They never had a name for the pig, which seemed strange to Sweetland after the fact. The Pig, they called it. Piggy. Porker. It would eat from their hands and lick them clean, thorough, fastidious, he could still remember the feel of that tongue between his fingers, the warm snout pushing against his palm. Its eyes closed as it worked, the lashes pale and fine.
They came home from school one afternoon and there was no sign of the pig. Piggy, they yelled. Hey, Porker! Ran to the flake whistling and shouting. Cold enough to see their breath as they called. They crept out to the shed, thinking the animal might have learned to lie in wait for them, planning a sneak attack. They slapped at the walls before poking their heads inside. But the pig was gone. Rooting through the garbage pile back of Loveless’s house in all likelihood, or stuffing itself on the filth thrown into the landwash from the stageheads. And they didn’t think more of it until they sat to their supper, when their father stood to carve a shoulder of pork, laying lavish portions on the plates.
Hollis turned toward him, but Sweetland wouldn’t look at his brother for fear of bawling. He folded his arms and sat as far from the meal as his chair back allowed. And Hollis did the same. Sweetland chewing on the inside of his mouth as the adults cleaned their plates. They were made to sit at the table until after dark. He could hear their parents arguing in the pantry and their mother came in to clear the cold food away. Eight months pregnant with Ruthie then, though the boys were told nothing about it and didn’t realize a child was on the way until the morning the girl was born. They were sent to their room finally and their father was forced to give most of the meat away so it wouldn’t spoil, hocks and crackle, bacon and ribs and chops.
“Father never did speak a word to us about it,” Sweetland said. “Took sick that November month, just after Ruthie was born, and he lay in his bed all winter. Died the end of February.”
“What was wrong with him?”
“What?” Sweetland said. He’d never mentioned his father dying as part of the story before and was surprised to have it come to the surface now.
“Your father,” Jesse said. “What made him sick?”
“No one knows,” he said.
Uncle Clar wanted to take the man across to Burgeo or Placentia to see a doctor, but his father wouldn’t hear of it. I’ll be right the once, he’d insisted. He was almost twenty years older than his wife but still a youngish man, just shy of sixty. And seemed to be getting better, as he predicted, just before he died. Ate a full meal of salt beef and cabbage that Sunday, the first time in months, propped against pillows in his sickbed. Asked after dessert and Sweetland carried up a partridgeberry pudding his mother had boiled in an old baking soda can. His father took three mouthfuls of the pudding, chewing slowly, like he was trying to guess the spices hidden within the whole. Slumped over in bed then, never made a sound.
“He was dead?” Jesse asked.
“Gone,” Sweetland said. “Just like that.”
His father’s ravenous appetite is what Sweetland remembered about the event, how incongruous it was. Eating against his end, Uncle Clar used to say. The body seeming to know ahead of the man himself what was coming.
Pilgrim stood up, leaned a little ways over the gunwale to start hauling in his jigger.
“Have you got one?” Jesse said.
“Feels like a fair size.”
The fish loomed as it rose, pulling dead, the white of its belly flickering out of the dark. “Jesus, she’s heavy,” Pilgrim said. It came to the surface calm, sacrificial, as all cod did, until it broke the surface where it twisted weakly and came clean off the hook.
“Lost her,” Pilgrim said, holding his bald jigger aloft.
“She’s right there,” Jesse said, pointing.
The fish lay stunned and adrift at the surface, as if it didn’t realize yet it was free. Sweetland miles away, stunned and drifting in much the same fashion.
“Right there,” Jesse said again, and Sweetland shook himself into motion finally, tied off his line, reached out with a gaff to snag and haul it aboard. It slapped on the deck without urgency and then lay still, its mouth working soundlessly, the silver coin of one eye gaping at the sky.
“How big is she?” Pilgrim asked.
“Big,” Jesse shouted.
Sweetland put a hand to the gunwale against the ocean’s swell, waiting for the spell of vertigo to pass. “She’s a beauty, all right,” he said.
It was still shy of noon when they made their meagre quota and started back for the cove.
“You want to clean some fish or you want to take the wheel?” Sweetland asked the boy.
“The wheel,” Jesse said.
Sweetland reached into a cooler at his feet for two beers and he sat aft beside Pilgrim, the men cleaning the cod as they steamed in. Gulls swirling above and behind them like a foul plume of engine exhaust, the scavengers screaming and fighting over the guts as they were tossed into the sea.
They finished Jesse’s five and Pilgrim’s, and Sweetland said he’d look after his own when he got back to the house. He leaned out into the spray to rinse his hands and forearms in the water, and he looked forward then, watching Jesse standing to one side of the wheel, his free hand moving like someone conducting an orchestra. The noise of the engine made it impossible to hear, but he knew the boy was carrying on a conversation with Sweetland’s long-dead brother.
“You want another beer?” he asked Pilgrim.
“I’m all right.”
Sweetland walked up to the wheelhouse and set the two empties at his feet.
“This is where the accident happened,” Jesse said to him.
Sweetland glanced out at the water to get his bearings. They were just passing over the Wester Shoals where he and his brother used to trawl for cod in the fall. “I spose it was Hollis told you that, was it?”
“Poppy told me.”
Sweetland looked back at Pilgrim sitting aft. “What else did Poppy tell you?”
“He said you was the only one was there, so it’s only you can tell the story.”
“What about your buddy there at the wheel? He was there, wouldn’t he?”
“He says you’ll tell the story when you’re ready.” Jesse didn’t take his eyes from the water ahead, talking in the same flat tone.
Sweetland looked away a minute as the vertigo crawled over him again.
“You don’t have to,” Jesse said.
“Just this once,” Sweetland said. “And Hollis can correct me if I gets anything wrong, how’s that?”
“Okay.”
“Okay, then.” He reached into the cooler for a beer. “We come out to do some trawling,” he said.
October month. They had the trawl baited with fresh squid and shot it out, let it fish on the bottom a couple of hours. They’d just gotten the boat that spring, a skiff with an ailing Acadia one-cylinder inboard that they’d bought from Glad Vatcher’s father. They’d been the only crowd in Chance Cove without a motor for years by then, still sculling out to the fishing grounds every day. Old Mr. Vatcher took a little cash money and a share of the summer’s fish as payment, not half what the boat was worth. A calm day but a strong tide running. Sweetland aft at the tiller, keeping the boat steady ahead of the tide, Hollis pulling in the trawl up forward.
“There was lots of fish on her,” he said. “Hollis was gaffing them aboard as they come to the surface. And there was this big one, saw him as he come near the surface, he must’ve been seventy or eighty pound. Hollis leaned out for it as the trawl come in but the thing sheared off the hook and we passed right overtop of it. So I shoved the engine in reverse, turned on the switch before the piston reached top dead centre and that sent it running opposite. A bit of a jolt, you can imagine. I turned to lean out over the water, gaffed the fish as we drove back to it. Biggest cod I ever seen just about. Hauled it in over the aft board,” Sweetland said. He took a mouthful of beer, glanced at Pilgrim in the stern. “Anyway,” he said. “Hollis fell across the trawl line when the boat shifted into reverse. He wouldn’t expecting it, I guess. And the length of trawl he’d already brought aboard started going over the side again as the boat drove aft. Hooks caught up in his clothes. He went into the water with it.”