After Glad shut the door behind him, Pilgrim pointed in the general direction of Duke’s seat. “It’s too bad you can’t learn to cut hair with that fucken mouth of yours.”
“I was only asking,” Duke said.
Sweetland went off to the pantry after more beer.
“I never thought Glad Vatcher would take the package,” Pilgrim said.
“Glad Vatcher can kiss my arse,” Sweetland called from the next room.
“It was his missus talked him into it,” Duke said. “Wanted to be handier to her crowd in St. Alban’s.”
“His missus can kiss my arse too,” he shouted.
He was half-cut by the time he’d finished his fifth beer and still hours of light left to the day. Everyone gone off to their suppers and he sat in the quiet, rolling the empty glass back and forth between the palms of his hands. Feeling sorry for himself, he supposed.
He sat at the laptop, trolled around the handful of sites he knew. Typed in a Google search on cow lifting. Five and a half million results. The Upsi-Daisy Cow Lifter. Harnesses, slings, cranes, buckets, hoists. An infinite library of information and none of it any practical use to them. A window they could peer through to watch the modern world unfold in its myriad variations, while only the smallest, strangest fragments washed ashore on the island.
He went through to the porch, took his coat and hat and walked down to Loveless’s, let himself into the barn. Loveless at the far end, sitting on one of the concrete blocks they’d used as a fulcrum, rubbing at a foreleg of the doomed cow with a towel. Sweetland crossed over to them, put a hand to the cow’s neck, rubbed between her ears awhile. Her breath intermittent and shallow.
“She don’t want to be up,” Loveless said. He was chewing angrily at the unlit pipe as he sat there.
“Don’t look like she do.”
“Sara wouldn’t be happy to see it.”
Sweetland straightened, put his hands in his pockets. Turned to see the little dog back in its place along the wall. “Hello, Smut,” he said.
Loveless twisted around on his concrete seat. “I had that one barred in the porch.”
“Well, that’s a regular Houdini you got there.” Sweetland bent at the waist and held a hand toward the dog, kissing the air to encourage it over, but it only stared.
“He won’t come near, you don’t have a bit of something to give him,” Loveless said.
“What do you use?”
“Steak mostly.”
“Is that why he’s so interested in your cow, I wonder?”
Loveless raised himself awkwardly off his seat and Sweetland had to reach a hand to keep him upright. “I don’t know how Sara managed all of this,” he said.
“She was a tough woman.”
“I can’t do nothing here without her.”
“Go lie down for a bit, I’ll take a spell.”
Loveless started away, but turned back to Sweetland before he reached the far end of the barn. He took the pipe from his mouth and stared at it. He said, “I’m going to take the package, Mose.”
Sweetland looked him up and down. “You’re tired,” he said. “Go lie down a while.”
“I got my mind made up,” Loveless said. “I got nothing here without Sara.”
“Go on,” Sweetland repeated quietly, and he watched the shabby figure push out the barn door. Then he dragged the concrete block to the cow’s hind leg and went at it with the towel, trying to massage blood back into the flesh. After fifteen minutes he moved to the opposite leg. He leaned his head against the cow’s flank a moment, a quiver still discernible in the muscle. “Well now, Sara,” he said aloud, missing the woman suddenly.
Sara Loveless. As squat and solid as her cow, they used to say. And almost as simple, ha ha. It was a local sport, making fun of Sara. She had no letters and spoke in truncated phrases reduced to bare fundamentals. Every person and creature and thing was a she. She need oil change. She got bad head. She raining now. She lazy as a cut cat. Sara was fond of beer and brandy and went to bed half-drunk most nights. Cursed like a sailor. But laziness was the only form of stupidity Sweetland couldn’t abide and whatever else might be said about Sara, she was not a lazy woman. Kept the animals and the garden, cut and cured her winter’s hay up on the mash. Tramping around in her rubber boots and an old gansey sweater that swayed almost to her knees. She wrecked a shoulder clearing boulders from her bit of pasture, years ago. Sweetland had seen her punch at it savagely with the opposite fist when it acted up, which was the only bit of doctoring she allowed.
She had never married and seemed completely unfit for it. But she was built for the island, unlike her brother, who sailed in the wake of Sara’s industry his entire adult life. How she’d suffered living in that house with Loveless all these years, Sweetland didn’t know.
He finished a round of the cow’s legs and then stood at her head, rubbing between her ears again, before he started for the door. He thought of the dog, unsure if it was still sitting there against the wall and it was too dark inside now to say. “You coming, Smut?” he said to the place he’d last seen the pup, but there was no sound or motion there and he carried on outside.
He opened Loveless’s door on his way along. “Your shift,” he shouted into the house and he walked down through the cove, his head buzzing with the first jangly notes of a hangover. He went out as far as the incinerator, stood looking over the open ocean, letting the wind scour away at him.
The ground fell steeply toward the water on the far side of the incinerator and the slope was thick with junk that couldn’t be burned, strollers and playpens, paint cans, barrels, a freezer, a bathtub, old hockey skates, a Star Choice satellite dish, four or five computer monitors that even Sweetland recognized as archaic. It was the world’s job, it seemed, to render every made thing obsolete.
He turned to see the cove glimmer in the last light, houses and windows glowing faintly orange and red, the colours fading and winking out as he watched. There was no stopping it, he knew. Days when the weather was roaring outside his mother would say, Stall as long as you like, sooner or later a body’s got to make a run for the outhouse. The whole place was going under, and almost everyone it mattered to was already in the ground.
Definitely. He was definitely feeling sorry for himself.
He passed his stagehead on the way in the arm and barely gave it a glance in the growing dusk, walking on a few steps before the strange detail struck him. He turned back to look at the door, picked out the shadowy U of the horseshoe he’d put there for luck thirty years ago. And something moving below it, a smudge in the gloom, a little bag, he thought, hanging from a strap.
He had to work up the nerve to step toward it. Stopped when he was near enough to make out the rabbit’s severed head. The creature’s eyes wide and staring, a four-inch nail driven through the silk of one ear to hold it in place. The head swaying soundlessly in the wind.
~ ~ ~
HE STOOD OUTSIDE after the Reverend disappeared around the back of the church, deciding whether or not to go in after Ruthie. His head floundering, trying to piece together what he’d seen in some way other than how it seemed. There were a dozen scenarios that were completely innocuous and only one that he knew in his gut to be true. He started back up toward Pilgrim’s house, thinking he’d stop at Ned Priddle’s place to ask Effie to look in on the sick man. He came around the front of the church just as his sister scuttled out the main doors and they startled away from one another.
Jesus, Moses, she said. Her arms wrapped a cardigan tight about herself. You scared the life out of me, she said.