Where’s the missus? Sweetland asked.
Gone down to sit with the dead one at the church.
She left you alone with those two upstairs?
They’re sound up there now, Pilgrim said. They won’t stir this night, I imagine.
Well that one down to the church idn’t about to stir, I guarantee.
You knows what she’s like, Moses. You’ll have a drink, he said. I got a fresh batch of shine ready.
Pilgrim was no use in a boat and had never worked a steady job, but he was a dab hand at brewing. Sold bottles of his moonshine door to door through the cove and to the deckhands on the ferry. He tended bar at the Fisherman’s Hall during bingo games and dances, the younger men getting a laugh passing off ones and twos as tens or twenties.
He was an “exhaustion product” as the women used to call it, his mother with a grown family and thinking she was through the change of life when she found herself unexpectedly pregnant. Pilgrim’s two eyes sightless from birth. She kept him on a tether until he was old enough to untie the knots himself and he became a ward of the community then, wandering from house to house. Every sighted person taking it upon themselves to steer him clear of the flakes, the wharves, the water. His blindness made even the smallest accomplishment seem a kind of magic trick — buttering a slice of bread, reciting Bible verses from memory, cutting cod tongues. The women clapped their hands and fed him raisins and sweet tea and kissed the crown of his head after he’d performed his most recent beguiling trick. There was nowhere in the cove he wasn’t welcomed like a son. Pilgrim treated Sweetland’s house as his own, staying for meals, spending half his nights sleeping head to foot between Sweetland and Hollis.
Music was the only vocation anyone had ever heard of for a blind child, and the church took up a collection of pennies and nickels to buy Pilgrim a fiddle. The toy violin made of pressboard and lacquer, strung with plastic strings. The church’s minister offered a handful of ineffectual lessons and Pilgrim spent hours at a time in a chair by the kitchen window, sawing out approximations of “Turkey in the Straw,” “The Lark in the Clear Air,” a few local jigs. He had so little aptitude for the music, he didn’t know how bad he was. Kept at it until his mother broke down in tears of frustration one evening and his father threw the contraption into the stove.
It wasn’t the end of his musical career. Pilgrim had a prodigious memory for the old labyrinthine ballads about murder and shipwreck and star-crossed love. He had no voice to speak of, but he was still called on at weddings and wakes and Christmas concerts to make his tuneless, inexorable way through one disaster or other.
Ruthie worked as custodian at the school and Pilgrim added a disability pension to the pot, along with whatever he made peddling his brew. And they muddled along, like everyone else on the island.
He and Sweetland sat at the table with glasses of shine and their smokes and the rumours already circulating about the men asleep in the town’s beds. Mongolian, some said. Trinidadian. Tibetan. Sri Lankan, according to the Reverend. Sweetland was shocked to learn the language they were speaking was English. He hadn’t understood a word that came out of their mouths.
Where did they think they were going, I wonder.
Somewhere in the States is where they were told, Pilgrim said.
The Promised Land.
The very same.
They sat in silence a few moments then, until they were startled by a commotion above them, a voice through the ceiling.
Sounds like they might be stirring, Sweetland said.
They could hear someone throwing up and Pilgrim rose from his seat, heading for the stairs. You might want to go get Ruthie, he said.
Sweetland went out the door and down the path at a clip. It was only the thought of the strangers asleep in the houses around him, and the dead boy laid out in the church, that kept him from screaming Ruth’s name as he pelted along.
The front door of the church was open and he checked himself as he came up to it. There were candles lit at the front near the body, the pale light just enough to add a little gloom to the dark inside. He whispered Ruth’s name as he walked up the aisle but there was no sign of her. He stopped well short of the dead boy under his sheet near the altar. He guessed she was in the minister’s room at the back but he couldn’t bring himself to walk past the corpse to reach the door, or to call loud enough to be heard. “Ruthie,” he said, hissing the word.
He backed up the aisle until he was outside. Turned and started toward the side entrance they had used to carry the body inside earlier in the day. The door swung open as he approached it and the Reverend came through. Sweetland was about to call out to him, but something in the man’s demeanour wouldn’t allow it. A hunch to his gait, his eyes on his feet. A rushed quiet about the man. The Reverend turned away from the path at the foot of the stairs and skulked through the long grass at the back of the church.
Sweetland looked up at the door. Ruthie still inside there, he knew.
4
SWEETLAND WOKE TO THE SOUND of Loveless’s cow bawling, a hollow moaning complaint carrying through the mauzy dark. He lifted himself up on an elbow to look out the window, down past Queenie’s house, but there was no sign of lights at Loveless’s place. He lay back and did his best to ignore it, but the lowing went on endlessly, a sound so full of helpless misery it made his stomach knot.
Fucken Loveless.
He pushed up out of bed, dressed awkwardly in the black. Dug around for a flashlight in the porch, walked down through the cove. Sweetland went along the path beside Loveless’s house to the barn where the miserable creature was calling, unhooked the door and stepped in. The building rank with the smell of shit and rotting hay. He played the light along the barn’s length to the spot where the cow stood with her head pushed into the corner. Her back legs wide and the haunches quivering as though she were plugged into an electrical outlet. The calf was hanging halfway to the ground, its nose swaying six inches off the ground. One foreleg still caught up inside the mother. The pink tongue hanging lifeless out of the mouth.
Sweetland walked across the dirt floor, placed a hand to the cow’s haunch. The animal’s head swung toward him and Sweetland glanced up at the motion, caught sight of a shadow darting further along the wall. He flicked the light across it, picked out the little lapdog skulking through the straw. “Hello, Smut,” he said and the dog sat down five feet from the cow. Ears cocked high.
Sweetland reached down to cup the calf’s muzzle, the nose wet and cold. He straightened stiffly and wiped the hand on the ass of his pants. “I’ll be back the once,” he said, to the cow or to the dog or the fetid room itself.
He turned on the porch light in the house and called up the hall. “Loveless!” he shouted. “You got a dead calf out there.” He waited a minute, heard the sound of bedsprings shifting. “You’re going to lose that cow if you don’t get your arse down here,” he said.
He went back along the path to the barn. Cast the light around a moment, the dog in the same spot though it was lying down and watching, attentive. Sweetland took off his coat and rolled it into a ball on the ground, propping the flashlight there so it shone on the cow’s hind end. He rolled the sleeves of his shirt above his elbows and knelt behind her. “Now, missus,” he said.
The dead calf was slick with birthing fluid, gelatinous and cold in the chill. No telling how long it had been hanging like that. The cow was fair gone herself. Sweetland pushed a hand into her, reaching to get his fingers around the foreleg caught up back there. It was tucked at an angle so unnatural he couldn’t find a decent grip. He wrapped an arm around the calf’s neck and leaned his weight against it, hauling at the leg as best he could. The cow lifted her head to bawl and the dog barked along. Nothing budged.