Sweetland

by Michael Crummey

  He sat back from the failure, slapping a hand against his thigh. Not conscious of thinking a thing, as if the little light of his mind had guttered out as well. He reached to pull the longest piece of wood off the pile, pushed himself from the ground and started up the rise, leaning on the three-foot stick for a cane. He walked past the cairns near the cliffs and the quad where it had been abandoned. He was thirty feet beyond the machine when he stopped and limped back to it. Opened the gas cap and moved his head left and right to peer inside. Caught sight of his own reflection in the last skim of gasoline at the bottom.

  He worked off his jacket and sweater, but couldn’t get his shirt over his injured shoulder. He tore it along the seams, dressed himself again in the soaking gansey and coat before wringing as much water as he could from the torn fabric. It was still too wet to soak up the little gasoline in the tank and Sweetland tipped the machine onto its side. Rested against it as the waves of pain pulsed through him. Removed the gas cap and hauled the machine all the way over onto its back, holding the shirt underneath to catch whatever might leak out. Shaking the quad back and forth to get every drop. He could smell gas on the cloth when he was done, but couldn’t even say if it was enough to burn.

  He walked back over the rise and down toward the light and he stood considering the pathetic pyre of scrap wood. Glanced across at the keeper’s house, took in the wasted length of the place that was slowly rotting into the ground. He moved what he’d gathered against the house’s foundation with the shirt balled underneath it. Flicked the lighter. The material so wet that the flame burned blue a few seconds, before the wood caught hold. Sweetland stepped away when the fire got going, but only far enough to stop himself scorching his skin. The heat so feral and delicious he almost wept.

  The building’s skirt scorched black behind the fire, but for a while it looked like the house would survive his attempt at arson with the smallest of scars to show. He wandered further afield looking for fuel, piled every knuckle of driftwood, every twisted branch of tuckamore he could find against the foundation. Within an hour the place was alight, the boarded windows belching smoke. Sweetland kept moving back as the inferno grew, as it threw wider bands of heat where the flames ate through to open air. He took off his coat and laid it flat on the ground, turning it regularly, like a cut of meat he was cooking over coals. He took off his gansey sweater and pants and socks and did the same with them. It was still snowing outside the fire’s fierce circle but not a flake touched him. When his clothes had dried, he dressed and lay down to sleep in one of the outer rings. Waking now and then to shift closer as the fire collapsed and settled.

  By late afternoon the walls and ceiling were down and the open flames burned off. The blackened stump of the building was still radiating enough warmth to keep him comfortable, but he expected it wouldn’t last through the night and he couldn’t risk staying out in the open. The snow coming at him in waves over the remains of the fire. The Priddles’ cabin was the closest bit of shelter but he’d cleaned out every scrap of food and firewood in the fall. And he knew he would never manage the climb out of the valley once he got down there.

  He pulled his jacket slowly over his injured shoulder, pushed on the one boot left to him. His head was throbbing with a concussion or a weed hangover or a fever, or some combination of all three. He had no idea how much daylight was left to him. He started up the rise toward the mash, the charcoaled ruins of the keeper’s house smoking behind him. By the time he made the crest, the snow was steady and drifting and he could just make out the path along the headland, the intermittent cairns marking the way. The ocean in a lather against the base of the cliffs.

  The back end of the storm came around as he scuffled along, the wind freshening and blowing northwest, and he walked into the blizzard, the ground drifting over so the path was almost impossible to distinguish. He turned back on to the wind now and then to clear the ice frozen to his eyelashes, trying to guess his location from what he could see nearby. The whiteout so complete that Sweetland lost sight of the ocean and light tower and the smoulder of the keeper’s house behind him.

  It was coming on to evening before he admitted to himself he was well off the path. He considered turning back to try for the Priddles’ cabin, but guessed he was closer to the cove than the lighthouse now, and an hour of daylight at best to travel in. The drifts were knee-deep and Sweetland walked with a curiously mechanical gait through the snow, all the feeling gone out of his legs, his injured arm cradling his injured ribs. Talking himself past the urge to lie down.

  It was nearly dark when he walked into the fence around Vatcher’s Meadow and it took him a few moments to recognize it for what it was, standing still in the storm, turning the thing over in his head. “Now, Mr. Fox,” he said when it finally came clear to him. He was in no shape to climb the fence and he followed the line south, looking for the gate. From there he angled across the meadow until he reached the fence on the far side, using the poles as markers. At the gate he struck as straight as he could manage from the corner post. Stumbled on the King’s Seat at the top of the hill above the cove, crouching out of the wind in its shelter awhile. Startled from a snug well of sleep that was almost too narrow to climb out of. He got to his knees, lifted himself into the wind’s crosscut.

  It was steeply downhill into the cove from there, and he stumbled all the way to the back of his property, his body alight with rivets and hinges and underground cables of pain as he lurched and righted himself and lurched opposite. He leaned against the shed when he reached it, catching his breath. The door of his house invisible in the dark and the blowing snow, though he knew it was only twenty steps distant. Sweetland not quite relieved to have made it back alive.

  He woke on the daybed, though he had no memory of coming into the house or lying down. He was still wearing his coat and his single boot. His hands felt miles away and they seemed to expand and shrink with his pulse. He was dying for a drink of water but the sink was too far off to get to and he stared helplessly across the room. He couldn’t guess what time of day it was, or what day of the week. It was bright outside and the sunlight made his head ache.

  Someone walked by the kitchen window as he lay there and he was too feverish to be startled or to wonder who it might be. There was a knock at the door and he took his time trying to fashion a response to it. “Come in,” he said finally. The knock came again and Sweetland worked himself onto an elbow, to give some heft to his voice. “Door’s open,” he called.

  The knocking continued and he got to his feet, reaching with his good arm for chairs and door jambs to stay upright as he crossed the kitchen to the porch. He paused in front of Uncle Clar, out of breath, sipping at the air against the welling ache in his chest. Saw the outline of himself superimposed on the ancient picture there, a ghostly image hovering in the background, as if he was a second exposure on the same strip of film. A figure bled of detail and substance, so that all the world showed through him. Moses Sweetland. This is he.

  The knock startled him and he turned to the door, swung it wide and lifted the latch on the storm door. His visitor standing there in a tweed jacket and tie, tan pants. Hands folded at the waist holding the inevitable briefcase. Sweetland couldn’t make out the man’s face through his one good eye, the features lost in a glare of sunlight.

  “Mr. Sweetland,” a voice said from the place where the mouth should have been.

  He paused a moment, waiting for the face to resolve out of the shine. He lifted a hand to shade his eyes.

  “Do you mind if I come in,” the government man said.

  Sweetland stood back to let the man go by, followed him into the kitchen. There was something he was meant to do for visitors and he groped through the murk, trying to think of it. The government man took a seat beside the window and placed the briefcase flat on the table in front of him, his hands folded on top. Sweetland went toward the stove and turned back slowly. “I could boil the kettle,” he said and stopped short, staring at the man. />
  “No tea for me,” the government man said, his face still missing behind a sourceless swarm of light, the voice rising out of that mouthless glitter.

  “All right.”

  “Maybe you should sit down, Mr. Sweetland.”

  “All right.”

  “Before I start,” he said, “I wanted to offer my condolences. For the loss of Jesse.”

  Sweetland eased himself into a chair without looking directly at the figure across the table, stung by the sound of the boy’s name.

  “And the awful business with the dog,” the government man said, “I’m very sorry about that.”

  “This is a sympathy call, is it?”

  The government man opened the briefcase and took out a sheaf of papers. “No,” he said. “Strictly professional. Some paperwork to get through.”

  Sweetland swung the enormous weight of his head around to stare directly at the government man. Squinting to try and push past the blur for some hint of the man’s eyes or nose or mouth. Anything human at all. “Can you get me out of here?” he said. “Is that what you come for?”

  The government man lifted his arms. “I’m afraid that ship has sailed,” he said. “This is simply a routine follow-up. I’ll be out of your hair in no time.”

  Sweetland nodded dumbly.

  “On a scale of one to five,” he said, holding a pen over a virgin form, “with one being completely satisfied and five being completely dissatisfied, how would you rate your living circumstances at the moment?”

  Sweetland didn’t answer. There was something in the whole set-up that was wrong and he could almost lay his finger on it.

  “Would I be right in thinking a five for this, Mr. Sweetland?” He made a mark on the sheet in front of him. “We’ll say five. On a scale of one to five, one being satisfactory and five being certifiable, how would you rate your current mental status?”

  Sweetland shook his head, still trying to get his hands around it, the something he knew was wrong and could almost name.

  “A five, then,” the government man said, and he made another mark on the paper.

  Sweetland looked out toward the porch. “You come in the wrong door,” he said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Last time you was here, you come to the front.”

  “We’re splitting hairs now, Mr. Sweetland.”

  “How’d you know about the dog?”

  “On a scale of one to five,” the faceless voice said, the pen poised again.

  “Who was it told you what happened to the dog?”

  The government man set his hands on the folder in front of him. “No one told me,” he said.

  “No one told you,” Sweetland whispered. He glanced one more time at the suit across the table, at the face missing behind a shapeless welter of light. He pushed himself out of his chair to reach for the man, but the dark folded in on him like a black comber rolling over and it swallowed the room whole.

  The world was askew when he came to himself. He recognized the room, the kitchen of the old house, but couldn’t place the pieces where they belonged. All the angles wrong.

  He shifted slightly and everything complained against the motion, shoulder and ribs, hips and knees, his back. He was flat out on the floor, his face against the bare wood. He tried to lift his head, but had to settle for flicking his eyes around the room. Daybed, stove. Silver legs of the chairs. Black boots facing him under the table. Someone sitting beside the window. Rough woollen trousers dripping wet. A pool gathering on the floor beneath the feet, the raw smell of salt water in the room.

  Sweetland closed his eyes again. “Is Jesse with you?” he said and he waited a long time for a reply before he glanced around again. Still just the one pair of boots under the table. He felt too vulnerable suddenly to stay where he was and he forced himself to his knees, hefted his fractured weight into the chair he’d been sitting in before he passed out. Looked across at his brother in the chair opposite. The young face so pale it glowed like the underside of sea ice. The kelpy hair streaming, his dead eyes glassy and expressionless.

  Sweetland was shaking helplessly again, the tremors stirring the scattered territories of his body that were occupied by pain. “I thought Jesse might be with you,” he said, clenching to stop his teeth chattering long enough to speak. “Being as you two was friends.”

  He waited then, expecting something from the figure across the table. “Hollis,” he said, to see if the name might wake the thing. But it sat there in the same silence, without so much as glancing his way. He had never felt so cold, not in all his life, not when he was being drowned in the ocean’s arctic currents, not when he was soaked to the bone and climbing the lighthouse ladder in the knifing wind. Sweetland bent double over his legs, holding his chest against the fever’s palsy as it shook through him. It was a cold he thought would never end. He looked over at his brother again. “You must be some sick of this fucken place by now,” he said.

  Hollis turned his head then and nodded in a distracted fashion that might have been a response to those words. Sweetland saw his living brother in that expression, the look that came over him when he was buried in some story in the old school reader or hauling at the oars beside him on their way to check the traps in their father’s coat. Blank but animate. Hollis absent even as he sat in the company of others, seeming to live elsewhere half the time.

  Sweetland thought he might offer some sort of apology then, but even in his addled state he could tell they were beyond apologies. He clenched his teeth against the chattering. “It’s good to see you,” he said.

  And the figure nodded again in the same distracted fashion.

  “Say me to Jesse if you sees him,” Sweetland said. “And Ruthie.”

  He had a longer list of names in his head that he wanted to offer his hellos to, but his throat closed over and he got no further.

  He woke on the daybed, lay with his eyes closed, listening to a fly buzzing at the kitchen window. Trapped and mad for the light outside.

  But it wouldn’t be a fly, of course. Months too early in the spring. An outboard engine he was hearing, approaching from a long ways off. The motor geared back as it passed by the breakwater into the cove, 150 horsepower or better, he thought, Evinrude or Honda or Yamaha. All makes sounded more or less the same these days. When he was a youngster you could name a boat’s owner by the particular racket of its engine alone. The Coffins drove an old Mianus that spit and complained exactly as its name suggested it might. The Vatchers ran a six-horse-power Acadia, a newfangled jump-start that didn’t sit well in wet weather, you could hear them cranking and priming and cranking after everyone else was away and gone in the morning. Ned Priddle’s father drove a little Perfection that sent the boat along without a wake or even much of a bow wave, as if it was a magic carpet the man was riding over the surface. He stood aft with the tiller between his knees, smoking a pipe as he made for open water.

  Sweetland thumbed through the catalogue of families and engines in his head as he lay there, and he forgot about the boat just arrived in the cove until the motor shut down and the quiet startled him. Voices ballooning in that stillness, two men it sounded like, expecting to find themselves alone in the cove. He ought to be interested in whoever was out there, he figured, but he couldn’t summon even that. He felt licked out, as brittle and clear as a pane of glass.

  The voices were making the walk up from the government wharf, pausing along the way to bicker back and forth, a note of disbelief or uncertainty creeping into the talk though Sweetland couldn’t pick out a single word of what they said. They skirted wide of his house, taking the path up toward the mash. Sweetland eased himself to his feet, looked down toward the water from the kitchen window. A new rig tied to the wharf, a fibreglass forty-footer. Someone with money to burn by the look of it. Those phantom cabin owners from Little Sweetland, maybe, checking the abandoned cove on behalf of friends interested in purchasing their own corner of the strange and far-flung.

  He heard
the visitors stop at the new cemetery, their voices echoing off the hills like they were shouting to one another from opposite sides of the cove. Something had unsettled them and Sweetland wondered if that fresh grave over Jesse’s plot was showing through the snow up there. They started back down toward the water and Sweetland took a seat at the kitchen table. Expecting they’d find him there eventually and happy enough to wait.

  It occurred to him they might have food with them. Something store-bought and fresh. He hadn’t eaten since the morning he left the cove in Loveless’s dory and he had no notion of how long ago that was. Days now. He felt the hunger from a ways off, it almost seemed to be afflicting someone else altogether. A mild curiosity that he was of two minds about satisfying.

  The voices made their way to the back of the house. The side door of the shed creaked, the conversation disappearing as they went inside. Moments later they came out into the open and Sweetland heard a voice say, “That’s almost a winter’s worth of wood gone through.”

  The latch on the storm door clattered and from his chair Sweetland saw daylight flood the porch.

  “Hello, the house,” someone called from the doorway.

  “Go on in, for fuck sakes,” the second voice said.

  “You go in, you’re so goddamn keen.”

  “You’re such a fucken woman, you know that?”

  Sweetland smiling to hear them at each other, even if he was only dreaming the brothers on the island with him. The Priddles came through the porch together, tentative, backlit by sunlight. Stared at him from the doorway.

  “B’ys,” Sweetland said.

  “Lord fuck,” Keith said.

  Barry pushed his brother so hard that Keith almost fell on his ass in the porch. “I fucken told you!” Barry shouted. “What did I fucken tell you?” He jumped across the kitchen so that all the joists in the floor bowed under him, the teacups swinging on their hooks, tinkling like wind chimes. “Motherfucking Sweetland!” he shouted. “I fucken told you, Keith,” he said, shaking his truncated finger at his brother.