Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  He turned into the wind and drove slow, leaning behind the handlebars for the little protection they afforded, peeking over the top now and then to be sure of the path. Grateful to be sitting down, to be conveyed. He cut across Vatcher’s Meadow, drove by the King’s Seat, and inched down the steep path into the cove. He set the quad away in the shed but didn’t bother with the tarp. Wet to the skin and ready to lie down beside a fire. He went through the porch into the kitchen and unzipped his jacket halfway, the dog stirring at the cold air, its black muzzle coming into the open.

  “Now, Mr. Fox,” Sweetland said. “Who’s got it better than this?”

  It stretched its neck up to sniff at his face. Licking at the mess of snot and spittle frozen to his chin.

  THEY WERE LAID OFF CONSTRUCTION in mid-September and almost left for home before they hired on at a steel mill in Hamilton, lucking into the union positions through a connection at the Caribou Club. Sweetland was against taking the job. He’d met men who planned to work in the steel plants a winter and had their twenty-year service watches from the company. But Duke had spent most of what he’d earned over the summer at the Caribou. His wife at home nursing the youngster and the new baby.

  I can’t go back to her with nothing, Duke said. We won’t even have time to go on the trawl if we leaves now.

  Sweetland shook his head.

  Two-ten an hour, Duke said. Think of the ring you could bring back to Effie.

  Promise me, he said, we’ll go home out of this.

  Back by Christmas, Duke said, on my mother’s grave.

  The steel mill was a city unto itself. Massive coke ovens, storage tanks and elevators, engine rooms, stock houses the size of city churches, miles of train tracks and gas lines and elevated piping that criss-crossed the blackened acres. Cooling stations, smoke and creosote and slag, the molten glow of the pour-offs at the open hearths like some evangelical’s vision of hell. Everything was in motion, cranes and railcars, conveyor belts shifting ore pellets to the blast furnaces, coal cars shuttling from the battery to the ovens, sheets of heated strip steel rolling through rotating cylinders. All of it seemed to be moving at cross purposes and the unremitting noise of the place was a physical thing, hammering against them. The air heated and condensed, packed with dust and steam and a nauseating chemical sweat. Men darting among the machinery like rats, their faces grimed with soot.

  They worked seventy hours a week and couldn’t drink enough in the off-hours to wash the taste of the mills from their mouths. They went to work hungover and nursed their heads with a thermos of rum and Coke. They met a university dropout in the lunchroom who introduced them to marijuana, rolling and smoking before the shift started. Sweetland didn’t feel a thing from the weed that he could point to, but the place seemed almost bearable when he was stoned.

  They kept an eye on the foreman through their shifts, taking their chance to sneak into the noisiest, most inhospitable crannies to pass a joint. They lit up somewhere different each time, as if they were trying to throw a tracking dog off the scent. The relentless mechanical whirl moving around them at impossible angles, at breakneck speeds. And as he wormed out of their most recent pot den one October afternoon, a corner of Sweetland’s clothing caught in the contraption and he was sucked into that vortex, his pants and underwear ripped clear of his body and he was dragged along a few interminable seconds before the alarm tripped out and everything shuddered to a halt. Sweetland still in the grip of the thing, one shoulder skinned raw and the right side of his face unrecognizable, his free hand cupped around the sear in his butchered lap.

  He came to briefly in the ambulance. Duke was tucked into a corner, his appendages in that narrow space folded away like the blades of a Swiss Army knife. Sweetland lifted one hand to gesture in his direction. That’s the last fucken advice I ever takes from you, he said.

  5

  THROUGH THE MONTH OF DECEMBER the radio was slowly strangled by Christmas carols. The CBC morning show counting down the shopping days as they dwindled. Sweetland gave no thought to his own place in the season until the afternoon of the twenty-fourth when he surprised himself by retrieving the tree from the shed.

  He didn’t bother with decorations at all after his mother died, and he was relieved to be free of the chore. Most houses in the cove had artificial trees, but his mother had always insisted on the real thing. Sweetland would hike to the back of the island, spend a day on snowshoes, picking through the straggle of spruce forest. Hunting for something that didn’t look half strangled, or lopsided, or otherwise misshapen by the poor soil, the driving weather.

  It wasn’t until Clara came back to Sweetland with Jesse in tow that he picked up an artificial tree on a trip across to Burgeo. Just to have something for the boy to look at, a place to lay the gift Clara had picked out and wrapped and signed Jesse’s name to. But Sweetland made a shaggery of stringing the lights and garland and hanging the glass bulbs, a job he’d always left to his mother. It was finicky work with no practical mechanical principles to guide him. When he was done the tree looked vaguely terrifying, and Jesse refused to go near it.

  Sweetland discovered his current tree while watching a hockey game, in a Canadian Tire ad featuring the four-foot-high ornament, the bulbs and lights built right in. Out of the box and plug it in and your job was done. It had a handful of settings to make the lights flash intermittently or light up in a corkscrew run, or in rotating sections from top to bottom. He had Glad Vatcher order one in for him and he put it up in the living room the day it arrived, the ninth of December.

  That fucken thing is silver, Duke Fewer said when he laid eyes on it. What kind of a tree do you know is silver?

  Everyone in Chance Cove had a laugh over it, but Jesse loved the bizarre confection. He was seven at the time and he sat in the tree’s presence for hours, his face blank and blissful, like someone stoned on hash brownies and staring at the stars.

  Sweetland laid the box on the kitchen table and cut through the masking tape holding it shut. He set the tree up on the table, the star at the top almost touching the ceiling beam. Stepped back two paces. It was nothing to look at without the lights, gaudy and lifeless, and he immediately regretted hauling it out. Packed the thing back into its box and set it in the porch, planning to throw it onto the pile of refuse below the incinerator in the morning. Something he should have done, he thought, when it came down last year.

  Clara and Pilgrim had come over to see him on Tibb’s Eve, with a fruitcake and a flask of rum. It was the first time Clara had been in the house since the day after Jesse was buried. She gave Sweetland a hug that felt like something she’d been rehearsing for months. And was glad to have out of the way.

  Sweetland had been keeping to himself all fall. Passed his days puttering in the shed, out of view of anyone below. It was Clara he dreaded seeing and he could tell it was the same for her. Impossible to keep clear of Jesse, even when he went unmentioned. That loss reflected back and forth between them like a bell ringing and echoing home off a cliff face.

  You haven’t got your tree up, she said.

  Don’t think I’ll bother with it.

  You got to have a tree, Pilgrim said.

  And what difference do it make to you? You can’t see it there anyway.

  It’s the spirit of the thing, Pilgrim said. He had his two hands spread wide, a gesture that dredged the word beseeching from the murk of Sweetland’s church years.

  Would you mind? Clara said.

  Sweetland looked at her, surprised. I thought maybe, he said.

  No, I’d like it, I think. I think it would be good. Jesse loved that tree.

  Get the blind fucker a drink, he said. I’ll go dig it out of the shed.

  There was hardly a Christmas light to be seen down through the cove as he walked back with the box in his arms. A dozen houses still occupied, scattered outposts of blinking green and blue lights in the dark. A mild year and no sign of snow. An air of desperate pretend about the season’s scattered trappings.


  They took their drinks into the living room where Sweetland set up the tree on top of the television. He turned off the overhead and they finished the flask and half the fruitcake and Sweetland went to the kitchen to stoke the stove and fetch a bottle of rye. The alcohol seemed hardly to touch them for a long time and they got quietly drunk together in the auroral glow of the tree lights as they pulsed and dimmed.

  Jesse used to say it was like the lights were breathing, Sweetland said.

  Why is that? Pilgrim asked. He roused himself in his seat where he’d been drifting off.

  They’re on a timer, Clara told him. They glows brighter a second and then fades out.

  We used to have candles in the branches, remember that, Mose? On those little clip-on candleholders. They was only lit ten minutes the whole of the season. And someone standing by with a bucket of water in case the tree caught fire.

  Sweetland gave Clara a look. You wouldn’t know but he seen it with his own two eyes, he said.

  Leave him be, Clara whispered.

  Tell us about the orange you used to get in the wool sock you had for a stocking, Pilgrim.

  And you was lucky to get that, the blind man said, swinging his glass wide enough the drink lipped over the side. We’d keep the orange peel, he said, and soak it in a glass of water with a bit of sugar. And we’d drink that down, honey-sweet.

  How many generations of youngsters have he bored to death with that story, I wonder.

  He bored me to death with it, Clara said and she rolled her eyes.

  Oh kiss my arse, Pilgrim said, the both of you. He tried to get to his feet and failed, the ice in his glass rattling onto the floor. Jesus, he said.

  Clara and Sweetland dragged Pilgrim up off the couch and they shuffled awkwardly into the kitchen.

  We’ll never get him down the hill like this, Sweetland said. Let him sleep it off on the daybed.

  They laid him out there beside the stove. Sweetland sat at the kitchen table as Clara untied Pilgrim’s boots and worked them from his feet. There was a quilt folded at one end of the bed that she shook out and tucked around his shoulders, Pilgrim already sound asleep. She leaned in to kiss him and lost her balance, reaching a hand to catch herself. She straightened from the daybed and turned around carefully. Fuck, she said. I’m wasted.

  One more for the road?

  Why not, hey.

  She sat across from Sweetland at the table and he poured them each a generous shot of rye, topping the glasses with Sprite. Pilgrim snoring across the room, a high, strangled sound like wind through a leaky door seal.

  He’s a fucken piece of work, that one, Sweetland said.

  Clara pointed at him with her drink. You don’t say a word about him.

  Wouldn’t dream of it. Loves him like a brother. Sun shines out of his blind arse.

  It’s not many men would have been as good to me as he’ve been, I know that for a fact.

  Coming home with Jesse to be looked after, you mean?

  That, she said. And the rest of it.

  The rest of what?

  Me not being his youngster.

  Sweetland didn’t so much as flinch, but he felt suddenly, miserably sober. He glanced at the man asleep on the daybed and then back across the table at Clara.

  He’s blind, Moses, she said, he’s not an idiot.

  Sweetland shook his head. How long have he known?

  From the beginning. Why do you think him and Mom had no youngsters all those years?

  What, they didn’t?

  Nope.

  Never? Sweetland said. Not once?

  Jesus, I don’t know about never, Clara said. Never for a long time though. Long before I come along, anyway.

  He told you all this?

  After Mom died. Thought he should come clean with me, I guess.

  It struck Sweetland that Clara was assuming he already knew the truth of the matter, that it wasn’t a secret she was divulging. Which likely meant Pilgrim assumed as much as well. The heat in the room was stifling. He got up from his chair and opened the door to the hallway, stood in the door frame a few minutes with his back to the kitchen. Breathing in the cool.

  How’s Uncle Clar doing out there? Clara said.

  He’s all right.

  Sin to leave him alone out in the hall like that, don’t you think? You should put him in the porch here, so’s he’ll have some company when you comes and goes.

  Clara, Sweetland said without turning to look at her. Do you know who your father is?

  Not a clue, she said. But I got my money on Loveless. And then she started giggling. Fucken Loveless! she shouted and she laughed drunkenly, almost hysterical. She caught her breath long enough to say, Can you imagine? Mom and Loveless?

  That’s my sister you’re talking about, Sweetland said, and Clara doubled over at the table, slapping her hand on the Formica.

  Jesus loves the little children, Sweetland said. He made his way to his chair unsteadily, waited there while Clara calmed down and wiped her eyes, ran her hands through her hair.

  Sorry, she said. Couldn’t help myself. She grimaced across the table and tapped at her front teeth with a fingernail. Can’t feel a damn thing, she said. And then she said, I expect you knows his name. My father’s. But I don’t care, to be honest. She tossed her head toward the man snoring beside the stove. We did all right, she said, not knowing.

  Sweetland nodded down at the table. That’s grand, he said.

  I don’t know how Mom managed to keep it a secret in this town, that’s what really amazes me.

  It don’t seem likely, I grant you that.

  Clara got up from her seat and steadied herself with a hand to the back of her chair. I should head home out of it, she said, before I makes a fool of myself.

  What about Jesse? Sweetland said.

  What about him?

  What happened to his father?

  His father got laid, Clara said. And I got knocked up. Just a one-night thing. Didn’t even know the guy’s last name.

  Jesus, Clara.

  You want to know the worst of it? she said. It wasn’t even a decent bit of skin.

  Jesus, Clara.

  She wavered on her feet, fighting to hold herself still. She covered her eyes, her mother’s gesture with a drunken weight added to it, the heel of the hand pushing her nose and lips askew. I hates the thought of leaving Jesse up there, she said. With no one even to cut the grass on his grave.

  Sweetland had expected Clara to bolt for St. John’s as soon as the resettlement money came through and he didn’t know what it was kept her from leaving but grief. And he supposed that was enough to hold a body still a long time. He thought of Sandra claiming Clara had come back to the island to have him in Jesse’s life. He’d stopped himself asking Clara about that a dozen times and stopped himself again now. For fear it wasn’t true.

  She staggered past him, through the porch to the outside door. You’ll be happy to know, she called, I won’t remember a word of this tomorrow. And she sang out merry Christmas as she left.

  He took the tree down in the morning and brought it to the shed with Pilgrim still passed out on the daybed. He and Clara never acknowledged the conversation and Sweetland was happy enough pretending it never happened. Though he had a hard time looking at Pilgrim ever after. All the talk the man sat through at the Fisherman’s Hall about Ruthie looking after those dark-haired men in her house. About the mainland reporters saying she gave the best “interview” they’d ever had, ha ha.

  Pilgrim never breathing a word about what he knew from the beginning.

  The weather turned bitter on Boxing Day, with winds out of the north-northwest that made the temperature feel colder still. Sweetland left a trickle running in the sinks upstairs and down to keep the pipes from freezing. It was too frigid to leave the kitchen at night and he bunked down on the daybed, the chill waking him when the fire burned low. He stirred the coals and filled the firebox until it was humming and crawled back under the quilts.

/>   The dog stayed indoors except when Sweetland went to carry in a turn of wood from the shed, which was just time enough for the animal to look after its business and roll in the snow and sniff at the wind with its head high in the air. It didn’t show any interest in staying out longer and spent the better part of a week in front of the stove while Sweetland dozed on the daybed or played endless games of patience or polished the soot off the glass bells of the kerosene lamps. He went out to the shed on the third day and took a ratty old herring net out of the rafters. He broke into Reet’s museum a second time and came away with a net needle and a ball of nylon and, on a whim, stepped into Duke’s barbershop to take the pile of magazines beside the chessboard, his face averted to avoid seeing whether or not the game had progressed since his last visit. He strung the herring net across the length of the kitchen and he spent hours trying to knit the thing into workable shape, walking back and forth to string the cables together. Leafed through a National Geographic to rest his back.

  Every day the radio weather predicted clear skies and milder than normal temperatures along the south coast. Sweetland glancing out the window each time he heard the forecast and talking back to the announcers. “I don’t know where you fuckers is living,” he said.

  There was drifting snow at the windows, the details of the outside world fading in and out like a television signal from the seventies. Time drifted and bowed in much the same fashion, the wind rattling endlessly in the chimney, the days blurring into one another. It was only the radio that kept them in order in Sweetland’s head, and when he turned it off to save the batteries he had trouble recalling the day of the week.

  The cold moderated a little on New Year’s Eve and Sweetland broke open a fresh batch of homebrew, making his way through half a dozen bottles as he listened to the year wind down on the radio. He called out the ten-second countdown to the dog, standing in the kitchen in his boots and coat with the .22 under his arm. He went to the door as the last seconds ticked away and the dog followed him outside. A clear evening lit by the moon, the wind just brisk enough to add an edge to the frost. Sweetland raised the rifle toward the hills ringing the cove and fired off three rounds to welcome the New Year. It was something people on the island had been doing as long as he could remember, standing at their doors to shoot into the air at the stroke of midnight. Sweetland feeling drunkenly nostalgic and willing to waste a precious handful of shells. His shots echoed off the rock face overhead and the dog cowered by the shed doors, growling at the racket.