Sweetland shook his head. Acting out, the Reverend called it. Like it was all just a show, something put on to entertain. He swore under his breath, walked out past the shed to look for the axe. Trying to settle himself as he searched around. The Reverend followed behind him to the back wall of the shed and Sweetland brushed past the man, walking to the side door with the recovered axe in his hand. Sat inside with the head in his lap, working the stone across the cutting edge. The Reverend came as far as the door and stood waiting there.
“I imagine Pilgrim already give you the play-by-play,” Sweetland said.
“He gave me his version of events.”
“Well who am I to argue with a blind man?”
The Reverend looked away out the door and Sweetland thought he might leave without saying anything else. But he turned back to the gloom in the shed. “I know how you feel about that boy,” he said.
“What you knows about how I feels,” Sweetland said, but the Reverend pushed ahead, talking over him.
“And you might think you’re watching out for Jesse in all of this. You’ve got everyone else convinced. But I don’t buy it.”
“Is that a fact?”
“That’s a fact, yes.”
“And I imagine you’re about to tell me how you sees it different.”
“I think you’re being a selfish son of a bitch, is what I think.”
Sweetland looked up from his lap, surprised by the obscenity, mild as it was. “Well,” he said, “you would be an expert on selfish sons a bitches.”
“You can muddy the waters if that makes you feel better. But it doesn’t change what’s going on here. The only card you have left in this game is Jesse. And you just might get what you want if you keep playing him.”
“There’s the door,” Sweetland said.
“I want you to ask yourself,” the Reverend said, “if using that youngster is worth the price.”
“You make sure you close it behind you when you go.”
The Reverend watched him a few moments longer before he left, pulling the door shut. Sweetland leaning back over his lap, repeating the sickle-shaped motion of the sharpening stone against the blade on his knee, the scrape of it like something working at bone.
He flicked on the radio in the kitchen when he went inside, a voice announcing the dates for the summer food fishery. Five cod per person per boat per day, the voice said. He hadn’t eaten a morsel since breakfast and he opened a can of tuna, put two slices of bread in the toaster. Staring out the window over the sink as he waited. Flicked off the radio and slapped Miracle Whip on the toast. Sat at the table, looking at the sandwich a few minutes before throwing it in the garbage can under the sink.
He walked down to Duke’s barbershop and let himself in, stood awhile studying the stalled chess game, then scanned blankly across the photos and clippings pasted to the wall. Stopped at an old Polaroid from their second stint on the mainland. Duke and himself grinning at the camera, in hard hats and undershirts. Both of them hungover no doubt. The colours had faded over the years, but it was his old face in the picture, without the purple scarring, without the grafted skin as tight and smooth as the skin of an apple. A shock still, to see himself in that other life, unmarked.
It was oppressively hot all that summer, a pulsing furnace heat through July and August. Six days a week they were at it, twelve hours a day, framing in the sprawling suburbs of York and Etobicoke, hammering two-by-fours in the sink of merciless humidity. He had never felt so recklessly lonely, so desperate to lose himself in the mindless drudge of work, in drink. Homesickness felt like the only thing keeping him alive.
He heard the door and turned to see the proprietor ducking his head under the frame.
“You’re looking thoughtful,” Duke said. “You have a notion for the game finally?”
“Might be I do.”
Duke raised his face to the ceiling. “The night is far spent,” he said, “the day is at hand.” He crossed to the board and stared. “So what’s your notion?”
“Throw the fucken thing in the stove.”
“You’re not giving up on it?”
“I’m done,” Sweetland said.
Duke stood with his hands on his hips a moment before he began moving the pieces back to their starting positions, glancing up now and then to see how Sweetland was taking it. “I hear you had a little racket with Jesse,” he said.
Sweetland made a dismissive motion with his hand.
Duke turned the board slightly after he had set the pieces, lifted the pawn on the far left ahead two spaces. The same opening, every time. “Your move, Bobby Fischer.”
“I think I’ll sit this one out,” he said.
Duke nodded helplessly. He climbed into the barber’s chair and the two men watched each other in the mirror. “I’m sure Jesse’ll be fine,” he said.
Sweetland went to bed early, not expecting to sleep. He turned his head periodically to check the time, the digital figures changing at such a glacial pace he finally unplugged the clock altogether. Stars through the window, a she-moon’s narrow sliver of light.
She’s on her back, Uncle Clar said when Sweetland first asked what she-moon meant. This was long before he was old enough to understand Clar’s cryptic explanation, and he couldn’t remember now when it came clear to him. Likely it was Duke got there first and passed the details on to him. A year older, and more reckless, always pushing ahead of what was handed out. It was Duke took Sweetland dogging the young couples when they were boys, chasing them up onto the mash or to the meadow out behind the church where they snuck off to mess around in the grass.
Pure devilment at first, doing their best to be an annoyance, pelting the couples with crabapples or spruce cones. Battering the hell out of it then, the young fellow flinging rocks at their heads. It was like hitting a hornets’ nest with a stick. Until it became something more serious and surreptitious. The game about slinking as close as possible, seeing as much as you could. Sweetland trying to describe it to Pilgrim afterwards, dresses pushed above the thigh, the naked skin and busy hands down there. Bare asses silvered in the moonlight. Pilgrim’s eyes wide with blind wonder. Lord Jesus, what a world they were living in.
Watching Queenie Coffin undress through her bedroom window, the summer her sister took sick with typhoid. Queenie Buffett, she was then. The tiny bedroom on the ground floor. Standing up close to the panes to take off her clothes for him, bold as brass. Hair cropped as short as a boy’s, pale nipples on a board chest. Hairless skin down there, that foreign crease looking oddly chaste. A simple pleasure between them, to see and be seen. Hardly a sexual thing at all, Sweetland thought, but for the hard-on that troubled him for hours afterwards. At some point he considered he should do the same for her, but Queenie showed no interest in a tit-for-tat exchange. And it was a relief to him that she did not.
He’d sat behind Queenie in the one-room schoolhouse for two winters and they seemed a pair of sorts because of it. But they were just two among the battalion of youngsters that knocked around in the cove together, fishing for conners off the stagehead, carting their dippers up on the mash to pick berries in the fall. During the quarantine she was moved out of the bed she shared with the sister and they jerried up a room with a cot and sheets hung from the ceiling on the ground floor. Sweetland would visit with her at that window, talking back and forth with her through the glass. There was a wooden vent at the base of the frame and he would smuggle treats to her, sweet-bread, raisins, a whip of licorice. Caught sight of her changing as he made for the window one evening and stopped dead. Queenie coming straight up to the panes when she saw him there. Bored out of her mind probably, pent up and restless. Half a dozen times after that she had undressed for him, presented herself a few minutes before putting on her nightclothes, her manner serious and unhurried. Her nakedness like a new thing to him each time, as if another layer had been peeled away.