He watched the room awhile then, thinking something might happen in there, but nothing did. It was a bitter night to be standing still and eventually he turned to walk home, throwing one last glance over his shoulder. Saw the child standing near the glass. He let out a whimper with the shock of it, and then covered his mouth to stop himself making another sound.
The girl was naked and stared out at the night with the same brazen look she had sixty years ago, her hair cropped short as a boy’s. Her child’s body stripling and oddly beautiful and distressing, just as he remembered. It took him a moment to register the fact she wasn’t alone in the room, that there was a woman seated in the chair at the window. Her hair in curlers and her head bowed toward a book in her lap. They were holding hands, the girl and the old woman beside her, though they each seemed oblivious to the other’s presence. “Queenie,” Sweetland said aloud. He raised a hand tentatively, as a greeting. But neither acknowledged him or seemed to know he was there. The woman in the chair turned a page with her free hand, a lit cigarette between the fingers.
He stood watching the two until he heard his teeth chattering with the cold. And he stayed a long while afterwards, not wanting to give them up, thinking they might meet his eyes eventually. When he couldn’t stand still a moment longer, he headed toward his place, walking backwards until he lost sight of the girl. Shuffle-ran to his porch to haul another coat overtop of the one he was wearing. By the time he turned the corner on his way back to Queenie’s the light was out.
He watched for it every evening afterwards, at the sink and during his walks, and always one last time before he turned in for the night. But he never saw the light or the child or the old woman again.
March came in like a lamb. There was a warm spell in the lead-up to St. Patrick’s Day that Sweetland didn’t trust for a second. Waiting for the storm that followed the holiday. Sheila’s Brush it was called, arriving in the wake of St. Paddy and usually heralding a full-on return to late-winter misery.
He took advantage of the mild temperatures to work outside, though he stuck close to home. He left the stove cold one morning and climbed up on the roof with the chimney brush. He’d improvised a pole by duct-taping broom handles to either end of an old stair rail salvaged from Loveless’s house, worked it hand over hand into the chimney, pushing the metal bristle down the flue. Hauled the brush up by its string and repeated the manoeuvre half a dozen times to scrub out the soot. Sweating in the sun’s fickle heat. The mythical storm was like a letter he half expected in the mail, and each day it didn’t show he was almost disappointed.
He looked up at the hills surrounding the cove, sunlight making them ring with meltwater. He’d always loved that sound, waited for it each spring. Hearing it made him certain of the place he came from. He’d always felt it was more than enough to wake up here, to look out on these hills. As if he’d long ago been measured and made to the island’s exact specifications.
The dog appeared to take the beautiful weather at face value, wandering further and further afield during the days, sometimes not coming back to the house until Sweetland was long asleep. It barked outside to be let in and Sweetland shuffled across the kitchen in the dark. He stood the door open and the dog ran straight for the dish by the stove where its food had been sitting all day. Sweetland stood listening to the porcelain scrape of it in the darkness, waiting for the dog to finish. It jumped onto the daybed then, turning circles among the quilts to settle in. Sweetland all the while complaining about being woken up and the mess it was making of his bed with its filthy paws. “You got a perfectly good doghouse out there to use,” he said. He drifted off listening to the dog grooming itself, the lap of its tongue as calm and insistent as water dripping from a tap.
He woke with a start, later than he was used to getting up, sunlight in the kitchen. The day already underway and he lay there nursing a centreless sense of dread. He’d forgotten to do something important was the feeling, but he couldn’t place the thing. He was up and had lit the fire and was walking to the door to piss into the snow when it struck him the dog hadn’t woken him in the night, coming back to the house. That it had been out wandering since the morning before.
The weather was mild enough that the animal might have kipped down in the bush or just meandered up on the mash all night, as it used to do when it was Loveless’s dog. Sweetland listened awhile to the runoff rattling down into the cove from the hills, thinking it was almost time to move back into the upstairs bedroom. Thinking he might be able to tail some rabbit slips on the mash before long. The morning still cool but already warming in the sunlight. And he knew it a certainty as he stood there that he would never see the dog alive again.
He didn’t leave the cove to go looking, not wanting to admit by his actions what his heart knew to be true. He puttered around the property, to be close by if the dog came back. Mid-morning he took a bucket of tar onto the roof and patched around the chimney flashing. It was a chore that didn’t need doing strictly, but he could keep an eye on most of the cove from up there and into the hills. He stayed on the roof until it was time to eat. Before he climbed down the ladder he put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, and he stood listening as the echoes swung across the hills. Watching for any sign of movement in that world of endless stillness.
In the afternoon he walked along the paths with a bit of salt fish in his shirt pocket. Not much to tempt the animal with, but he had nothing better to offer. He felt sure it was nowhere close, but he couldn’t stop himself going through the motions regardless. Most of the houses in the cove were built on shores or rock foundations and he kept an eye for cubbyholes the dog might have crawled into, kneeling at the likeliest spots and calling its name. He went out Church Side to the meadow and then backtracked around the harbour, walking all the way to the incinerator. He stopped there, leaned a little ways into the iron darkness, waited for his eyes to adjust. Dirty snow drifted against the far wall. Black lumps of unidentifiable refuse. Loveless’s calf just inside the entrance, the bare skeleton collapsed and so jumbled by scavengers it would be almost impossible now to identify the creature for what it was.
After he finished his supper that evening he took up the dog’s bowl and threw the two-day-old food into the stove. Washed it along with his own dishes and refilled it with the leftover potato and fish he’d cooked for himself. Set the bowl back beside the stove.
He sat at the kitchen window, looking out at Diesel’s doghouse in the failing light, listening for the weather on the radio. He went to the door every half-hour to whistle up to the hills. And again when he woke to take a piss in the middle of the night, standing on the doorsill in his small clothes, the chill licking at his ankles. Decided as he stood there that he would go up on the mash in the morning and set a few snares, see if he couldn’t get a bit of fresh craft to eat.
He hadn’t slept much before he woke to piss and didn’t sleep at all afterwards, staring at the kitchen window for the first sign of light. Getting up now and then to set a junk of wood in the stove. There was no rush, he knew that for a fact. And he was anxious to start out all the same.