“It’s not like we don’t have the room to spare,” Pilgrim said.
The sparse congregation murdered a handful of Queenie’s favourite hymns without accompaniment, the Reverend playing the first note on a soggy-sounding electric organ. They were all out of the habit and subdued by the occasion. Jesse’s was the only clear voice in the church. He had perfect pitch, according to the Reverend, and he showed an unlikely capacity for recalling lyrics. He sometimes forced Sweetland to sit through twenty or thirty impeccably rendered verses of the morose ballads he’d learned from Pilgrim. But he had no patience for the musical limitations of others.
Don’t sing, he’d say to Pilgrim, waving his hands and jumping foot to foot like someone standing on hot coals. Don’t sing, just say the words.
The wounded sound of the congregation was too much for Jesse and halfway through the second hymn he surrendered, sitting and covering his ears. He rocked back and forth and moaned softly while Clara tried to soothe him, running a hand across his shoulders.
Duke turned to Sweetland from the pew ahead. “I’m with Jesse,” he whispered.
The coffin was loaded back onto the trailer for the trip to the new cemetery, a fenced square of hillside that had been ordained to its current purpose only fifty years ago. The old cemetery was tucked away in a droke of trees above the incinerator, up a trail so steep coffins were tied on a sledge and dragged to their final resting place with a rope.
Sweetland lined up behind the family to throw his handful of dirt onto the polished lid and then took up a shovel to help fill the grave, alongside Glad Vatcher and young Hayward Coffin. He was afraid Jesse would stay to watch the morbid proceeding but Clara led him away with the mourners, the boy glancing over his shoulder as he went. The other Coffin boys had gone down to Queenie’s house as well and Glad tried to send Hayward after them. “You don’t have to be at this now,” Glad said, but Hayward shook his head. He was nearly the same age as Glad and the two had fished together a few seasons as younger men. The spade rang against the rocks in the soil with every shovelful as young Hayward stooped and threw the clay down onto his mother, his mouth working fiercely. And they finished the job together without speaking another word.
They made their way down to the reception when they were done, warm enough from the work to carry their jackets. Halfway along Glad and young Hayward began talking back and forth about the weather in Oregon and work, about Loveless losing his calf and the job they had getting the cow on her feet.
“Never gave her a snowball’s chance,” Glad said. “And she seems right as rain there now.”
“Just goes to show, I guess,” young Hayward told him.
“You planning to stay for a visit at all?”
“High season,” young Hayward said. “Can’t afford to miss the work.” He looked around and shook his head. It was his first trip home since he left, long before the cod fishery was shut down. “To be honest,” he said, “my skin’s already starting to crawl being stuck out here. No offence,” he added quickly.
At Queenie’s house, old Hayward sat against the wall with a grandson on his knee. The Reverend and Jesse staring at the tiny screen of an iPod, sharing a set of headphones to watch that goddamn Titanic movie. Pilgrim and Duke and a few others nursed drinks or cups of tea in their chairs while the rest of the crowd milled aimlessly around the cramped rooms that had been Queenie’s only weather for most of her adult life. A handful of people lined up to shake old Hayward’s hand and offer their final condolences when they saw Sweetland come in, making a public point of their departures that Sweetland ignored.
Sandra was sitting beside Clara on the landing to the stairs, both women holding rum and Cokes. They had gone off to university in St. John’s together but Sandra came home as soon as she graduated, teaching at the little school before finally following the rest of her crowd up to the mainland five years ago. She came unsteadily across the room when she saw Sweetland.
“How are you holding up?” he asked, which set her to crying, and he looked away as she collected herself.
She said, “I was going through her things yesterday. Found all the books I’ve been sending her in a box under the bed. I don’t think she touched them.”
“No,” he said, “she read a few.”
“She told you that?”
“She always made a point of saying if it was a book from you she was reading,” he said and left it at that.
“I hated the thought of her wasting her time on that Harlequin junk.”
“You should know better than most,” he said, “she wouldn’t going to change to satisfy anyone.”
“I know, I know,” she said, furious suddenly. “I wasted half my life trying to get her off the smokes. And the other half trying to get her out the door of this fucking house.” She raised her glass to the faces looking her way. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry.” She swallowed half her drink in a single mouthful. “I was born upstairs here,” she said, her voice lowered to imitate her mother’s tobacco-mangled whisper. “And I’ll be leaving this house in a box. If I had to listen to her say that one more time I would have choked her.”
She was on the verge of tears again and Sweetland looked down at his shoes. He said, “I think she was reading one of the books you sent, the last going off.”
“Really? Which one?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “One of the Newfoundland books you sent down.”
She nodded emphatically and blew a breath through her lips. “Mom always talked about you,” she said. “When she called. She always had a bit of news about you.”
“Well,” he said. “She had to scrounge for news around here, I imagine.”
Sandra kept staring, sizing him up. Drunk enough to be reckless. “You know,” she said, “I always thought Mom was sweet on you.”
Sweetland laughed and turned halfways away from her.
“She told me once,” Sandra said and she waved her hand. “I don’t know when this was, ages ago. Before I went off to university. She said she always had it in her head you and her would get married.”
“She was having you on,” he said. Sweetland glanced across at old Hayward, to be sure their conversation was a private one in the room’s racket.
“No. No, she wasn’t. She was talking about what it was like growing up around here. Before the lights and all of that. Said you two were thick as thieves.”
“We was just youngsters,” he said.
She could see she’d embarrassed him. “You need a drink,” she said, heading for the kitchen counter to refill her own. She handed him a full glass as he came up to her. She reached into her purse which was hanging over the back of a kitchen chair. “I’m going for a smoke,” she said.
“When did you start smoking?”
“Mom’s last pack,” she said. “Thought I’d finish it off for her. Come out with me.”
They put on their coats and walked around the side of the house. Sandra turned her back to the wind to light her cigarette.
“How many left in that pack?”
“Half a dozen or so.” She blew a plume of smoke that whipped away in the breeze. She paused then, her head cocked as if to listen, and he did the same instinctively. “Everyone says you’re set on staying here.”
“Might be I am.”
“Must be hard.”
“What’s that?”
“Sitting in the king’s seat on this whole business,” she said. “Everyone hung up on your yea or nay. Can’t imagine a lonelier spot.”
He shrugged. “Verily,” he said, aping the minister reading from Psalms at the funeral. Trying to make a joke of it.