Sweetland (33 page)

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.

“It’s all right,” Sweetland said. “Just having a bit of fun.”

And he froze then, hearing the pop pop pop of a rifle in the distance, up on the mash, he thought. The dog barking madly at the night sky and Sweetland shouted at the creature to shut up. He heard it again, pop pop pop, down over the hill this time, in the cove. More shots following on their heels, and Sweetland ran around the side of the house, standing in the open there. Looking over the dark cove below, the silvered silhouette of empty buildings. He raised the rifle and fired another shot into the air, stood with the cold stock against his face as the echoes died away. Waited there a long time listening, the silence below like a tide rising to lap at his boots, at his frozen knees, at the waist of his coat.

He turned finally and hustled back into the house, rushing to lock the door and put out the lamp, and he sat on the daybed beside the stove with the .22 across his lap.

The cold woke him. The fire in the stove guttered to ash and the air in the kitchen crystalline, an arctic stillness about him. He was on the daybed in his boots and coat and he didn’t move for fear of rolling onto
the dog. He felt around for the creature, but it wasn’t anywhere within reach. And he realized then he’d left the dog outside, when he ran into the house and barred the door. Hours ago, he guessed.

Sweetland was calling for it before he’d even gotten to his feet, yelled its name from the open door. The moon gone down and only the stars for light. He walked around the building, calling into the wind. He crouched at Diesel’s doghouse to look inside, the towel on the floor drifted over with snow. He walked a little ways down toward the cove, shouting at the top of his lungs.

He went out to the shed where he’d seen the dog last and he found a blur of tracks beyond it, to the back of his property and heading through drifts to the path leading out of the cove. Sweetland went into the house for a hat and gloves and the rifle, a flashlight. The dog spooked by the flurry of gunshots and could be anywhere up there, he guessed. Running mad on the mash until it holed up somewhere out of the wind. There wasn’t enough meat or fur on the creature to keep it alive through a night this cold, that much he knew.

He put in a fire, so the kitchen wouldn’t be a complete icebox when he got back. Took an old blanket from the shelf over his boots and went to the shed where he stripped the tarp off the quad. He picked up a red gasoline container from beneath the workbench and shook it. Put the empty down and grabbed the Priddles’ container beside it, poured the last of the fuel into the tank. It hadn’t been started since the cold snap settled in and Sweetland wasn’t even sure it would turn over. The engine rolling sluggishly at first, like something buried in taffy. He didn’t want to flood it and he took his time, coaxing the reluctant spark along, leaning over the machine like he was protecting a flame in the bowl of his hands. When it finally took hold it roared in the enclosed space, choppy and discontented. Sweetland kept it alive with the accelerator and he let it idle a long time after it settled into a steady rhythm. He thought long enough on the gunshots he’d heard at midnight to take his last box of ammunition from a cupboard over the workbench and he packed it with
the blanket into the carryall. Opened the front doors and kicked the machine into gear, edging out into the night. He couldn’t guess how much time the dog had left, if it was still alive at all. He stopped long enough to close the doors behind him and then started up out of the cove.

Sweetland paused at the top of the path, beside the King’s Seat. It was buried in drifts of snow, just one cold stone arm visible, but the mash beyond it looked to have been scoured clean by the wind. He stood holding the handlebars as he lurched over the frozen trail around Vatcher’s Meadow, driving slow and calling as he went. He couldn’t see much beyond the headlight’s reach and he stopped occasionally, shutting the engine off to shout the dog’s name and listen.

He left the quad on the far side of the meadow and started walking, afraid the noise of the machine might be driving the animal further away. Now and then he stopped, thinking he’d heard some motion ahead or behind him. But it was just the nylon whiff of his own pants as he walked, the toggle on his jacket zipper knocking in the wind. Near noises made strange in the dark.

He was close enough to Burnt Head he could see the light over the rise, an intermittent glim like photographs being taken, away in the distance. The wind had dropped while he wasn’t paying attention and a calm that felt otherworldly had settled on the night. He was about to call for the dog again when he saw the first of them moving on the rise. Dark figures outlined in flashes against the horizon, heading toward the lighthouse.

Sweetland stopped still where he was, flicking off the flashlight. Watched without moving, to be sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him. Another, and then another, following the same path down toward the keeper’s house. He’d left the box of ammunition in the carryall on the quad and he considered going back for it now. But he was afraid to look away, thinking it might all disappear if he did. He watched the silent procession swell above him, dozens more trailing in from the blackness and disappearing down the ridge toward the Fever Rocks.

When the last of the figures passed out of his sight he made his way up toward them, moving slow in the unearthly quiet. He could see the keeper’s house over the rise but there was no sign of the walkers. He waited until the building’s details came clearer to him in the dark before he went down toward it, stayed close to the side of the house, edging up to the far corner. Allowing one cautious eye beyond it.

There were hundreds of them standing on the headlands. All clustered close to the cliffs of the Fever Rocks, as many people as ever lived in the cove, he guessed, and not a sound among them. All facing the ocean where the intermittent light stirred the blackness. A pale glow about the unlikely congregation though the moon was down, each figure silhouetted against the night sky. An air of waiting about them so palpable that Sweetland held his breath as he watched.

He felt exposed there, as if he was spying on some secret ceremony and bound to be found out. He turned to sneak off the way he’d come when someone brushed past him, a hunchback in a black overcoat, limping toward the rest. Sweetland fell back against the lighthouse to keep his feet, holding out the barrel of the .22 in both hands to fend off the night. They were still walking down from the rise in a steady trickle, he saw, their faces blank and unhurried. They went past without showing the slightest concern to have him there. Strangers every one of them, though he felt they knew him. That he was known to them somehow. A woman in a headscarf turned her head as she went by and smiled blankly. An eerie incongruity to the expression on her face. The teeth in her head too small for her mouth.

The cold woke him. Light outside when he opened his eyes, mid-morning already. He could hear the trickle of water running in the sink, though the stove was long dead and the room ticked with frost. A heated beach rock at the small of his back the only hint of warmth in the world. He reached behind himself, touched a hand to a matted tangle of fur.
The dog licking at his bare fingers. He shifted carefully to get a look at the animal, the head coming up to greet him.

“Now, Mr. Fox,” he said. He scratched underneath the dog’s ears and it leaned its weight into his hand. There was a streak of white fur on its black chin, like a soul patch, and Sweetland stroked it between his fingers. “I hope you had a better night than I did.”

The dog jumped to the floor and shook itself and Sweetland pushed himself upright. His head two sizes too small for all it carried. He was still wearing his coat and boots, the .22 leaning against the foot of the daybed. He spent a few minutes trying to separate out the night, to set what was real from what he might have dreamt lying there on the daybed. The dog ran up to nip at his pants and then clattered across the painted wood to the door, scratching to be let out. “Hold your horses,” Sweetland said.

He opened the storm door and the dog ran into the cold air, cocked a leg against the clothesline pole. Sweetland keeping a close eye, not wanting to let the creature out of his sight again. He was about to call it in when he looked across at the shed doors and the mad trip up on the mash came back to him, the walkers parading to the light. He went to the side door and listened a moment before he went in, expecting he didn’t know what. Found the quad there, trussed underneath the canvas tarp, with no sign the machine had been moved in weeks.

He was oddly crestfallen to see it. A symptom of too much time alone, he guessed, to have felt almost grateful for the company of the nameless dead filing out past the light. To be disappointed seeing he’d dreamt or imagined the entire thing.

The dog had followed him in to nose around the room and Sweetland called it from the side door as he was leaving. “Mr. Fox,” he said, and it came out from behind the red gas cans under the workbench, sitting at the door to be let out. Sweetland staring at those three containers. He went across the room and picked them up in turn. All of them empty. He lifted the tarp off the back of the quad and opened the
carryall, took out the blanket he’d packed there and the box of ammunition. He put the shells back in the cupboard over the workbench and turned to leave, but had to catch himself against a rising spell of dizziness.

He lifted his head to the rafters once it passed. His eyes coming to rest on the white wooden cross directly above him, his name hand-lettered there in black. And he nodded a simple hello.

T
HE FIRST WEEKS AFTER
the accident Sweetland drifted through porous layers of pain and narcotic relief. Duke quit the job at the steel mill to be closer to the hospital and he spent all of his time there, scavenging meals off trays left in the hallways, finding an empty bed to sleep in at night or kipping down in the abandoned television room.

Sweetland was barely capable of carrying on a conversation those early days and Duke talked up the revolving cast of men in the other beds on the ward instead. Wanting to know where they were from and what they did for a living and how many youngsters they had. Half the people in the hospital were from elsewhere in the world, it seemed, from Italy or Greece or some Balkan country they’d never heard of. He ran errands for patients who needed cigarettes or chewing gum or a letter posted. An elderly man from Spain admitted for bypass surgery spent the long hours of his convalescence teaching Duke to play chess. After the Spaniard was discharged, Duke tried to pass on what he’d learned to Sweetland, using a checkerboard borrowed from the television room, improvising chess pieces out of beer caps, paper clips, pennies, empty syringes. The nurses and custodial staff stopping to check on the progress of the latest game, laying wagers on the outcome.

When Sweetland was too tired or stoned on medication for chess, Duke wandered the hospital aimlessly, flirting with the nurses at the
desk. He mopped the floors on the ward if he found a bucket unattended, just to have something to do with his time.

You ought to go back, Sweetland told him finally.

You’re here a long while yet.

And you got no work. And a wife home with a youngster you haven’t even laid eyes on.

I can wait.

You fly the fuck home out of it.

You kiss my arse.

A rake like you, Sweetland said.

A week they argued it back and forth until Sweetland ratted him out to the nurses, telling them Duke had been living in the hospital more than a month. He heard the racket down the hall the next morning, Duke shouting at the top of his lungs as he was hauled away by Security.

Sweetland woke in the hospital dark that night to see him sitting in a chair by the bed.

You’re a lousy cunt, Moses Sweetland, Duke said.

How’d you get in here?

It’s not a fucken bank or anything. I walked in.

I’ll call Security, Duke, I swear to God.

I’m going, Duke said, don’t get a hard-on. He leaned in close to the bed. I just wanted to know if there’s a message you wants passed on to Effie when I gets back.

Tell her I won’t likely be home for Christmas, Sweetland said.

6

A
FTER THE COLD SNAP, THE WEATHER
reverted to its regular schizophrenia. Snow, followed by days of rain and sleet, ice pellets. Thaws followed by sudden freeze-ups that made the paths treacherous to walk. None of it matched the forecast he was getting on the radio. There was a storm in February that lasted two full days, a fierce gale of wind and snow drifting halfway up the kitchen windows. The radio announcer calmly calling for scattered flurries and moderate easterly winds and a low of minus one.