It was too much for Sweetland to sit through. Go fuck yourselves, he told the tormentors.
Never mind now, Pilgrim said.
Christ, Sweetland said. You just sits there and takes it, that’s the worst of it. Makes me sick.
Pilgrim picked aimlessly at the label on his bottle. You’re not going to stop them having their fun, he said.
I want to talk to you today, the Reverend said from the pulpit, about our recent unexpected visitors to Sweetland. He read a few verses from the Psalms. He wanted the congregation to imagine themselves in the position of those unfortunates in the lifeboat, he said. To be set adrift without warning or explanation, with nothing to say if they would ever be found. Or if anyone was even looking for them. Orphaned on an ocean that seems endless.
Sweetland had to credit the man for gall, standing up there in his robes with a straight face. In front of his own wife and Ruthie.
We could see it as a metaphor, the Reverend said, for our own place in the universe, for the questions we ask about our own lives.
Ruthie got up as he spoke and she crabbed her way past the others in her pew, whispering apologies, walking for the entrance with a hand to her mouth. People watching her go, nodding or shaking their heads. The morning sickness, they were all thinking. How it was about time the couple had a child in the house. How they had all stopped expecting it to happen and how God works in mysterious ways.
The Reverend droning on about hope and faith, like he hadn’t noticed her leaving.
7
AWEEK AFTER HE MADE THE CALL to the government man, Sweetland received a slender stack of forms in the mail. Clara came up to witness his signature, to fold the papers into the self-addressed envelope provided.
“That’s it, then,” she said. “You sending them on the ferry this week?”
“You take them,” he told her. “Be sure they gets out.”
She ironed the envelope flat on the table with the palm of her hand. “I guess I owe you a thank-you for this,” she said.
He jerked his head back, the motion barely perceptible but enough to stop her following through. He said, “You going to tell the boy now?”
Clara had asked Sweetland not to say anything to Jesse until all the papers were signed. Thinking he might back out and not wanting to risk the upheaval for nothing. “Not just yet,” she said. “Want to pick the right moment. He’s going to hate my guts for awhile, I imagine,” she said, and she tried to laugh at the notion.
“I should be the one to break the news,” Sweetland said. “He’ll likely blame me for it all anyways.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I told him I wouldn’t going anywhere. He was counting on me sticking it out.”
Clara shook her head. “I’ll tell him,” she said.
She pushed a clutch of loose papers across the table, information on relocation and retraining and various government assistance programs. “Have you decided?” she said. “Where you’re going to shift to?”
“Haven’t give it much thought.”
Clara stared down at her hands. “You know you’d be welcome to come into St. John’s with us,” she said.
Sweetland made a noise in his throat to say he’d as likely live on the moon as in St. John’s. He shifted in his chair to turn halfways away from her.
Clara tapped the papers with an index finger. “You should hang onto these.”
“All right,” he said, though he didn’t so much as glance at them.
“Jesse will come around,” she said.
The first week of August there was a town meeting at the Fisherman’s Hall, the government man in on the ferry. Sweetland waited at the kitchen window, watching as people made their way over, Ned Priddle, Glad and Alice Vatcher, Rita Verge, Duke Fewer. He saw Clara heading out with Pilgrim on her elbow, Jesse straggling behind, looking despondent. Maybe the news had finally trickled down to the boy, he thought.
Sweetland gave the crowd a few minutes to get settled into the Fisherman’s Hall before he gathered up his chainsaw and gas can and walked down to the government wharf. Diesel barking and lunging at the end of her chain as he went by. The ferry was still docked at the wharf, adding an extra hour and a half to its stop in order to take the government man back to the mainland after the meeting. Sweetland waved up at the crewmen on deck as he walked past. He had his own boat out on the collar and was bringing it in hand over hand when Loveless spoke to him. “Going for a bit a wood?” he said.
Sweetland looked behind to where Loveless was sitting on a lobster pot in the shade of the ATM. He had his little dog on its length of string, sitting between his feet.
“You’re not going up to the meeting?”
“Don’t like meetings,” Loveless said. “Sitting still that long.”
Sweetland smiled at the objection. “Sure all you does all day long is sit, idn’t it?”
“On my own schedule,” Loveless said. “I can get up to take a leak whenever the urge strikes.”
“Fair enough.”
“You going for a bit a wood?” he asked again.
“Thought I might.”
“Late to start across. You’ll have to spend the night.”
“Might do.”
Loveless chewed his pipe back and forth awhile. “You’ll just have to leave all the wood behind come this time next year, won’t you?”
“Kiss my arse,” Sweetland said, and he stepped down into the boat, started up the engine. He hated to see Loveless making sense. It made him think the world was coming apart at the seams altogether.
He had no heart for the work and didn’t even bother going all the way across to the mainland, stopping in at Little Sweetland again to wander around the abandoned cove, feeling idle and solitary and anxious. He went by the cabins and shaded his eyes to look in the windows. Metal bunks and Formica tables, an incongruous flat-screen television in both. Gas generators stored beside top-of-the-line wood stoves. Someone working out in Fort McMurray or at the nickel mine in Labrador, he’d heard. Money to burn and two weeks a year to get away from it all. Others said it was eccentrics from the Canadian mainland or the States, people who wouldn’t show their faces years at a time. Just enjoyed being able to say they owned an exotic bit of property in a corner of the world no one else had heard of. Sweetland had half a mind to set a match to the buildings, out of spite.
He walked up onto the barrens, toward the headlands where he and Duke had spotted the bison. The path across the swale had all but disappeared and he had to force a trail through the tuckamore. He stood at the edge of the cliffs, the wind up there rifling through his clothes. He could make out Sweetland in the distance, the long hump of it on the horizon. Even in the full light of day, he could see the intermittent flash of the light on Burnt Head, warning away traffic.
Late afternoon by the time he came back down to the wharf and he started for home, travelling slow. There was a low bank of fog sitting on the horizon, the north end of Sweetland already buried, Burnt Head swallowed in the mist. He took the long way around, past the south-end light on the Mackerel Cliffs where the day was still bright and cloudless. He steamed in close to the island, the rocks to starboard so sheer they looked like something CGId in a Hollywood studio. The sky above the boat confettied with wheeling seabirds, turrs and murrs and puffins and tinkers, their endless chatter echoing off the cliff face. The acrid stink of shit like a single fiddle note that held and held and held in the air. Every ledge up there occupied by birds who nested all summer on the bare rock.