He turned to the lighthouse and the island then, started slowly up the rise. Sweetland walked along the front of the building where the plywood near the cistern had been reset with screws. All his materials, the dry clothes and food that he’d stored in the dark beneath the house locked away now, or confiscated. He thought to stop in at the tower to dry himself in the greenhouse warmth of the glass room but the door didn’t budge when he tried to open it. There was no lock on the latch and he stood looking at the closed door with his hands at his sides. Saw the fresh welts along the seams where the Coast Guard crew had torched it shut. A dozen spot welds around the frame. Sweetland ran his hand along the edge, the bump of each weld still warm from the acetylene.
The crew would make a report about the broken lock on the tower and the board removed from the skirting when they got back to St. John’s. Kids out from Fortune Bay on a weekend drinking spree, they’d put it down to. Vandalism and mischief. Cokeheads home from the Alberta oil fields, looking for trouble.
Not some lunatic geriatric holed up on his own out here. Losing his frigging mind.
He checked his slips on the way back along the mash, out of habit more than intention. There was a single animal in the snares and he carried it home by the feet, the animal’s ears brushing the ground as he went.
The dog was waiting near Diesel’s house and ran out to meet him as he came through the back of his property. “Now, Mr. Fox,” Sweetland said. “Where have you been hiding.” It waddled along on its back legs awhile, nosing the rabbit in Sweetland’s hand.
He went into the porch and paused there, looking back to see if the dog would follow. It stared at him, its head cocked, but didn’t come any closer. He left the door wide behind him, thinking the dog might change its mind eventually. He walked through the porch and stopped two steps into the kitchen. The butchered fish lay in its own gore on the counter, the muck of it running down the cupboard doors to the floor, bloody streaks dried to the wood. The black-and-white picture of his grandfather propped on the daybed.
Sweetland crossed to the stove and lit a fire, waited for the flame to take hold in the splits. Then he filled the woodbox until it was roaring. He set a pot of water on the stove and dug out a bucket from beneath the sink, splashed half a cup of Javex into the bottom. He scooped the remains of the codfish into two plastic bags, carried them out behind the shed. The dog following him and watching as Sweetland dug a hole to bury the mess, and he tamped the dirt down firm. Then he went back inside and sat beside the portrait of Uncle Clar to wait for the water to boil.
He spent what was left of the daylight hours scouring the kitchen. He scrubbed the floor with a brush and then mopped it, standing in the porch while he waited for it to dry. He stood on a chair to empty the shelves and wipe them down, and then he set about cleaning out the cupboard drawers. Lifted out the cutlery tray and stopped still when he saw the folded sheet of paper beneath it.
He could see the line of letters glued to the inside and his hands were shaking when he laid it flat on the counter. YOU GET OUT, it said, OR YOULL BE SOME SORRY. Sweetland leaned on the counter, rubbed his face across his shoulder. A feeling like bugs crawling beneath his clothes. No telling how long it had been sitting there, waiting for him to come across it, but the threat had a biblical air about it now, something irrefutable and final. He balled the sheet and turned to the stove, threw it into the fire. Set the damper back without waiting to see it catch.
He scrubbed his hands clean and then he set the rabbit in the gleaming sink to dress it, the naked carcass inching free of the fur. He scooped the head and feet and the entrails into a silver bowl that he set aside as he quartered the rabbit. He went out to the root cellar for potatoes and carrot and turnip and when he came back to the kitchen the dog was lying near the stove, sniffing at the blood in the air. Sweetland stopped in the porch doorway and they stared at one another.
“I hope you wiped your feet before you come in,” he said finally.
He lit the two lamps and made a pastry for his stew and set the crock-pot in the oven. He picked the heart and liver from the silver bowl and he fried them up with a little meat he’d set aside and when it had cooled he put it down for the dog. He watched the animal push the bowl across the floor with its muzzle, licking the dish clean. Sweetland filled the empty bowl with water and when the dog had its fill of that it stretched out in the heat beneath the daybed.
Sweetland changed out of his filthy clothes while his supper was cooking, boiled them in a metal tub, rinsed and wrung them in the sink, hung them on a line above the stove. He sat to the table with the rabbit stew and as he lifted the first spoonful he caught sight of Uncle Clar leaning against the wall across the room, eyes averted, pretending to pay Sweetland no mind.
He went to the daybed and hefted the weight of the picture frame. Considered setting it back in the hallway where it had been. But he carried it into the porch instead, hung it on a nail kitty-corner to the door. So Uncle Clar would have at least that much company when he came and went.
THEY FOUND WORK building split-level bungalows among crews of Italians and Hungarians and Caribbeans. They were so far outside the city that it was only Saturday evenings they could make the trek into Toronto. They drank at the Caribou Club, a new bar catering to the expats who’d left Newfoundland to work in Ontario’s packing plants and factories, in the auto sector, on road gangs. Economic refugees mourning the anachronistic little world they’d abandoned, the squat saltboxes that housed three generations, the brawling weather, the root cellars and fish flakes and outhouses, the rabbit warren of bloodlines knitting the tiny outports into impossible tangles. Old Sam and Dominion Ale and cod liver oil, Tibb’s Eve and Candlemas Day and Sheila’s Brush and Radway’s Ready Relief, Jackie tars and colcannon and breakfast fish. A weakness for superstition and singing and tribal politics. An antediluvian vocabulary spoken in accents so inbred and misshapen they felt like foreigners everywhere else in the city.
The club was on College Street in the heart of Little Italy. A yearly membership fee of two-fifty. They drank with familiar strangers from Conception Bay and the Codroy Valley and Placentia, from the French Shore, the Bay of Islands, the Burin. Men who made twice their wages packing meat or watching bottles trundle along conveyor belts or marking time on assembly lines of one description or other. The crowd drunken and good-naturedly nostalgic, arguing the merits of punts and skiffs and dories, talking Joey Smallwood or the Newfie Bullet or Churchill Falls or whether beer mixed with ginger ale was a fit drink for a lady. The Caribou Show Band packing the dance floor, dressed in their red polyester sport jackets.
They stayed until the club closed its doors and then moved on to house parties, sometimes winding up in a city park or a cemetery where they slept under trees or between the graves. Woke on damp grass in the open air, their clothes and hair wet with dew. They took their all-day hangovers to a restaurant on College with a bottomless cup of coffee, then to the movies at the Odeon or to wrestling shows at Maple Leaf Gardens, before hitching a ride back out to the worksite in the evening. Talking all the time about when they might be able to jack up and move home.
There were letters from Effie telling Sweetland the weather and how the fish were running, and she rated the minister’s Sunday sermons as though she was grading a student’s exam. Ned Priddle came home to Chance Cove from the mines in Buchans, he wasn’t twenty-five, she wrote, and almost bald. She took the ferry back to her parents’ house in Fortune that July and the letters arrived less frequently as the summer passed. Sweetland felt less obligated to answer in turn, relieved to be free of the chore. He’d never had call to write much down and was surprised by the work of it, by how little he could make of words on a page. There wasn’t much to be said besides the drudgery of the job and the relentless heat. Mostly he talked about what was happening in his absence (“The capelin must be all but done by this time.” “I imagine you’re up after the partridgeberries with Mother these days”). And he closed each letter with th
e promise he’d be home before Christmas.
4
THE SNOW FELL AND STAYED ON the ground by the beginning of December, as it used to when he was a boy. The days closed in to dusk by mid-afternoon, settling to a coal-black pitch by four thirty with only the lamps to work by. Sweetland hadn’t relied on lamps since the first generators came to the island in the late sixties. Glad Vatcher’s father bought them second-hand out of the Family Herald, from farmers on the prairies who had no need of them after their electrical service came through. Old Mr. Vatcher ran power to two dozen houses from four in the afternoon until he was ready for bed. He’d flash the lights three times before shutting it all down for the night, to give people a chance to find their oil lamps or bank their fires and get to bed themselves.
Sweetland couldn’t top up the lamps without thinking about Loveless. Nine-year-old Sara refilling the family’s lamps on the front bridge, leaving Loveless alone for all of two minutes when she stepped into the house on some forgotten errand. The pint glass of kerosene empty when she came back outside and no idea what might have happened to it before she smelled the oil on the toddler’s breath. She stink bad, Sara said, waving a hand to clear the memory of those fumes.
It was months before a doctor had a look at him and he pronounced Loveless fit and healthy. It was the hiccups that saved the child from the worst of it, he said, keeping him awake a full twenty-four hours. He’d likely have suffered brain damage if he’d slept, the doctor said.
Didn’t sleep when she drink the oil, Sara used to say as explanation for her brother’s peculiar ways, but she have a lot of catnaps.
Sweetland was burning through the kerosene more quickly than he remembered it going and he allowed himself only a couple hours of light in the evenings as he cooked and ate his supper. He sat in the dark with his tea, listening to the radio for the news and weather, a damper on the stove lifted half off, the fire adding shadow to the blackness.
During the brief hours of daylight he kept himself busy with anything he could turn his hand to. He dug footpaths to the shed and the woodpiles, and down the hill as far as the government wharf. He put on a fresh batch of homebrew that fermented in a carboy near the stove, he drained his empties and boiled the bottles to sterilize them. He removed a vinyl window from Glad Vatcher’s house to replace the leaky wooden window at the back of the shed. He fished for brown trout up on the mash, lighting a fire by the pond to cook them in the open air. He stripped and cleaned and rebuilt the quad’s starter engine, drained the oil and replaced the air filter. He let the motor run a few minutes when he was done, took a spin down as far as the government wharf, to be sure he’d set everything back where it belonged. He had no more than a quarter tank of gas left and a litre in one of the red containers. He parked the quad under its canvas tarp and expected to leave it there until the spring.
The dog wandered off on its own during the day but came barking to be let in after the lamps were lit. It lay at his feet beneath the table and followed him upstairs when he took himself to bed at eight or nine o’clock. Sweetland heated a beach rock in the oven and carried that with him in a pillowcase, slipping it under the covers to warm the sheets. The dog lay at the foot of the bed beside the rock or nosed its way under the blankets to curl against Sweetland’s back. He slept a dead sleep as the house clicked and whined into the deepening winter.
He often woke in the middle of the night, feeling rested and ready to start the day, though he could tell by the stars through the window it was too early to move. It was something he’d come to expect since he started going to bed in the early evening, this lull in his sleep. As if a body required the break before he finished dreaming. A natural intermission. He’d taken to filling the dead time with plans for the following day, with lists and inventories, with family trees, mindless mathematical sums. The number of stairs he’d climbed at the light tower in his time as keeper (268 stairs × [(365 days × 10 years) × 3 trips a day]). The number of strokes he and Hollis put in at the oars going to and from the traps before old Mr. Vatcher sold them the second-hand skiff. The names of everyone in the Loveless family back four generations. Three nights in a row Sweetland drifted to sleep trying to fish up the name of a fierce Salvation Army woman from Heart’s Desire who was married to Loveless’s great-uncle Baxter.
Occasionally he tried to recreate one of Jesse’s lectures on volcanoes or icebergs and it was a surprise to realize how little of the boy’s endless yammer he’d taken in. He couldn’t recall any of the Latin names of the whales or what exactly defines an ungulate or the name of the rocks dropped by glaciers. The boy claimed Sweetland and St. Pierre and Ramea and most of Newfoundland’s south coast were submerged by the weight of the glacial ice sheet and they had all bobbed above the surface like corks as the glaciers retreated. It was a fact Sweetland remembered only because he’d pooh-poohed the fanciful notion for months afterwards. Jumping up and down on the mash, then waving at Jesse to hold still as he cocked his head. She bounced that time, he’d say. Did you feel it? He’d give another little hop while Jesse stared at him with a look of stoic disbelief.
It was Sweetland’s job to remain ignorant in those ritual exchanges, to offer inane questions and commentary, to nitpick and quibble while the youngster tried to sink his objections under the weight of pure knowledge. They were like pro wrestlers circling one another in a ring where all the moves were choreographed, the winner predetermined. Sweetland hadn’t realized how much he enjoyed the farcical pageant, how much he’d been missing it. But the memory of Jesse’s dogged seriousness in the face of his clowning was so raw that it forced him out of bed, and he learned to stay clear of it, moved on to other distractions.
Most nights he pictured a map of the island and set about naming every feature and landmark from the south-end light to Chance Cove and on to the Fever Rocks, before he did the same thing along the lee side. The litany started at the Mackerel Cliffs and went from there to Pinnacle Arch, to Lunin Rock, the Devil’s Under-jaw, the Flats, Murdering Hole, Tinker Cliffs, Old Chimney, Gannie Cliff Point, Wester Shoals, Mad Goat Gulch, Upper Brister, the Founder. He took his time, being careful to include as much detail as possible, as though the island was slowly fading from the world and only his ritual naming of each nook and cranny kept it from disappearing altogether. Coffin Pond, Cow Path Head, the Tom Cod Rocks, the Offer Ledge, Gansy Gulch, Lunin Cove, Lower Brister, Watering Gulch, the Well. Each time, he remembered some additional feature, an abandoned grebe’s nest, the heart-shaped fissure in the sea-stack rocks near Music House, the radio beacon west of Clay Hole Pond. The map each time becoming more complete.
It was a night in mid-December when Sweetland wandered up into the valley above Music House on that imaginary map, and for the first time he placed the Priddles’ cabin in its place, two-thirds of the way to high ground. He’d never thought to name it before and it occurred to him he hadn’t made the trip out there since having the island to himself. The brothers had a generator at the cabin which meant there’d be gasoline stored there, a resource so obvious he felt stupid not to have thought of it. Beyond that essential, there might be cans of beans or corned beef or Chef Boyardee pastas; batteries and matches; bottles of rye or dark rum or Scotch; soap and shaving cream; magazines or old newspapers or books of word searches. The thought of the plunder on the opposite side of the island was so diverting, Sweetland was afraid he wouldn’t sleep the rest of the night. But eventually he drifted off.
Blue skies when he woke, but the morning looked for weather. An augural bank of cloud away off west and south. The temperature hovering around the freezing mark, a clammy feel to the air. The radio forecast saying snow or rain or some mix of the two, depending on how the system tracked. Wind and a couple of days of December fury coming on, and it wasn’t sensible to head out there with that sentence hanging over him. But the thought of the cabin, now that he’d struck on it, was impossible to resist.
He stripped the tarp off the quad. There was enough gas to get him partway t
o the lighthouse, which would save him lugging a full container all the way back across the island, and give him a ride home into the cove through whatever weather was coming. The Priddles had never locked their place to his memory, but he brought a hammer and a set of screwdrivers and the axe, just in case. The dog chased him as he pulled out of the shed and started up the path toward the mash, Sweetland driving slow and glancing back now and then to see the animal was with him. He cut across Vatcher’s Meadow and he was halfway to the lighthouse when the engine sputtered and quit. Sweetland sat on the machine a few minutes after it died, as if all it needed was a rest, as if it might pick itself up after a nap and carry on.
The clouds were a long ways to the south, the day still bright. He glanced up at the sun, ghosted on both sides by blurred reflections of itself. Sun hounds, Uncle Clar called them. A fierce bit of weather approaching, all appearances to the contrary. He had an hour’s walk to the light and that far again down to the Priddles’ cabin. And he was likely going to find himself holed up there awhile.
He climbed off the quad, took his pack from the carryall. He called for the dog, turned a circle where he was standing. The ground lying flat as far as he could see and no sign of the animal. He put his fingers to his mouth, whistled for all he was worth. He looked up at the sun hounds, watched them shimmer as the moisture being pushed ahead of the storm flexed and bowed. He whistled again and shouted until he was hoarse. A little dwy of snow blew in off the ocean from the distant clouds. “Jesus fuck,” he said.
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