For the life of him now he couldn’t remember the dead sister’s name.
Queenie raised her cigarette to the gaudy red lips, dragged the smoke into her chest. She looked past him, down to the water. “The Priddles is on their way.”
He turned toward the dock where the ferry was already in and tied up. He saw the Priddles heading over from Church Side with their duffle bags on their shoulders and he thought to walk down to see them off. But it was too much to take on. He went up to his house instead and stripped out of his filthy clothes in the porch, left them in a heap on the floor. Fell asleep on the daybed in the kitchen.
Jesse was at the table when he woke, the laptop open in front of him.
“Shouldn’t you be into the school?” Sweetland asked.
“It’s dinnertime.”
Sweetland could see the boy had helped himself to two tins of peaches. “You put in a fire.”
“It was cold in here,” Jesse said. “You looked cold.”
“Put the kettle on for me, would you?”
Jesse crossed to the stove, added a junk of wood to the firebox, pushed the kettle full over the heat. “What happened to your clothes?” he asked.
“Forgot to wear a napkin at supper last night.”
“Ha,” Jesse said.
It was a recent thing, his ability to separate a person’s tone into categories, to pick out a joke for what it was and acknowledge it. Sweetland’s role as court jester paying off finally. Or the Reverend’s work with him. Or just the boy catching up with life.
“Your mother know you’re over here?”
“Poppy knows.”
“That don’t mean your mother is going to be happy about it.”
“Loveless’s calf was born dead last night.”
Sweetland sat up in his underwear and socks, raked his fingers through his hair before he thought better of it. Looked at his hands, crusted black and red. “Where’d you hear that, now.”
“Poppy told me.”
He walked to the sink and ran the water until it was scalding, scrubbed at his skin with a brush. Scoured at the blood under the nails. “Did your pop say how the cow was doing?”
“She’s lying down,” Jesse said. “Won’t get up out of it.”
Sweetland turned off the taps, shook the water from his hands and forearms, wiped them down with a cup towel. He’d have to burn the clothes he was wearing, he figured. “You’re not playing poker over there, I hope.”
“Angry Birds,” Jesse said.
“Well,” Sweetland said. “That’s all right, I spose.”
What was it about the youngster? It was his seriousness, maybe, that made him seem distant. He was doggedly loyal and affectionate in a standoffish way that a body could confuse for the opposite of affection and loyalty. He had a cat’s self-centred indifference to the world as others saw it, a cat’s inscrutable motivations. He took odd notions, running off now and again for no obvious reason, disappearing up on the mash or hiding out at the lighthouse or as far as the Priddles’ cabin in the valley. He never tried to explain himself after the fact or was incapable of it. He couldn’t be trusted altogether because you couldn’t guess with any certainty what he was thinking.
When Sweetland moved back into the cove from the keeper’s house, he spent most of his evenings at Pilgrim’s, eating his supper there and watching an hour or two of television with Jesse. America’s Funniest Home Videos. Wipeout. Two and a Half Men. Then Jesse would begin the first of the many elaborate stages required to get him to bed. Clara and Wince took turns saying their good-nights and bringing the boy a glass of water and adjusting the pillows to his satisfaction, and then he’d call for Sweetland. Lying in the dark with Jesse to answer endless questions about hockey and fishing and wrestling, about the saucy rooster Sweetland killed when it went after Ruthie, about the boatload of Sri Lankans he’d happened on near Burnt Head.
It was impossible to say what Jesse made of these stories, why he returned to them so obsessively, insisting they be told in the same manner each time. He seemed to be constantly checking the world at large against the one in his head, making sure they were one and the same. Though at night, in his bedroom, it seemed just another ploy to delay the inevitable. Jesse clinging to wakefulness like a drowning man, rousing himself out of near sleep to ask one more thing.
Tell me about the coat, he would say.
What coat? Sweetland asked.
The one you and Hollis wore.
I don’t know if I remembers much about it.
You had to go out and check the nets in the morning before school.
You want to tell the story?
No, Jesse said. You tell it.
All right, Sweetland said.
Up before light, the two of them. Putting a bit of fire in the stove, the house cold as stone. A cup of tea and fried capelin and they went along to the stagehead, climbed down into the punt and set the oars. They had to sell the skiff with the inboard after their father died and it was an hour’s rowing out to the nets, longer if the wind was southerly. Only the one decent coat between them, their father’s old jacket kept on a hook in the porch. Neither of them big enough to fill it out on their own, sitting side by side with one arm each in the sleeves, coming back on the oars. Uncle Clar telling them how they looked like a fat little two-headed man on his way to check his herring nets.
Why did you have to share a coat? Jesse asked.
It was hard times after Father died. Just me and Hollis to look after the fish. Hollis wouldn’t as old as you when all that was going on.
Jesse was quiet a moment and then he said, You was with Hollis when he drowned.
That’s enough of that now.
But Hollis says—
I heard enough of what your imaginary friend says about it all.
He’s not imaginary, Jesse said in the same flat tone.
Well I’m not talking to him either way. You want another story or not?
Clara usually had to call an end to the interrogation, her silhouette at the bedroom door. Last one, she’d say and then stand there to make sure Jesse didn’t sneak in another. But occasionally Sweetland outlasted the boy and he lay a few minutes longer, letting the spell of sleep settle in before he moved. Jesse’s face blank but animate, a living thing. The last of Sweetland’s blood beside him. The smell of woodsmoke in his hair. The untainted sweetness of a child’s breath.
Uncle Moses, Jesse whispered one evening. He had turned to face the wall, a sure sign he was about to go under, and Sweetland leaned in close to hear him. I have a secret to tell you, Jesse whispered. Sweetland raised his head, listening, and he waited there a good while before he realized the boy was sound asleep.
He doubted Jesse even remembered the announcement of a secret about to be shared, but some childish part of Sweetland’s mind was still expectant in his presence. As if a riddle at the heart of things was about to be revealed. He was like the world itself, Sweetland thought, a well you would never see the bottom of, that might swallow you whole if you weren’t careful.
He went to the fridge and leaned into the cool. “You want something else to eat,” he asked.
“Can we go see the cow?”
“I had enough of cows for one day.”
“You don’t have any cows.”
“I got to eat something,” he said. “And then I got some work to do in the shed.”
“I’d rather go see the cow.”
“Well go see the bloody cow then,” Sweetland said.
He was at the table saw ripping a length of two-by-six to replace the sill in the shed’s side door when Glad Vatcher came to see him. He shut down the machine, ran his hand along the cut. Waited for the younger man to say something.