He lit a lamp and warmed a panful of salt fish and French-fried potato for his breakfast. He packed a jar of water and a lunch of cod slathered in partridgeberry jam, to spare himself one more meal of plain salt fish. Put two cans of peaches and the last of the box of ammunition in the pack, half a dozen snares to keep up the charade he was going after rabbits. Tied a set of snowshoes to the leather fastener. Overcast, the wind steady out of the south and the morning looked for rain, so he packed his yellow slicker as well. Drove the quad on the last dregs of his fuel past the new cemetery and out of the cove. It was barely light by the time he reached the King’s Seat and he turned the machine off there, balanced himself up on the stone arm of the Seat. Facing inland, trying to guess which direction to set out in.
He put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, the sound falling quick and hard. The mash beyond him still black and featureless. “That’s a big fucken island, Sweetland,” he said. He sat back on the quad and waited there until it was light enough to pick out the orange tire wire and charcoaled wood of his bonfire pushing up through the snow. Sweetland started up the quad then. He drove around Vatcher’s Meadow, moving slow. Looking and pretending not to look.
He’d almost reached the rise ahead of the north-end light when the engine began falling off, gurgling along ten feet or so and spinning out before kicking in another few seconds. Sweetland turned the machine off and took his pack from the carryall. Walked over the rise, down to the keeper’s house. He went beyond it to the cliffs above the Fever Rocks for the first time since the night he’d witnessed the gathering out there, turning a circle to take in the headlands. Felt the first drops of rain strike his face. He pulled on his slicker and started along the path toward the Priddles’ cabin. Winter a mess in the trees, the snowpack melting underneath. He went through to his thigh in the rotten snow and spent ten minutes working his leg free, using the butt of the.22 to shovel, wrenching his foot back to the surface. Lay there catching his breath while the rain pocked his jacket. “Break a fucken hip,” he said aloud. “Where will you be then.”
The dog was light enough to trot along on the surface of the snowpack, and Sweetland strapped into his snowshoes, trudged a mile past the cabin turnoff, setting his snares haphazardly as he went. Wasting his time on a fool’s errand and angrier with every miserable step he took. So poisoned he felt ready to shoot the dog himself if he found the bastard thing alive.
He walked the length of the island from the Fever Rocks to the south-end light in the rain. Ate his lunch as he walked so as not to waste daylight. His pants and boots soaked through. He made his way along the lip of the Mackerel Cliffs, thinking the dog might have come foraging through the detritus of last year’s breeding season. Broken eggshells and the occasional puffin’s bill scattered like sand dollars in the bare moss nearest the cliff edge, a tinker’s wing snagged in a bit of gorse.
Late afternoon and the light already dimming when he saw it lying twenty yards ahead, black and red against a patch of snow. Stopped where he was, turned toward the cliffs. “Now, Mr. Fox,” he said. The ocean roiling a thousand miles below him.
When he was ready, he walked over to the dog. Impossible to say what had gotten into it, though it looked like the creature had been worked over by a parade of scavengers. It lay on its back, the head torqued sharply up and to one side, its milk-white teeth bared. The eye picked from the one socket he could see. The stomach was open and the cavity stripped clean. Sweetland looked beyond it a little ways, saw scattered tufts of its black fur flickering like down in the wind and wet. He shucked out of his pack and knelt beside the creature. Tried to push the lips of its cold muzzle back down around the teeth.
It was too much of a mess to carry uncovered and he hadn’t thought to bring something to wrap it up. He took off his slicker and laid it on the ground, set the dead animal on the coat and used the arms to tie the bundle tight. Started back for the cove in the cold, steady downpour with what was left of the dog tucked under his arm. The wind rising and driving across the top of the island, blowing so hard over the exposed ground he had to walk at an angle to stay upright, leaning hard to port into the gale.
He stopped shivering halfway to the King’s Seat, which he guessed was a bad sign. Most of the feeling in his legs was gone and he had trouble keeping his feet on the path down into the cove, using the stock of the.22 like a cane. He let himself into the kitchen and stood in the middle of the room, dripping rainwater on the wood floor. Realized in the quiet of the house that he was bawling helplessly and likely had been for some time. His shoulders hitching on the ragged sobs.
He changed out of his soaked clothes, peeling the material away like layers of skin. His head was pulsing and he could feel the first glimmer of a fever stoking its furnace somewhere in the body’s basement. He wanted to lie down for five minutes but knew he wouldn’t have it in him to get up. He lit the storm lamp, put on the heaviest coat in the porch, and carried the yellow slicker out to the shed for a shovel. The wind had dropped with the sun, but there was no let-up in the rain. Sweetland walked his burden up to the new cemetery and set it down in the lee of Jesse’s headstone, placing the storm lamp beside it. Then he pushed the head of the spade into the grass over the boy’s grave.
A foot below the surface the earth was still frozen solid, the shovel ringing against the flinty ground as he swung with all his weight. He carved out a shallow bowl and laid the animal there in its slicker shroud. It wasn’t deep enough by half but Sweetland was too exhausted to dig further into the frost. He placed the shovel over the open hole and walked back down to the shed for a salt beef bucket, headed on to the landwash in the gathering darkness. He filled the bucket with beach stones, carried them back up the path. He stopped every ten or twelve steps to set the weight down, moving to the opposite side of the bucket to change arms. Hefted the rocks, shuffled another ten steps along. Looking up to the glow of the kerosene lamp where he’d left it in the graveyard, working his way back to that tiny beacon.
He knelt beside the new grave, laid the rocks carefully on top of the dog’s body, to spare it any more scavenging. He shovelled the wet earth over the stones, stepping the mound flat with his foot. He sang most of an old hymn under his breath then, humming in the spots where the words escaped him, The night is dark and I am far from home, hmmm hmm hm hm. He turned away when he was done and shuffled toward the house, dragging the head of the spade in his wake.
He forgot the lamp where it sat near the headstone and it threw shadows across the boy’s name until the small hours of the morning when it dimmed and bowed and flickered and finally went out in the rain.
~ ~ ~
CLOUDS OF DOCTORS APPEARED at his bedside after each new surgery, talking back and forth in what sounded to him like Latin or some other dead language. A single nurse among the nine or ten young men. She stood beside a bearded, bespectacled chain-smoker to hold his ashtray and his files. The doctor’s accent like the Nazis Sweetland had heard in war movies at the Park Theatre or the Odeon. The doctor set his cigarette in the ashtray before he lifted the sheets and folded them down around Sweetland’s knees to display the ruined flesh in the patient’s lap.
Traumatic degloving lesion of the penile and scrotal tissue, he announced to the assembled group. The skin presenting avulsion was fixed to the penis through a pedicle formed by a flap in the coronal sulcus, and the skin at the scrotal base was preserved. We assumed the skin’s viability due to the pedicle with what appeared to be good vascularization. The left testis was covered with the remaining scrotal skin, the right testis was buried in the inguinal region until grafting could be conducted.