5
THROUGH THE MONTH OF DECEMBER the radio was slowly strangled by Christmas carols. The CBC morning show counting down the shopping days as they dwindled. Sweetland gave no thought to his own place in the season until the afternoon of the twenty-fourth when he surprised himself by retrieving the tree from the shed.
He didn’t bother with decorations at all after his mother died, and he was relieved to be free of the chore. Most houses in the cove had artificial trees, but his mother had always insisted on the real thing. Sweetland would hike to the back of the island, spend a day on snowshoes, picking through the straggle of spruce forest. Hunting for something that didn’t look half strangled, or lopsided, or otherwise misshapen by the poor soil, the driving weather.
It wasn’t until Clara came back to Sweetland with Jesse in tow that he picked up an artificial tree on a trip across to Burgeo. Just to have something for the boy to look at, a place to lay the gift Clara had picked out and wrapped and signed Jesse’s name to. But Sweetland made a shaggery of stringing the lights and garland and hanging the glass bulbs, a job he’d always left to his mother. It was finicky work with no practical mechanical principles to guide him. When he was done the tree looked vaguely terrifying, and Jesse refused to go near it.
Sweetland discovered his current tree while watching a hockey game, in a Canadian Tire ad featuring the four-foot-high ornament, the bulbs and lights built right in. Out of the box and plug it in and your job was done. It had a handful of settings to make the lights flash intermittently or light up in a corkscrew run, or in rotating sections from top to bottom. He had Glad Vatcher order one in for him and he put it up in the living room the day it arrived, the ninth of December.
That fucken thing is silver, Duke Fewer said when he laid eyes on it. What kind of a tree do you know is silver?
Everyone in Chance Cove had a laugh over it, but Jesse loved the bizarre confection. He was seven at the time and he sat in the tree’s presence for hours, his face blank and blissful, like someone stoned on hash brownies and staring at the stars.
Sweetland laid the box on the kitchen table and cut through the masking tape holding it shut. He set the tree up on the table, the star at the top almost touching the ceiling beam. Stepped back two paces. It was nothing to look at without the lights, gaudy and lifeless, and he immediately regretted hauling it out. Packed the thing back into its box and set it in the porch, planning to throw it onto the pile of refuse below the incinerator in the morning. Something he should have done, he thought, when it came down last year.
Clara and Pilgrim had come over to see him on Tibb’s Eve, with a fruitcake and a flask of rum. It was the first time Clara had been in the house since the day after Jesse was buried. She gave Sweetland a hug that felt like something she’d been rehearsing for months. And was glad to have out of the way.
Sweetland had been keeping to himself all fall. Passed his days puttering in the shed, out of view of anyone below. It was Clara he dreaded seeing and he could tell it was the same for her. Impossible to keep clear of Jesse, even when he went unmentioned. That loss reflected back and forth between them like a bell ringing and echoing home off a cliff face.
You haven’t got your tree up, she said.
Don’t think I’ll bother with it.
You got to have a tree, Pilgrim said.
And what difference do it make to you? You can’t see it there anyway.
It’s the spirit of the thing, Pilgrim said. He had his two hands spread wide, a gesture that dredged the word beseeching from the murk of Sweetland’s church years.
Would you mind? Clara said.
Sweetland looked at her, surprised. I thought maybe, he said.
No, I’d like it, I think. I think it would be good. Jesse loved that tree.
Get the blind fucker a drink, he said. I’ll go dig it out of the shed.
There was hardly a Christmas light to be seen down through the cove as he walked back with the box in his arms. A dozen houses still occupied, scattered outposts of blinking green and blue lights in the dark. A mild year and no sign of snow. An air of desperate pretend about the season’s scattered trappings.
They took their drinks into the living room where Sweetland set up the tree on top of the television. He turned off the overhead and they finished the flask and half the fruitcake and Sweetland went to the kitchen to stoke the stove and fetch a bottle of rye. The alcohol seemed hardly to touch them for a long time and they got quietly drunk together in the auroral glow of the tree lights as they pulsed and dimmed.
Jesse used to say it was like the lights were breathing, Sweetland said.
Why is that? Pilgrim asked. He roused himself in his seat where he’d been drifting off.
They’re on a timer, Clara told him. They glows brighter a second and then fades out.
We used to have candles in the branches, remember that, Mose? On those little clip-on candleholders. They was only lit ten minutes the whole of the season. And someone standing by with a bucket of water in case the tree caught fire.
Sweetland gave Clara a look. You wouldn’t know but he seen it with his own two eyes, he said.
Leave him be, Clara whispered.
Tell us about the orange you used to get in the wool sock you had for a stocking, Pilgrim.
And you was lucky to get that, the blind man said, swinging his glass wide enough the drink lipped over the side. We’d keep the orange peel, he said, and soak it in a glass of water with a bit of sugar. And we’d drink that down, honey-sweet.
How many generations of youngsters have he bored to death with that story, I wonder.
He bored me to death with it, Clara said and she rolled her eyes.
Oh kiss my arse, Pilgrim said, the both of you. He tried to get to his feet and failed, the ice in his glass rattling onto the floor. Jesus, he said.
Clara and Sweetland dragged Pilgrim up off the couch and they shuffled awkwardly into the kitchen.
We’ll never get him down the hill like this, Sweetland said. Let him sleep it off on the daybed.
They laid him out there beside the stove. Sweetland sat at the kitchen table as Clara untied Pilgrim’s boots and worked them from his feet. There was a quilt folded at one end of the bed that she shook out and tucked around his shoulders, Pilgrim already sound asleep. She leaned in to kiss him and lost her balance, reaching a hand to catch herself. She straightened from the daybed and turned around carefully. Fuck, she said. I’m wasted.
One more for the road?
Why not, hey.
She sat across from Sweetland at the table and he poured them each a generous shot of rye, topping the glasses with Sprite. Pilgrim snoring across the room, a high, strangled sound like wind through a leaky door seal.
He’s a fucken piece of work, that one, Sweetland said.
Clara pointed at him with her drink. You don’t say a word about him.
Wouldn’t dream of it. Loves him like a brother. Sun shines out of his blind arse.
It’s not many men would have been as good to me as he’ve been, I know that for a fact.
Coming home with Jesse to be looked after, you mean?
That, she said. And the rest of it.
The rest of what?
Me not being his youngster.
Sweetland didn’t so much as flinch, but he felt suddenly, miserably sober. He glanced at the man asleep on the daybed and then back across the table at Clara.
He’s blind, Moses, she said, he’s not an idiot.
Sweetland shook his head. How long have he known?
From the beginning. Why do you think him and Mom had no youngsters all those years?