The Shipping News (17 page)

“Let me help,” said Dawn, half up, her skirt caught under the chair leg. But there was nothing she could do. Her voice echoed in the hard room.

Quoyle pierced the crust with an aluminum implement. Bunny stuck her fork into the candle flame.

“Don’t do that,” said the aunt dangerously. A section of lobster pie rose from the steaming dish, slid onto Dawn’s plate.

“Oh, is it lobster?” said Dawn.

“Yes, indeed.” The aunt. “Lobster pie, sweet as a nut.”

Dawn made her voice very warm, addressed the aunt. “I’ll just have salad, Agnis. I don’t care for lobster. Since I was a girl. We had to take lobster sandwiches to school. We’d throw them in the ditch. Crab, too. Like big spiders!” Tried a laugh.

Bunny looked at the crust and orange meat on her plate. Quoyle braced himself for screeching but it did not come. Bunny chewed ostentatiously, said “I love red spider meat.”

Dawn to Quoyle. Confiding. Everything she said overwrought. Pretending an interest.

“It’s so awful what those people did to Agnis.” Didn’t actually care.

“What people?” said Quoyle, his hand at his chin.

“The people in the Hitler boat. The way they just sneaked out.”

“What’s this?” said Quoyle, looking at the aunt.

“Well, looks like I got stiffed,” she said, flames of rage sweeping into her hair roots. “We installed the banquettes on the yacht, all chairs but two done and delivered, all that. And they’re gone. The yacht’s gone. Pulled out after dark.”

“Can’t you track them through the yacht registry? That boat’s one of a kind.”

[153] “I thought I’d wait a little,” said the aunt. “Wait to hear. Maybe there was a reason they had to leave in a hurry. Sickness. Or business. They’re involved in the oil business. Or she is. She’s the one with the money. Or she remembered a hair appointment in New York. That’s how they are. Why I didn’t say anything to you.”

“Didn’t you do some work for them back in the States? That would show their address?”

“Yes, a few years ago I upholstered the sofas. But those papers are still back on Long Island. In storage.”

“I thought you were having everything sent up here,” said Quoyle, noticing again the emptiness of rooms, the lack of the furniture she said was being shipped. Two months now.

Dawn noticed his lips were slippery with butter from the lobster pie.

“It takes time,” said the aunt. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Outside the wind was up and humming in the cables. Bunny at the window.

“Who wants to play cards,” said the aunt. Chafing her hands and squinting like a stage villain card shark.

“Know how to play All-Fours?” said Dawn.

“Girl,” said the aunt, “you know it.”

Glanced at the cupboard where she kept her whiskey bottle. Could bite the top off.

19

Good-bye, Buddy

“The Russian Escape. A prisoner is ... secured to his

guard ... In his efforts to escape he rubs his hands together

until the heels of his hands pinch a bight of the rope. It is then

an easy matter to roll the bight down as far as the roots of the

fingers, where it can be grasped with the finger tips of one hand

and slipped over the backs of the fingers of the other hand.

The prisoner then pulls away and the ... rope slips over the back

of his hand and under the handcuff lashing.”

THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

SOMETIMES
Tert Card blew everybody out of the place. It was a hot, windless noon hour like a slot between two warring weather systems. They squeezed into Billy’s truck, off to the Fisherman’s Chance in Killick-Claw for fish and chips, escaped and away from Tert Card who scratched with both hands. Who had the itch in his armpits.

They sat on the public wharf eating out of Styrofoam boxes, stunned by the heat. Quoyle breathed through his mouth, squinted against dazzle. Although Billy Pretty warned, pointed to the north east horizon at violet clouds pulled from a point as a silk scarf is pulled from a wedding ring. In the southwest they saw rival billows in fantastic patterns, as though a paper marbler had worked through [155] them with his combs making French curls, cascades and winged nonpareil fountains.

“This week I’ve the most sexual abuse stories I’ve ever had,” said Nutbeem. “Jack ought to be happy. Seven of them. The usual yaffle of disgusting old dads having it on with their kiddies, one more priest feeling up the choirboys, a nice neighborly uncle over in Stribbins Cove who gives the girls rides to Sunday School and buys them sweets if they pull down their knickers for him. One was a bit unusual—gives you a glimpse into the darker side of the Newfoundland character. This lad was a bouncer at a bar down in Misky Bay, tried to throw out some drunk. But the drunk went to his truck, got a tomcod from the ice chest in the back, into the bar again, overpowered the bouncer, ripped his trousers stem to stern and sexually assaulted him with the tomcod.” Nutbeem did not laugh.

“What’s a tomcod?” asked Quoyle.

Billy leaned against a piling, yawned. “Small one, boy. Small cod. You got your tomcod, your salt cod, your rounders ... Any way you want to call it, it’s fish.”

Gazed at the advancing clouds. Tendrils snaking into open blue.

“ ‘Tis a strange time, strange weather. Remember we had a yellow day on Monday—the sky cast was an ugly yellow like a jar of old piss. Then yesterday, blue mist and blasting fog. Cap it off, my sister’s youngest boy called up from St. John’s, said there was a fall of frozen ducks on Water Street, eight or ten of them, feathers all on, eyes closed like they was dreaming, froze hard as polar cap ice. When that happens, look out, boys. Like the story I got yesterday over the phone. Same place as Nutbeem’s tomcod, Misky Bay. Oh, Misky Bay is going through some kind of band of astral influence. Wouldn’t be surprised to hear if they hadn’t had a fall of frozen ducks down there, too.”

“Give us the story,” said Nutbeem, coughing into his pipe.

“Not much of a story, but it shows the feeling that’s took hold of Misky Bay. I wouldn’t go down there—as I get it from the Mounties a mother of three children went at her grandmother with [156] a metal towel rack, laced her up something shocking, then set fire to the house. They got ‘em out, but the poor old lady was bloody as a skinned seal and burned all up and down. And, in the kitchen, the fire volunteers finds a treasure trove. In a bucket under the sink is three hundred dollars worth of religious jewelry shoplifted from Woolworth’s over the past year. Each says the other done it.”

“I didn’t get any car wrecks this week.” Quoyle, still thinking of the one in his mind. A breeze ruffled the bay, died.

“Of course,” said Nutbeem, “never rains but it floods the cellar. I’ve got these tremendously nasty sexual assaults, but I’ve also got my best foreign news story-the Lesbian Vampire Trial’s over. Just heard it on the shortwave this morning.”

“Good,” said Quoyle. “Maybe Jack will give up the car wreck for that. Any pictures?”

“They’re rather difficult to get on the older radios,” said Nutbeem. “And I think it’s unlikely Jack will give up the car wreck spot to an Australian story. That’s a standing order: a car wreck and pix on page one. You’ll have to use an old one out of Tert’s file unless somebody smashes up between now and five o’clock. You got the shipping news and a boat piece, anyway. Right?” Nutbeem, who touched down and flew away.

“Right.” Quoyle licked ketchup off the box lid, screwed his napkin into a knot. “The boat that blew up in Perdition Cove Tuesday morning.”

Billy stretched and yawned, his withered neck taut again for a few seconds. “I can feel the season changing,” he said. “Drawing in. This weather change coming means the end of hot weather. Time I got out to Gaze Island and worked on me poor old father’s grave. Put it off last year and the year before.” Some sadness straining the words. Billy seemed stored in an envelope; the flap sometimes lifted, his flattened self sliding onto the table.

“What hot weather?” said Quoyle. “This is the first day I can think of over forty degrees Fahrenheit. The rain is always ready to turn into snow. And where’s Gaze Island?”

“Don’t know where Gaze Island is?” Billy laughed a little. His stabbing blue-eyed look. “Fifteen miles northeast of the narrows. Bunch of whales went aground there once—some calls it Whale [157] Island, but it is Gaze Island to me. Though it had other names in the beginning. A beauty place. A place of local interest, Quoyle.” Teasing.

“Like to see it,” said Quoyle who had found his tub of coleslaw. “I’ve never been on an island.”

“Don’t be stun, boy. You’re on one now, just look at a map. You can come out with me. You ought to know about Gaze Island, you ought. Proper thing. Saturday morning. If the weather’s decent I’ll go out Saturday.”

“If I can,” said Quoyle. “If the aunt doesn’t have major things planned for me.” Kept gazing out at the bay. As if waiting for a certain ship. “There was a newsprint carrier hove to out in the bay yesterday. I was going to write about it.” The sunlight fading as the clouds came on.

“Saw her out there. Heard she had some trouble.”

“Fire in the engine room. Cause unknown. Diddy Shovel says that five years ago she wouldn’t have put in here for mutiny or famine. But now there’s the repair dock, the suppliers, the truck terminal. So they’re coming in. Plans to enlarge the dockyard. He says they’re talking about a shipyard.”

“Ar, it wasn’t always like this,” said Billy Pretty. “Killick-Claw used to be a couple of rickety fish stages and twenty houses. The big harbor, up until after World War II, was at the same damn place we been talking about—Misky Bay. Ar, she was a hot place—them big warships in there, tankers, freighters, troop carriers, everything. After the war, boy, she laid right down flat on the deck. And Killick-Claw come up and give her a kick overboard. Go ahead, ask me what happened.”

“What happened?”

“Ammunition. During the war Misky Bay was a ammunition-loading port. They dropped so goddamn many tons of the stuff overboard that nobody dare let down an anchor to this day in Misky Bay. The ammunition and the cables. There is a snarl of telephone and telegraph cables down at the bottom of that harbor would make you think a army of cats with a thousand balls of wool been scrabbling and hoovering around.

“Fact, that’s probably when poor old Misky Bay started [158] downhill, when the blast was put on her. You know, that’d be a good head for my towel rack story, ‘Misky Bay Curse Still Wrecking Lives.’ ” The sun obliterated, a chop on the water, stiff breeze.

“Look at that.” Billy, pointing at a tug towing a burned hulk. “Don’t know what they think they’re going to do with that. That must be your story from Perdition Cove. What happened, Quoyle?”

The stink of char came to them.

“Got it here,” fishing in his pocket. “Course it’s still rough.” But he’d spent two days talking to relatives, eyewitnesses, the Coast Guard, electricians, and the propane gas dealer in Misky Bay. Read it aloud.

GOOD-BYE, BUDDY

Nobody in Perdition Cove will ever forget Tuesday morning. Many were still asleep when the first streak of sunlight painted the stern of the long-liner
Buddy
.

Owner Sam Nolly stepped aboard, a new light bulb in his hand. He intended to replace a burned-out light. Before the streak of sunlight reached the wheelhouse Sam Nolly was dead and the
Buddy
was a raft of smoking toothpicks floating in the harbor.

The powerful blast shattered nearly every window in Perdition Cove and was heard as far away as Misky Bay. The crew of a fishing boat off Final Point reported seeing a ball of fire roll across the water followed by a dense black cloud.

Investigators blamed the explosion on leaking propane gas that accumulated forward overnight and ignited when Sam Nolly screwed in the fresh bulb.

The long-liner was less than two weeks old. It was launched on Sam and Helen (Bodder) Nolly’s wedding day.

“A shame,” said Billy.

“Not bad,” said Nutbeem. “Jack will like it. Blood, Boats and Blowups.” Looked at his watch. They got up. A paper blew away, rolled along the wharf and into the water.

Billy squinted. “Saturday morning,” he said to Quoyle. Eyes [159] like a blue crack of sky. Back to Tert Card, the cramped office. Overhead the cloud masses had merged, taken the form of fine-grained scrolls like tide marks on the sand.

After Billy and Nutbeem went in Quoyle lingered, stood in the cracked road a minute. The long horizon, the lunging, clotted sea like a swinging door opening, closing, opening.

20

Gaze Island

“The Pirate and the Jolly Boat.

A pirate, having more prisoners than he has room for,

tows one boatload astern.

All knives are taken away, and the boat made fast with

the bight of a doubled line. The after end of the line is ring

hitched to a stern ringbolt. CLOVE HITCHES are put around

each thwart, and the line is rove through the bow ringbolt and

brought to deck. They are told to escape if they can.

How do they escape?”

THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

QUOYLE
in Billy Pretty’s skiff. The old man hopped aboard nimbly, set a plastic bag under the seat and yanked the rope. The engine started—
waaah
—like a trumpet. A blare of wake spilled out behind them. Billy plunged around in a plywood box, dug out a tan plastic contraption, propped it in a corner, sat down and leaned back.

“Ah. ‘Tis me Back Buddy—gives the spinal column support and comfort.”

There was nothing to say. Haze on the horizon. The sky a sheet of pearl, and through it filtered a diffuse yellow. The wind filled Quoyle’s mouth, parted and snapped his hair.

“There’s the Ram and the Lamb,” said Billy, pointing at two rocks just beyond the narrows. The water swilled over them.

[161] “I like it,” said Quoyle, “that the rocks have names. There’s one down off Quoyle’s Point—”

“Oh, ay, the Comb.”

“That’s it, a jagged rock with points sticking up.”

“Twelve points onto that rock. Or used to be. Was named after the old style of brimstone matches. They used to come in combs, all one piece along the bottom, twelve to a comb. You’d break one off. Sulfur stink. They called them stinkers—a comb of stinkers. Quoyle’s Point got quite a few known sunkers and rocks. There’s the Tea Buns, a whole plateful of little scrapers half a fathom under the water, off to the north of the Comb. Right out the end of the point there’s the Komatik-Dog. You come on it just right it looks for all the world like a big sled dog settin’ on the water, his head up, looking around. They used to say he was waiting for a wreck, that’d he’d come to life and swim out and swallow up the poor drowning people.”

Bunny, thought Quoyle, never let her see that one.

Billy pulled his cap down against the glare. “You get together with old Nolan yet?”

“No, I think I saw him one morning out alone in an old motor dory.”

“That’s him. A strange one, he. Does everything the old way. Won’t take unemployment. A good fisherman but lives very poor. Keeps to himself. I doubt he can read or write. He’s one of your crowd, some kind of fork kin from the old days. You ought to go down to his wee house for a visit.”

“I didn’t think we had any relatives still living here. The aunt says they’re all gone.”

“She’s wrong on this one. Nolan is still very much among the quick, and I hear he’s got it worked up in his head that the house belongs to him.”

“What house? Our house? The aunt’s house on the point?”

“That’s the one.”

“This is a fine time to hear about it,” muttered Quoyle. “Nobody’s said a word to us. He could have come by, you know.”

“That’s not his way. You want to watch him. He’s the old [162] style of Quoyle, stealthy in the night. They say there’s a smell that comes off him like rot and cold clay. They say he slept with his wife when she was dead and you smell the desecration coming off him. No woman would have him again. Not a one.”

“Jesus.” Quoyle shuddered. “What do you mean, ‘old style of Quoyle.’ I don’t know the stories.”

“Better you don’t. Omaloor Bay is called after Quoyles. Loonies. They was wild and inbred, half-wits and murderers. Half of them was low-minded. You should have heard Jack on the phone when he got your letter to come to the
Gammy Bird
. Called up all your references. Man with a bird’s name. Told Jack you was as good as gold, didn’t rave nor murder.”

“Partridge,” said Quoyle.

“We was on pins and needles waiting to see what come in the door. Thought you was going to be a big, wild booger. Big enough, anyway. But you know, the Quoyles only been on the Point there a hundred years or so. Went there in the 1880s or 1890s, dragging that green house miles and miles across the ice, fifty men, a crowd of Quoyles and their cunny kin pulling on the ropes. Dragged it on big runners, spruce poles made into runners. Like a big sled.”

Out through the narrows and Billy set a seaward course. Quoyle had forgotten his cap again and his hair whipped. The skiff cut into the swell. He felt that nameless pleasure that comes only with a fine day on the water.

“Ar,” said Billy above the motor and the sound of water rushing off the hull, “speaking of named rocks, we got ‘em all along, boy, thousands and thousands of miles with wash balls and sunkers and known rocks every foot of the way. Newfoundland itself is a great rock in the sea, and the islands stribbled around it are rocks. Famous rocks like the Chain Rock and the Pancake up in St. John’s, both of them above water and steep-to, and there’s old terrors that they’ve blowed up—the Merlin and the Ruby Rock that was in St. John’s narrows. A hundred years ago and more they blew them up. Up along the north shore there’s Long Harry. And mad rocks with the seaweed streeling.

“I mind to Cape Bonavista there’s Old Harry Rock under two fathoms and he stretches out three mile into the sea and at the far [163] end is a cruel little rise they call Young Harry. In North Broad Cove they’ve Shag Rock and Hell’s Rock. The shag, y’know is the cormorant, the black goose, a stinking black thing that the old people used to say built its nest with dead fish. That’s what they called you if you come from Grand Banks. If you come from Fortune you were a gaily, a scarecrow. Down on the Burin Peninsula.” Billy Pretty tossed his head up and sang in a creaky but lilting tenor:

Fortune gaily-baggers and Grand Bank shags

All stuffed into paper bags.

When them bags begin to bust

The Grand Bank shags begin to cuss.

“You heard that one? Now, to rocks again, Salvage Harbor has a big broad one they call the Baker’s Loaf and on along you’ll find the Cook-room Rock. Funk Islands is snaggy water, reefs and shoals and sunkers. The Cleopatra and Snap Rock. The Fogo Islands, dangerous waters for rocks where many a ship has wrecked. Born and brought up there to find your way through. And sticking out of the water is the jigger, Old Gappy, Ireland Rock, the Barrack Rock, the Inspector who wants to inspect your bottom.

“Look there, you can see it now, Gaze Island. Been about three years since I come out here. Where I was born and brought up and lived—when I was ashore—until I was forty years old. I shipped out and worked the freighters when I was young for quite a few years. Then I was in two wrecks and thought if there was going to be another, I wanted it to be in home water. There’s many of my relatives down under this water, so it’s homey, in a way. I come back and fished the shore. Jack Buggit was part of my crowd, even though he come from Flour Cove. His mother was my mother’s cousin. You wouldn’t know it to look at us, but we’re the same age. Both seventy-three. But Jack hardened and I shriveled. The government moved us off Gaze in ‘sixty. But you’ll see how some of them houses is standing just as straight and firm after thirty-odd years empty. Yes, they
looks
solid enough.”

“Like our house down on the Point,” said Quoyle. “It was in good shape, endured forty years empty.”

“It endured more than that,” said Billy.

[164] Gaze Island reared from the water as sheer cliff. Half a mile from the formidable island rocks broke the surface, awash with foam.

“That’s the Home Rock. We takes our bearing off it.” He changed course toward the southern tip of the island.

Billy worked through an invisible maze of shoals and sunkers. The boat pointed at a red stone wall, waves smashing at its foot. Quoyle’s dry mouth. They were almost in the foam. Twenty feet from the face of the cliff he still could not see the entrance. Billy headed the boat at a shadow. The sound of the engine multiplied, beat and shouted at them, echoed off the walls that rose above onyx water.

They were in a narrow tickle. Quoyle could reach out and almost touch the rock. The cliff wall opened gradually, the tickle widened, bent left, and came out into a bay enclosed by a hoop of land. Five or six buildings, a white house, a church with a crooked steeple, a slide of clapboard, old stages and tilts. Quoyle had never imagined such a secret and ruined place. Desolate, and the slyness of the hidden tickle gave the sense of a lair.

“Strange place,” said Quoyle.

“Gaze Island. They used to say, over in Killick-Claw, that Gaze Islanders were known for two things-they were all fish dogs, knew how to find fish, and they knew more about volcanoes than anybody in Newfoundland.”

Billy brought his boat up to the beach, cut the engine and raised it. Silence except for the drip of water from the propeller, and the skreel of gulls. Billy hawked and spat, pointed down the land curve to a building set away from the shore.

“There’s our old place.”

Once painted red, greyed it to a dull pink by salt weather. A section of broken fence. Billy seized his bag and jumped out of the boat, bootheels made semicircles in the sand. Secured the line to a pipe hammered into the rock. Quoyle clambered after him. The silence. Only the sound of their boots gritting and the sea murmur.

“There was five families lived here when my dad was a boy, the Prettys, the Pools, the Sops, the Pilleys, the Cusletts. Every family was married with every other family. Boy, they was kind, [165] good people, and the likes of them are gone now. Now it’s every man for himself. And woman, too.”

He tried to lift a fallen section of fence from the weeds, but it broke in his hands and he only cleared away the tangle from the upright section, braced it with rocks.

They walked up to the high gaze that gave the island its name, a knoll on the edge of the cliff with a knot of spruce in one corner, all hemmed around with a low wall of stones. Quoyle, turning, could look down to the cup of harbor, could turn again, look at the open sea, at distant ships heading for Europe or Montreal. Liquid turquoise below. To the north two starched sheet icebergs. There, the smoke of Killick-Claw. Far to the east, almost invisible, a dark band like rolled gauze.

“They could see a ship far out in any direction from here. They’d put the cows up here in the summer. Never a cow in Newfoundland had a better view.”

They walked over the moss and heather to a cemetery. A fence of blunt pickets enclosed crosses and wooden markers, many fallen on the ground, their letters faded by cold light. Billy Pretty knelt in the corner, tugged at wild grass. The top of the wooden marker was cut in three arcs to resemble a stone, the paint still legible:

W. Pretty

born 1897 died 1934

Through the great storms of life he did his best,

God grant him eternal rest.

“That’s me poor father,” said Billy Pretty. “Fifteen was I when he died.” He scraped away, pulling weeds from a coffin-shaped frame that enclosed the grave. It was painted with a design of black and white diamonds, still sharp.

“Painted this up the last time I was over,” said Billy, opening his bag and taking out tins of paint, two brushes, “and I’ll do it again now.”

Quoyle thought of his own father, wondered if the aunt still had his ashes. There had been no ceremony. Should they put up a marker? A faint sense of loss rose in him.

[166] Suddenly he could see his father, see the trail of ground cherry husks leading from the garden around the edge of the lawn where he walked while he ate them. The man had a passion for fruit. Quoyle remembered purple-brown seckle pears the size and shape of figs, his father taking the meat off with pecking bites, the smell of fruit in their house, litter of cores and peels in the ashtrays, the grape cluster skeletons, peach stones like hens’ brains on the windowsill, the glove of banana peel on the car dashboard. In the sawdust on the basement workbench galaxies of seeds and pits, cherry stones, long white date pits like spaceships. Strawberries in the refrigerator, and in June the car parked on a country road and the father on his knees picking wild strawberries in the weeds. The hollowed grapefruit skullcaps, cracked globes of tangerine peel.

Other fathers took their sons on fishing and camping trips, but Quoyle and his brother had blueberry expeditions. They whined with rage as the father disappeared into the bushes, leaving them in the sour heat holding plastic containers. One time the brother, face swollen with crying and insect bites, picked only fifteen or twenty berries. The father approached them, arms straining with the weight of two brimming pails. Then the brother began to cry, pointed at Quoyle. Said Quoyle had taken his berries. Liar. Quoyle had picked half a quart, the bottom of his pail decently covered. Got a whipping with a branch torn from a blueberry bush, with the first stroke berries raining. On the way home he stared into the berry pails watching green worms, stink bugs, ants, aphids, limping spiders come creeping up chimneys to the surface of the fruit where they beat the air and wondered. Backs of his thighs on fire.