He leafed aimlessly through Duke’s magazines without reading a word or even registering the pictures. It was a mechanical activity that offered some relief from the tedium of fatigue, a sense of forward progress, of time passing. Picking up one after another and blindly turning the pages start to finish, reaching for the next. He’d made his way through to the bottom third of the pile when he began coming across the mutilated articles, squares and rectangles cut from the pages, and even then it took a while to process what he was seeing. He went to the drawer where he’d put away the threatening notes and he spent half an hour matching them to the words and letters scissored from the headlines. The door to the barbershop was never locked and he supposed anyone could have slipped in and borrowed a magazine for the purpose at hand. Though he couldn’t guess why they might see the need to return it when they were done.
All those months the man had held his counsel in Sweetland’s presence, refusing to offer a word of advice one way or another. Sweetland shook his head. “You’re a lousy cunt, Duke Fewer,” he said. He didn’t know if he should be amused or murderous or heartbroken. But he didn’t have it in him to feel much of anything at all.
He burned the notes and the magazines in the stove and he occupied himself then with simply staring out the window. Hours watching the slice of cove visible from the kitchen table. He could see the ruined line of the breakwater, the remaining stones lying low in the ocean, the waves pushing past them into the harbour’s calm. It was the end of the government wharf, that loss. Though it would be years, he guessed, before the sea managed to finish the job.
He was days into that vigil before Sweetland noted the extended lull in the world he was observing. That there hadn’t been a sign of a living creature in all the time he’d sat there. Even the gulls seemed to have disappeared. He’d grown accustomed to silence and stillness in his months alone. But the absence out there seemed of a different order altogether and it gave a new focus to his sedentary time at the table, watching to prove his observation wrong.
Near the end of March he caught sight of a ring seal inside the remains of the breakwater, the dark head bobbing in the shallows of the cove. It was early in the year to see them this far south and Sweetland waited at the kitchen window a long time. Afraid he might have imagined it, just to address the lack he was seeing out there. He was ready to dismiss the sighting altogether until he spotted the creature near the government wharf. He went in and out of the porch, gathering up his coat and boots, rummaging for ammunition. His limbs felt brittle and insubstantial, every motion shadowed by the fever’s aftermath. His heart pounding in his throat.
He started down the path with the.22 and then turned back to the shed, to haul the oars down out of the rafters. Hoofed his awkward load toward the water, his coat hanging open, his head bare to the wind. It was bitterly cold despite the sunshine, but he didn’t feel a thing in the rush. Giddy with seeing the animal, taking it as a sign the world was shifting back into an orbit he recognized.
He went to the government dock, which was high enough to give him a shot anywhere across the cove. Spring seals tended to sink and even if he managed to hit the animal he’d likely have nothing to show for the effort. If he was lucky, it would float at the surface long enough to get Loveless’s boat in the water. He was too weak to hold the rifle steady and he knelt behind a capstan to rest an elbow on the metal.
A lop on the cove, sunlight strobing across the surface. A dozen times he thought he spotted the seal amid the glimmer and black. Saw it bobbing in the shade of the breakwater rocks finally, its sleek head like something carved out of stone and sanded smooth. Sweetland took a breath, letting it out slowly. A spit of ocean kicked up and the sound of the rifle echoed in the ring of hills behind him. Sweetland scanned back and forth across the area he’d fired at. He might have missed the creature altogether and it wouldn’t come up for air again until it was safe in open water. It might be floating there dead or already sinking to the bottom.
Loveless’s boat was still weighted with beach rocks and iron junk. Sweetland emptied the bilge as quickly as he could manage, using the butt-end of an oar to hammer the frozen stones free of one another. He set the drain plug with the heel of his hand and he dragged the boat toward the landwash. It seemed to have gained weight in the winter cold, Sweetland grunting it backwards in foot-long increments. He went around to the bow once he reached the water and shoved it out far enough to float, used an oar to pole into deeper water after he climbed aboard.
He pulled across the cove toward what was left of the breakwater, craning over his shoulder as he went. He was almost on top of it before he caught sight of the body, a dark figure just under the dark surface. He hadn’t thought to bring a gaff or a hook in the rush and he hauled his sleeves up past the elbow as he drifted toward it. He lifted one oar clear of the thole-pin lock and leaned over the gunwale to bring the water-logged weight of the corpse alongside, trying to lever it closer to the surface. Reached down into the stinging cold with his bare hand.
The animal’s coat was slick and surprisingly loose on the body. He wrapped his fist in the hide, leaned the other hand on the gunwale to ratchet the thing out of the water, and a young boy’s lank head of hair broke the surface, the scalp glowing a tuberous white beneath it. The sight clapped all the breath from Sweetland’s lungs. He fell back against the far side of the dory, his feet kicking against the boards in spasms. He lifted his head over the gunwale and vomited into the ocean, choking on the bile. He drew in a wet, ragged breath and screamed up at the hillside, at the blank houses. He dropped into the bilge, his back against the gunwale, his eyes on the low sky. “Leave off me,” he said. “For the love of Jesus, leave off me.”
The dory drifted around as he lay there, swinging Sweetland toward the body again. It had turned belly up and he could see the smashed nose and missing ear, the eyes wide and staring at the clouds. He grabbed the oar and flailed savagely at the thing until he was far enough away to set the oars and row back toward the beach. A sickening, guttural grunting in the air, like the sound of someone being electrocuted. He was halfway up the path to the house before he recognized the sound was coming from his own mouth.
When he reached the house he turned the kitchen table on its side, dragging it crabwise into the porch and nailing the Formica across the door. He didn’t put in a fire but he kept the radio on low for the intermittent comfort of human voices as the tidal signals drifted in and out. He slept in troubled snatches, coming to himself like someone shaking themselves out of a nightmare. Kept himself awake making a list of what to pack, debating the best time to start out and the likeliest way off the island. It was a bad time of year to chance the crossing, especially in a crate as feckless as Loveless’s dory. It was riskier to row out past the north-end light around the Fever Rocks, but twice the distance to round the Mackerel Cliffs. He would have to hopscotch across to Little Sweetland, break into one of the cabins there to spend the night. Then try for the mainland the following morning if the weather held.
He stayed clear of the windows, spying on the cove from behind a curtain’s edge. He hadn’t hauled Loveless’s dory up onto the landwash when he came ashore, jumping over the bow into water past his knees, sloshing up onto the beach, raving like a lunatic. The boat had been drifting unmoored around the harbour ever since. There was just enough of a breakwater left to stop it floating away altogether and Sweetland watched for it to come back into shallow water or close enough to the government wharf to get a line on it somehow. Trying not to think what else might be drifting unmoored inside the breakwater.