The Shipping News (32 page)

Grasped and cut the windpipe, worked out the lungs, stomach, gut, keeping the membrane intact, cut up through the pelvic bone, then worked the sharp knife cautiously around the anus, never nicking the thin gut. And gently pulled the whole intact mass away from the carcass. Tossed buckets of seawater to cool and wash the meat. A pool in the body cavity.

He carried the pelt twenty feet away to a clean patch, laid it fur side up, swept the waterdrops off with his broom, then worked anti-yellow into the fur and along the edges. Perfect. That’s she, by god, he said to himself.

¯

Wavey came at suppertime one evening to the Burkes’ house. Carried a basket, Herry swinging along behind her, scratched the edge of the road with a stick. Sea still light under iridescent cauli flower clouds. She opened the Burkes’ kitchen door, went in where Quoyle boiled spaghetti water. Of course she had walked, she said. In the basket she showed a seal flipper pie.

“You said you never ate it yet. It’s good. From the shoulder joint, you know. Not really the flippers. From a seal Ken got. His last seal, he says. He’s away to Toronto soon.” She would not stay. So Quoyle stuffed his children into their jackets, left the pie on the table for a few minutes to drive her home. Pulled up in front of the picket fence. Her hand on the basket handle, his hand on hers. The heat of her hand lasted all the way back to the Burkes’ house.

The pie was heavy with rich, dark meat in savory gravy. But Sunshine ate only the crust, itching to get back to her crayons. A pinpoint cross above a page of undulating lines. “It’s Bunny,” she said. “Flying over the water.” And laughed with her mouth wide open, showing small teeth.

In the night Quoyle finished the whole thing and licked the pan with a tongue like a dishclout. Was still standing with the pan in his hand when the kitchen door opened and Wavey came in again.

[307] “Herry’s sleeping at Dad’s,” she said. “And I’m sleeping here.” Breathless with running.

Real Newfoundland kisses that night, flavored with seal flipper pie.

¯

Three or four days later he was still thinking about seal flipper pie. Remembered the two raw eggs Petal gave him. That he had invested with pathetic meaning.

“Petal,” said Quoyle to Wavey, “hated to cook. Hardly ever did.” Thought of the times he had fixed dinner for her, set out his stupid candles, folded the napkins as though they were important, waited and finally ate alone, the radio on for company. And later dined with the children, shoveling in canned spaghetti, scraping baby food off small chins.

“Once she gave me two eggs. Raw eggs for a present.” He had made an omelet of them, hand-fed her as though she were a nestling bird. And saved the shells in a paper cup on top of the kitchen cabinet. Where they still must be.

“Sure, she must have made a bit of toast from time to time.”

“She wasn’t home much. She worked—in the daytime. And at night and weekends—I guess she was out with her boyfriends. I know she was out with them.”

“Boyfriends!”

He would say it. “Petal went with men. She liked other men,” said Quoyle. “A lot.” Unclear whether he meant the degree of liking or the number of men. Wavey knew, hissed through her teeth. Hadn’t she guessed there was a nick in the edge of that axe? The way Quoyle talked of his love, but never the woman? Could pull out one from her own skein of secrets.

“You know,” she said, “Herold.” Thought of Herold stumbling in at dawn smelling of cigarettes, rum and other flesh, coming naked into the clean sheets, pubic hair sticky and matted from his busy night. “It’s just cunt juice, woman,” he’d said, “now shut up.” She exhaled, said “Herold,” again.

“Um,” said Quoyle.

“Herold,” said Wavey, “was a womanizer. He treated me body [308] like a trough. Come and swill and slobber in me after them. I felt like he was casting vomit in me when he come to his climax. And I never told that but to you.”

A long silence. Quoyle cleared his throat. Could he look at her? Almost.

“I know something now I didn’t know a year ago,” said Quoyle. “Petal wasn’t any good. And I think maybe that is why I loved her.”

“Yes,” said Wavey. “Same with Herold. It’s like you feel to yourself that’s all you deserve. And the worse it gets the more it seems true, that you got it coming to you or it wouldn’t be that way. You know what I mean?”

Quoyle nodded. Kept on nodding and breathing through pursed lips in a whistling way as though considering something. While handsome Herold and ravishing Petal scuttled in and out of ratholes of memory. Something like that.

¯

Quoyle couldn’t get used to the sight of Benny Fudge knitting. Wolf down his sandwich and haul out the stocking, ply the needles for half an hour as rapidly as the aunt. No sooner done with the blue stuff than he was tearing into white wool, some kind of a coat, it looked like.

Quoyle tried to make a joke about it. “If you could write like you knit.” Benny looked up, hurt.

“More than knitting. Benny was champion net mender. He knows the twine needle better’n he knows his wife, isn’t that right, Benny?” Billy winked at Quoyle.

“In a different way,” said Benny, black hair falling over his face as he bent to the work.

His writing was not that bad, either, said Quoyle, mollifying. Billy nodded, still on the subject of knitters and busy hands.

“Jack knits a little still, not like he used to of course. He was a good knitter. But he never had the grip on it Benny does. Benny’s like that transport driver, you know, drove a container truck between St. John’s and Montreal?”

Quoyle thought of Partridge. He’d call him up that night. Tell [309] him. What? That he could gut a cod while he talked about advertising space and printing costs? That he was wondering if love came in other colors than the basic black of none and the red heat of obsession?

“This driver used to barrel right across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, had his arms sticking through the steering wheel, knitting away like a machine. Had a proper gansey knit by the time he got to Montreal, sell it for good money as a Newf fisherman’s authentic handicraft.”

“Might as well,” said Benny Fudge. “Happen to know what he got for one?”

“No. But I can tell you about the time buddy was ripping along down the Trans-Canada knitting about as fast as the truck was going when this Mountie spies him. Starts to chase after him, doing a hundred and forty km per. Finally gets alongside, signs the transport feller to stop, but he’s so deep in his knitting he never notices.”

One of Billy’s jokes. Quoyle smiled faintly.

“Mountie flashes his light, finally has to shout out the window, ‘Pull over! Pull over!’ So the great transport knitter looks at the Mountie, shakes his head a bit and says, ‘Why no sir, ‘tis a cardigan.’ ”

Benny Fudge didn’t crack a smile. But Billy screeched like rusty metal.

¯

At the end of the seal hunt Jack switched to herring. He had his herring trap.

That was what Quoyle loved best, it seemed, sitting on the stony shore out of the wind behind a rock, holding the grill of silvery herring over coals. These cold picnics on the lip of the sea. Wavey made a table from a piece of driftwood and a few stones. Herry trailed rubbery seaweed. The sun warmed a grassy bit of sheep pasture where Bunny and Sunshine raced across the slope.

“Wavey!” Sunshine’s shrill voice. “Wavey, did you bring marshmallows?”

“Yes, maid. The little ones.”

The Maids in the Meadow thought Quoyle, looking at his [310] daughters. And as though something dropped in place, he matched Billy’s father’s verse with his life. The Demon Lover. The Stouthearted Woman. Maids in the Meadow. The Tall and Quiet Woman.

Then Bunny ran at them with her hands cupped. Always an arrow flying to the target. A stiff, perfect bird, as small as a stone in a child’s hand. Folded legs.

“A dead bird,” said Wavey. “The poor thing’s neck is broken.” For the head lolled. She said nothing about sleep nor heaven. Bunny laid it on a rock, went back to look at it twenty times.

The herrings smoked, the children dodged around, saying Dad, Dad, when are they ready. Dad, said Herry. And put his pie-face up, roaring at his own cleverness.

¯

“Cockadoodle Christ, you’re worse than the gulls.” Jack, watching Quoyle shovel herring into a bucket.

“I could eat the boatload.”

“If you wasn’t getting out the paper you ought to take up fishing. You’re drawn to it. I see that. What’s good, you know, you bring a little stove in the boat, frying pan and some salt pork, you can have you the best you ever ate. Why you never see a fisherman take a bag of lunch out. Even if he goes hungry now and then. Nothing made ashore that’s as good as what you pull out of the sea. You’ll come out with me one time.”

Two weeks later the herring were unaccountably gone and the
Gammy Bird
took a temporary dive in size while Billy and Quoyle and Dennis helped Jack overhaul his lobster pots, build a few new ones. And Benny Fudge went to Misky Bay to have all his teeth pulled.

“I don’t know if I’ll be fishing lobster for meself or all of yous.”

“I wish I was going out,” said Billy. “Oh there’s money in lobster. But you can’t get a license. Only way anyone here could have a license for lobster is if you turned yours over to Dennis, here.”

“I’m ready,” said Dennis.

“Won’t be tomorrow,” said Jack. Short and hard. Jealous of [311] his fishing rights. He was. And wanted to keep his last son ashore.

“Come a nice day we’ll have a big lobster boil, eh?” said Billy. “Even if we have to buy them off somebody down at No Name Cove. Too bad there isn’t some kind of occasion to celebrate.” Winked at Dennis, rolled his eyes at Quoyle.

“There is,” said Quoyle. “The aunt’s coming back this Saturday and we’re having a welcome home party at my house. But I doubt there’ll be lobster.”

Jack had a pile of stones at the corner of his shack. Anchors for the lobster pots, he said. Slingstones.

38

The Sled Dog Driver’s Dream

“A leash for a large dog of rawhide belt lacing. Taper and skive

four thongs, form a loop with the small end of the longest

strand, and seize all strands together. Lay up a FOUR-STRAND

SQUARE SINNET. Surmount it with a large BUTTON KNOT.

Cover the seizing with a leather shoestring TURK’S HEAD.”

THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

ALVIN YARK’S
sweater zipper rattled as he hooked his worn measure out of the pocket. Time to get to the work. Had got cleaned out the day before with a quart of steeped she-var needles, had moved his bowels and was ready now to move the earth. Marked the keel with his pencil stub for the timber pairs, still uncut from curved planks. The window showed empty road. Humming, singing, he turned to the overhead rack that ran the length of the shop and pulled down wood ribbands, tacked them the length of the frame, from forehook to midship bend to the afterhook timbers. And there was the boat.

“ ‘E missed the best part, did Quoyle. Missed seeing ‘er come out of nothing.” Checked the window again. Nothing but April water streaked with white like flashing smiles, like lace tablecloths [313] snapping open in slow motion. Clots of froth bobbed against the pilings. Beyond the headland, bergy bits, pans and floes, a disintegrating berg like a blue radiator in the restless water.

At last the mud-throwing hump of Quoyle’s station wagon moved into Yark’s view. He stopped in the doorway, the oxblood sweater caught on a nail. Picked fussily at the wool loop where another would have yanked, said he had to be back in good time. For the aunt’s welcome home supper. He and Wavey had spent the morning, he said, making enough fish chowder to sink a tanker and Alvin and Evvie had better come to help put it away.

“I enjoys a bit of a time,” said Yark. “Agnis in or comin’ in?”

Quoyle had picked up the aunt in Deer Lake at noon. She looked fit. Full of energy and ideas.

But Quoyle dreamed, thoughts somewhere else. He picked up the wrong tool when Yark pointed.

“Hundred things going on,” he mumbled. The Lifestyles page was on his mind. Mail pouring in. They’d never run another birdhouse plan but what was the cure for homesick blues? Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. “I’m coming back some day,” they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore.

Yark half-sang his interminable ditty, “Oh the
Gandy Goose
, it ain’t no use, cause every nut and bolt is loose, she’ll go to the bottom just like the
Bruce
, the
Gandy Goose
, and kill a Newfound
LAND
er,” while he transferred the measurements to the rough boards.

“You’ll ‘ave your boat next Saddy. She’ll be finished.” Thank God, thought Quoyle. Man Escapes Endless Song. A pale brown spider raced along the top ribband.

“Weather coming on. I see the spiders is lively all day and my knees is full of crackles. Well, let’s cut them timbers. ‘Oh it was the Bruce, who brought the moose, they lives so good out in the spruce.’ ”

Quoyle looked at his boat. The timbers were the real stuff of it, he thought, mistaking the fact for the idea. For the boat had existed in Yark’s mind for months.

[314] As Yark sawed and shaped, Quoyle leaned the timbers against the wall. Their curves made him think of Wavey, the lyre-shape of hip swelling from waist, taut thighs like Chinese bridges. If he and Wavey married, would Petal be in the bed with them? Or Herold Prowse? He imagined the demon lovers coupling, biting and growling, while he and Wavey crouched against the footboard with their eyes squeezed shut, fingers in their ears.

The twilight drew in, their breaths huffed white as they set and braced the timbers.

“It ain’t no use, it ain’t no use, I gots to get some tea into my caboose,” sang Yark as they stepped from gloom into green afterglow. Sea and sky like tinted glass. The lighthouse on the point slashed its stroke, house windows flowered pale orange.

“Hear that?” said Yark, stopping on the path. Arm out in warning, fingers splayed.

“What?” Only the sucking draw of the sea below. He wanted to get home.

“The sea. Heard a big one. She’s building a swell.” They stood below the amber sky, listening. The tuckamore all black tangle, the cliff a funeral stele.

“There! See that!” Yark gripped Quoyle’s wrist, drew his arm out to follow his own, pointing northeast into the bay. Out on the darkling water a ball of blue fire glimmered. The lighthouse flash cut across the bay, revealed nothing, and in the stunned darkness behind it the strange glow rolled, rolled and faded.

“That’s a weather light. Seen them many times. Bad weather coming.” Although the trickster sky was clear.

¯

Cars and trucks parked along the road in front of the Burkes’ house, and through the window he could see people in the kitchen. He stepped into music. Wavey playing “Joe Lard” on her accordion and Dennis thumping at a guitar. Who was singing? Beety pulled pans out of the oven, shouted a joke. A burst of laughter. Mavis Bangs told Mrs. Buggit about a woman in St. John’s who suffered from a caked breast. Ken and his buddy leaned against the wall with their arms folded, watching the others. For they were in a [315] Toronto of the mind, at a sophisticated party instead of an old kitchen scuff.

“Dad.” Bunny, pulling at Quoyle, his jacket half off, whispering urgently. “I been waiting and waiting for you to come home. Dad, you got to come up to my room and see what Wavey got for us. Come on, Dad. Right now. Please.” On fire about something. He hoped it wasn’t crayons. Dreaded more broccoli trees. The refrigerator was covered with them.

Quoyle let himself be dragged through the company, eyes catching Wavey’s eyes, catching Wavey’s smile, oh, aimed only at him, and upstairs to Bunny’s room. On the stairs an image came to him. Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some invoke night perfume. Some had centers as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swallowed. And among the common bull’s-eyes and peppermints a few rare ones; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought calm and gentle pleasure. Were his fingers closing on that one?

Herry and Sunshine were lying on the floor. Marty pushed a bowl of water toward a husky puppy. White fur, the tail curled up like a fern. The puppy galloped at Bunny, seized the loop of her shoelace and pulled.

“It’s a white dog.” Could hardly say it. Watched her from the corner of his eye.

“She’s a sled dog, Dad. Wavey got her for me from her brother who raises sled dogs.”

“Ken? Ken raises sled dogs?” He knew it wasn’t Ken, but was groping to understand this. Man Very Surprised to See White Dog in Daughter’s Chamber.

“No, the other brother. Oscar. That’s got the pet seal. Remember we saw the pet seal, Dad? But Ken drove us over. And Oscar’s going to show me how to train her when she gets big enough. And I’m going to race her, Dad. If she wants to. And I’m going to ask Skipper Al if he’ll help me make a komatik. That’s the sled, Dad. We saw one at Oscar’s. I’m going to be a dog-team racer when I grow up.”

[316] “Me too,” said Sunshine.

“That’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever heard. My dogteam kids. Have you named her yet?”

“Warren,” said Bunny. “Warren the Second.”

“Warren the Second,” said Herry.

Quoyle saw his life might be spent in the company of dynastic dogs named Warren.

“Dad,” whispered Bunny, “Herry’s getting a dog too, it’s Warren the Second’s brother. Tomorrow. But don’t tell him. Because it’s a secret.”

Quoyle went downstairs to hug the aunt and then Wavey. Because he was so close then, and in bravado, he kissed her. A great true embrace. Her teeth bruised his lip. The accordion be tween them huffed a crazy chord. A roar and clapping at this public intimacy. As good as an announcement. Wavey’s father sat at the table, one hand on his thigh, the other tapping cigarette ash into a saucer. A lopsided smile at Quoyle. A wink of approval rather than complicity. That must be where Wavey got her little winks. But Jack was in the pantry looking out the window at the dark.

“Jack,” called Beety, “what are you fidgeting at in there?” She set out a tall white cake plastered with pink icing. Candy letters spelled “Welcome Agnis.” Quoyle ate two slices and tried for a third but it went to Billy Pretty who came in late with snow in his hair. Stood near the stove. Importantly. Every man in the room looked at him. Though he had said nothing.

“Marine forecast don’t say much, but I tell you it’s shaping up for a good one. Snowing hard. I’d say gusting to thirty knots anyway. Out of the east and backing. I’d say she’s going to be a regular screecher. Listen at it.” And as the accordion’s lesser wind wheezed and died they heard the shriek of air around the corner of the house.

“Must be one of them polar lows they can’t see coming until it’s gone. I’d better say my greetings and get off home. I don’t like the feel of it,” said Billy through cake.

Nor did anyone else.

“I’m going to bore up home, buddy,” shouted Jack to Quoyle. “Y’know, I felt it coming. Smash me boat to drumsticks if I don’t [317] haul her up. Mother’ll go with Dennis.” And pointed at his wife, at Dennis. Understood.

By nine o’clock the uneasy guests had gone, thinking of drifted roads and damaged boats.

“Looks like you brought it with you, Aunt.” They sat in the kitchen, surrounded by plates, the aunt with her noggin of whiskey. A skeleton of forks in the sink.

“Oh, don’t ever say that. Don’t ever tell somebody they brings a storm. Worst thing you can say.” But seemed glad.

¯

A pendulum clock brought from the equator to a northern country will run fast. Arctic rivers cut deepest into their right banks, and hunters lost in the north woods unconsciously veer to the right as the earth turns beneath their feet. And in the north the dangerous storms from the west often begin with an east wind. All of these things are related to the Coriolis, the reeling gyroscopic effect of the earth’s spin that creates wind and flow of weather, the countering backwashes and eddies of storms.

“Backing wind, foul weather,” Billy Pretty said to himself, steering sideways down a hill. The wind angling to the north now.

He had seen wind hounds a few days before, lozenges of light in a greasy sky. Imagined wind in his inner eye, saw its directions in the asymmetrical shapes of windstars on old maps, roses of wind whose elongated points pictured prevailing airs. The storm star for his coast included a backing point that shifted from the northeast to the southwest.

By midnight the wind was straight out of the west and he heard the moan leap to bellowing, a terrible wind out of the catalog of winds. A wind related to the Blue Norther, the frigid Blaast and the Landlash. A cousin to the Bull’s-eye squall that started in a small cloud with a ruddy center, mother-in-law to the Vinds-gnyr of the Norse sagas, the three-day Nor’easters of maritime New England. An uncle wind to the Alaskan Williwaw and Ireland’s wild Doinionn. Stepsister to the Koshava that assaults the Yugoslavian plains with Russian snow, the Steppenwind, and the violent [318] Buran from the great open steppes of central Asia, the Crivetz, the frigid Viugas and Purgas of Siberia, and from the north of Russia the ferocious Myatel. A blood brother of the prairie Blizzard, the Canadian arctic screamer known simply as Northwind, and the Pittarak smoking down off Greenland’s ice fields. This nameless wind scraping the Rock with an edge like steel.

Billy mumbled prayers in his pillow for poor souls caught on the waves tonight, riding a sea striped with mile-long ribbons of foam. The stiff tankers, old trawlers with bad hulls would break apart.

At last he had to get up. The electricity was out. He fumbled in the dark, found the flashlight and shone it through the window. Could see nothing inches away but snow hurling at velocities that made the air glow.

Cautiously he opened the door, felt it leap as the wind smote it. And wrestled it closed. A fan of snow across his kitchen floor, his naked footprint in it. Every window in the house rattled, and outside a cacophony of rolling buckets, slapping rope, snapping tarpaulins against the roar. The wires between his house and the utility pole keened discordancies that made his scalp crawl. The cold was straight from the glaciers, racing down the smoking ocean. He thrust junks of wood onto the coals, but the chimney barely drew. The wind, he thought, was blowing so hard it was like a cap over the chimney. If that was possible.

“Blow the hair off a dog,” he said. And his own dog, Elvis, twisted her ears, the skin on her back shuddered.

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In the Burkes’ house the aunt marked the beating of the sea, a pummeling sound that traveled up through the legs of the bed. Up the road Mrs. Buggit recognized the squealing gasps of a drowning son. Herry, rigid in his blankets, experienced immensity, became a solitary ant in a vast hall. And down in St. Johns in his white bed the old cousin trembled with pleasure at what he had conjured with wind-knots.