Sweetland (34 page)

It took days to dig out from the storm. A permanent gloom inside from the height of snow over the windows, the paths to the shed and the outhouse shoulder high and no wider than the upstairs hallway. He and the dog suffering a long fit of claustrophobia in the tiny lifeboat of the kitchen, until a thaw set them loose. Four afternoons of sunshine and a southeasterly warm enough to pass for July, waterfalls of melt off the eaves of the buildings. Two nights of steady rain and the snowpack disappearing so quickly Sweetland could watch it go, inch by inch. The radio like a broken record repeating its call for flurries and moderate winds and minus one.

It had been comic at first, to see the forecast so far off the mark day after day. But there was something increasingly disturbing in the disconnect. It seemed a sign of a widening fracture in the world.

He got up with the light each morning and washed and fed himself and he occupied his waking hours with whatever chores the day required. The dog at his heels as he went about the property, or on its wanders up to the mash or down through the cove. From the kitchen window Sweetland would catch sight of it on the government wharf or nosing along the side of Queenie’s house and he’d watch until the dog was out of sight. There was a comfort in knowing it was out there on its own trajectory, that his house was one of the many points on the animal’s compass.

There were days the dog wandered off as soon as it was let outdoors and there was no sign of the creature again before dark. Sweetland waiting each evening to see it go by the kitchen window, to hear it barking outside or scratching at the door. It went straight for its food bowl and afterwards lay at Sweetland’s feet, dozing but watchful, wanting him to settle for the night on the daybed so it could do the same.

In the few minutes between waking and getting up, Sweetland combed leisurely through the dog’s fur, working twigs and shards of tree bark and burrs from the tangle as it slept beside him. It was the only time the animal allowed that sort of intimate attention. As a rule it balked at being picked up or coddled or mauled, shying away and growling. Sweetland tried to clip the hair around its eyes before Christmas, thinking the creature must be half-blind behind those bangs. But it refused to let him near with the scissors and kept a wary distance for days afterwards. He wasn’t willing to chance losing the dog’s trust altogether and gave up the idea, settling for the idle grooming he was allowed. Like a chimp picking nits from the fur of a companion.

Before it was fully awake the dog stretched and rolled on its back, legs splayed while Sweetland scratched its belly. Its testicles were nearly hairless and they made an impression in that posture, two bald fruit in their wild nest of fur. He thought of Loveless talking about the darling set of balls on the dog. Out looking for love half the time it wandered off, Sweetland guessed, trying to scare up a female canine whose rear
end was no higher than a beef bucket. “I expect you’re shit out of luck on this island, Mr. Fox,” he said. And he gave the testicles the affectionate little rub he’d seen Loveless bestow. “Shit out of luck.”

For years he’d had the same lonesome feeling about Jesse—that the boy was stranded on the island of his own peculiar self, that he’d never find a soul fit for his eccentric way in the world. Between the ages of five and six, Jesse was a compulsive masturbator. He would have a go at himself anywhere the mood struck, at school, in a church pew, in the living room while they were watching
SpongeBob SquarePants
. His mouth half open, his face blank as a doll’s. It seemed a completely asexual activity, an itch he scratched absently, though it was hard to argue the point when parents of other students complained. The Priddles christened the boy Jerk-off, a name that was in common usage around the cove for awhile, and Sweetland badgered Jesse to keep it in his pants. Put that thing away, he’d say. The boy ignoring him until Sweetland reached to tap the back of his head. Put it away, he repeated.

Clara thought it was a phase and seemed willing to wait it out. Leave him be, she said. You’ll just make him self-conscious about it.

He could stand a dose of self-conscious if you asks me, Sweetland said.

He’ll grow out of it, she said.

Clara had been right about that. Though the memory of it always made Sweetland feel heartsick and embarrassed for the boy. He never believed Jesse had abandoned the practice altogether, or that the urge wouldn’t come back to haunt him when he hit his teens. That he wouldn’t want more from the world than it had to offer him on that front.

He allowed he might be wrong to think so, God knows it wasn’t his particular area of expertise. At the age of seventy, he was still technically a virgin. He wasn’t in the habit of thinking of himself as such, but he couldn’t argue the fact.

On his first trip to Toronto, Duke arranged a date for him with a woman who worked the weekday lunch counter at a nearby Woolworth’s
and occasionally turned tricks in the evenings. A welcome to the mainland, Duke called it. She was ancient, Sweetland thought at the time, though she couldn’t have been older than thirty-five. A mole high on one cheekbone that made her seem vaguely French. A shrill, mechanical laugh that could have cut sheet metal.

He did not want to have sex with the woman. He was worried about making her pregnant, about catching some mortifying French disease. He’d never used a condom and was afraid of looking like an idiot trying to put one on in front of a stranger. He made an effort to back out of the arrangement, which he hadn’t gone looking for to begin with.

Already paid for, Duke said. Ask for a blowjob, it’s better than screwing anyway.

He was so hard when she went down on him that he couldn’t feel a thing other than pressure, an insistent discomfort, as though it was a medical procedure of some kind being performed on him. He had both hands on her head, trying to release his cock, and he came in spite of himself, suffering through a grating convulsion that was completely devoid of pleasure. He rolled onto his side, curling up in a defensive position.

What the Christ was that? he asked.

I know, she said. Tell your friends. And she winked at him. Marion, her name was. She was still wearing the mustard-yellow polyester uniform from the lunch counter, a blue name tag pinned above her breast.

Nothing more then before Effie Burden fumbling at his fly in Bob-Sam’s wagon on the way to the light at the Mackerel Cliffs.

And that was the end of such things for him.

He still walked as far as the lighthouse on Sundays if the weather was anywhere shy of miserable. It was a slow trip out, an hour longer than walking in summer. He didn’t bother trying to break into the light
tower at Burnt Head, built a small fire in the lee of the keeper’s house and boiled snow-water for tea, sitting on his coat, feeding the dog stale Purity crackers and salt fish and slivers of bottled beet.

Before starting back he walked down past the house to look out at the Fever Rocks and beyond them to the busy grey-blue of the ocean. He thought he might catch a glimpse of a container ship swinging wide for the eastern seaboard of the States, some evidence of the world rumoured beyond the island’s ark. But there was only the endless conveyor belt of the waves ticking toward the shoreline.

He never went down as far as the cliffs, not since the night he’d watched the crowd assemble there in their echoing cathedral silence. A lunatic’s vision, he expected, though something about it seemed beyond his capacity for fabrication, even drunk as he was. And he felt it would be a trespass to walk where those strangers had been standing, hushed and oddly expectant. He couldn’t recall a single detail of those faces in the light of day but it still niggled at him, the sense that he’d known them in another lifetime, that their names were adrift below the surface and just about to come to him. But he never managed to hook a single one.

Since the first snow of the fall he’d been taking the short detour to the new cemetery on his way back down into the cove. He walked through the rows to spend a few minutes with the dead lying there. His closest blood lined off near the back fence, his mother and Ruthie, Uncle Clar and Jesse.

Jesse had liked to follow Sweetland up to the cemetery when he cut the grass or spent a morning painting the fence. It was the only time Sweetland actively discouraged the boy’s company, knowing it would lead to questions about Hollis’s absent marker. Clara thought that might be the reason Jesse fixated on him—the lack of definition to the loss, the absence of a clear resting place. The thought that Hollis was somewhere out there still.

It makes Hollis sad, Jesse said one afternoon. Not having a headstone with the others.

Is that right? Sweetland said.

It makes him feel lonely.

Well, boo-fucken-hoo. Tell him when he stops wandering around the cove with you, maybe we’ll put one up for him.

And Jesse had carried on a dialogue with Sweetland’s dead brother then, walking through the graveyard to discuss the size and colour and style of headstone Hollis might prefer. It made Sweetland nearly mental at the time, listening to that one-sided conversation, and he told Jesse to shut up or bugger off home out of it. But he had less and less room to judge the youngster. He knelt to clear the fresh fall of snow from the names and dates on the stones, Jesse’s and Uncle Clar’s and Ruthie’s and his mother’s. Queenie Coffin’s and Effie Priddle’s. Old Mr. Vatcher and Sara Loveless. Saying hello to each of them aloud and telling them the weather and what he planned to cook for his supper. Like a Jesus idiot.

The flour he’d bought in Miquelon was brown and had no preservatives and he lost most of it to mould and weevils by the new year. He’d known there wasn’t enough salt meat to see him through the winter, even rationing it as he did. The rabbit and occasional brown trout and cured cod he lived on was so lean he couldn’t keep the flesh on his bones. His clothes began to hang off his frame in unfamiliar ways, sloughing at his shoulders and hips. He added an extra hole in his belt with a hammer and four-inch nail, to keep his pants from slipping around his arse. He ran out of store-bought liquor and salt beef halfway through January month. He had a final meal of rabbit stew the first week of February and he cut the last morsels of meat on his plate into bite-sized chunks, sharing them out with the dog. He put the plate on the floor to be licked clean of gravy and when the dog looked up again he showed his empty hands. “All gone, Mr. Fox,” he said.

The snow in the woods on the mash was too deep and rotten to allow for setting snares and, with the exception of a single partridge he’d
managed to shoot on a walk to the lighthouse, he subsisted on homebrew and root vegetables and the cod he’d put up in the fall. He had eaten through the fish that was properly cured. All that was left to him was under-salted and slimy, the stacked layers of flesh gone green at the edges. He soaked the brine from the fish overnight and boiled it most of an afternoon, adding fresh water every hour, just to make it palatable. He put down a bowl for the dog, who nosed it awhile and walked away to lie three or four feet distant with its head on its paws. Sometimes the maggoty fish sat there a full day before the dog gave in to its hunger, chewing at the sour meat with an obvious distaste Sweetland wouldn’t have thought an animal capable of.

“Go catch your own goddamn dinner, you don’t like it,” he said.

On occasion the dog did just that, carrying home bones it discovered up on the mash or dug out of someone’s backyard garbage pile, and it lay near Diesel’s house, grinding at a long-discarded T-bone or the jaw of a sheep or a young cow.

Sweetland saw the animal trotting up from the waterfront one afternoon with its head held high, some flaccid creature in its mouth. He stood at the kitchen window as the dog came closer, watching it stop now and then to drop its cargo and walk around it, until it had found a more manageable way to carry the awkward load. It was a bullbird the dog had gotten hold of, the black and white creature about the same size as the dog’s head. Dovekies they were called elsewhere in the world, according to Jesse.

It was an unlikely catch. Sweetland hadn’t often seen bullbirds west of Cape Race and they were usually gone out to sea by the first of February. He knelt over the dog, who growled to have him so close to his prize. “All right there, Mr. Fox,” he said, and he gave the dog a flick with the back of his hand. He picked up the bird and turned it over. It wasn’t oiled that he could tell, and there was no obvious injury to explain the dog’s luck. Sweetland ran a thumb along the breastbone and then stood to look out at the harbour, shading his eyes to see the water against the sun’s glare.

He went into the shed for a dip net stored in the rafters and walked down the path. Before he was halfway to the shoreline he could see them rolling in on the tidal surge. Dozens of bullbirds dead in the water, the corpses like tiny buoys off their moorings and drifting in past the breakwater. More again already grounded on the beach. Sweetland scooped up eight or ten and he walked back to the house with the loaded dip net on his shoulder, seawater dripping behind him.