He looked around and shook his head. It was his first trip home since he left, long before the cod fishery was shut down. “To be honest,” he said, “my skin’s already starting to crawl being stuck out here. No offence,” he added quickly.
At Queenie’s house, old Hayward sat against the wall with a grandson on his knee. The Reverend and Jesse staring at the tiny screen of an iPod, sharing a set of headphones to watch that goddamn Titanic movie. Pilgrim and Duke and a few others nursed drinks or cups of tea in their chairs while the rest of the crowd milled aimlessly around the cramped rooms that had been Queenie’s only weather for most of her adult life. A handful of people lined up to shake old Hayward’s hand and offer their final condolences when they saw Sweetland come in, making a public point of their departures that Sweetland ignored.
Sandra was sitting beside Clara on the landing to the stairs, both women holding rum and Cokes. They had gone off to university in St. John’s together but Sandra came home as soon as she graduated, teaching at the little school before finally following the rest of her crowd up to the mainland five years ago. She came unsteadily across the room when she saw Sweetland.
“How are you holding up?” he asked, which set her to crying, and he looked away as she collected herself.
She said, “I was going through her things yesterday. Found all the books I’ve been sending her in a box under the bed. I don’t think she touched them.”
“No,” he said, “she read a few.”
“She told you that?”
“She always made a point of saying if it was a book from you she was reading,” he said and left it at that.
“I hated the thought of her wasting her time on that Harlequin junk.”
“You should know better than most,” he said, “she wouldn’t going to change to satisfy anyone.”
“I know, I know,” she said, furious suddenly. “I wasted half my life trying to get her off the smokes. And the other half trying to get her out the door of this fucking house.” She raised her glass to the faces looking her way. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry.” She swallowed half her drink in a single mouthful. “I was born upstairs here,” she said, her voice lowered to imitate her mother’s tobacco-mangled whisper. “And I’ll be leaving this house in a box. If I had to listen to her say that one more time I would have choked her.”
She was on the verge of tears again and Sweetland looked down at his shoes. He said, “I think she was reading one of the books you sent, the last going off.”
“Really? Which one?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “One of the Newfoundland books you sent down.”
She nodded emphatically and blew a breath through her lips. “Mom always talked about you,” she said. “When she called. She always had a bit of news about you.”
“Well,” he said. “She had to scrounge for news around here, I imagine.”
Sandra kept staring, sizing him up. Drunk enough to be reckless. “You know,” she said, “I always thought Mom was sweet on you.”
Sweetland laughed and turned halfways away from her.
“She told me once,” Sandra said and she waved her hand. “I don’t know when this was, ages ago. Before I went off to university. She said she always had it in her head you and her would get married.”
“She was having you on,” he said. Sweetland glanced across at old Hayward, to be sure their conversation was a private one in the room’s racket.
“No. No, she wasn’t. She was talking about what it was like growing up around here. Before the lights and all of that. Said you two were thick as thieves.”
“We was just youngsters,” he said.
She could see she’d embarrassed him. “You need a drink,” she said, heading for the kitchen counter to refill her own. She handed him a full glass as he came up to her. She reached into her purse which was hanging over the back of a kitchen chair. “I’m going for a smoke,” she said.
“When did you start smoking?”
“Mom’s last pack,” she said. “Thought I’d finish it off for her. Come out with me.”
They put on their coats and walked around the side of the house. Sandra turned her back to the wind to light her cigarette.
“How many left in that pack?”
“Half a dozen or so.” She blew a plume of smoke that whipped away in the breeze. She paused then, her head cocked as if to listen, and he did the same instinctively. “Everyone says you’re set on staying here.”
“Might be I am.”
“Must be hard.”
“What’s that?”
“Sitting in the king’s seat on this whole business,” she said. “Everyone hung up on your yea or nay. Can’t imagine a lonelier spot.”
He shrugged. “Verily,” he said, aping the minister reading from Psalms at the funeral. Trying to make a joke of it.
“Clara isn’t very happy with you,” Sandra said.
“Clara was never too happy with me.”
“You know that’s not true. She thought the sun shone out of your arse when she was a girl.”
“Well,” he said. “She grew out of that notion.”
“I don’t know. You’re half the reason she came home.”
He laughed. “Not fucken likely,” he said.
“She wanted you to be around for Jesse. Same as you were for her growing up.”
“She
never told you that.”
“She didn’t need to tell me,” Sandra insisted. “Why do you think she carried him out to the lighthouse every Sunday? So she wouldn’t have to go to church?”
“Never give it much thought, I guess.”
Sandra looked drunkenly at the cigarette to see how much more there was to get through. “It’s a sin you never had youngsters of your own,” she said. “You know what Mom used to say about you? She’d say, That’s a good man going to waste, that is.”
He was only half listening, still trying on the unlikely notion of why Clara had come back to the island, to see if it fit his memory of the facts.
“What was it happened between you and Effie Priddle?” Sandra asked, and Sweetland glanced across, startled. “You two were engaged once,” she said.
“We was never engaged.”
“You went off to Toronto looking to make enough money to buy her a ring.”
“Who’s after telling you that?”
“Was it what happened to your face when you were up there?”
“Sandra.”
“I don’t think it was,” she said, answering her own question. “There’s plenty of women would have had you, don’t think I don’t know.”
“We should go back inside.”
“Are you gay, Moses?”
He shook his head. “Your poor mother is just put in the ground.”
Sandra took a sip of her rum. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m half-cut.”
“I’d say you passed half-cut about three miles back.”
“Ha,” she said and she raised her glass to him. “I just want you to know,” she said. “If you were. It wouldn’t make any difference to me.”
He shook his head again, a strangled little smile on his face, and he started along the side of the house without her.
Sandra was the last of Queenie’s children to leave Sweetland after the funeral. And without giving it much apparent thought, old Hayward packed a suitcase the night before the ferry arrived and went off to live with her in Alberta. The house left exactly as it was, the sheets on the bed and all the dishes in the cupboards. Queenie’s extensive library of romances and mysteries in the cardboard boxes she used to store them. It was a decision so sudden that it felt like a second death. The storm door nailed shut. Sweetland was constantly surprised to find the place dark when he looked out his windows at night or ambled by on his walks.
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