Sweetland (2 page)

“I was let go when they automated the light ten years back.”

“You were a fisherman before that?”

“Right up until the moratorium in ’92.”

“So you’ve never lived anywhere else?”

“A couple of trips to Toronto for work,” he said, “when I was about your age.”

The government man made a motion toward his own face, afraid of pointing directly at Sweetland’s scars. “Is that where?”

“What else is it you got in there?”

He closed the folder and sat back. “That’s everything,” he said.

“Not much when you lays it out like that.”

“Not enough to tell me why you’re so set against this move.”

“Just contrary, I guess.”

“You’d rather stay here with the dead, is that it?”

“A body could do worse for company.”

The government man brushed his fingers lightly back and forth across the edge of the table, as if he were at a piano and not wanting to strike a note. “How long is it your people have lived out here, Mr. Sweetland?”

“Time before time,” Sweetland said and then smiled at himself. “People been fishing here two hundred years or more. I expect my crowd was the first ones on the island.”

“Because it’s eponymous, you mean?”

Sweetland stared blankly.

“It’s named after them. Your family and the island have the same name.”

“Yes,” Sweetland said. “That’s what I mean.”

They stared at one another then and Sweetland could see the youngster was casting about in his mind for some other tack to take. He put his chin in one hand and tapped his nose with the index finger. Then he leaned to one
side to put the folder back into his briefcase. “As you are aware,” he said, “the government is offering a package to the residents of Sweetland to move anywhere in the province they like. A minimum of one hundred thousand dollars per household, up to one hundred and fifty thousand, depending on the size of the family and other considerations. Plus adjustment assistance and help looking for work or retraining or returning to school.”

“Jesus,” Sweetland said, “I thought the government was broke.”

The younger man ignored him. “But we will not move a soul out of here unless we have a commitment from everyone to the package.”

Sweetland nodded. “Same old bullshit.”

“This is not the 1960s, Mr. Sweetland. This move isn’t being forced on the town. We will pay to resettle the residents, as we’ve been asked to do. But we will not be responsible for some lunatic alone in the middle of the Atlantic once everyone else is gone.”

“Me being the lunatic.”

“There won’t be any ferry service after the move. Which means no supplies coming in. There will be no phone service. No online banking, no poker. No electricity. By definition, I’d think anyone out here on their own would have to be certifiable.” The government man glanced at his watch. “You’ve been made aware of the September deadline.”

“I been made aware.”

“There are people hoping to make the move across as early as this fall, which means everyone would have to sign by the first.”

“I am aware,” Sweetland said again.

The government man reached into an inside pocket of his coat. “My email address is on there, my cell number, you can contact me anytime.”

Sweetland set the card on a shelf above the counter and followed his guest along the hall, to let him out the door he came in. Placing a hand to the back of a chair and then the wall as he went, the room tilting under his feet.

The light blared in through the open door and Sweetland came out as far as the doorstep. He shaded his eyes to gaze down toward the water.
Folks in their yards or on the paths or at the wharf, all busy not looking his way.

The government man was staring down to the harbour as well, and Sweetland couldn’t help taking the place in through the stranger’s eyes. A straggle of vinyl-sided bungalows, half of them sitting empty. Saddle-roofed sheds and propane tanks and ATVs and old lumber in untidy piles, like trash dumped on the slope by some natural disaster. The white church on the point, the Fisherman’s Hall with Rita Verge’s hand-lettered MUSEUM sign at the side entrance. A handful of geriatric boats moored off in the cove.

“That’s a beautiful view,” the government man said. “I can see why you don’t want to leave it.”

“You didn’t strike me,” Sweetland said, “as an ass-kisser.”

“I work for the government,” the youngster said and he shrugged good-naturedly. “It’s just part of the job.”

He didn’t like the fucker, it was true. Not one bit.

He levered the door into the frame and leaned back against the wall. Stared across at an oval black-and-white portrait of his grandfather hung by the door. A young man from another age—a high starched collar, a waistcoat, the chain of a pocket watch, an elaborate waxed moustache.

“Now Uncle Clar,” he said. “It’s just me and Loveless.”

The eyes of the man in the picture looking off to one side, as if to avoid the issue altogether.

Sweetland went out to his root cellar for the last of his seed potatoes, spent an hour setting spuds in the garden. He hosed the rake and spade clean when he was done and set them away in the shed. He washed his hands in the kitchen and through the tiny window over the sink he caught sight of Queenie Coffin next door, scattering a packet of seeds through her window onto the patch of ground below it. Which meant the summer—what passed for summer—was well and truly started.

Practically everyone else in the cove was gathered at the Fisherman’s Hall for the meeting with the government man and there was an eerie stillness about the place, as if the island was already abandoned. He expected Reet Verge would be sent across to badger him when the meeting was done and he packed a few things into his knapsack, drove his quad up out of the cove to avoid her. He climbed past the trail to the new cemetery and beyond it to the peak of the hills.

At the top of the climb he stopped beside the King’s Seat to take in the view of Chance Cove and the island north and south, even though Jesse wasn’t with him. Jesse had asked a thousand times if those stones had been assembled into the vague shape of a throne or if it was an accidental configuration, but no one alive knew the answer. Probably no one else had ever thought to wonder about it.

Sweetland went as far as the lighthouse, to put out a few rabbit snares that he and Jesse could check on in the morning. A surprise to welcome the youngster back, to scour the week’s worth of city grit from his mouth.

It was almost four o’clock by the time he made it back to Chance Cove. The government man away on the ferry and the town’s emissary come and gone from Sweetland’s house for now. He backed the quad into the shed and covered the machine with a tarp, went into the house through the back porch. Ran cold water from the tap while he reached for a glass.

Sweetland drew his hand back when he caught sight of the folded sheet of paper propped inside the cupboard. Stood still while the water ran, trying to think when he’d last opened that door. He used the same glass out of the drain rack for days on end, which meant it could have been planted there any time during the past week. He turned off the tap and took the sheet down, held it at arm’s length. YOU GET OUT, the message read, OR YOULL BE SOME SORRY.

He refolded the paper and opened the drawer below the forks and knives, set it in beside the other notes he’d found tucked around the house over the last six months. They were all the same, comically sinister,
offering vague threats against his person and his property, all written with words and letters cut from print headlines and glued to the paper like a ransom demand out of the movies. It was a ploy so amateurish that Sweetland would have thought Loveless was behind it, but for the fact the spelling was more or less correct. And Loveless was the only hold-out left besides himself.

Sweetland shut the drawer and took down a glass, drank the water in slow mouthfuls. He couldn’t bring himself to take the threats seriously and he’d never mentioned the notes to anyone. He wasn’t sure why he was holding onto them.
In case
, was how he thought of it. Though he couldn’t say in case of what exactly.

He was up early the next morning with the radio on. Made himself a sandwich and an extra for Jesse, packed them with two tins of peaches. He put on his boots in the porch, carried his coat and knapsack outside. Paused there a moment, listening, then slammed the door as hard as he could. Pilgrim’s dog started barking mad where she was leashed in the yard, the sound of it echoing up off the hill behind the cove.

“Shut up, Diesel!” Sweetland shouted, louder than he needed to. “Shut the hell up!”

He puttered around the ATV underneath the purple glow of the street light attached to the shed, strapping his .22 to the handlebars, tying the canvas pack onto the carryall at the back. Heard Pilgrim’s door open and close and the sound of the boy running. Glanced up to see him motor along the side of the house. He was within two feet of Sweetland before he came to an abrupt stop and he stood there at attention, staring up into the old man’s face.

Lank and pale, the boy was, like something soaked too long in water. The purple light making his face look sallow, cadaverous. “Jesse,” Sweetland said. He had never made peace with the youngster’s name. It sounded fey, feminine, like something off one of those soap operas
Sweetland’s mother used to watch. He’d tried to rechristen the boy with half a dozen nicknames—Bucko, Mister Man, Hunter—but Jesse would only answer to his proper name.

“You going up on the mash?” the boy asked.

“Got a few slips out,” Sweetland said. “Thought I might see if I had any luck. Clara know you’re up here?”

“Mom’s still asleep. I told Pop.”

“And what did your pop say?”

“He told me not to be a nuisance.”

Sweetland nodded. “Get your helmet out of the shed,” he said.

Sweetland drove out the back of his property and when they reached the King’s Seat at the top of the path Jesse slapped at his shoulder, shouting for him to stop. He jumped off the quad and ran across to the stones, pulling the helmet from his head. The sun just coming up full, the ocean deepening blue in the new light. Jesse skipped up onto the seat and stood with his arms spread wide. “I’m the King of the World!” he shouted, his voice rolling down the hill toward the cove, picking up speed as it went. “I’m the King of the World!”

Sweetland allowed he was the only person in Christendom who hadn’t seen that goddamn
Titanic
movie. Jesse knew the film so intimately he could quote every word of dialogue and sometimes did. He insisted on stopping whenever they passed the Seat and Sweetland waited on the quad while the boy had his moment.

“Come on, Your Highness,” he said finally, “the day idn’t getting any younger.”

Beyond the King’s Seat, the trail went east to Vatcher’s Meadow where Glad Vatcher summered his animals—half a dozen cows and the bull, twenty head of sheep fenced on forty acres of marsh grass and gorse. There was a gate on both sides so people could cross the meadow when the animals were moved into the barn for the winter, but the summer path circled the field. They drove inland about half a mile, following the barbed wire fence, until they picked up the trail on the opposite side,
ravelling east over the headlands to Burnt Head. The plateau was dotted with massive granite boulders that Jesse claimed were called erratics, dropped there by retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age.

Is that what they’re teaching you in school these days, he’d asked.

Saw it on television, Jesse said.

It was a wonder to Sweetland what stuck in the youngster’s head. He still insisted on taking off every stitch of clothes just to take a piss and couldn’t be counted on to flush the toilet, but he could lecture a body on a hundred different topics—aircraft, the digestive system, moon landings, Mount Everest, ping-pong, whales. Sweetland dreaded getting the boy started on whales. Their Latin names, their numbers and size, their diets, their migration routes, the sound and meaning of their songs. It was as if there was a tape in the youngster’s head just waiting for someone to press Play.

Beyond the mash, the trail veered out toward the ocean. Ancient rock cairns placed every twenty feet along the path, to keep walkers from going over the cliff edge in the dark or in stormy weather. Three hundred feet to the surf below. The top of the old light tower was just visible beyond the rise, out on Burnt Head.

Sweetland pulled in behind the abandoned lightkeeper’s house which had been sitting unoccupied the ten years since the light was automated. Jesse ran up the rotting steps, holding his hands to the windows and reporting the latest damage. Storm winds had stripped the ocean-side shingles and the relentless wet had rotted through the ceilings, the floors a mess of ceiling plaster and soaked insulation. Mouse shit on every surface. Sweetland hated even to look at the place. “Don’t you go inside there,” he called.

He took his .22 and backpack off the quad and they headed inland again, the new light flashing on their right shoulder as they walked clear of the ruined building. Just a beacon on a metal tripod drilled into the farthest point of rock these days. A hundred feet north of the beacon there was a helicopter pad built overtop of the Fever Rocks, used
by the Coast Guard when they brought supplies to the keeper, or came out for light maintenance. A helipad, Jesse told him it was called.

You’re making that up, Sweetland had said.

Am not.

There’s no such word as
hellish pad
.

Helipad, Jesse had repeated. Nothing insulted the youngster more than inaccuracy or invention. With the one notable exception, he was literal to a fault. He spelled
helipad
for Sweetland, to underline the word’s veracity. He’d always been a champion speller. Near-photographic memory, according to the Reverend. A generation ago, the Reverend said, they’d have called the boy an idiot savant.

I’d say that’s about half right, Sweetland said.

Sweetland still called it the hellish pad, over the boy’s objections. He never missed a chance to lampoon Jesse’s childish seriousness. He had hoped to goad the youngster off the beaten track of his thoughts, to make him look at the world from a slightly crooked angle, though it made no appreciable difference and he kept at it now mostly out of habit. For his part, Jesse seemed to accept Sweetland’s mockery as a fact of life, granting him special dispensation to behave like a fool, a kind of court jester in the youngster’s kingdom of the exact.