You left Wince alone up there with those two fellows.
They was sound asleep, the both of them.
Well one of them was puking his guts out when I left.
She skipped ahead then, half running on the path. Why did you leave him? she asked.
He told me to come get you.
But you was right there in the house.
They were having a racket to avoid talking about other things, he knew. And that suited Sweetland well enough.
He followed Ruthie inside but stayed in the kitchen as she went up the stairs. Listened to the muffle of voices through the ceiling, the coughing and dry heaves of the sick man. Pilgrim called from the landing, asking him to put the kettle over the heat for hot water, to hand up rags from under the sink, the mop and bucket from the back porch. Sweetland went about collecting the materials he’d been asked for, but couldn’t even find it in himself to answer.
Sweetland was best man and father-giver at his sister’s wedding, handing Ruthie away when the minister asked, and he passed Pilgrim the ring for Ruthie’s finger. Pilgrim was besotted with the girl and had been for years, everyone could see that. He spent part of every day in their company, was a fixture at the Sweetland table. Talk-sang a few ballads to try and impress Ruthie as the women cleared up the dishes. And would never have laid a finger on her but for Sweetland insisting she teach him to dance.
His mother is in the ground for long ago, he said when she objected, how else is the poor frigger going to learn?
Sweetland appointed himself chaperone while Ruthie hummed a tune and wrestled Pilgrim around the tiny kitchen space. Pilgrim topped up on shine to overcome his mortal shyness before his lessons, though it did little to help his dancing.
You’re about as graceful as a cow in a dory, she told him.
Got no head for it, he said.
It’s only a bit of math, she insisted, and she counted the steps aloud, one two three, one two three.
Ruthie thought of him as a kind of hapless uncle, made fun of his awful voice, snuck up behind him to cover his sightless eyes with her hands and shout Guess who? Blind to how the older man felt before he proposed to her. She refused him twice, and it was only her mother’s intervention that swung things in Pilgrim’s favour.
Ruthie’s been leading that poor soul on, she said to Sweetland.
He started in his chair, glanced across at her. Sure, she was only showing him how to dance.
His mother was knitting in a rocker by the stove and her hands paused at their work. She looked directly at her son. You know how Pilgrim feels about Ruthie, she said. Dancing is leading enough for a man in his condition.
Sweetland leaned forward on his knees, his eyes on the floor. Pilgrim have got his heart set, that’s plain.
You needs to have a word, Moses.
It made sense to him that Ruthie marry the man, to formalize the relationship already cemented between Pilgrim and themselves. The dancing lessons were just a way of setting them in each other’s path. He expected the rest to follow as a matter of course, if there was more to come of it. He’d never considered he might be called on to shift things further along that road himself.
She dotes on you, his mother said. She’ll mind what you tells her.
I don’t know, he said. That’s more your place than mine.
His mother dropped her knitting in her lap, threw her head to one side in frustration. It was you started this whole business, she insisted.
He stared at the tiny woman in her horn-rimmed glasses, surprised every time by the flash of ice in her. All right then, he said.
Ruthie thought the sun shone out of Sweetland’s arse in those days. She had always looked to his opinion, over even her mother’s. They had never spoken a cross word, she had never refused him a request. Pilgrim was practically family already, he told her, and he had to watch out for them both anyway. It was only a bit of math, he said.
The sick man upstairs was still urging helplessly. There seemed no end of foulness to spew from his guts. Sweetland walked up the stairs with the materials Pilgrim had asked for, placed them in his arms at the landing. He could hear Ruthie’s voice speaking low in the room where the refugees were lying. Everything all right? he asked.
Ruthie’s here, Pilgrim said. She’ll look out to him.
I’ll go on, then, he said. Sweetland couldn’t look at him, even though the man was blind.
Wince, Ruth called, I needs those rags.
We’re all right here, Pilgrim said to Sweetland and he headed steadily along the hallway, turning sharply into the sickroom like a man with eyes to see.
5
ON THE FIRST OF JULY, Hayward Coffin came downstairs to find Queenie dead in her chair by the window, a half-smoked cigarette guttered in her hand. Her book face down on her lap.
The funeral was delayed a day to give Queenie’s children time to make the trip back from the mainland. Most were travelling from the oil sands in Alberta, her oldest boy coming from Oregon where he ran a deck and fencing company. All of them forced to wait on the ferry schedule after their flights. The coffin had to be shipped over on the ferry as well, from a funeral home in Fortune, and meantime they waked Queenie on a bare table in the parlour. Clara had washed and laid Queenie out in a purple dress she’d found in her wardrobe, but couldn’t dig up a pair of shoes to put on her feet.
“She haven’t wore shoes since 1977,” Hayward told her. “Put on her slippers,” he said, “she might as well be comfortable.”
The coffin was heavy as a dory and too wide to be carried through the door where Queenie used to stand smoking and talking to passersby. They had to take out the window above her chair to bring it into the house, and again to lift the dead woman out a day later, half a dozen men reaching their hands to catch her as she crossed into the open air for the first time in forty-odd years. Being careful not to trample the straggle of flowers that had come up from the seed she’d tossed outside.
The Reverend opened up the old church and aired it out the day before the funeral. Clara and Reet Verge and Queenie’s daughter swept out the vestibule and polished the dark wooden pews and set out vases of fresh-cut wildflowers. The weather hadn’t improved much through the month of June and was still wet and cold into the first week of July. Everyone wearing coats over their mourning clothes. They set Queenie on a trailer behind an ATV and the funeral train followed her down to the church. Sweetland bringing up the rear with Duke and Pilgrim and Loveless.
“Queenie Coffin,” Loveless said, “in her coffin.”
“She told me she wouldn’t going to be around the fall,” Sweetland said.
“She been saying that this twenty year,” Duke said. “She was bound to be right about it sooner or later.”
“A sin to take her out of it,” Pilgrim whispered. He had his face lifted high, uncertain about his footing on the dirt path, his left hand inside Sweetland’s elbow. “Should have buried the poor woman under the kitchen floor.”
“She’s dead,” Duke said. “It don’t matter a goddamn to her where she goes now.”
At the church Sweetland guided Pilgrim into the pew beside Clara and Jesse, but the boy swung out a hand to hold the blind man off.
“Jesse,” Clara whispered, trying to bring his arm down, but he wouldn’t relent.
“What’s wrong now?” Sweetland asked him.
“That’s Hollis’ spot,” he said, his eyes toward the front of the church.
“I can make room,” Pilgrim said, and he sat two feet from Jesse to leave the space free.
“Well Christ,” Sweetland sighed. He sat beside Pilgrim and took out a mouldy hymn book, flipping aimlessly through the pages. “I don’t know which one of you is worse.”