Loveless came into the barn with a storm lamp in his hand. He had a coat on over his bare torso, a pair of striped pyjama bottoms tucked into his boots.
“The fuck have you got done here now,” Sweetland said.
Loveless peered in at the scene a moment and turned around in a panicky circle. “That goddamned animal, Sara,” he said to the ceiling, as if the dead woman was watching them from the rafters. “She haven’t been nothing but trouble to me.”
“It’s not the bloody cow’s fault,” Sweetland said. “What were you doing asleep in bed?”
“I was out with her till almost midnight,” he said. “I didn’t think she was going to go tonight.”
Sweetland gave the man a look. “Well everything’s locked up in there now. You should go get Glad.”
“I don’t want nothing to do with Glad Vatcher.”
“Don’t be a goddamned idiot.”
“You got to do something, Moses.”
“Well Christ,” Sweetland whispered.
“I can’t lose Sara’s cow.”
“Shut up a minute,” he said. Sweetland looked into the black of the vaulted roof, considering. He picked up the flashlight and headed for the door.
“Moses?”
“Don’t you touch that animal before I gets back,” he said.
He went up to his shed, rifled through a tool chest below the workbench. Collected a pair of canvas gloves, wire cutters, electrical tape. Hung near the door there was a length of thin cable once used to secure lobster traps on the stage and Sweetland slipped it across his shoulder on the way outside.
Loveless stared at the cable when Sweetland came back into the barn. “Jesus, Mose,” he said.
“You want to lose Sara’s cow?”
He took a moment to consider the possibility, shook his head.
“Bring that light in,” Sweetland said. He taped one end of the cable, worked it inside the cow, pushing for the calf’s shoulder joint. He forced his second hand in below the first and reached for the taped end blindly, his face against a quivering flank, grunting with the effort. The cow had gone eerily silent and was slowly shaking her head back and forth. “Come on now,” Sweetland said, “come on.” When he’d hooked the cable around the foreleg he sat back, both hands sliding free at once, drawing the taped end out. He shook the mess from his hands, shucked his forearms and fingers clean with straw, and put on the gloves. He cut the wire to leave himself with an even length top and bottom. “You hold her head,” he said to Loveless. “Don’t let her come back to me.” He wrapped the cable around his palms and once Loveless had a grip on the animal’s neck he started in pulling left under right, a steady jigging rhythm, the wire singing with the strain.
After fifteen minutes he stopped to shake the blood back into his hands. He took off one glove and reached inside to check on the cable’s progress. He looked up at Loveless who hadn’t spoken a word since he started. “You want to take a spell at this?” he asked, but Loveless shook his head.
It was half an hour longer before the cable gnawed all the way through the joint. Sweetland wrapped an arm around the calf’s neck again and put his weight into it, shouldering toward the dirt floor as it inched loose and then came free in a sluice of blood and afterbirth. The cow stumbled sideways, leaning her full weight against the barn wall, and Sweetland hauled the corpse out from under her. The amputated foreleg hadn’t come free with the body and Sweetland reached back inside to find it. Laid it beside the calf near about where it would have been if it was still attached. Knelt there with his hands on his thighs to catch his breath.
“Will she be all right, you think?” Loveless asked.
Sweetland glanced up at the cow. She was shaking along her length, her head bowed almost to the dirt floor. “How does she look to you?”
The dog crept out of the darkness and sniffed at the calf, at the dead eye staring into the rafters. It took one tentative lick at the snout and backed away. Sat there and looked up at Sweetland. A little blaze of white on its black chest. A tuxedo dog, Loveless said it was called. The man probably paid extra for that, Sweetland thought.
“You got to get this mess cleaned up,” Sweetland said as he got to his feet. His clothes were soaked through with the filth, the material dank and cold against his skin. “And if that cow needs anything else, you go get Glad Vatcher, you hear me?”
Loveless was staring down at the slick corpse. “What do I do with this?”
Sweetland started for the door. “Dig a hole somewhere and bury it,” he said.
It was light when he left the barn and Queenie Coffin was standing just inside her doorway as he walked by, cradling her elbow, her cigarette held high. She shook her head at the sight of him. She said, “You looks like the tail end of a good time, Moses Sweetland.”
“Loveless lost his calf,” he said. “As like he’ll lose the cow along with it.”
Queenie took a slow drag. “I heard her bawling,” she said.
“I don’t know why he bothered bringing her over to Vatcher’s bull this year. He knows as much about animals as I knows about Saudi fucken Arabia.”
“He was just missing Sara.”
“That’s a hell of a way to show it, killing her cow.”
“Be a mercy if she goes, probably. And one less creature to have to take off the island.”
Sweetland stared at her, standing one step above him in her nightdress and housecoat, the curlers still in her hair. The bright red lipstick making her face look strangely lifeless in the early light, as though it was a mask she was wearing over her real face.
When Queenie was just shy of twelve, her older sister came down with typhoid fever. Glad Vatcher’s father ferried out a doctor from Burgeo who quarantined the entire family inside the house. They were kept fed by their neighbours, and Sweetland’s mother would occasionally send him over with a pot of soup or a meal of salt beef and cabbage that he left on the front bridge. It was the only time he’d ever knocked on a door in the cove, to let them know their dinner was there. He’d back away from the house then, twenty or thirty feet, watching to see Queenie or one of her younger sisters lean out to take it in.
It was Uncle Clar who framed out the girl’s coffin in his shop after she died. Sweetland was with him as Queenie’s father shouted the child’s height and her breadth at the shoulder through a window, Uncle Clar jotting the measurements on a scrap of wood. Queenie was standing against the far wall behind her father, though he couldn’t see her face for shadow and she wouldn’t lift her head to look his way.
Poor little lamb, Clar repeated a hundred times as he sawed and planed the boards, as he nailed and sanded and varnished. Sweetland helped the old man carry the finished coffin down and they left it on the front bridge, as he did the family’s meals. Queenie’s father opening the door to drag it inside. The funeral was held later that morning, the coffin sitting on the bridge again with the dead girl inside. Every soul in Chance Cove standing below it to sing a few hymns and bow their heads as the minister said his prayers. The family watching it all from the parlour windows, the sisters bawling behind the glass. Waving goodbye as the coffin was hefted and carried up to the old graveyard.
Sweetland spent the entire service watching Queenie. She had hidden herself away at one corner of the window, almost out of sight altogether, and she never once looked up at the funeral congregation, never caught his eye, and he was relieved in some obscure way not to have to bear it.