Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  “Don’t wake him,” she said. “He’ll be up half the night.”

  Sweetland went up the stairs with a hand to the rail, padded along the hall to Jesse’s room. The door was closed and Sweetland turned the knob carefully. Eased it open and listened awhile to be sure he hadn’t disturbed the sleeper. The boy was on his back with all the sheets kicked to the foot of the bed. One knee propped against the wall, both arms flung above his head. He was wearing the only pyjamas he would consent to put on, a pair he’d outgrown years before and refused to surrender, though the sleeves came almost to his elbows, the pant legs rising halfway up his shins. Clara had been trying to get him into something new for months, going so far as to ask for Sweetland’s help cajoling.

  Jesus, Sweetland told him, you looks like a streel in those machines.

  Don’t care, Jesse said.

  You looks like one of them street urchins got no one belonged to them.

  Don’t care, Jesse repeated.

  The pyjamas made him look hopelessly vulnerable in his bed, his limbs like pale shoots growing out of the fabric, the smooth expanse of his belly exposed. The little well of the navel a thimbleful of darkness. Jesse’s face was turned toward the door but angled unnaturally up toward the headboard. He looked like he’d fallen from a height, dropped from a roof-top or a headland and come to rest in that mangled posture. Sweetland wanted to ease the boy’s arms back down at his sides, to straighten the leg crooked against the wall. He wanted to lie down with the boy awhile and listen to him breathe.

  He allowed himself to lift the bedsheets up over Jesse’s chest, but wouldn’t even chance touching the youngster’s hair before he left. Closed the door as carefully as he’d opened it, made his way back downstairs to the living room where he said his good-nights. He mentioned going out after a few cod when the food fishery opened and said that Jesse was welcome to come if he wanted. And he walked drunkenly home, with no idea if Clara would allow it or not.

  She brought Jesse down to the government wharf two days later, the boy carting their lines coiled in plastic tubs, Pilgrim following behind. Sweetland reached a hand up as the boy climbed into the boat and Jesse turned into his belly to hug him briefly. The first time in years.

  Clara helped Pilgrim down and handed their gear to Sweetland. “Make sure he keeps his lifejacket on,” she said.

  “Have you got a lifejacket for Hollis?” Jesse asked.

  “Hollis is staying home out of it with your mother,” Pilgrim said.

  Clara looked down at Sweetland, apologetic.

  “Hollis can come if he wants,” Sweetland said. “But I got neither lifejacket for him.”

  Jesse mumbled a few words to the air beside him and then nodded, listening. “Hollis says he don’t need one,” he announced.

  It promised to be a large day, clear skies and hardly a breath of wind. Sweetland let Jesse take the boat around the breakwater and he glanced back into the cove as they made the turn, the remains of his stagehead a dark smudge on the view, the blackened timbers awash at high tide. Jesse asked a stream of questions about the fire, wanting to know how it started and how hot the fire might have been and if Sweetland planned to build another stage. Sweetland was as evasive as he could manage as the boy pressed on about who might have set the fire and why they might have done it. “No telling people’s minds” was all he said about it.

  Just as they turned into open water, a harbour porpoise kicked up off the bow. Jesse shouted and pointed as the porpoise veered down and away from the boat.

  “Puffin pig,” Sweetland said, using the name he’d grown up with.

  “It’s not a pig,” Jesse insisted. He offered the proper name and then spelled it, to underline its propriety.

  “Pardon me, Your Highness,” Sweetland said, and he waited then for Jesse to ask about the pig they’d had when Sweetland was a youngster. But the habitual question never came, lost in the novelty of steaming out to the ledge, Sweetland guessed, the prospect of going after the cod. Though it felt like another crack showing in their lives together. The boy as good as gone already.

  They motored on to Saturday Ledge where he cut the engine. They let out their lines until the jiggers touched bottom, brought them up a yard and started into the work of it, hauling and releasing the full length of their arms. It was the first day of the food fishery and there were boats up and down the shore, on the Shag Rocks, on the Offer Ledge, on Pilgrim’s Shoal, and away out to the Mackerel Cliffs at the south end. It almost looked like old times on the water, everyone at the cod.

  “Tell me about the pig you had,” Jesse asked then.

  “What pig?” Sweetland said.

  “The pig used to chase you and Hollis.”

  “I don’t remember much about it,” he said. He spat over the gunwale into the water. Almost angry to feel so relieved.

  “Your father bought a piglet.”

  “Right,” he said. “Father bought a piglet from old man Vatcher one spring, kept it in the shed out back.”

  As pale and inquisitive as an infant child, it was. Old eyes watching them. He and Hollis fought over who would bring it table scraps and fish guts, the pink snout raised above the rail as they approached the pen. Through the summer it foraged free and learned to follow them around the property, sat outside the door while they ate their meals. A year later it weighed as much as a handbar of salt fish, five feet from snout to tail. It had taken to waiting for Sweetland and Hollis to come home from school, chasing them out to the flake used for drying capelin and squid, the boys jumping onto the surface and the pig rooting underneath in a mock fury. They’d make a break for the shed with the snorting pig at their heels, climb the walls of the pen, shouting down at the creature snuffling beneath them. It shouldered the boards so the building shook, waiting for them to head to the flake. They’d go back and forth between the two refuges a dozen times, until their mother or Uncle Clar told them to stop tormenting the animal.

  Jesse turned his head to the water suddenly, taking up his line hand over hand, the water spinning off the nylon as it came over the gunwale.

  “You got one already?” Pilgrim asked.

  Sweetland tied off his line to help gaff the fish aboard, but Jesse flicked his catch expertly over the gunwale onto the deck. Stood back then, staring at the thing, his mouth open.

  The bag was tied tight at the mouth but the jigger had ripped a hole in the plastic and Sweetland could see the rabbit carcasses inside when he bent to free the hook. The heads and back paws removed. Most of the flesh gone off the bones after two months in the ocean.

  “Well?” Pilgrim said from where he was standing aft. “Did he get one?”

  Sweetland glanced up at Jesse. He tried to smile, though all the feeling had gone out of his face. “He got one,” Sweetland said, not wanting to explain what the boy had hauled aboard. Not sure he could. “But he’s too small to keep.” He used the gaff to lift the bag out over the water and dropped it, watched it sink down into the dark.

  “Well there’s fish about anyway,” Pilgrim said.

  “Put your line back out,” Sweetland told the boy. “Where was I?”

  “Stop tormenting the animal,” Jesse said uncertainly.

  “Put your line out,” Sweetland said again and he handed the jigger across. Once Jesse had fallen into his rhythm, he repeated, “Stop tormenting the animal.”

  They never had a name for the pig, which seemed strange to Sweetland after the fact. The Pig, they called it. Piggy. Porker. It would eat from their hands and lick them clean, thorough, fastidious, he could still remember the feel of that tongue between his fingers, the warm snout pushing against his palm. Its eyes closed as it worked, the lashes pale and fine.

  They came home from school one afternoon and there was no sign of the pig. Piggy, they yelled. Hey, Porker! Ran to the flake whistling and shouting. Cold enough to see their breath as they called. They crept out to the shed, thinking the animal might have learned to lie in wait for them, planning a sneak attack.
They slapped at the walls before poking their heads inside. But the pig was gone. Rooting through the garbage pile back of Loveless’s house in all likelihood, or stuffing itself on the filth thrown into the landwash from the stageheads. And they didn’t think more of it until they sat to their supper, when their father stood to carve a shoulder of pork, laying lavish portions on the plates.

  Hollis turned toward him, but Sweetland wouldn’t look at his brother for fear of bawling. He folded his arms and sat as far from the meal as his chair back allowed. And Hollis did the same. Sweetland chewing on the inside of his mouth as the adults cleaned their plates. They were made to sit at the table until after dark. He could hear their parents arguing in the pantry and their mother came in to clear the cold food away. Eight months pregnant with Ruthie then, though the boys were told nothing about it and didn’t realize a child was on the way until the morning the girl was born. They were sent to their room finally and their father was forced to give most of the meat away so it wouldn’t spoil, hocks and crackle, bacon and ribs and chops.

  “Father never did speak a word to us about it,” Sweetland said. “Took sick that November month, just after Ruthie was born, and he lay in his bed all winter. Died the end of February.”

  “What was wrong with him?”

  “What?” Sweetland said. He’d never mentioned his father dying as part of the story before and was surprised to have it come to the surface now.

  “Your father,” Jesse said. “What made him sick?”

  “No one knows,” he said.

  Uncle Clar wanted to take the man across to Burgeo or Placentia to see a doctor, but his father wouldn’t hear of it. I’ll be right the once, he’d insisted. He was almost twenty years older than his wife but still a youngish man, just shy of sixty. And seemed to be getting better, as he predicted, just before he died. Ate a full meal of salt beef and cabbage that Sunday, the first time in months, propped against pillows in his sickbed. Asked after dessert and Sweetland carried up a partridgeberry pudding his mother had boiled in an old baking soda can. His father took three mouthfuls of the pudding, chewing slowly, like he was trying to guess the spices hidden within the whole. Slumped over in bed then, never made a sound.

  “He was dead?” Jesse asked.

  “Gone,” Sweetland said. “Just like that.”

  His father’s ravenous appetite is what Sweetland remembered about the event, how incongruous it was. Eating against his end, Uncle Clar used to say. The body seeming to know ahead of the man himself what was coming.

  Pilgrim stood up, leaned a little ways over the gunwale to start hauling in his jigger.

  “Have you got one?” Jesse said.

  “Feels like a fair size.”

  The fish loomed as it rose, pulling dead, the white of its belly flickering out of the dark. “Jesus, she’s heavy,” Pilgrim said. It came to the surface calm, sacrificial, as all cod did, until it broke the surface where it twisted weakly and came clean off the hook.

  “Lost her,” Pilgrim said, holding his bald jigger aloft.

  “She’s right there,” Jesse said, pointing.

  The fish lay stunned and adrift at the surface, as if it didn’t realize yet it was free. Sweetland miles away, stunned and drifting in much the same fashion.

  “Right there,” Jesse said again, and Sweetland shook himself into motion finally, tied off his line, reached out with a gaff to snag and haul it aboard. It slapped on the deck without urgency and then lay still, its mouth working soundlessly, the silver coin of one eye gaping at the sky.

  “How big is she?” Pilgrim asked.

  “Big,” Jesse shouted.

  Sweetland put a hand to the gunwale against the ocean’s swell, waiting for the spell of vertigo to pass. “She’s a beauty, all right,” he said.

  It was still shy of noon when they made their meagre quota and started back for the cove.

  “You want to clean some fish or you want to take the wheel?” Sweetland asked the boy.

  “The wheel,” Jesse said.

  Sweetland reached into a cooler at his feet for two beers and he sat aft beside Pilgrim, the men cleaning the cod as they steamed in. Gulls swirling above and behind them like a foul plume of engine exhaust, the scavengers screaming and fighting over the guts as they were tossed into the sea.

  They finished Jesse’s five and Pilgrim’s, and Sweetland said he’d look after his own when he got back to the house. He leaned out into the spray to rinse his hands and forearms in the water, and he looked forward then, watching Jesse standing to one side of the wheel, his free hand moving like someone conducting an orchestra. The noise of the engine made it impossible to hear, but he knew the boy was carrying on a conversation with Sweetland’s long-dead brother.

  “You want another beer?” he asked Pilgrim.

  “I’m all right.”

  Sweetland walked up to the wheelhouse and set the two empties at his feet.

  “This is where the accident happened,” Jesse said to him.

  Sweetland glanced out at the water to get his bearings. They were just passing over the Wester Shoals where he and his brother used to trawl for cod in the fall. “I spose it was Hollis told you that, was it?”

  “Poppy told me.”

  Sweetland looked back at Pilgrim sitting aft. “What else did Poppy tell you?”

  “He said you was the only one was there, so it’s only you can tell the story.”

  “What about your buddy there at the wheel? He was there, wouldn’t he?”

  “He says you’ll tell the story when you’re ready.” Jesse didn’t take his eyes from the water ahead, talking in the same flat tone.

  Sweetland looked away a minute as the vertigo crawled over him again.

  “You don’t have to,” Jesse said.

  “Just this once,” Sweetland said. “And Hollis can correct me if I gets anything wrong, how’s that?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, then.” He reached into the cooler for a beer. “We come out to do some trawling,” he said.

  October month. They had the trawl baited with fresh squid and shot it out, let it fish on the bottom a couple of hours. They’d just gotten the boat that spring, a skiff with an ailing Acadia one-cylinder inboard that they’d bought from Glad Vatcher’s father. They’d been the only crowd in Chance Cove without a motor for years by then, still sculling out to the fishing grounds every day. Old Mr. Vatcher took a little cash money and a share of the summer’s fish as payment, not half what the boat was worth. A calm day but a strong tide running. Sweetland aft at the tiller, keeping the boat steady ahead of the tide, Hollis pulling in the trawl up forward.

  “There was lots of fish on her,” he said. “Hollis was gaffing them aboard as they come to the surface. And there was this big one, saw him as he come near the surface, he must’ve been seventy or eighty pound. Hollis leaned out for it as the trawl come in but the thing sheared off the hook and we passed right overtop of it. So I shoved the engine in reverse, turned on the switch before the piston reached top dead centre and that sent it running opposite. A bit of a jolt, you can imagine. I turned to lean out over the water, gaffed the fish as we drove back to it. Biggest cod I ever seen just about. Hauled it in over the aft board,” Sweetland said. He took a mouthful of beer, glanced at Pilgrim in the stern. “Anyway,” he said. “Hollis fell across the trawl line when the boat shifted into reverse. He wouldn’t expecting it, I guess. And the length of trawl he’d already brought aboard started going over the side again as the boat drove aft. Hooks caught up in his clothes. He went into the water with it.”

  “Hollis couldn’t swim.”

  “Wouldn’t have mattered, him tangled up in the line like that. I shut off the motor soon as I saw he was over, but there was still a lot of strain on the trawl. Rushed up ahead to cut it loose.”

  “You cut the line?”

  Sweetland shrugged. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the boy. “Wasn’t thinking right,” he said. “I had to get him free of the strain, w
as what I had in my mind. Only way I could figure to do it was cut the line. Worse thing I could’ve done.”

  Hollis was only a fathom under water by the time he killed the engine and got forward. He could see the white of his brother’s face looking back up to the surface. Hundreds of pounds of fish on the trawl and the weight of it pulling Hollis down and down into that black. Eighteen years old, his brother was.

  “I’d have done it all different,” Sweetland said. “If I had my time back.”

  Jesse was nodding his head, still staring out at the water. “He’s not mad at you,” he said.

  It was like a hand out of nowhere against his chest, he almost lost his balance. “He said that, did he?”

  “He wanted me to tell you,” Jesse said.

  “Well then,” Sweetland said. And he turned to look out at the open ocean awhile.

  They hefted the fish coolers onto the government wharf and carried them up the hill. Jesse ran ahead into Pilgrim’s house to get his mother and she came to the door, reaching a hand to help. Clara invited him in for a fry-up, but Sweetland shook his head. “Not hungry,” he said.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Best kind.”

  “You don’t seem yourself.”

  “More I don’t,” he said and he tried to smile it off, though his face felt crooked and unnatural.

  He took his five fish up to the house and stood at the kitchen counter in his rubber boots to fillet them. Ripping the backbone from its trough of flesh. The layer of dark skin peeling off with a sound like lengths of Scotch tape being unspooled. The meat underneath as white as the driven snow. He packed the fillets into clear plastic bags and stowed them in the fridge.

  Stood still in the middle of the kitchen then, one hand at his chest opening and closing, mimicking his own heartbeat. “Where was that,” he said into the silence. He went across to a drawer beside the sink and picked through it. There was an open shelf above the laptop with a handful of telephone directories from two decades ago, a row of Canadian Living recipe books his mother used to collect. Spare change, ancient keys for locks that no longer existed, thumbtacks, chewing gum, antacids. He shuffled his hand back and forth through the bric-a-brac, as if he was stirring up sediment in a shallow pond. Closed his hand finally on the card he was looking for. He held it out at arm’s length, turned it a little to the light from the window.