He was almost finished his smoke when he was startled by the sound of a voice behind him, a single indecipherable syllable. Spun around to see one of the Sri Lankans in the open doorway. It was the fellow he’d thrown the line to at the bow of the lifeboat, who had gestured to ask for water. He was dressed in a flannel work shirt three sizes too big, a pair of oversized pants cinched to his hipless frame with a belt, the cuffs turned halfway up his shins. He looked like a youngster wearing a costume of grown-up’s clothes for a Sunday School play. He nodded at Sweetland and gestured to his mouth again.
Sweetland shook a cigarette from the pack and passed the man a book of matches, but the Sri Lankan’s hands were too shaky to strike one. Sweetland lit the smoke and lit one for himself as well. He waved a hand toward the door. Sorry for your loss, he said, and the Sri Lankan muttered something unintelligible and sorrowful. And then they smoked in silence awhile.
Sweetland kept glancing into the church over the man’s shoulder, thinking of Ruthie and Pilgrim exchanging vows up at that altar. Ruth had bawled the whole night before the ceremony, seventeen and set to ruin her life on Sweetland’s say-so. The girl’s hand trembling as Pilgrim slipped the ring on her finger, her face raw and swollen under the wedding veil. She did not love the man in any fashion, that was plain enough, but she soldiered through it. And Sweetland never saw his sister cry another tear in the years that followed, never heard her utter a word of complaint about her marriage or the husband she’d been tied to. He had taken a false comfort in those facts and was gutted now to see how wrong he’d been about it all.
There was a rustle of movement inside the church and he watched the brother of the dead boy limp out of the shadows, dressed just as strangely, and leaning all his weight on Ruthie’s shoulder. She looked steadily at Sweetland as she approached, her face set. Defiant. And Sweetland dropped his cigarette, crushed it out under his shoe so he wouldn’t have to hold her eye. The Sri Lankan he’d been smoking with reached for the young man’s free arm and Sweetland made a move to take Ruth’s place, but she shook her head. We’re fine here, she said.
He watched them make their slow way up the path. Sorry for your loss, he said again.
He had no inkling how long he would drag those peculiar men in his wake. He almost resented having found them out there for a time, thinking he’d never have discovered the truth about Ruthie otherwise and would have been happier not knowing.
Impossible to say now when it changed for him, when he started to see himself and his sister’s life mirrored darkly in that story — forcing the girl into a marriage she didn’t ask for or want, setting her adrift on that ocean without so much as a drop of water to drink. He might have been speaking to Ruthie and not the Sri Lankans as they left the church that morning. And for years he would have to fight the urge to whisper the phrase in every private moment they had before she died: Sorry for your loss.
The wind turned sometime during the night and he woke to the sound of weather against the front of the cabin, sleet slashing across the door and the window beside it. Pitch-black. The frigid cold in the room enough to tell him the temperature had dropped when the wind shifted.
He’d burned through every bit of firewood in the cabin during the day, and after he’d finished the flask of vodka he had taken the axe to the firebox and the ladder to the loft and burned those as well. All that was left for him now was a small pile of green wood he’d cut while there was still daylight. He tried to light a fire with it, but the wind whistling in the chimney wouldn’t allow the draft to take, pushing smoke back into the cabin. The flame sputtered anemic and heatless and went out altogether while Sweetland nodded off. He’d been too drunk to think of retrieving blankets from the loft bunks before he burned the ladder and he lay cramped on the loveseat under his coat the whole night. The dog curled in his lap was the only bit of heat in all the wide world. His two feet gone to ice.
The morning was a long time coming, the day’s first grey light shrouded by the storm’s weight. Sweetland went out to piss on the lee side of the cabin and he took the axe down into the valley, looking for deadfall that would be dry enough to burn. Wind whipping the snow so he couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. After half an hour of scrabbling blind he had an armful of dry sticks and he managed to light a fire to boil meltwater for tea. He hung his jacket over the heat and he had a breakfast of freeze-dried soup that he shared with the dog. When the dead wood was roaring he put a junk of green spruce in the stove where it spit and burned blue and gave almost no heat. He looked down at the dog where it was still lying on the loveseat.
“What about you?” he said. “You look like you’d burn.”
He spent a lot of time staring at the commemorative map of Newfoundland. Even from across the room he could see how badly detailed it was. Only the largest communities and bays and islands were identified. He walked over to look closer. Little Sweetland was there, and Sweetland lying in the open Atlantic beyond it, but neither warranted a name.
He went across to the cupboards and picked through them a second time, moving every item on the shelves, lifting the cutlery tray, looking for a pen of some sort, a marker. His search rewarded with a stub of pencil and a tightly wound baggie of marijuana. “Well now, Mr. Fox,” Sweetland said. He still had one hand-rolled cigarette that he was saving for a special occasion and he considered that this qualified. He broke it open and mixed the tobacco with the weed, rolled himself two joints. The marijuana dry as dust, an ancient stash the brothers had probably forgotten. Sweetland wet one of the joints in his mouth to keep it from burning too quickly. He smoked half the reefer, choking on the ragged draw and fighting to keep it down. He pinched out the flame to save the second half for later and then he sharpened the pencil stub with a knife, waiting for the stone to hit him.
Nothing to it, not that he could say. He felt completely straight.
He sat in front of the map of Newfoundland and wrote Sweetland across the irregular yellow oblong where he had spent almost his entire existence. Wrote Little Sweetland across the smaller island two inches above it. And he spent the better part of an hour then, adding missing names along the coastline, drawing in small islands that had been inexplicably left out. Folded his arms when he’d run through the inventory he carried in his head, considering the place. On a whim he reached up to draw a circle in the centre of Fortune Bay. Wrote Queenie’s Island across the face of it. He carried on then, dotting the shoreline with islands and communities and features that didn’t exist, naming them all after people he knew. Bob-Sam’s Island. Jesse’s Head. Priddle’s Point. Pilgrim’s Arm. Vatcher’s Tickle.
He stepped away when he thought he was done, admiring his handiwork. Reached up to draw a line through the faux-antique Come Home Year. Wrote Stay Home Year above it. Giggled aloud then and felt immediately self-conscious. Stoned out of his head, he realized.
He glanced across at the dog. “Some clever, hey?”
The animal turned a few circles on the loveseat, then flopped down with a sigh.