Sweetland (8 page)

He refrained from all forms of labour on Sunday. He didn’t cut wood or go fishing or weed the garden or check his slips. He wouldn’t even go out to the shed to putter at the dozen odd jobs that were only halfways done. He sat in the living room to watch the televangelists for an hour or two in the morning, a habit he picked up from his mother in her later years.
What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world?
they thundered, before imploring the sick and the lame to sign over their meagre savings, their disability benefits. His mother wrote a twenty-five-dollar cheque every week that she entrusted to Sweetland for mailing. He burned each one in the stove, knowing she hadn’t looked at her bank balance in the years since her old-age pension kicked in.

Sweetland paid no attention to what the preachers were on about, though he enjoyed watching them pace and throw their arms around
and froth at the mouth. They looked like professional wrestlers trying to get a rise from a crowd at Maple Leaf Gardens. He watched the shows for the hymns the choirs performed between the readings and sermons. He was never much for singing himself, but he knew the tunes and he hummed along under his breath.

He had an early lunch of tuna fish on white bread and a tin of peaches for dessert, then spent the first half of the afternoon online, playing poker. Even that caused him a twinge of guilt. Games of chance were the devil’s tool according to his mother, and she hadn’t allowed so much as a hand of 120s on the Lord’s Day when they were youngsters. They sat around in their Sunday best, listening to the eight-day clock tick away the endless seconds. Uncle Clar asleep upright in his chair. A body was allowed to cook food and wash dishes, but the remainder of the day was given over to enforced rest and contemplation, which to Sweetland had always seemed a form of torture.

In his years at the lighthouse there were duties that couldn’t be left and he polished the mirrors and watched the horizon to note the ships that passed and made entries about the day’s weather and wind in the keeper’s journal, he checked the back-up generators or repainted the light tower or tended the garden like it was any other day of the week. He thought the job might have cured him of the Sabbath habit, but it settled on him as soon as he moved back into Chance Cove. As if it wasn’t his mother but the house itself that imposed the ritual observance.

Before supper he went for a stroll through the cove, the clouds in rags overhead. He went by Loveless’s place, taking the path toward the barn, calling out to Loveless as he passed below the living room windows. The cow was standing in the tiny strip of field alongside the leaning barn, gnawing at the grass she’d already cropped down to the dirt. Sweetland placed a hand against the heat of her belly and the cow shook her head without raising her muzzle from the ground. She looked about ready to drop her calf where she stood.

“She’s going to burst she don’t have that calf soon,” Loveless said, coming up behind them.

“You got neither bit of hay to put out for her?” Sweetland asked. “There’s not enough grass left here to feed a rabbit.”

“She eat up all the hay I set aside over the winter.”

“Well can’t you get some from Glad?”

Loveless looked away a moment, chewing at the unlit pipe. “He wants to take that cow away from me, Glad Vatcher do.”

“Jesus, Loveless. Why would he want to take your cow?”

“Tried to buy her off me when I brought her over to the bull last fall. Wouldn’t hardly take no for an answer.”

“He was just trying to keep the old girl from starving to death.”

“She got plenty there,” Loveless said.

“You should have him come look at her.”

“Who, Glad?”

“Yes, fucken Glad. Just to give her a once-over. Before the calf comes.”

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” Loveless said and he looked around himself, one hand picking at his pant leg. He walked close enough to put a hand on the cow’s flank. “He was after me to take the package, Moses.”

“Well, let him talk,” Sweetland said. “Don’t pay no mind.”

“He was hard about it. He said some things.”

“What kind of things?”

“He wouldn’t say nothing the like of it to Sara.”

Sweetland watched the man a moment. He said, “You haven’t been getting any notes, have you?”

“Notes?”

“Ransom notes, like. With letters cut out of magazines.”

Loveless stared at Sweetland like he was being made fun of somehow.

“Never mind,” Sweetland said. “You look out to that cow.”

Loveless slapped the animal’s flank. “She’s fine, this one,” he said. “She’ll be all right.”

Sweetland was back at the virtual tables early that evening when the Skype icon started jumping for his attention. He clicked it open to answer the call, Jesse sitting at a desk in his bedroom down over the hill. His pale face looming white in the screen’s illumination.

“What are ya at, Jesse?”

“Homework,” he said.

“Good man.”

“What are you doing?” The boy’s image was jerky, the voice slightly out of sync with his mouth. There was something sinister in the disconnect, Sweetland thought. He’d always hated that about Skype, preferred talking on the telephone. Though he had no time for the phone, besides.

“Not much,” Sweetland said. “Playing a bit of poker.”

“Winning or losing?”

“What do you think?”

“Losing.”

“Ah kiss my arse,” he said.

Sweetland had never gone near a computer before Queenie’s youngest daughter packed up and moved to Edmonton five years back. He’d trundled down to her house with his wheelbarrow to collect the desktop he’d bought from her, walked out with the hard drive in his arms. Welcome to the twenty-first century, Sandra said to him. He set the plastic tower down in the bed of his wheelbarrow and came back to the door for the monitor. Don’t worry, he’d said, I’m only visiting.

Sweetland never expected to touch the thing himself. He bought it for Jesse, thinking to occupy the boy’s attention and save himself the endless interrogation he made of his visits. Clara came to the house with Jesse that evening to help set up the machine, the youngster explaining each individual component to Sweetland as they went.

This is your mouse, Jesse said, pointing to the plastic doohickey beside the keyboard. You uses that to move the cursor.

The what?

This thing, Jesse said, pointing to nothing Sweetland could identify on the screen. Go ahead, he said, move the mouse.

And Sweetland had poked at it with his index finger, like he was prodding a sleeping animal.

It won’t bite you, Moses, Clara said to him, grab ahold.

Jesus loves the little children, he sighed.

Jesse spent the weeks that followed walking him through the basics, and he surrendered to the boy’s insistence, thinking it would be less trouble than resisting. Sweetland had never so much as used a telephone before his first trip to the mainland with Duke in 1962, and no one on the island had phone service before the electricity arrived in the early seventies. It seemed a minor miracle now to find himself in the house where he was born, Skyping with a twelve-year-old. He heard a voice offstage and Jesse leaned in close to the screen. “Check your Facebook account,” he said before the square went black.

Sweetland had lied to the government man about not being on Facebook. Jesse had badgered him into joining, but Sweetland had only one friend. He signed in, clicked on the link Jesse had sent. A YouTube video began loading and he opened it full screen. A two-minute clip of Jesse “The Body” Ventura pile-driving a series of hapless opponents in the ring. It was as though the boy knew how Sweetland felt about his name and was working to alter his opinion.

Sweetland had forgotten about the professional wrestler and was surprised to see him in his prime on the internet. The web was like the ocean, Sweetland thought, there was no telling what lived in the murkiest depths. He allowed it might be possible, if a body knew where and how to look, that everything he’d known in his life and since forgotten could be found drifting down there, in grainy two-minute clips.

He clicked to replay the video, turned up the volume. The floor of the ring pulsing with the impact of those massive bodies, the crowd on its feet. People said it wasn’t real, the wrestling, that it was just a pageant
of sham fighting, shadowboxing. Jesse Ventura flung himself across the chest of his opponent from the height of the corner ropes, slamming the man backwards onto the mat beneath his weight. Any idiot could see it was choreographed, that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. But that fall looked real enough from where Sweetland was sitting.

The sky was still threatening in the morning, low, patchy fog on the hills. Almost too wet to go up on the mash, but he hadn’t been out to check the slips in two days. He packed a sandwich, his .22, his rain gear. Jesse was likely watching the house from his bedroom window and Sweetland wouldn’t look that way when he went outside. A look would be all the invitation the boy needed. He drove the ATV up behind his property and climbed slowly out of the cove.

He’d crested the rise and started around Vatcher’s Meadow when he saw the quads bombing toward him. He pulled off the trail and waited there. The Priddles whistled past in their army camouflage and ball hats and then spun around to come back up to him. Sat their machines to either side so Sweetland had to turn his head shoulder to shoulder to look at one and then the other. Early for them to be about, though there was no telling their hours when they were on a bender. “B’ys,” he said.

“How’s Mr. Sweetland?” Barry said.

He glanced across to Keith and nodded. “The Golden Priddles,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.”

“Been spending most of our downtime in St. John’s.”

“What is it going on in St. John’s is so goddamned important?”

“Just life,” Barry said. “You should look into it sometime.”

“Send me the brochure, why don’t you.”

“Where you off to this time of day?”

“Got a few rabbit slips out past the keeper’s house,” Sweetland said.

Barry leaned back on his seat. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said
to his brother, “but I believe Mr. Sweetland here is engaged in poaching activity.”

“The fucker belongs in Her Majesty’s Penitentiary,” Keith said.

“Perhaps we should give the wildlife officer a call.”

“Oh kiss my arse,” Sweetland said, which got a laugh from the brothers.

Keith leaned across and tapped Sweetland’s arm with his index finger. He said, “Father tells us you still haven’t signed on to the package.”

“Can’t deny it.”

Keith shook his head, solemn. “The old man says he’s going to cut off your nuts with a fish knife, you don’t sign.”

“Is that a fact,” Sweetland said.

“I told him I’d be happy to do it for him, if it came to that.”

“Jesus, Keith,” Barry said. “Don’t mind Keith,” he said to Sweetland. “He’s just being a fucker.”

“I’m just being a fucker,” Keith agreed. The two men smiling, enjoying the moment. Though they were both considered residents of the island and had voted for the move.

Barry started up his quad. “We’ll drop by for a drink some night before we goes.”

“Whatever you like,” Sweetland said and he kicked into gear, drove off over the field of marsh grass and moss.

At the lighthouse he grabbed the canvas backpack and the .22 from the quad without looking up at the keeper’s house. The Coast Guard had just finished refurbishing the place a year before it was decommissioned. Spent a small fortune roofing and painting it, installing a skirt around the foundation to box in the three-hundred-gallon cistern that collected rainwater in the crawl space beneath the floor. The house fitted out with new furniture and appliances, dishes, cutlery. Sweetland was living alone out there at the time and he tried to refuse most of the upgrades. But some budget line was allocated and had to be spent before the end of the fiscal year.

People in Chance Cove waited until the shingles on the ocean side were stripped off by the wind, and weather seeped in through the bare boards, before they touched it. Everything of any use came out then—fridge and stove, beds, toilet and bathtub, countertops, highboys and dressers, cupboards—the building like a wrecked vessel being stripped for salvage. Sweetland kept clear of the pilfering for fear of losing his tiny pension, though he didn’t begrudge anyone what they managed to put to use.

He started along the trail heading north. It was half a mile to where he’d tailed his rabbit slips and it looked like he’d wasted the trip early on. Nothing in the first half-dozen, though one had been taken and managed to twist free. He would have taken up the snares altogether without Jesse to keep him company but for Clara’s self-righteousness. He reset the wire slip out of bald spite, settled the spruce branches he’d cut snug to either side on the run. The day was lightening and Sweetland shucked his rain jacket, stuffed it away in his pack. Took a mouthful of water from the Mason jar. Headed on to the next snare.

At first glance he thought a fox or weasel had gotten at the creature in the slip, some savage thing eating ugly, making a bloody mess. It crossed his mind it might have been Loveless’s little lapdog to blame. That he might be forced to shoot the pup, to keep him clear of the snares.

He pushed his cap high and knelt to clear the ruined thing from the run. Froze there on his knees. The animal decapitated, the guts and entrails pulled out through a knife’s incision in the stomach. Hind feet chopped off. He looked away from the mess and the rabbit’s dead eyes were staring at him. The head set in the branches of the tree above the snare, one brown ear nailed to the trunk to hold it in place.

He stood the .22 on its stock and hauled himself to his feet. “Jesus fuck,” he said. He took up the packsack and walked fifty feet back along the trail to sit against a boulder. It was too early for lunch but he took out the sandwich, chewing on the tasteless bread and washing it
down with water. A shower of rain started to fall and he glanced up, trying to guess how long it might last. He put his rain gear on and made his way back along the path to the snare. He took the grocery bag that had held his sandwich and scooped the ruined game into it. The smear of viscera dark through the white plastic. He worked the fabric of the rabbit’s ear over the nail’s hold and placed the head in the bag as well.