“Clara isn’t very happy with you,” Sandra said.
“Clara was never too happy with me.”
“You know that’s not true. She thought the sun shone out of your arse when she was a girl.”
“Well,” he said. “She grew out of that notion.”
“I don’t know. You’re half the reason she came home.”
He laughed. “Not fucken likely,” he said.
“She wanted you to be around for Jesse. Same as you were for her growing up.”
“She never told you that.”
“She didn’t need to tell me,” Sandra insisted. “Why do you think she carried him out to the lighthouse every Sunday? So she wouldn’t have to go to church?”
“Never give it much thought, I guess.”
Sandra looked drunkenly at the cigarette to see how much more there was to get through. “It’s a sin you never had youngsters of your own,” she said. “You know what Mom used to say about you? She’d say, That’s a good man going to waste, that is.”
He was only half listening, still trying on the unlikely notion of why Clara had come back to the island, to see if it fit his memory of the facts.
“What was it happened between you and Effie Priddle?” Sandra asked, and Sweetland glanced across, startled. “You two were engaged once,” she said.
“We was never engaged.”
“You went off to Toronto looking to make enough money to buy her a ring.”
“Who’s after telling you that?”
“Was it what happened to your face when you were up there?”
“Sandra.”
“I don’t think it was,” she said, answering her own question. “There’s plenty of women would have had you, don’t think I don’t know.”
“We should go back inside.”
“Are you gay, Moses?”
He shook his head. “Your poor mother is just put in the ground.”
Sandra took a sip of her rum. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “I’m half-cut.”
“I’d say you passed half-cut about three miles back.”
“Ha,” she said and she raised her glass to him. “I just want you to know,” she said. “If you were. It wouldn’t make any difference to me.”
He shook his head again, a strangled little smile on his face, and he started along the side of the house without her.
Sandra was the last of Queenie’s children to leave Sweetland after the funeral. And without giving it much apparent thought, old Hayward packed a suitcase the night before the ferry arrived and went off to live with her in Alberta. The house left exactly as it was, the sheets on the bed and all the dishes in the cupboards. Queenie’s extensive library of romances and mysteries in the cardboard boxes she used to store them. It was a decision so sudden that it felt like a second death. The storm door nailed shut. Sweetland was constantly surprised to find the place dark when he looked out his windows at night or ambled by on his walks.
He had taken to stopping in at his stagehead every evening, poking around inside, half expecting to find the last rabbit’s head nailed up or some other indignity done to the place. It could be any one of half a dozen men to blame, he knew, or some combination of the group in cahoots. Trying to put a fright into him, thinking he could be scared off. Might be it was Hayward Coffin was at it, he thought, in which case there was nothing more to worry about.
He’d been expecting to see more of Jesse with school out for the summer. But the boy had been knocked off kilter by Queenie’s funeral and further again after Hayward’s disappearance, which made even less sense to him. Sweetland had been taking him to fish for trout up at Lunin Pond, a bribe to muscle the youngster into sitting through sessions at the Reverend’s house, but Jesse lost interest in that excursion in the upheaval around him. He’d been torturing every adult in the cove with the same questions about Hayward’s departure, why he left and what he was going to do with himself in Edmonton and whether Jesse would ever see the man again. The day after Hayward left Jesse started claiming he saw a light in Queenie’s living room window. Even being told that the electricity to the house was shut off wasn’t fact enough to sway him. Sweetland set two chairs outside the window one evening and they stared at the blackened pane until Clara came looking to get him to bed.
“Now,” Sweetland said, “you just imagined it.”
The boy seemed to hold that demonstration against Sweetland, as if it was designed to make a fool of him, and he grew more standoffish and cold than Sweetland could remember. He was regressing on every level, according to the Reverend. Singing nonsense syllables and waving his hands and rocking on his feet. It was only when he was plugged into some electronic device that the boy seemed to calm down, to lose himself briefly.
The Priddles came back to Sweetland shortly after Hayward went west, and the loss in the cove made even the brothers relatively subdued and reflective. They stayed more or less sober and visited at houses they hadn’t gone into in years. Sweetland walked up to the cemetery with them when they went to pay their respects and they stood around the fresh grave, handing a flask back and forth between them. The brothers telling stories of stealing cigarettes from Queenie’s stash as youngsters, climbing halfway into her window when she went upstairs to use the bathroom, reaching for the pack where she’d left it beside her chair. Tearing off up to the old cemetery, Queenie cursing at them from the window vent beside the toilet.
It struck Sweetland again it could have been the Priddles who nailed the rabbit head to the door of the stage while he was trying to birth the dead calf in Loveless’s barn. For a lark, a little fuck you remembrance on their way off the island.
Before they left the graveyard Keith stopped at his mother’s marker, kneeling at the white marble to trace a finger across the dates scored into the stone. Barry and Sweetland walked on to the gate. “He’s going to have a little bawl now,” Barry said, his tone dismissive and affectionate both.
“Spose he can’t help feeling it’s his fault somehow,” Sweetland said.
“He’s just drunk is all. He cries watching fucken Marley & Me. Keith,” he called. “Let’s fly the Jesus out of this.”
Barry held out the flask but Sweetland shook his head. The boys had never asked him about their mother. It was an odd reticence on their part, he thought, though he was relieved not to have to say anything about the woman or what passed between them.
Barry turned his back on the sight of his brother kneeling at their mother’s grave. He glanced across at Sweetland and rolled his eyes. “Keith,” he called over his shoulder. “Me and Mose are going on ahead.” But he didn’t move from where he stood. And they waited there until Keith had finished communing with whatever he imagined his mother might have been before he ended her life on his way into the world.
Two weeks after Hayward left on the ferry for Alberta, Pilgrim came to see Sweetland at the house, Jesse leading him up the path by the hand. A changeable day, threatening rain awhile and then brightening, the clouds scoured away for half an hour before they crowded back.
Jesse sat on the daybed with his headphones, listening to his iPod, in another world altogether while the two men settled at the table. Sweetland watching the mercurial weather as it skated across the afternoon’s surface. They talked about the funeral service and Hayward’s sudden departure and the Priddles’ visit to the island, though the conversation was skittish, distracted. As if they expected any moment to light on a topic more serious and consequential.
The phone rang, so loud in the tiny room that both men started. Sweetland stared at the unlikely contraption where it was fixed to the side of the kitchen cupboard.