“Hollis couldn’t swim.”
“Wouldn’t have mattered, him tangled up in the line like that. I shut off the motor soon as I saw he was over, but there was still a lot of strain on the trawl. Rushed up ahead to cut it loose.”
“You cut the line?”
Sweetland shrugged. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the boy. “Wasn’t thinking right,” he said. “I had to get him free of the strain, was what I had in my mind. Only way I could figure to do it was cut the line. Worse thing I could’ve done.”
Hollis was only a fathom under water by the time he killed the engine and got forward. He could see the white of his brother’s face looking back up to the surface. Hundreds of pounds of fish on the trawl and the weight of it pulling Hollis down and down into that black. Eighteen years old, his brother was.
“I’d have done it all different,” Sweetland said. “If I had my time back.”
Jesse was nodding his head, still staring out at the water. “He’s not mad at you,” he said.
It was like a hand out of nowhere against his chest, he almost lost his balance. “He said that, did he?”
“He wanted me to tell you,” Jesse said.
“Well then,” Sweetland said. And he turned to look out at the open ocean awhile.
They hefted the fish coolers onto the government wharf and carried them up the hill. Jesse ran ahead into Pilgrim’s house to get his mother and she came to the door, reaching a hand to help. Clara invited him in for a fry-up, but Sweetland shook his head. “Not hungry,” he said.
“Are you okay?”
“Best kind.”
“You don’t seem yourself.”
“More I don’t,” he said and he tried to smile it off, though his face felt crooked and unnatural.
He took his five fish up to the house and stood at the kitchen counter in his rubber boots to fillet them. Ripping the backbone from its trough of flesh. The layer of dark skin peeling off with a sound like lengths of Scotch tape being unspooled. The meat underneath as white as the driven snow. He packed the fillets into clear plastic bags and stowed them in the fridge.
Stood still in the middle of the kitchen then, one hand at his chest opening and closing, mimicking his own heartbeat. “Where was that,” he said into the silence. He went across to a drawer beside the sink and picked through it. There was an open shelf above the laptop with a handful of telephone directories from two decades ago, a row of Canadian Living recipe books his mother used to collect. Spare change, ancient keys for locks that no longer existed, thumbtacks, chewing gum, antacids. He shuffled his hand back and forth through the bric-a-brac, as if he was stirring up sediment in a shallow pond. Closed his hand finally on the card he was looking for. He held it out at arm’s length, turned it a little to the light from the window.
He dialled the number incorrectly three times, which was almost too much to get through. He stood with the receiver in his hand, trying to quiet his breath. Walked himself through the digits one more time on the rotary dial, listened to the ring travel.
“Hello,” the government man said.
“Yes,” Sweetland said. He tried to bring the man’s face to mind, but the features wouldn’t coalesce out of the blur of light that masked him when he’d first arrived at Sweetland’s door. He grabbed for the back of a chair and pulled it out from the table to sit down. “It’s Sweetland calling,” he said.
“Who’s that?” the voice said. “Moses Sweetland?”
“Yes,” he said. “This is he.”
Sweetland was up early the next morning and down to the wharf while the stars were still bright. He hadn’t slept and couldn’t lie still any longer. He took his chainsaw and gas can, though he had no real interest in cutting wood. He just wanted out of the cove before the news made the rounds.
He drove to Burnt Head and around the Fever Rocks, riding slow as the day’s light came up on the world, without a notion as to where he was going or why. He went into the lee of Little Sweetland and stared up at the bare hillsides as he passed Tilt Cove. Not a sign to say where the dozens of houses and flakes and outbuildings once stood. He came about, chugged into the abandoned harbour. There was a wooden wharf kept up by the mysterious owners of the two cabins on the hill, and he tied up there.
Sweetland sat on the dock with a cup of tea from the thermos, waiting for the sun to lift the cove out of shadow. Walked up onto the beach then, strolled aimlessly across the hillside. The community’s remains might have been a thousand years old for all that was left of them. There were depressions to show where the houses and root cellars had been, the overgrown outline of shale foundations. Not a board or shard of glass or shingle otherwise, all of it scavenged or rotted or blown to hell and gone. He tried to imagine the buildings in their places, tried to unearth the names of the people who’d lived in them. Dominies and Barters and Keepings.
He glanced toward the harbour now and then, trying to tell by its location which outline had been the Dolimounts’ house. It was still standing the last occasion he’d come ashore with Duke Fewer—1966 that was, the first Come Home Year sponsored by the Smallwood government, a campaign to encourage the diaspora of economic refugees to spend their summer vacation at home in Newfoundland. Sweetland had given up working on the schooner to stay closer to Chance Cove at the time, fishing on Duke’s longliner, and they’d had a poor season at it. Dozens of people coming back to the cove from the mainland as the fishery floundered. They flaunted their store-bought, handed out suitcases full of trinkets to the youngsters, talked hourly wages and hockey games at Maple Leaf Gardens and how much they missed Newfoundland. Most of them hadn’t shown their faces home in a decade and Sweetland couldn’t wait for the fuckers to leave.
He and Duke did some hook and line in the early fall and trawled through October, with barely enough luck to warrant the money they were spending on gas. They decided to go across to the Burin to try for moose. A cold rain on the barrens and no sign of a living thing to shoot at for three days. Spent their time tramping through sodden gorse and tuckamore, slept nights in a leaky tent not half big enough to accommodate Duke’s appendages. They ate potted meat sandwiches on white bread, drank instant coffee laced with rye. Hands and feet numb from the unrelenting chill and every item of clothes they’d packed soaked through.
I’ve had enough of this bullshit, Duke said. They were crouched under a square of canvas angled over a scraggly fire, their fourth morning out, waiting for the kettle to boil.
Sweetland had his hands stretched to the flame but couldn’t feel any heat coming off it at all. Be a long winter, he said, without a bit of moose meat put aside.
The winter won’t be half as long as the last three days have been, Duke said.
They had a two-hour tramp back to the bay where they’d moored the boat and they walked it in silence, one behind the other. They piled all their gear in the wheelhouse and huddled there in misery as Sweetland nosed into open ocean. And they travelled most of the way back to Sweetland without speaking a word.