“Who, Keith?” He was adrift on the effects of the pills he’d taken and was feeling no pain, though he was finding it hard to follow the bread crumbs of the conversation.
“Yes, fucken Keith. Out before daylight, going to all the shoal grounds, jigging until after dark. Hoping to strike you as you floated past. He’d of got some fright now, he brought you up with a hook through your eyeball.”
“That cunt there wouldn’t even get in the boat with me,” Keith said.
“I knew you wouldn’t down there, that’s why. Never believed you was drowned, first nor last. Loveless said you had your pack and some kind of duffle bag aboard when you left the cove that morning and there was nothing on the boat when they found it.”
“Fucken Loveless,” Sweetland said and he shook his head.
“They had the hardest time getting Loveless to leave,” Barry said. “That little dog of his took off the night before the ferry come. He had half the crew up on the mash calling for the goddamn thing. Delayed the ferry six hours. There was a constable out from the RCMP, he had to threaten to arrest him to get Loveless aboard.”
“You didn’t see the dog, did you?” Keith asked.
Sweetland shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
The brothers were home in Newfoundland after a six-week stint in Fort Mac. They’d purchased the new rig with their government relocation money, Barry told him, and decided to take it for a spin, look over the cove, maybe spend a night or two at the cabin in the valley.
“I burnt the ladder to the loft out there,” Sweetland said.
“Out where?”
“The cabin,” he said. “I went along for a visit the winter. You never had enough wood put up to last a night. Had to burn something.”
“Fair enough,” Barry said.
“And I took the bit of gas you had out there for the generator. And drunk the vodka. And you had some dope tucked away that I got into.”
Barry turned to look at his brother. “This fucker belongs in Her Majesty’s Penitentiary,” he said.
“Anything else?” Keith called.
“No,” Sweetland said, and then he corrected himself. “Yes. That map you had on the wall out there.”
“What map?”
“The Come Home Year thing,” Sweetland said. “It’s around here somewhere.” He waved vaguely and then he said, “I burnt the keeper’s house to the ground a few days ago.”
The brothers exchanged a look and he could see them silently dismiss the claim as the drugs talking. “It’s a fucken wonder you’re alive at all,” Barry said. He offered another spoonful of soup and Sweetland raised a hand to hold it off.
“Come on, old man,” Barry said. “You’re nothing but skin and grief.”
He shook his head. “I’m all right,” he said. He had no appetite for anything but company and he spent a while asking after the people he’d known his years in the cove, where they’d wound up and how they were doing off the island. Occasionally bringing up names of people who had died decades before Barry and Keith were born. Dozing at times as the brothers offered what they knew, so the news came to him in fragments, as though it was washing up on the beach like flotsam from a wreck.
“We should let you sleep,” Barry said finally. “We’ll bunk upstairs.”
Sweetland shook his head. “Don’t leave me down here alone.”
“I’ll stay with him,” Keith said.
“How’s them pills holding out? You need another hit?”
“I’m the best kind,” Sweetland said.
Barry stood up and set the bowl on the counter. Leaned over him with an arm on either side of his shoulders, his face almost close enough to kiss. Sweetland said something to him then, his voice so weak it was inaudible.
“What is it?”
He worked his mouth a few seconds. “You crowd is real, is you?” he said.
Barry put his hand to the old man’s chest. “Real as you are.”
Sweetland nodded. “The Golden Priddles,” he said.
“Moses fucken Sweetland,” Barry said. “I swear to Christ.”
Sweetland flickered out then and didn’t come to himself until the pain needled through the narcotic, pricking him awake. He glanced across to the table where Keith was sitting up with a kerosene lamp.
“Keith,” he said.
The younger man looked up, startled. “What were you on when you did this?” Keith asked. He tapped at the tabletop with a knuckle.
“What is it?”
“The map from the cabin,” he said. “You must have been stoned out of your mind.”
“You got any more of them pills on you?” Sweetland said.
“Yes, b’y.” He came across the room, shaking the contents of the bottle into his palm. Sat beside Sweetland while he picked through the lot. Even in the gloom Sweetland could see the crude letters tattooed on the man’s knuckles, F*E*A*R and H*O*P*E. “These’ll see you through the rest of the night,” Keith said, and he reached to place them on Sweetland’s tongue.
Sweetland shook his head. “Other hand,” he said.
Keith looked at him. “What’s that now?”
“Use the other hand for me.”
Keith looked down a second, shifted the pills as he was told. And Sweetland opened his mouth.
“You’re some Jesus sook,” Keith said.
Sweetland looked up at his face and Keith stared back, unself-conscious in the night’s quiet, in the dim light. Barry’s snoring overhead almost a peaceful sound through the ceiling. Sweetland reached for the hand that he’d requested, and the two men sat like that for what felt to him a long time.
Keith shook his head. “You got some mess made of yourself, Mose.”
“If you scalds your arse,” Sweetland said and he smiled weakly. “I got what I was after and then some.” He squeezed the hand he was holding. “I wanted to say thanks,” he said. “For the cross you put up.”
Keith shrugged. “Owed you that much. After all the beer and skin mags you give us.”
Sweetland almost asked then about the mutilated rabbits, about the fire that burned his stage, whether the brothers had anything to do with that business. But it seemed too far off. A gauzy, edgeless dream that was bleeding coherence and meaning as he lay there. “I think I’m ready to sleep now,” he said. “You go on upstairs, get some rest.”
“You sure you’re all right?”
“Best kind,” Sweetland said. He squeezed Keith’s hand once more and let it loose of his own. And before he knew it, he was gone.
It was still dark when he woke, feeling rested and ready to start the day. He sat up carefully, lifting his legs to the floor, surprised how little discomfort the movement caused him. Blessed the wonders of the Golden Priddles’ magic pills. Keith had left the kerosene lamp burning on the kitchen table, the light twinned in the windowpane. Even from across the room he could see the soot clouding the glass and he went over to turn back the wick. Noticed the map there, spread across the table’s surface, the paper kinked along the rough creases where it had been folded in his knapsack. Stay Home Year scrawled across the top. Sweetland shook his head at that now, at the long list of fanciful harbours and coves and islands and straits he’d pencilled around the coast. Along the entire length of Newfoundland’s south coast were the words Here Be Monsters with a shaky emoticon happy face drawn beside it. His handwriting, though he couldn’t for the life of him remember setting them there. Stoned out of his mind, like Keith said.
Sweetland traced his finger down the Avalon Peninsula where he’d crossed out St. John’s and renamed the capital city Loveless Town, then along the southern shore, across Placentia Bay to the boot of the Burin. Keith had drawn in the leg and high-heeled shoe of Italy there, a dot handy about Italy’s knee with Rome written beside it. He smiled over that as he glanced past St. Pierre and Miquelon toward Sweetland. And he stood away from the table then, a hand raised to his mouth.