Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  “Kiss my arse,” Sweetland said, and he stepped down into the boat, started up the engine. He hated to see Loveless making sense. It made him think the world was coming apart at the seams altogether.

  He had no heart for the work and didn’t even bother going all the way across to the mainland, stopping in at Little Sweetland again to wander around the abandoned cove, feeling idle and solitary and anxious. He went by the cabins and shaded his eyes to look in the windows. Metal bunks and Formica tables, an incongruous flat-screen television in both. Gas generators stored beside top-of-the-line wood stoves. Someone working out in Fort McMurray or at the nickel mine in Labrador, he’d heard. Money to burn and two weeks a year to get away from it all. Others said it was eccentrics from the Canadian mainland or the States, people who wouldn’t show their faces years at a time. Just enjoyed being able to say they owned an exotic bit of property in a corner of the world no one else had heard of. Sweetland had half a mind to set a match to the buildings, out of spite.

  He walked up onto the barrens, toward the headlands where he and Duke had spotted the bison. The path across the swale had all but disappeared and he had to force a trail through the tuckamore. He stood at the edge of the cliffs, the wind up there rifling through his clothes. He could make out Sweetland in the distance, the long hump of it on the horizon. Even in the full light of day, he could see the intermittent flash of the light on Burnt Head, warning away traffic.

  Late afternoon by the time he came back down to the wharf and he started for home, travelling slow. There was a low bank of fog sitting on the horizon, the north end of Sweetland already buried, Burnt Head swallowed in the mist. He took the long way around, past the south-end light on the Mackerel Cliffs where the day was still bright and cloudless. He steamed in close to the island, the rocks to starboard so sheer they looked like something CGId in a Hollywood studio. The sky above the boat confettied with wheeling seabirds, turrs and murrs and puffins and tinkers, their endless chatter echoing off the cliff face. The acrid stink of shit like a single fiddle note that held and held and held in the air. Every ledge up there occupied by birds who nested all summer on the bare rock.

  A bald eagle drifted out of the lowering sun, making a lazy sweep above the headlands, and Sweetland watched the entire colony leave their ledges in a rush as the predatory shadow passed over. It was like a waterfall coming down the rock face, thousands of birds in a sudden raucous descent that seemed almost enough to swamp the boat as they clattered past. The cliffs above him suddenly bare.

  He came around at the government wharf and docked in the space vacated by the ferry. Glanced up the hill as he tied on and hauled the boat back out on the collar. The hills that loomed over the cove muffled in the crawling sheets of fog.

  He’d expected to find the place quiet, everyone inside at their supper, but there was an eerie busyness about the harbour. People standing in small clusters outside their houses, men gassing up ATVs. Everyone strangely focused, like passengers preparing for an evacuation order.

  Loveless came down the path from the Fisherman’s Hall in a slovenly run, trying desperately to keep his feet. “He’ve gone missing,” Loveless shouted. “We can’t find him.”

  “Who?” Sweetland said. “The little dog?”

  “No,” Loveless said, and then he looked around in a panic, noticing for the first time that the dog wasn’t with him.

  “Loveless, who the hell is it gone missing?”

  “Jesse,” he said. “He’ve run off somewhere. There’s no one can find him.”

  Sweetland went straight to Pilgrim’s house with Loveless on his heels. Pilgrim sitting in a rocker at the window. “We told Jesse you was signed up for the package,” he said.

  “At the meeting?”

  “We thought it might be better in a crowd. Everyone going together, you know. Something he could be part of.”

  “That was Clara’s idea, was it?”

  “The Reverend’s.”

  “Well fuck,” Sweetland said. “Why’d you let him leave the hall in that state?”

  “He wanted to hear it from yourself you was signed on. He was only going over to your place.”

  “You didn’t hear my boat going out?”

  Pilgrim lifted his face to the ceiling. “I spose so,” he said. “Yes, I heard it.”

  “Well who the hell did you think it was? Loveless?”

  “I never put it together.”

  Sweetland set both hands on his hips.

  “He wouldn’t upset, Mose, not like he gets. He was calm as could be. Even the Reverend thought he was fine.” Pilgrim shook his head. “Clara figured it might be good for him to talk to you on his own.”

  “Where’s Clara and the Reverend now?”

  “Up on the mash, looking for him.”

  Sweetland threw a jar of water and a few tins of peaches and a flashlight into his canvas pack at the house, drove his ATV out the back of his property. He went up as far as the King’s Seat, stopped there to look down over the cove. The barrens east and west shrouded in fog. It seemed a big island all of a sudden. He headed for the keeper’s house, stopping to chat with the searchers he passed on the way, people walking in twos and threes along the trails.

  There was no real panic among them. Everyone in the cove had taken a turn in an afternoon search party when Jesse had gone missing over the years. They’d spent the better part of a day tracking him down one October Sunday. Duke Fewer found him just before dark, singing “The Cliffs of Baccalieu” in the crawl space that held the cistern beneath the keeper’s house. Dry and content there. Sweetland reminded himself of that incident as he drove over the mash. But it didn’t offer him a moment’s comfort.

  He pulled up beside two other quads parked below the keeper’s house. The Priddles’ machines. He touched a hand to the engine covers, but they were cold. Called out a hello that died in the fog and he did a turn around the house. Peeked into the crawl space, listening to the dank stillness that surrounded the cistern. He went up the steps and forced the front door open, pushing it past the debris that had fallen from the ceiling. An air of galloping neglect about the empty shell. Broken glass and sagging plaster and bare studs where the cupboards and sink had been ripped out. He covered his nose and mouth against the chemical stink of sodden insulation, the pestilential hum of rot. No one had been inside that space in a long time but he walked through anyway, to be sure.

  He took the pack off the quad on his way past, headed along the trail where he set his snares. Heard someone coming up out of the valley, called hello. The Priddles came into view then and he waited as they walked the fifty yards up to him.

  “Any sign down there?”

  “Not a thing,” Barry said.

  Sweetland looked over the trees in the valley. “He could be anywhere out here if he don’t want to be found.”

  “Coming on duckish now,” Keith said. “He’ll get spooked when dark settles in.”

  “He’ll be looking for us now the once,” Barry said. “Don’t worry.”

  “I’ll carry on down. He was wanting to talk to me earlier on. Might be he’ll show himself if he hears me calling.”

  “Everyone’s meeting back at the hall if there’s no news by ten,” Keith said. “Just to do a head count. Figure next steps.”

  “He’ll be home before then,” Barry said.

  Sweetland made his way as far down as the Priddles’ cabin in the valley as darkness fell. The brothers had been by there not an hour before, but it was possible Jesse had snuck in between times, with night coming on. Curled up in the loft. Sweetland stood the cabin door open and waited there a second. “Jesse,” he said. Nearly pitch inside and he threw the beam of his flashlight across the furniture, the ladder to the loft under the eaves. Out on the water he could hear a boat inching along the shoreline. Glad Vatcher swinging a searchlight up on the hills, the beam edgeless and diffuse in the fog. He stepped into the room and stood in the black quiet. Trying not to think the boy was lying dead somewh
ere in the woods.

  He left the Priddles cabin and walked back up to the keeper’s house, then drove overland on the quad. Stopping every few hundred yards to listen and call out. He could hear voices in all directions, calling the same. He took the trail back down into the cove, parked behind the house. Did a quick walk through, turning lights on in all the rooms as he called Jesse’s name. He walked out the arm then, past the burnt-out timbers of his stage, as far as the decommissioned incinerator. Let the beam of his flashlight play around the inside of the metal bell, picking out the blackened shards of incombustible refuse. Stopped short on the remains of the dead calf lying inside the incinerator’s maw. Bone showing through the dead leather of its skin. The maggots already done with it.

  Fucken Loveless.

  Shortly before ten he went back to the house, stood listening in the kitchen. He could tell the boy wasn’t in the building but he walked through the rooms anyway, upstairs and down, to be able to say he had. He made his way to the Fisherman’s Hall, the main lights on and the room crowded with people. A pot of soup on a hot plate, loaves of bread, cheese and crackers. Tea and coffee. Clara was sitting beside Pilgrim with her hand in his. She nodded at Sweetland quickly but didn’t hold his eye. For fear of crying, he knew, and he walked to a seat near the back to spare her having to look at him.

  There was no news. Rita Verge had called the Coast Guard and they were sending a chopper with a search and rescue team if there was no sign of Jesse come morning. The Priddles had printed up a satellite photo of the island off of Google Earth and they were gridding it with a marker, circling the most likely spots to look.

  “There’s no sense tramping around out there in the dark,” Duke Fewer said. “Someone’s going to get themselves killed at that.”

  “Well I’m not going to sit here with a finger up my ass,” Keith said.

  “He’ll be looking for us up there now,” Barry said. “We just wants to make it easier for him to find us.”

  “We should get a bonfire going up on the mash,” Keith said. “Out at the keeper’s house. Over on the Mackerel Cliffs.”

  “Not the cliffs,” Clara said. “Not the cliffs,” she repeated. “He could walk right off the cliffs trying to make his way to the fire.”

  “All right,” Keith said, “we’ll get a fire going somewhere on the trail, half a mile or so shy of the cliffs.”

  The Reverend said, “We should make sure all the lights are on here, help him find his way down if he’s looking.”

  “He won’t see the lights in the cove till he gets to the King’s Seat,” Sweetland said. “If he’s on the mash, they won’t help a damn. Does that PA in the steeple work at all?”

  “Hasn’t been used in twenty years.”

  “Be worth checking. You could hear that racket halfways to Little Sweetland. It might lead him in.”

  “I’ll see what I can do with it,” the Reverend said.

  Before they had finished dividing up into parties and filling the gas tanks of their ATVs, they heard the sickly hum of an amplifier, then the click and scratch of a needle touched on vinyl. Ray Price singing “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” Sweetland saw Clara turn away from them at the first words of the chorus, the back of her hand pressed against her mouth, going off into the dark alone.

  Sweetland followed the Priddles up to the King’s Seat and on out to the keeper’s house where they started a fire in the clearing below the building. Keith went down to the cabin then, to start up the generator and keep the lights on there.

  The fog had lifted while they were inside the hall, the sky overhead so clear now that the stars felt almost close enough to touch. Barry had a flask of rum that he offered across, but Sweetland shook his head. Settled in the circle of heat, waiting. The two men watched the flames eat away at the wood in silence. Listening to the vague sound of music from the cove and the endless rustle of the surf against the Fever Rocks beyond the keeper’s house, a commotion so distant and so insistent that it almost seemed to be the noise of the stars overhead.

  Every hour or so Barry wandered off with a flashlight after deadfall and scrap wood to keep the fire burning, eventually hammering the rails and boards from the deck to feed the flames as the night passed. At some point he came back from the quad with a blanket that he draped over Sweetland’s shoulders, and Sweetland drifted off where he sat, despite the rat’s nest of commotion in his chest. Woke from a dream of Hollis staring up at him through cold fathoms of water, the white of his face fading as he sank down and swiftly down and no way on God’s earth to reach him. Sweetland had no idea where he was. Raised his head to see Barry sitting across the fire, hugging his knees.

  “The fire’s bringing in the lost sheep,” Barry said, and he gestured down at Sweetland’s feet where Loveless’s little dog was curled up in the orange light.

  “Hello, Smut,” Sweetland said.

  Before first light they boiled a kettle on the coals of the fire and they drank instant coffee and shared out a handful of Jam Jams from Barry’s pack. The dog had long since disappeared again on its wander. They talked back and forth about what they might do when the sun came up. The recorded hymns from the church steeple still audible, though barely.

  “Could be he’s home and dry by now,” Barry said.

  “They’d have turned off that friggin music for long ago if he was home.”

  “I expect you’re right about that.”

  When it was grey enough to pick out the chopper pad over the Fever Rocks they packed up their materials and kicked the last coals of the fire apart. Barry decided to walk down after Keith who would otherwise sleep until noon, then meet Sweetland back at the Fisherman’s Hall. “Gotta take a leak,” Barry said, and he walked out around the corner of the keeper’s house. Sweetland was tying his pack on the quad when Barry shouted for him. He had wandered down toward the chopper pad, calling back over his shoulder.

  “What is it?” Sweetland asked.

  “You see anything down there?”

  “Where are you looking?”

  Barry pointed inside the Fever Rocks, near the Coast Guard ladder. The sea throwing a white spume up the red cliff face. They walked all the way down to the pad, straining against the gloom. A bit of flotsam down there being tossed against the rocks, lifeless in the ocean currents. Sweetland turned and started up toward the keeper’s house. Grunting with the strain of the climb.

  Barry called after him. “It might not even be the youngster, Moses.”

  “That’s him,” Sweetland said. “That’s Jesse.”

  Barry chased Sweetland back up to the quads where the older man was picking through the materials in his carryall. “We’ll drive back into the cove,” Barry said, “send out a boat.”

  “Tide’s turning,” Sweetland said. “He could be halfways to Boston by then. How much line you got on your machine?”

  “You can’t carry him up that Jesus ladder.”

  “I’m not leaving him down there.”

  “All right,” Barry said. “I’ll see if I can get a rope on him. Hitch him to the ladder until we can get a boat out from the cove.”

  “I’ll go,” Sweetland said.

  “You won’t help nothing getting yourself killed out here this morning.”

  “I’m going to need something to hook him with.”

  Barry watched Sweetland a moment, trying to gauge whether talking was any use at all. “I got the grapple on the front of the quad.”

  “He won’t hold still there for long.”

  The two men went out across the chopper pad and paused a moment in the lee of the winchhouse, adjusting the gear they carried. They went down the ladder one after the other, pausing now and then to check their progress and to keep an eye on the body being slammed against the rocks. Sweetland was below Barry and he went to the foot of the ladder, stepping knee deep into the ocean down the last rung. He turned sideways to the rock face, hooking one arm into the rail to hold himself steady. He reached his free hand above his head. “Pas
s me the grapple,” he shouted.

  “We got about thirty feet of slack to work with,” Barry said.

  “Tie on the end so we don’t lose the works.”

  The surf surge came up as high as Sweetland’s chest and the fierce cold of it slapped the breath from his lungs. Jesse’s body rolling in the same swell, his hair wet and plastered to his dead face. Sweetland pitched the grapple toward him underhanded as the sea receded and he came up short. He hauled the grapple in and pitched and fell short a second and a third time between the surges.

  “I needs both hands,” he said.

  “Jesus, Mose.”

  “Grab my jacket,” he said, and he slipped his arm free of the ladder.

  Barry braced his knees under the metal rails on both sides and twisted the neck of Sweetland’s collar in one hand, held fast to a rung with the other. Sweetland leaned out as far as he could against that halter and swung the line two-handed, landing it five or six feet beyond the body. He dragged it back then, hoping to hook the boy’s clothing as it passed over him. The sea coming in above his shoulders, sluicing icy down the back of his coat.

  The grapple snagged and let go half a dozen times before he caught something that held. He managed to drag Jesse ten feet along the rocks until the hook came loose and the body floated free. The boy’s defenceless head knocking against the cliffs as the waves rose and fell.

  “I needs a second,” Barry shouted and the two men stopped to catch their breath, climbing up a few yards to get Sweetland out of the ocean. He’d lost the feeling in his legs and had trouble lifting his feet to the rungs.

  “We’ll never get him up this ladder,” Barry said, “even if you manages to hook him over.”

  “I’m not leaving him there.”

  “Moses fucken Sweetland,” he said, “I swear to Christ.”

  “One more try,” Sweetland insisted. “He’s halfways over to us.”

  He gimped back down into the ocean, waited for Barry to get a grip on his collar, and flung the grapple. Finally brought the boy in his ripped and sodden clothing close enough to grab by hand. He turned face on to the ladder, hooking his free arm through a rung. Barry was after him to step up out of the water but he was too exhausted even to answer. The younger man spidered down beside him, reached around his waist to take the weight of the corpse. His face at Sweetland’s ear.