They watched the rest of the show in silence but for Clara setting the scene for Pilgrim now and again. They’re in a car, she’d say. He’s in a motel room with his secretary. Sweetland and Clara talked aimlessly during the commercials while Pilgrim was making fresh drinks in the kitchen and he tried to keep clear of anything that might sour the visit. Before he left, Sweetland said, “Be all right if I looked in on him a minute?”
“Don’t wake him,” she said. “He’ll be up half the night.”
Sweetland went up the stairs with a hand to the rail, padded along the hall to Jesse’s room. The door was closed and Sweetland turned the knob carefully. Eased it open and listened awhile to be sure he hadn’t disturbed the sleeper. The boy was on his back with all the sheets kicked to the foot of the bed. One knee propped against the wall, both arms flung above his head. He was wearing the only pyjamas he would consent to put on, a pair he’d outgrown years before and refused to surrender, though the sleeves came almost to his elbows, the pant legs rising halfway up his shins. Clara had been trying to get him into something new for months, going so far as to ask for Sweetland’s help cajoling.
Jesus, Sweetland told him, you looks like a streel in those machines.
Don’t care, Jesse said.
You looks like one of them street urchins got no one belonged to them.
Don’t care, Jesse repeated.
The pyjamas made him look hopelessly vulnerable in his bed, his limbs like pale shoots growing out of the fabric, the smooth expanse of his belly exposed. The little well of the navel a thimbleful of darkness. Jesse’s face was turned toward the door but angled unnaturally up toward the headboard. He looked like he’d fallen from a height, dropped from a roof-top or a headland and come to rest in that mangled posture. Sweetland wanted to ease the boy’s arms back down at his sides, to straighten the leg crooked against the wall. He wanted to lie down with the boy awhile and listen to him breathe.
He allowed himself to lift the bedsheets up over Jesse’s chest, but wouldn’t even chance touching the youngster’s hair before he left. Closed the door as carefully as he’d opened it, made his way back downstairs to the living room where he said his good-nights. He mentioned going out after a few cod when the food fishery opened and said that Jesse was welcome to come if he wanted. And he walked drunkenly home, with no idea if Clara would allow it or not.
She brought Jesse down to the government wharf two days later, the boy carting their lines coiled in plastic tubs, Pilgrim following behind. Sweetland reached a hand up as the boy climbed into the boat and Jesse turned into his belly to hug him briefly. The first time in years.
Clara helped Pilgrim down and handed their gear to Sweetland. “Make sure he keeps his lifejacket on,” she said.
“Have you got a lifejacket for Hollis?” Jesse asked.
“Hollis is staying home out of it with your mother,” Pilgrim said.
Clara looked down at Sweetland, apologetic.
“Hollis can come if he wants,” Sweetland said. “But I got neither lifejacket for him.”
Jesse mumbled a few words to the air beside him and then nodded, listening. “Hollis says he don’t need one,” he announced.
It promised to be a large day, clear skies and hardly a breath of wind. Sweetland let Jesse take the boat around the breakwater and he glanced back into the cove as they made the turn, the remains of his stagehead a dark smudge on the view, the blackened timbers awash at high tide. Jesse asked a stream of questions about the fire, wanting to know how it started and how hot the fire might have been and if Sweetland planned to build another stage. Sweetland was as evasive as he could manage as the boy pressed on about who might have set the fire and why they might have done it. “No telling people’s minds” was all he said about it.
Just as they turned into open water, a harbour porpoise kicked up off the bow. Jesse shouted and pointed as the porpoise veered down and away from the boat.
“Puffin pig,” Sweetland said, using the name he’d grown up with.
“It’s not a pig,” Jesse insisted. He offered the proper name and then spelled it, to underline its propriety.
“Pardon me, Your Highness,” Sweetland said, and he waited then for Jesse to ask about the pig they’d had when Sweetland was a youngster. But the habitual question never came, lost in the novelty of steaming out to the ledge, Sweetland guessed, the prospect of going after the cod. Though it felt like another crack showing in their lives together. The boy as good as gone already.
They motored on to Saturday Ledge where he cut the engine. They let out their lines until the jiggers touched bottom, brought them up a yard and started into the work of it, hauling and releasing the full length of their arms. It was the first day of the food fishery and there were boats up and down the shore, on the Shag Rocks, on the Offer Ledge, on Pilgrim’s Shoal, and away out to the Mackerel Cliffs at the south end. It almost looked like old times on the water, everyone at the cod.
“Tell me about the pig you had,” Jesse asked then.
“What pig?” Sweetland said.
“The pig used to chase you and Hollis.”
“I don’t remember much about it,” he said. He spat over the gunwale into the water. Almost angry to feel so relieved.
“Your father bought a piglet.”
“Right,” he said. “Father bought a piglet from old man Vatcher one spring, kept it in the shed out back.”
As pale and inquisitive as an infant child, it was. Old eyes watching them. He and Hollis fought over who would bring it table scraps and fish guts, the pink snout raised above the rail as they approached the pen. Through the summer it foraged free and learned to follow them around the property, sat outside the door while they ate their meals. A year later it weighed as much as a handbar of salt fish, five feet from snout to tail. It had taken to waiting for Sweetland and Hollis to come home from school, chasing them out to the flake used for drying capelin and squid, the boys jumping onto the surface and the pig rooting underneath in a mock fury. They’d make a break for the shed with the snorting pig at their heels, climb the walls of the pen, shouting down at the creature snuffling beneath them. It shouldered the boards so the building shook, waiting for them to head to the flake. They’d go back and forth between the two refuges a dozen times, until their mother or Uncle Clar told them to stop tormenting the animal.
Jesse turned his head to the water suddenly, taking up his line hand over hand, the water spinning off the nylon as it came over the gunwale.
“You got one already?” Pilgrim asked.
Sweetland tied off his line to help gaff the fish aboard, but Jesse flicked his catch expertly over the gunwale onto the deck. Stood back then, staring at the thing, his mouth open.
The bag was tied tight at the mouth but the jigger had ripped a hole in the plastic and Sweetland could see the rabbit carcasses inside when he bent to free the hook. The heads and back paws removed. Most of the flesh gone off the bones after two months in the ocean.
“Well?” Pilgrim said from where he was standing aft. “Did he get one?”
Sweetland glanced up at Jesse. He tried to smile, though all the feeling had gone out of his face. “He got one,” Sweetland said, not wanting to explain what the boy had hauled aboard. Not sure he could. “But he’s too small to keep.” He used the gaff to lift the bag out over the water and dropped it, watched it sink down into the dark.
“Well there’s fish about anyway,” Pilgrim said.
“Put your line back out,” Sweetland told the boy. “Where was I?”
“Stop tormenting the animal,” Jesse said uncertainly.
“Put your line out,” Sweetland said again and he handed the jigger across. Once Jesse had fallen into his rhythm, he repeated, “Stop tormenting the animal.”