Sweetland (3 page)

Beyond the pad was a decommissioned winchhouse, and leading down from the winch to the water was a higgledy series of ladders screwed into the cliffs, two hundred feet in length, angled awkwardly to follow the contours of the rock face. The Fever Rocks were the access point for the lightkeeper long before choppers were an option, supplies and materials hauled up by winch from boats below. The ladders were still maintained for emergency access to the light when the weather was too foggy for a helicopter to fly. They looked like something designed and built by Dr. Seuss. Generations of island youngsters had rowed out here to climb it on a dare. Sweetland had managed it once, he and Duke and Pilgrim drunk and in the dark. The sight of it still made him feel slightly nauseous, almost sixty years on.

The path led into a section of scrub forest and passed above a ravine scored into the island’s back, and from there on to its southern tip. It was how the keeper used to travel to the south-end light above the Mackerel Cliffs, a five-hour trip by horse and cart back in the day. Sweetland managed it in just over an hour on the quad. The path was rarely used anymore and was nearly overgrown, the spruce crowding in. They had to walk single file, Jesse out in front, the wet branches soaking their sleeves as they went.

Clara had gotten the boy a haircut while they were in St. John’s, cropped close at the nape and sides. Sweetland could see the seashell whorls of the double crown at the back of Jesse’s head. A lick of hair sticking up between them, a rogue pook that had gone its own way since he’d had enough hair to comb. Before Jesse learned to walk, Sweetland used to twirl it around his finger to make it stand straight, like a headdress feather in the cowboy movies he’d watched with Duke in the old Toronto theatres. Mommy’s little Indian, he called him.

The youngster couldn’t stand anyone touching his head now and Sweetland thought he might be to blame for that. He could just resist the urge to reach out and smooth the lick down.

The slips were tailed at the base of spruce trees where the runs crossed the trail. They were tied to an alder standard he’d pushed firm into the ground, the silver noose snugged around with brush. A rabbit lying in the first snare and Sweetland knelt to help Jesse work the wire free of the neck, tying a length of string around the paws so the boy could carry the animal across his shoulder.

They walked nearly two hours before they stopped for lunch, settling in a clearing beyond the valley. The peak of the Priddles’ cabin half-hidden among the spruce and birch below. The racket of gannets nesting on the Music House headlands drifting up to them where they sat. They had two brace for their efforts and Sweetland laid the rabbits
in the grass at their feet, the animals fat and sleek and bug-eyed. He dug out the sandwiches and they ate in silence a few minutes. When Jesse finished his lunch he sang for a while, belting out the details of some bygone disaster, though it wasn’t a performance. The audience was irrelevant, Sweetland knew. The song part of a private landscape that surfaced now and then into the wider world.

Sweetland rooted in the bag after a tin of peaches, which was the only fruit the boy would eat. Only from a can, only Del Monte. Sweetland had a cupboardful at the house. He opened the top, passing it across when the song was done.

“Pop says it’s just you and Loveless wants to stay now,” Jesse said.

Sweetland stared across at the boy, who was focused on the tin, shovelling the fruit into his mouth with a plastic spoon. He hadn’t once mentioned that whole business before now. From what Sweetland could tell, the issue of resettlement had never registered in the peculiar peaks and valleys of the youngster’s mind, though it had been the main topic of conversation in the cove for years now. “Will I have to go?” Jesse asked. He was still staring into the tin as he ate.

“Not as long as I’m around,” Sweetland said.

The boy scooped the last of the fruit into his mouth, tipped up the tin to drink the juice. It was impossible to say what he thought of it all, one way or the other.

“So,” Sweetland said. “You just come back on the ferry yesterday, was it?”

“Mom took me to see the doctor into St. John’s,” he said. Like this was news to Sweetland.

“And what did the doctor have to say to you? You’re retarded, is it? Antisocial? Codependent? Mentally unstable? Psychopathic?”

“No,” the boy said.

“Well what are you going all the way into St. John’s to see him for then?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know.”

“Your mother’s the one should be seeing the doctor.”

“She sees him too,” Jesse said. “She goes in after me.”

Sweetland smiled. “Fat lot of fucken good it’s doing her, hey?”

“I don’t know,” the youngster said.

He’d gone too far, Sweetland thought and he said, “Never mind me.” By way of apology.

“I don’t mind.”

He let out a breath of air, stared away down the valley. Even Sweetland thought it was a lonely life for the youngster sometimes, stuck in that head of his. Surrounded by geriatrics and imaginary friends. And as if on cue, Jesse said, “Hollis went into St. John’s to see a doctor one time.”

“Where’d you hear the like of that?”

“Hollis told me.”

Sweetland’s brother, the boy was talking about. Dead fifty years or more. “Is that a fact,” Sweetland said.

“He was into St. John’s most of the winter one year.”

Sweetland got to his feet and busied himself picking up their bit of material, packing it away. “Finish up now,” he said. A feeling like bugs crawling on his skin he could only get clear of by moving. “We got better things to do than sit around here jawing.”

They cleaned the rabbits at Sweetland’s kitchen sink. Jesse on a chair to hold them aloft by the hind paws as Sweetland flicked a blade through the fur above the ankles, peeled the coats down the length of the carcasses an inch at a time. Flesh the colour of mahogany and grained like wood. The mottled guts slopping into the stainless steel bowl of the sink.

The phone rang and Jesse jumped off the chair to answer but Sweetland stopped him, afraid it might be Clara. “You wash up,” he said. “It’s time you got home to your supper.”

The boy rinsed his hands under the tap as the phone jangled on awhile. He said, “Are you going out after wood tomorrow?”

“Might be.”

“I could help.”

“Take one of these down to your pop,” Sweetland said, and he slipped a naked carcass into a clear plastic bag. Jesse waiting with his freshly washed hands held out, as if he was about to receive a ceremonial sword.

After he’d scoured the sink, Sweetland went out the back porch door and walked around to the front of the house. Looked east and west like someone deciding on a route before he ambled down through the cove. He went by Pilgrim’s house, but he didn’t so much as glance in the windows, scurried past with his eyes averted.

Sweetland carried on to Duke Fewer’s barbershop, a one-room shed next to Duke’s house. There was a barber’s chair as old as Buckley’s goat screwed into the bare plywood floor. One wall mostly mirror, the other pasted with faded photos and newspaper clippings yellowed with age. A buzzing neon light fixture, a coat stand, a sink in one corner, a wood stove opposite to heat the room through the winters. Two wooden chairs along the wall below the photos, and, on a low table between them, a chessboard beside a stack of magazines
—National Geographic
and
Time, Sports Illustrated
and
Maclean’s
—that dated from thirty years before and hadn’t been touched in nearly that long.

Duke was sitting in the barber’s chair with the three-day-old paper arrived on yesterday’s ferry. His praying mantis legs crossed in a fashion that seemed barely human. Didn’t glance up when Sweetland came in and looked to have dozed off with his heavy-lidded eyes half-open, but for the habitual tremor in his hands that made the paper shake. “Be done in a minute,” he said finally, and Sweetland took a seat, stared down at the game in progress on the chessboard.

Duke bought the barber’s chair from a second-hand building supply in St. John’s when the cod stocks collapsed and the government ended the inshore fishery in ’92. Sweetland had tried to talk him out of it. To begin with, there were only ninety-odd people living in Chance Cove in
those days and every one of them got their hair cut in Reet Verge’s kitchen, but for Ned Priddle who was bald as a cue ball. And Duke had never cut hair in his life, regardless. Man nor woman was willing to sit in that chair and let Duke at them with the clippers.

Duke rustled the paper. “Pilgrim was by earlier. Said you and Jesse was out checking slips.”

“Got a couple brace on the backside, above the Priddles’ cabin.”

“Pilgrim says Clara wouldn’t very happy about it.”

“I don’t imagine,” Sweetland said quietly.

Duke had a straight razor and a shaving cup and offered shaves for a dollar fifty. As far as Sweetland knew, he had no takers on that offer either. A tax write-off, Duke called it when he put out his shingle. Though it was anyone’s guess what exactly he was writing off. Twenty-odd years he’d been spending six afternoons a week out here, sweeping the floor and reading the paper, watching passersby through the tiny window beside the door. His ex-wife had abandoned the island twenty-five years ago, his children all shifted off to one part of the mainland or other. He gossiped with the men who dropped in for a cup of tea, a gander at the chessboard, moving a piece here or there. Duke played the white and never lost.

“Who’ve been at this board?” Sweetland asked.

Duke craned to look over his shoulder. “There’s been seven or eight had a go since you was here last.”

“You didn’t let Loveless touch anything.”

“You’re in check there,” he said and he shook out the paper. “If you hadn’t noticed.”

“Loveless still thinks it’s a goddamn checkerboard.”

“He means well.”

Sweetland grunted. “So does the fucken government.”

Duke nodded, which was as close as he came to laughter. “Didn’t see you at the meeting yesterday.”

“You was taking attendance, was you?”

“Just Loveless and yourself and Queenie missing. Hard not to notice. Hayward thinks you and Queenie must be having a little something on the side.”

“He’s not worried about Loveless?”

“Hayward’s paranoid,” Duke said. “He’s not an idiot.”

“Well,” Sweetland said, as if there was some doubt about the fact.

“You heard he signed up for the package after all,” Duke said.

“I heard.”

“Just you and Loveless, then.”

He glanced over at the man in the chair. Sweetland knew where he stood on the matter, but Duke Fewer was the only person on the island who’d never once tried to sway him, one way or the other. The barbershop felt like the only safe place he had left. “Don’t start,” he said.

“Makes no odds to me. I’m leaving, government package or no. Laura’s crowd have got a room waiting for me.”

“Jesus,” Sweetland said. “Who’s going to take over the barbershop once you goes?”

“You can kiss my arse,” Duke said.

“A rake like you got neither arse to kiss.”

Sweetland moved his king out of check and Duke folded the paper, climbed down from the chair. An elaborate process, uncrossing those long limbs, setting them upright on the floor. He walked across to the board and lifted his rook, setting it down shakily. “Check,” he said.

Sweetland sat back in disgust. “Fucken Loveless,” he said.

Duke eased into the empty chair across from Sweetland. Both men stared at the board, like they expected one of those wooden figures to move of its own accord and were determined not to miss it. Duke cleared his throat. “There’s some saying they’ll burn you out if you don’t take that package.”

“Some who?”

“It was just talk.”

“You heard someone saying they was going to burn me out?”

“Not direct, like,” Duke said. “There’s people have heard it spoke of.”

“Well, they can all kiss my arse.”

“People are getting worked up, Mose. A hundred grand is a lot of money.”

Sweetland stared at Duke, trying to read what he was saying exactly. If there was a message from someone being passed on second-hand. He said, “You think I should take the package?”

Duke raised his eyes. “You remember what come of the last bit of advice I offered you.” He let out a breath of air and gestured toward the board. “You got a move or you just going to stare?”

Sweetland stood up. “Needs to have a think on it,” he said.

“I got plenty of newspaper to get through yet.”

Sweetland turned back at the door. “Don’t you let Loveless touch that board,” he said.

O
NCE HE
’
D TIED ON TO THE LIFEBOAT
, it occurred to Sweetland he had about a fifty-fifty chance of finding his way in through the fog. He stayed clear of the horn on Burnt Head and jogged west by the compass once he guessed he was well beyond the Fever Rocks. The engine echoing faintly back to him now and then from the invisible cliffs to starboard.

He was crawling, staring through the murk for any sign of land. Even the lifeboat was barely visible when he looked behind.

He carried on, keeping to deep water, trying to estimate how far along the island he’d travelled. He passed a depression in the steep face of the cliffs, a hollow space in the engine’s echo coming back to him that he hoped was Lunin Cove. He cut the engine and put out a jigger, letting the line run until it touched bottom eighteen fathom down. He was over the Offer Ledge which meant three miles to the breakwater. He travelled blind another half an hour, the fog thickening as he stared. He stopped the engine and dropped the jigger and it came up on the Tom Cod Rocks less than a fathom underneath him.

The first hint of it came through the white mist as he was bringing up the line—a low droning that seemed as placeless and dispersed as the fog. The men in the lifeboat standing when they heard it, looking around aimlessly. Sweetland sailed west a ways, stopped again. A voice
this time, ahead and well off his port side. He made three or four more stops before he recognized it, Tennessee Ernie Ford singing “The Old Rugged Cross” from the church steeple. There was never a bell up there, just a PA system that played hymns out over Chance Cove for an hour before Sunday-morning services. You could hear it miles away on the water on a clear day, and even now Ford’s industrial-strength baritone managed to carry through the heavy drapes of fog to where they inched along the shore. “Softly and Tenderly.” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” “Whispering Hope.” Sweetland humming along even when the engine drowned out the sound of the recording.