Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  The fever broke two days later, but he was still too weak and unsteady to leave the house. He sat at the kitchen window, listening to the forecasts and trying to match them to the conditions outside, though there wasn’t a single reliable detail in the announcements. As if the island had drifted into its own latitude, beyond the reach of the CBC’s meteorologists.

  He leafed aimlessly through Duke’s magazines without reading a word or even registering the pictures. It was a mechanical activity that offered some relief from the tedium of fatigue, a sense of forward progress, of time passing. Picking up one after another and blindly turning the pages start to finish, reaching for the next. He’d made his way through to the bottom third of the pile when he began coming across the mutilated articles, squares and rectangles cut from the pages, and even then it took a while to process what he was seeing. He went to the drawer where he’d put away the threatening notes and he spent half an hour matching them to the words and letters scissored from the headlines. The door to the barbershop was never locked and he supposed anyone could have slipped in and borrowed a magazine for the purpose at hand. Though he couldn’t guess why they might see the need to return it when they were done.

  All those months the man had held his counsel in Sweetland’s presence, refusing to offer a word of advice one way or another. Sweetland shook his head. “You’re a lousy cunt, Duke Fewer,” he said. He didn’t know if he should be amused or murderous or heartbroken. But he didn’t have it in him to feel much of anything at all.

  He burned the notes and the magazines in the stove and he occupied himself then with simply staring out the window. Hours watching the slice of cove visible from the kitchen table. He could see the ruined line of the breakwater, the remaining stones lying low in the ocean, the waves pushing past them into the harbour’s calm. It was the end of the government wharf, that loss. Though it would be years, he guessed, before the sea managed to finish the job.

  He was days into that vigil before Sweetland noted the extended lull in the world he was observing. That there hadn’t been a sign of a living creature in all the time he’d sat there. Even the gulls seemed to have disappeared. He’d grown accustomed to silence and stillness in his months alone. But the absence out there seemed of a different order altogether and it gave a new focus to his sedentary time at the table, watching to prove his observation wrong.

  Near the end of March he caught sight of a ring seal inside the remains of the breakwater, the dark head bobbing in the shallows of the cove. It was early in the year to see them this far south and Sweetland waited at the kitchen window a long time. Afraid he might have imagined it, just to address the lack he was seeing out there. He was ready to dismiss the sighting altogether until he spotted the creature near the government wharf. He went in and out of the porch, gathering up his coat and boots, rummaging for ammunition. His limbs felt brittle and insubstantial, every motion shadowed by the fever’s aftermath. His heart pounding in his throat.

  He started down the path with the .22 and then turned back to the shed, to haul the oars down out of the rafters. Hoofed his awkward load toward the water, his coat hanging open, his head bare to the wind. It was bitterly cold despite the sunshine, but he didn’t feel a thing in the rush. Giddy with seeing the animal, taking it as a sign the world was shifting back into an orbit he recognized.

  He went to the government dock, which was high enough to give him a shot anywhere across the cove. Spring seals tended to sink and even if he managed to hit the animal he’d likely have nothing to show for the effort. If he was lucky, it would float at the surface long enough to get Loveless’s boat in the water. He was too weak to hold the rifle steady and he knelt behind a capstan to rest an elbow on the metal.

  A lop on the cove, sunlight strobing across the surface. A dozen times he thought he spotted the seal amid the glimmer and black. Saw it bobbing in the shade of the breakwater rocks finally, its sleek head like something carved out of stone and sanded smooth. Sweetland took a breath, letting it out slowly. A spit of ocean kicked up and the sound of the rifle echoed in the ring of hills behind him. Sweetland scanned back and forth across the area he’d fired at. He might have missed the creature altogether and it wouldn’t come up for air again until it was safe in open water. It might be floating there dead or already sinking to the bottom.

  Loveless’s boat was still weighted with beach rocks and iron junk. Sweetland emptied the bilge as quickly as he could manage, using the butt-end of an oar to hammer the frozen stones free of one another. He set the drain plug with the heel of his hand and he dragged the boat toward the landwash. It seemed to have gained weight in the winter cold, Sweetland grunting it backwards in foot-long increments. He went around to the bow once he reached the water and shoved it out far enough to float, used an oar to pole into deeper water after he climbed aboard.

  He pulled across the cove toward what was left of the breakwater, craning over his shoulder as he went. He was almost on top of it before he caught sight of the body, a dark figure just under the dark surface. He hadn’t thought to bring a gaff or a hook in the rush and he hauled his sleeves up past the elbow as he drifted toward it. He lifted one oar clear of the thole-pin lock and leaned over the gunwale to bring the water-logged weight of the corpse alongside, trying to lever it closer to the surface. Reached down into the stinging cold with his bare hand.

  The animal’s coat was slick and surprisingly loose on the body. He wrapped his fist in the hide, leaned the other hand on the gunwale to ratchet the thing out of the water, and a young boy’s lank head of hair broke the surface, the scalp glowing a tuberous white beneath it. The sight clapped all the breath from Sweetland’s lungs. He fell back against the far side of the dory, his feet kicking against the boards in spasms. He lifted his head over the gunwale and vomited into the ocean, choking on the bile. He drew in a wet, ragged breath and screamed up at the hillside, at the blank houses. He dropped into the bilge, his back against the gunwale, his eyes on the low sky. “Leave off me,” he said. “For the love of Jesus, leave off me.”

  The dory drifted around as he lay there, swinging Sweetland toward the body again. It had turned belly up and he could see the smashed nose and missing ear, the eyes wide and staring at the clouds. He grabbed the oar and flailed savagely at the thing until he was far enough away to set the oars and row back toward the beach. A sickening, guttural grunting in the air, like the sound of someone being electrocuted. He was halfway up the path to the house before he recognized the sound was coming from his own mouth.

  When he reached the house he turned the kitchen table on its side, dragging it crabwise into the porch and nailing the Formica across the door. He didn’t put in a fire but he kept the radio on low for the intermittent comfort of human voices as the tidal signals drifted in and out. He slept in troubled snatches, coming to himself like someone shaking themselves out of a nightmare. Kept himself awake making a list of what to pack, debating the best time to start out and the likeliest way off the island. It was a bad time of year to chance the crossing, especially in a crate as feckless as Loveless’s dory. It was riskier to row out past the north-end light around the Fever Rocks, but twice the distance to round the Mackerel Cliffs. He would have to hopscotch across to Little Sweetland, break into one of the cabins there to spend the night. Then try for the mainland the following morning if the weather held.

  He stayed clear of the windows, spying on the cove from behind a curtain’s edge. He hadn’t hauled Loveless’s dory up onto the landwash when he came ashore, jumping over the bow into water past his knees, sloshing up onto the beach, raving like a lunatic. The boat had been drifting unmoored around the harbour ever since. There was just enough of a breakwater left to stop it floating away altogether and Sweetland watched for it to come back into shallow water or close enough to the government wharf to get a line on it somehow. Trying not to think what else might be drifting unmoored inside the breakwater.

  He emptied out his packsack to take stock of what he had on
hand, shaking the thing upside down on the kitchen table. A dozen shells for the .22. A pair of woollen vamps. The crumpled map he’d stolen from the Priddles’ cabin at the height of his glassy stone and forgotten about. He set the map on the counter and went about packing the bag with tins of peaches, with salt fish wrapped in tinfoil, the last of his ammunition and a blanket and a change of clothes, fresh water in a glass jar. Wanting to be ready to make a run for it when he saw a chance. He cut a new bailer to replace the one he’d used to clean the magnificent cod in the fall.

  He listened to the marine forecast morning and evening, but he’d long ago given up lending it any credence. Rain it called for and the sky offered intermittent flurries. It predicted winds out of the north at fifteen knots and the house shook in a gale blowing southeasterly. Sweetland watched the sky at sunrise and sunset and the clouds on the horizon and at night he watched the moon for any sign he might glean there about approaching weather.

  On the third night of his vigil he saw the boat riding tight up against the government wharf. The moon almost full, the sea beyond the breakwater’s ruins lying flat calm, a shimmering ladder of moonlight across the surface. It was four in the morning and two full hours to the first glimpse of sunrise. Not a breath of wind.

  He chanced turning on a flashlight to find his pack and a jigger he’d tied to twenty foot of line. He shoved the flashlight into his pocket, removed the nails from the table tipped across the door frame, levering his weight on the hammer so they slid silently from the wood. Eased the doors open and snuck out with his packsack.

  He collected his rifle where he’d left it on the landwash and then carried on to the wharf where he could hear the hollow thunk of the dory butting concrete. He dropped the jigger from the dock to hook it at the bow, hauling the dory along to the metal rungs of the ladder. He climbed down far enough to hold the boat in place with a foot on the bow, reached up to grab his pack and rifle. Water had been seeping into the dory for days, eight or ten inches collected in the bilge, and Sweetland bailed for all he was worth, working himself into a sweat. Took up the oars before he was halfways done and swung the head around for open water, wanting out of the cove.

  He could feel the dory lift on the easy swell as he cleared the edge of the breakwater and he turned east for the Fever Rocks. He stayed close enough to shore he could hear the waves shushing the cliffs. The sheer headlands white and black in the moonlight, looking like dented sheets of metal. The night so still it unnerved him. There could only be weather on the other side of a calm so complete. He had a three-hour haul to the Fever Rocks and the better part of the day then on to Little Sweetland. He glanced up at the moon, setting now and edged with frost. The flash of the north-end light a lifetime away over his shoulder.

  Before the sun rose the sky was overcast and threatening, a scudding wind kicking a lop on the water high enough to spit over the gunwale. Sweetland leaning forward to bail every few minutes, trying to hold the dory steady with a single oar lodged under his arm. Soaked with ocean spray, his face rimed with salt. He could feel the temperature drop as the wind funnelled out of the coming storm and he didn’t think for a moment about turning back. He sculled further off the land to give himself plenty of leeway around the Fever Rocks, thinking if he managed to clear the north-end he would row into the lee of the island, pull up in the alcove below Music House until the weather blew itself out.

  The wind shifted easterly and bore down as he cleared the point, a spiralling squall of snow shearing in. The seas rising around him so he lost sight of horizon and sky in the troughs, the island steaming closer every time the boat roller-coastered aloft. The north-end light flashing uselessly through the storm. Sweetland gave up any pretension of strategy or course, rowing all he was worth for open ocean to keep off the cliffs, the Fever Rocks looming black above him through the drift. The boat riding low and heavy, so much water aboard it was all Sweetland could do to hold her face on to the gale. She slewed sideways and slammed and tossed her head like a horse spooked and trying to throw a rider. The wind and the rolling chain of waves driving him onto the island and he could see he had no chance of staying clear.

  He was too close to shore now to see the light. Only the edge of the helipad and the square outline of the winchhouse above him made any impression in the dirty blur of the storm and he gave up fighting the sway of things, rowing only to keep upright and abreast of the waves, trying to angle the boat toward those marks as he was hurled shoreward. The crests rising higher as he approached the island, the boat levered almost to ninety degrees and he lay flat to keep from being pitched across the stern. Just making the peak before slamming into the trough. She flipped arse over kettle finally and landed face down on top of Sweetland as he went under in the surf. Flailing mad in the black and roar and sudden icy choking, the boat smashing against the rocks and coming apart around him. Sweetland scraped across the ragged granite as the wave retreated until he was lifted and thrown bodily against the rocks by the next wave steaming in. Scraped and lifted and thrown with the stern board and the oars and scraps of wood. He tried to find a handhold each time, something to stop the relentless pistoning, came up hard against metal finally, wrapped a forearm around a rung of the Coast Guard ladder riveted to the Fever Rocks.

  He was buried in each successive wave as he clung there, the weight almost enough to rip him loose. He crawled up one rung at a time between the battering avalanches of water that fell over him with a pendulum’s steady rhythm, until he was out of the ocean’s reach. Stopped to catch his breath then, to make the world slow down. His head had struck the cliffs each time he was thrown and he couldn’t see out of his right eye. A knife working at the same shoulder. He’d lost one boot in the undertow’s suck and the other was filled to the lip with seawater.

  He glanced up the height of stairs above him and then rested his forehead against a metal rung. His winter coat sopping, the drag on him like an animal tied across his shoulders, but he wouldn’t chance removing it for fear of falling. He started up the ladder with his useless arm and blinded eye, his legs quivering helplessly. His one good arm going numb as he went and he held a rung between his teeth to rest it, to shake the blood back into his fingers. The taste of metal and rust in his mouth.

  He refused to look up or down once he started, refused to think in terms of progress. There was a rung to climb and a rung that came after it, he ticked the purgatorial steps off without counting or measuring, and he didn’t know quite what to make of it when his head crested the rock face at the top of the ladder. He touched a hand to the winchhouse to satisfy himself he was where he appeared to be on the headland, then crawled along the path to the flat surface of the helipad, and across that toward the lighthouse, not trusting himself to stand, the wind blowing wild in the open air.

  He stopped in the lee of the keeper’s house, sitting back against the skirt around the foundation. He kicked off his one remaining boot, tipped out the water and worked it back over the dripping sock. He touched his face gingerly, the right eye swollen shut. Thick strands of ice in his wet hair.

  There was the sway of things, Sweetland knew. There was fighting the sway of things or improvising some fashion of riding it out. And then there was the sway of things beyond fighting and improvisation. It was almost impossible to know the difference between one and the other, but he felt close to making a call on the line. He was soaked and hypothermic and the cold was likely going to kill him. Even if he survived, Loveless’s boat was gone and he had no way off the island now.

  The snow was falling thick in the wind. Sweetland stood and hobbled around the keeper’s house and at each window he tried to pry off the board fastened over the glass, without so much as loosening a nail. He sat back in the lee, tucked his hands inside his jacket to try and warm them under his armpits. Fumbled at something unexpected in the inside pocket and drew it out. A plastic baggie containing two Bic lighters, the joint and rolling papers he’d taken from the Priddles’ cabin in the fall. The bag intact an
d everything inside, miraculously, still dry. He shook the contents onto the ground between his legs, wet the joint in his mouth. Hid his head in his coat out of the wind to light up. The smoke as foul as he remembered and it tipped him into a coughing fit, his chest seizing up with a crushed-glass agony that told him he must have cracked ribs against the cliff face as well.

  He choked down the rest of the joint and then waited for the stone to take the edge off of something, the pain or the cold or the miserable caul of dread that threatened to suffocate him. He managed to drop off eventually, waking every few minutes and drifting away again into a mangled facsimile of sleep. Stayed there in that fitful state until the wind dropped off, snow falling steady and soft.

  Sweetland scavenged awhile for firewood, but there was hardly a stick about to burn. Most of the decking at the front of the house had been hauled away by the Priddles after easy firewood, and he’d used most of the remainder himself to boil tea on his Sunday visits. He kicked the last few boards free and added them to his meagre pile. Not nearly enough to dry his clothes or touch the chill at the core. A fire to make him feel the cold all the worse when it was done. He looked up at the barred windows of the keeper’s house, thinking of the remaining chairs and the desk and table, the bed frames and bureaus inside. And no way to get at any of it.

  He had nothing in the way of kindling or tinder and he crumpled the last half-dozen rolling papers into a ball, cracked one of the lighters with a rock to soak the paper with fluid. Pushed it among the scraps of wood and set it alight. The flame immediate and fragile and Sweetland cozied near with his jacket held wide to protect it from the wind and snow, adding bits of moss to coax the fire along, waiting for something solid to take. Blowing on the embered heart awhile before it all went black and dead.