Sweetland walked her to the outhouse after dark, watching the stars as he waited for her to do her business. Carried her on his back when they climbed up to the mash to pick berries, Ruthie singing into his ear as payment for the ride.
It was Sweetland who killed the rooster when it went after Ruthie. A creature so vicious you couldn’t turn your back to it, his mother carrying a stick to slap it away when she went out to collect the eggs. The red comb flopping side to side as it strutted around in a military rage. Ruthie skipping innocently across the yard one afternoon and the cock flying up at her, slashing at her clothes and face. Talons sharp as fish hooks. Tore her dress at the shoulder, ripped one earlobe so it hung by a string of flesh.
Sweetland beat the bird to death with a barrel stave while his mother sewed Ruthie’s lobe back on with needle and thread in the kitchen. He was so savage the rooster couldn’t be cleaned to make a meal of it.
That’s a waste of good meat, Uncle Clar said, scraping the ragged mess up with a shovel.
Sweetland was still in a lather. He could hear Ruthie bawling in the kitchen where Hollis was holding her arms while their mother stitched the girl’s lobe in place. He swung at the animal as Uncle Clar walked past him, wanting to kill the dead thing over again. The ring of wood against the shovel making his elbows tingle. He stamped on the ruined corpse where it fell to the ground.
Are thee done? Uncle Clar asked him.
I’m done, Sweetland said. Though he knew he was not, and likely never would be.
That same murderous commotion at work in him now, though he didn’t know who it should be directed toward, the Reverend or Ruthie. That blind fucker, Pilgrim. The fallen world itself.
What’s her name? the reporter asked.
Sweetland looked at her dumbly.
Your sister, she said. What did you say her name was?
Ruthie, he said. Ruth Pilgrim.
I will definitely talk to her, the reporter said. As soon as we’re done here.
And he answered her questions about his feelings then, making a bloody fool of himself from all he could tell.
6
THE RCMP PATROL BOAT out of Burgeo motored into the cove a week after the fire. The constable came to Sweetland’s house and asked about the smell of gas everyone remarked on and his boat untied and if there was anyone who might be holding a grudge against him or might have a reason to target his property.
“Only everybody,” Sweetland said.
The constable made a useless note in his black notebook, and Sweetland thought for a moment about digging the threatening letters out of the drawer where he kept them. But there hardly seemed a point to it.
“So you have no idea who might be responsible?”
“Could be half a dozen people. A dozen,” he corrected himself.
“Well,” the constable said. “Unless someone comes forward with more information, it isn’t likely we’ll ever know who set the fire.”
“Won’t no one come forward,” Sweetland said. “I wouldn’t tell you myself if I knew.”
The constable cocked his head. “Why is that?”
If you scald your arse, Sweetland’s mother used to say, you got to learn to sit on your blisters. He said, “I got what was coming to me, I expect.”
Sweetland went down to Duke’s shop in the afternoon to look in on the chess game that was going on without him. Pilgrim already sitting there with Duke. The two men had been interviewed by the constable as well and they couldn’t let the topic go, throwing out names of the most likely culprits, speculating on how they might have gone about it, the idiocy of risking every building in Chance Cove.
“It’s lucky you still got the boat anyway,” Pilgrim said.
“Whoever it was,” Duke said, “wanted to make sure you had a way to get the hell out of here, is what I think.”
The chess game looked to be halfways done already. A couple dozen moves made on each side, a third of the black pieces removed from the board. As though time was running out and the players were in a race to finish.
“You still planning on going out for the food fishery?” Pilgrim asked.
Sweetland gave him a look that Pilgrim could sense from across the room.
“Jesse’s been asking,” he said by way of explanation.
“I don’t know if Clara would be too keen on the notion.”
Pilgrim made a motion with his shoulders. “Might be she’s feeling a little more kindly toward you,” he said. “Account of the fire taking your stage.”
“A silver lining to every cloud.”
“Come over tonight,” Pilgrim said, “after the youngster’s gone to bed. We’ll see how it goes.”
He watched the house from his kitchen window that evening and waited half an hour after Jesse’s light went out. Walked around to the back door and let himself in. Pilgrim called from the living room and Sweetland went along the narrow hall, stood there in the doorway.
“How’s the house?” he asked.
“Everyone’s grand,” Pilgrim said.
Clara didn’t turn her head from the television and Sweetland thought it was a mistake to have come. “What is it you’re watching?”
“Mad Men,” Pilgrim said. “Clara can’t get enough of it.”
Sweetland glanced at the screen. An office of impeccably dressed men from another age, all of them smoking like tilts. Pilgrim got up from his seat. “You’ll have a drink,” he said and went by Sweetland to the kitchen. “Go in and sit down.”
He took a chair just inside the doorway, his eyes on the television. Every fifteen seconds someone lit up a fresh cigarette. It made him crave one himself.
“When was it you quit smoking?” Clara asked, as if she could sense that urge rising in him.
“I don’t know. Sometime after your mother died.”
“She was always after you to give them up, I remember.”
“Ruthie was always after me to do one thing or another. Thought I needed mothering, I spose.”
“She thought you needed a wife, more like it.”
“Well,” he said. And he shrugged at the television.
“I remember you used to let me light them for you.”
He looked at her. “I never no such thing,” he said.
“You did,” she insisted. “I’d sit in your lap and strike the match on the side of the box.”
“How old were you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Five or six.”
“Ruthie must have loved that.”
“Mom never knew a thing about it,” Clara said. And then she said, “I can’t believe you forgot about that.”
“More can I,” he said. He hated confronting those lost moments, being presented with some detail from his past and having to look on it like a stranger. It made his life feel like a made-up thing. A net full of holes.
“I still expect to see you with a cigarette, for some reason. Even after all this time.”
“I could light one up, if that’d make you feel better.”
“There’s only one thing would make me feel better about you.”
He turned back to the television.
“It wouldn’t be the end of the world, would it?” she said. “To live somewhere else?”
Pilgrim appeared in the doorway, holding a drink. “Moses,” he said, “where are you?”
“In hell, I think,” Sweetland whispered.
The drink was rye and water without ice. Pilgrim hadn’t brewed shine since Clara came back to Sweetland with Jesse in tow. Couldn’t make it cheap enough anymore to compete with the controller’s liquor, he said.