And then her sister died. Which, it turned out, was the end of many things. He carried on visiting with her through the weeks of quarantine that followed, but never saw her naked again. Stopped expecting or even wanting it. Years later, it was Hayward Coffin who took her up onto the mash, and Sweetland thought nothing of the fact. The exchange at her window something he’d never spoken of, to Queenie or anyone else. Dead and buried up on the hill now, that young girl and her strange, unacknowledged gift to him.
Sweetland looked over at the clock’s blank face. He couldn’t begin to guess what time it was. Late, was all he knew. He sat up, reached for his clothes. Sidestepped the door, went out the hall and downstairs into the dark of the kitchen. He drew off a glass of water at the sink and drained half in one go. The angry, alien glow on the waterfront flaring beyond Queenie’s house when he glanced out the window.
The fire was lighting the entire harbour by the time he made his way to the shore path, flames coming through the stage’s ceiling, through the door standing open, through the broken panes in the side window. Sweetland could see all the way across to the government wharf and beyond it to the church on the point, clear as day. He could see his boat set loose from the stagehead, drifting away from the fire toward the breakwater. Cinders were dropping through the floorboards, hissing as they hit the water pooled in the landwash underneath, flankers rising lazily on the drafts of heat, floating out across the cove. Sweetland couldn’t get within thirty feet of the burning building but he could smell the gasoline used to set the blaze. The place must have been soaked to go up so fast.
People running out of their houses behind him, shouting over the noise of the fire. Youngsters sent up onto the roofs of nearby buildings to sweep burning embers off the shingles. The Priddle brothers and Reet Verge and a dozen others carted buckets of seawater to put out spot fires in yards and the grass along the paths. Garden hoses sprayed down from houses further up the hill and Glad Vatcher brought his boat along the waterline, dousing the closest buildings with the stream of a pressure washer.
The inferno was so intense that the stage collapsed on itself and fell into the landwash within an hour and there was only watching it then, the entire population standing over the slowly dissipating heat, their clothes and skin stained a pulsing red and orange in the dark light. Sweetland looked up and down the line of eerily lit faces, like some biblical image of the apocalypse. The anonymous arsonists standing there among them, taking it in.
~ ~ ~
THE ISLAND WAS OVERRUN in the wake of the incident with the lifeboat. As if, for the first time ever, someone had placed Sweetland on a map for strangers to find it. RCMP officers and investigators from the Coast Guard and Transport Canada arriving in twos and threes to take statements from Bob-Sam Lavallee and the Reverend and Sweetland himself.
Bob-Sam had the Coast Guard officers stay at the lighthouse during their visit and they told him what they knew. The men in the lifeboat were, in fact, Sri Lankan and they’d all spent a life’s savings to be smuggled into the United States. It was anyone’s guess how they ended up bobbing around the North Atlantic. There were two that died in the hold during the trip and they thought they were all going to perish down there before they were lowered in the lifeboat and cut loose. Not so much as a drop of water among them.
What about the ship they were on? Sweetland asked.
They was snuck aboard in the dark, Bob-Sam said. And put off in the middle of the night. Never spoke three words to any of the crew. White fellows, they said. But they could’ve been Russian or Scandinavian or Spanish.
There were reporters and photographers coming off the ferry runs for a while as well. Most of them stayed only as long as the ferry was docked and they charged around Chance Cove in a mad rush, snapping photos and taking quotes from the folks they spotted on the wharf or outside the houses. They were like a crowd of wild goats let loose in town, butting their heads into sheds and kitchens to nose around with their cameras, tearing off without so much as a kiss-my-arse. The women going on about the cinnamon colour of the refugees’ skin and the hair on them so black it gleamed like oil. Loveless inviting them in for watery drinks and Jam Jams, making himself out to be a central character in the events. They was a sight, sir, he liked to say, come out of the fog like a boatload of the dead, poor souls.
Sweetland was poisoned with the whole affair and wished they’d all fuck off home out of it, leave him and the island alone. But everyone wanted to hear his version of events and hunted him down to pose the same half-dozen questions. All of them asking him to spell his name, for accuracy’s sake. Sweetland, he’d say as they bent their heads over their notebooks, S-w-i-e-t-l-u-n-d.
They glanced up and he shrugged. It’s an old Swedish name, he said.
A few reporters settled in for days at a time. A fey gentleman with a southern accent and a limp who claimed to be writing for The New Yorker, though nothing appeared there that Sweetland ever heard of. An old-time drinker with a Toronto magazine who asked to be shown some local colour and spent a night passed out under Sweetland’s kitchen table with his pants around his ankles.
There was a television crew from the CBC who set Sweetland up near the waterside window in his stage. A crowd of youngsters at the open door to watch and they recruited young Hayward Coffin to hold a silver reflector just out of the frame. The interviewer asking Sweetland how he felt, coming upon those lost souls out there in the fog, to find the dead boy in the lifeboat.
How I felt? he said.
Yes, she said. She was Ruthie’s age, or thereabouts. She wore pink slacks and a short white jacket and clownish makeup she retouched whenever the cameraman changed positions or swapped out his battery pack. An air of mainland entitlement about her. She’d come at him with a puff pad before they began and he tried to fend her off. It’s for the glare, she explained as she lowered his arm and had a go at his face with the powder. He took a dislike to her that seemed unaccountably fierce.
How I felt? he asked again.
Her eyes didn’t waver. Were you surprised? she said.
No, he said. No, I had a letter come the week before, asking me to meet them out there.
She smiled and nodded. She turned to the cameraman and he lowered the camera from his shoulder. She leaned toward Sweetland with both elbows on her clipboard. We’re just trying to tell the story here, she said to him, her voice almost a whisper. No one’s trying to embarrass you or make you look foolish.
You’ll want to talk to my sister, he said suddenly, surprising himself. He hadn’t spoken three words to Ruthie since the night he’d caught her sneaking out of the Reverend’s office.
Your sister?
She looked after the one that died, down to the church, he said.
Sweetland was devoted to Ruthie who had lost her father before she had a chance to know the man. He was often first awake in the house when she was a girl, and she came out of her mother’s room to meet him at the top of the stairs, shivering in her nightdress. He carried her down to the kitchen in the dark of winter mornings, sat her on the stove while he laid shavings and kindling into the firebox, feeding the flames for quick heat. Ruthie chatting away to him about the dreams she’d had or some game she’d been playing with the cat or the size of Mrs. Vatcher’s drawers on the line. He’d lift her down once the fire had taken hold and send her into the pantry for plates and cutlery to set the table while he fried a panful of capelin.