He emptied out his packsack to take stock of what he had on hand, shaking the thing upside down on the kitchen table. A dozen shells for the.22. A pair of woollen vamps. The crumpled map he’d stolen from the Priddles’ cabin at the height of his glassy stone and forgotten about. He set the map on the counter and went about packing the bag with tins of peaches, with salt fish wrapped in tinfoil, the last of his ammunition and a blanket and a change of clothes, fresh water in a glass jar. Wanting to be ready to make a run for it when he saw a chance. He cut a new bailer to replace the one he’d used to clean the magnificent cod in the fall.
He listened to the marine forecast morning and evening, but he’d long ago given up lending it any credence. Rain it called for and the sky offered intermittent flurries. It predicted winds out of the north at fifteen knots and the house shook in a gale blowing southeasterly. Sweetland watched the sky at sunrise and sunset and the clouds on the horizon and at night he watched the moon for any sign he might glean there about approaching weather.
On the third night of his vigil he saw the boat riding tight up against the government wharf. The moon almost full, the sea beyond the breakwater’s ruins lying flat calm, a shimmering ladder of moonlight across the surface. It was four in the morning and two full hours to the first glimpse of sunrise. Not a breath of wind.
He chanced turning on a flashlight to find his pack and a jigger he’d tied to twenty foot of line. He shoved the flashlight into his pocket, removed the nails from the table tipped across the door frame, levering his weight on the hammer so they slid silently from the wood. Eased the doors open and snuck out with his packsack.
He collected his rifle where he’d left it on the landwash and then carried on to the wharf where he could hear the hollow thunk of the dory butting concrete. He dropped the jigger from the dock to hook it at the bow, hauling the dory along to the metal rungs of the ladder. He climbed down far enough to hold the boat in place with a foot on the bow, reached up to grab his pack and rifle. Water had been seeping into the dory for days, eight or ten inches collected in the bilge, and Sweetland bailed for all he was worth, working himself into a sweat. Took up the oars before he was halfways done and swung the head around for open water, wanting out of the cove.
He could feel the dory lift on the easy swell as he cleared the edge of the breakwater and he turned east for the Fever Rocks. He stayed close enough to shore he could hear the waves shushing the cliffs. The sheer headlands white and black in the moonlight, looking like dented sheets of metal. The night so still it unnerved him. There could only be weather on the other side of a calm so complete. He had a three-hour haul to the Fever Rocks and the better part of the day then on to Little Sweetland. He glanced up at the moon, setting now and edged with frost. The flash of the north-end light a lifetime away over his shoulder.
Before the sun rose the sky was overcast and threatening, a scudding wind kicking a lop on the water high enough to spit over the gunwale. Sweetland leaning forward to bail every few minutes, trying to hold the dory steady with a single oar lodged under his arm. Soaked with ocean spray, his face rimed with salt. He could feel the temperature drop as the wind funnelled out of the coming storm and he didn’t think for a moment about turning back. He sculled further off the land to give himself plenty of leeway around the Fever Rocks, thinking if he managed to clear the north-end he would row into the lee of the island, pull up in the alcove below Music House until the weather blew itself out.
The wind shifted easterly and bore down as he cleared the point, a spiralling squall of snow shearing in. The seas rising around him so he lost sight of horizon and sky in the troughs, the island steaming closer every time the boat roller-coastered aloft. The north-end light flashing uselessly through the storm. Sweetland gave up any pretension of strategy or course, rowing all he was worth for open ocean to keep off the cliffs, the Fever Rocks looming black above him through the drift. The boat riding low and heavy, so much water aboard it was all Sweetland could do to hold her face on to the gale. She slewed sideways and slammed and tossed her head like a horse spooked and trying to throw a rider. The wind and the rolling chain of waves driving him onto the island and he could see he had no chance of staying clear.
He was too close to shore now to see the light. Only the edge of the helipad and the square outline of the winchhouse above him made any impression in the dirty blur of the storm and he gave up fighting the sway of things, rowing only to keep upright and abreast of the waves, trying to angle the boat toward those marks as he was hurled shoreward. The crests rising higher as he approached the island, the boat levered almost to ninety degrees and he lay flat to keep from being pitched across the stern. Just making the peak before slamming into the trough. She flipped arse over kettle finally and landed face down on top of Sweetland as he went under in the surf. Flailing mad in the black and roar and sudden icy choking, the boat smashing against the rocks and coming apart around him. Sweetland scraped across the ragged granite as the wave retreated until he was lifted and thrown bodily against the rocks by the next wave steaming in. Scraped and lifted and thrown with the stern board and the oars and scraps of wood. He tried to find a handhold each time, something to stop the relentless pistoning, came up hard against metal finally, wrapped a forearm around a rung of the Coast Guard ladder riveted to the Fever Rocks.
He was buried in each successive wave as he clung there, the weight almost enough to rip him loose. He crawled up one rung at a time between the battering avalanches of water that fell over him with a pendulum’s steady rhythm, until he was out of the ocean’s reach. Stopped to catch his breath then, to make the world slow down. His head had struck the cliffs each time he was thrown and he couldn’t see out of his right eye. A knife working at the same shoulder. He’d lost one boot in the undertow’s suck and the other was filled to the lip with seawater.
He glanced up the height of stairs above him and then rested his forehead against a metal rung. His winter coat sopping, the drag on him like an animal tied across his shoulders, but he wouldn’t chance removing it for fear of falling. He started up the ladder with his useless arm and blinded eye, his legs quivering helplessly. His one good arm going numb as he went and he held a rung between his teeth to rest it, to shake the blood back into his fingers. The taste of metal and rust in his mouth.
He refused to look up or down once he started, refused to think in terms of progress. There was a rung to climb and a rung that came after it, he ticked the purgatorial steps off without counting or measuring, and he didn’t know quite what to make of it when his head crested the rock face at the top of the ladder. He touched a hand to the winchhouse to satisfy himself he was where he appeared to be on the headland, then crawled along the path to the flat surface of the helipad, and across that toward the lighthouse, not trusting himself to stand, the wind blowing wild in the open air.
He stopped in the lee of the keeper’s house, sitting back against the skirt around the foundation. He kicked off his one remaining boot, tipped out the water and worked it back over the dripping sock. He touched his face gingerly, the right eye swollen shut. Thick strands of ice in his wet hair.
There was the sway of things, Sweetland knew. There was fighting the sway of things or improvising some fashion of riding it out. And then there was the sway of things beyond fighting and improvisation. It was almost impossible to know the difference between one and the other, but he felt close to making a call on the line. He was soaked and hypothermic and the cold was likely going to kill him. Even if he survived, Loveless’s boat was gone and he had no way off the island now.