The Shipping News (4 page)

“Sounds simpleminded,” sobbed Quoyle into his teacup.

“Well, if he was, it’s the first I ever heard of it. They say when he went under the ice he called out, ‘See you in heaven.’ ”

“I heard that story,” said Quoyle, salty saliva in his mouth and his nose swelling up. “He was just a kid.”

“Twelve years old. Sealing. He’d got as many whitecoats as any man there before he had one of his fits and went off the ice. Nineteen and twenty-seven.”

“Father told us about him sometimes. But he couldn’t have been twelve. I never heard he was twelve. If he drowned when he was twelve he couldn’t have been my grandfather.”

“Ah, you don’t know Newfoundlanders. For all he was twelve he was your father’s father. But not mine. My mother—your grandmother—that was Sian’s sister Addy, and after young Sian drowned she took up with Turvey, the other brother. Then when
he
drowned, she married Cokey Hamm, that was my father. Lived in the house on Quoyle’s Point for years—where I was born—then we moved over to Catspaw. When we left in 1946 after my father was killed—”

“Drowned,” said Quoyle. Listening in spite of himself. Blowing his nose into the paper napkin. Which he folded and put on the edge of his saucer.

“No. Afterwards we went over to stinking Catspaw Harbor where we was treated like mud by that crowd. There was an awful girl with a purple tetter growing out of her eyebrow. Threw rocks. And then we came to the States.” She sang “ ‘Terra Nova grieving, for hearts that are leaving.’ That’s all I remember of that little ditty.”

Quoyle hated the thought of an incestuous, fit-prone, seal-killing child for a grandfather, but there was no choice. The mysteries of unknown family.

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[26] When the police burst in, the photographer in stained jockey shorts was barking into the phone. Quoyle’s naked daughters had squirted dish detergent on the kitchen floor, were sliding in it.

“They have not been obviously sexually abused, Mr. Quoyle,” said the voice on the telephone. Quoyle could not tell if a man or a woman was speaking. “There was a video camera. There were blank film cartridges all over the place, but the camera jammed or something. When the officers came in he was on the phone to the store where he bought the camera, yelling at the clerk. The children were examined by a child abuse pediatric specialist. She says there was no evidence that he did anything physical to them except undress them and clip their fingernails and toenails. But he clearly had something in mind.”

Quoyle could not speak.

“The children are with Mrs. Bailey at the Social Services office,” said the mealy voice. “Do you know where that is?”

Sunshine was smeared with chocolate, working a handle that activated a chain of plastic gears. Bunny asleep in a chair, eyeballs rolling beneath violet lids. He lugged them out to the car, squeezing them in his hot arms, murmuring that he loved them.

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“The girls look a lot like Feeny and Fanny used to, my younger sisters,” said the aunt, jerking her head up and down. “Look just like ‘em. Feeny’s in New Zealand now, a marine biologist, knows everything about sharks. Broke her hip this spring. Fanny is in Saudi Arabia. She married a falconer. Has to wear a black thing over her face. Come on over here, you little girls and give your aunt a big hug,” she said.

But the children rushed at Quoyle, gripped him as a falling man clutches the window ledge, as a stream of electric particles arcs a gap and completes a circuit. They smelled of Sierra Free dish detergent scented with calendula and horsemint. The aunt’s expression unfathomable as she watched them. Longing, perhaps.

[27] Quoyle, in the teeth of trouble, saw a stouthearted older woman. His only female relative.

“Stay with us,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.” He waited for the aunt to shake her head, say no, she had to be getting back, could only stay a minute longer.

She nodded. “A few days. Get things straightened up.” Rubbed her palms together as if a waiter had just set a delicacy before her. “You can look at it this way,” she said. “You’ve got a chance to start out all over again. A new place, new people, new sights. A clean slate. See, you can be anything you want with a fresh start. In a way, that’s what I’m doing myself.”

She thought of something. “Would you like to meet Warren?” she asked. “Warren is out in the car, dreaming of old glories.”

Quoyle imagined a doddering husband, but Warren was a dog with black eyelashes and a collapsed face. She growled when the aunt opened the rear door.

“Don’t be afraid,” said the aunt. “Warren will never bite anyone again. They pulled all of her teeth two years ago.”

4

Cast Away

“Cast Away, to be forced from a ship by a disaster.”

THE MARINER’S DICTIONARY

QUOYLE’S
face the color of a bad pearl. He was wedged in a seat on a ferry pitching toward Newfoundland, his windbreaker stuffed under his cheek, the elbow wet where he had gnawed it.

The smell of sea damp and paint, boiled coffee. Nor any escape from static snarled in the public address speakers, gunfire in the movie lounge. Passengers singing “That’s one more dollar for me,” swaying over whiskey.

Bunny and Sunshine stood on the seats opposite Quoyle, staring through glass at the games room. Crimson Mylar walls, a ceiling that reflected heads and shoulders like disembodied putti on antique valentines. The children yearned toward the water-bubble music.

Next to Quoyle a wad of the aunt’s knitting. The needles jabbed his thigh but he did not care. He was brimming with nausea. [29] Though the ferry heaved toward Newfoundland, his chance to start anew.

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The aunt had made a good case. What was left for him in Mockingburg? Unemployed, wife gone, parents deceased. And there was Petal’s Accidental Death and Dismemberment Insurance Plan money. Thirty thousand to the spouse and ten thousand to each eligible child. He hadn’t thought of insurance, but it crossed the aunt’s mind at once. The children slept, Quoyle and the aunt sat at the kitchen table. The aunt in her big purple dress, having a drop of whiskey in a teacup. Quoyle with a cup of Ovaltine. To help him sleep, the aunt said. Blue sleeping pills. He was embarrassed but swallowed them. Fingernails bitten to the quick.

“It makes sense,” she said, “for you to start a new life in a fresh place. For the children’s sake as well as your own. It would help you all get over what’s happened. You know it takes a year, a full turn of the calendar, to get over losing somebody. That’s a true saying. And it helps if you’re in a different place. And what place would be more natural than where your family came from? Maybe you could ask around, your newspaper friends, tap the grapevine. There might be a job up there. Just the trip would be an experience for the girls. See another part of the world. And to tell the truth,” patting his arm with her old freckled hand, “it would be a help to me to have you along. I bet we’d be a good team.

The aunt leaned on her elbow. Chin on the heel of her hand. “As you get older you find out the place where you started out pulls at you stronger and stronger. I never wanted to see Newfoundland again when I was young, but the last few years it’s been like an ache, just a longing to go back. Probably some atavistic drive to finish up where you started. So in a way I’m starting again, too. Going to move my little business up there. It wouldn’t hurt you to ask about a job.”

He thought of calling Partridge, telling him. The inertia of grief rolled through him. He couldn’t do it. Not now.

Woke at midnight, swimming up from aubergine nightmare. [30] Petal getting into a bread truck. The driver is gross, a bald head, mucus suspended from his nostrils, his hands covered with some unspeakable substance. Quoyle has the power to see both sides of the truck at once. Sees the hands reaming up under Petal’s dress, the face lowering into her oaken hair, and all the time the truck careening along highways, swaying over bridges without railings. Quoyle is somehow flying along beside them, powered by anxiety. Clusters of headlights flicker closer. He struggles to reach Petal’s hand, to pull her out of the bread truck, knowing what must come (wishing it for the driver who has metamorphosed into his father) but cannot reach her, suffers agonizing paralysis though he strains. The headlights close. He shouts to tell her death is imminent, but is voiceless. Woke up pulling at the sheet.

For the rest of the night he sat in the living room with a book in his lap. His eyes went back and forth, he read, but comprehended nothing. The aunt was right. Get out of here.

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It took half an hour to get a phone number for Partridge.

“Goddamn! I was just thinking about you the other day.” Partridge’s voice came fresh in the wires. “Wondering what the hell ever happened to old Quoyle! When you going to come out and visit? You know I quit the papers, don’t you? Yeah, I quit ‘em.” The thought of Mercalia on the road alone, he said, made him go to the truck driver school himself.

“We’re a driving team, now. Bought a house two years ago. Planning on buying our own rig pretty soon, doing independent contracting. These trucks are sweet-double bunk, little kitchenette. Air-conditioned. We sit up there over the traffic, look down on the cars. Making three times the money I was. Don’t miss newspapers at all. So what’s new with you, still working for Punch?”

It only took ten or eleven minutes to tell Partridge everything, from falling in one-way love to riding the nightmares, to leaning over a tableful of maps with the aunt.

“Son of a bitch, Quoyle. You been on the old roller coaster. You had the full-course dinner. Least you got your kids: Well, I’ll tell you. I’m out of the newspaper game but still got some contacts. [31] See what I come up with. Gimme the names of the nearest towns again?”

There was only one, with the curious name of Killick-Claw.

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Partridge back on the line two days later. Pleased to be fixing Quoyle’s life up again. Quoyle made him think of a huge roll of newsprint from the pulp mill. Blank and speckled with imperfections. But beyond this vagueness he glimpsed something like a reflection of light from a distant hubcap, a scintillation that meant there was, in Quoyle’s life, the chance of some brilliance. Happiness? Good luck? Fame and fortune? Who knows, thought Partridge. He liked the rich taste of life so well himself he wished for an entree or two for Quoyle.

“Amazes me how the old strings still pull. Yeah, there’s a paper up there. A weekly. They looking for somebody, too. You interested, I’ll give you the name I got. Want somebody to cover the shipping news. Guess it’s right on the coast. Want somebody with maritime connections if possible. Quoyle, you got maritime connections?”

“My grandfather was a sealer.”

“Jesus. You always come at me out of left field. Anyway, it works out, you got to handle work permits and immigration and all that. Deal with those guys. O.k. Managing editor’s name is Tertius Card. Got a pencil? Give you the number.”

Quoyle wrote it down.

“Well, good luck. Let me know how it goes. And listen, any time you want to come out here, stay with Mercalia and me, you just come on. This is a real good place to make money.”

But the idea of the north was taking him. He needed something to brace against.

A month later they drove away in his station wagon. He took a last look in the side mirror at the rented house, saw the empty porch, the forsythia bush, the neighbor’s flesh-colored slips undulating on the line.

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[31] And so Quoyle and the aunt in the front seat, the children in the back, and old Warren sometimes with the suitcases, sometimes clambering awkwardly up to sit between Bunny and Sunshine. They made her paper hats from napkins, tied the aunt’s scarf around her hairy neck, fed her French fries when the aunt wasn’t looking.

Fifteen hundred miles, across New York, Vermont, angling up through Maine’s mauled woods. Across New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on three-lane highways, trouble in the center lane, making the aunt clench her hands. In North Sydney plates of oily fish for supper, and no one who cared, and in the raw morning, the ferry to Port-Aux-Basques. At last.

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Quoyle suffered in the upholstery, the aunt strode the deck, stopped now and then to lean on the rail above the shuddering water. Or stood spraddle-legged, hands knotted behind her back, facing wind. Her hair captured under a babushka, face a stone with little intelligent eyes.

She spoke of the weather with a man in a watch cap. They talked awhile. Someone else reel footing along, said, Rough today, eh? She worried about Warren, down in the station wagon, tossing up and down. Wouldn’t know what to make of it. Never been to sea. Probably thought the world was coming to an end and she all alone, in a strange car. The man in the watch cap said, “Don’t worry, dog’ll sleep the ‘ole way across. That’s ‘ow dogs are.”

The aunt looked out, saw the blue land ahead, her first sight of the island in almost fifty years. Could not help tears.

“Comin’ ‘ome, eh?” said the man in the watch cap. “Yar, that’s ‘ow it takes you.”

This place, she thought, this rock, six thousand miles of coast blind-wrapped in fog. Sunkers under wrinkled water, boats threading tickles between ice-scabbed cliffs. Tundra and barrens, a land of stunted spruce men cut and drew away.

How many had come here, leaning on the rail as she leaned now. Staring at the rock in the sea. Vikings, the Basques, the French, English, Spanish, Portuguese. Drawn by the cod, from the days when massed fish slowed ships on the drift for the passage to [33] the Spice Isles, expecting cities of gold. The lookout dreamed of roasted auk or sweet berries in cups of plaited grass, but saw crumpling waves, lights flickering along the ship rails. The only cities were of ice, bergs with cores of beryl, blue gems within white gems, that some said gave off an odor of almonds. She had caught the bitter scent as a child.

Shore parties returned to ship blood-crusted with insect bites. Wet, wet, the interior of the island, they said, bog and marsh, rivers and chains of ponds alive with metal-throated birds. The ships scraped on around the points. And the lookout saw shapes of caribou folding into fog.

Later, some knew it as a place that bred malefic spirits. Spring starvation showed skully heads, knobbed joints beneath flesh. What desperate work to stay alive, to scrob and claw through hard times. The alchemist sea changed fishermen into wet bones, sent boats to drift among the cod, cast them on the landwash. She remembered the stories in old mouths: the father who shot his oldest children and himself that the rest might live on flour scrapings; sealers crouched on a floe awash from their weight until one leaped into the sea; storm journeys to fetch medicines—always the wrong thing and too late for the convulsing hangashore.

She had not been in these waters since she was a young girl, but it rushed back, the sea’s hypnotic boil, the smell of blood, weather and salt, fish heads, spruce smoke and reeking armpits, the rattle of wash-ball rocks in hissing wave, turrs, the crackery taste of brewis, the bedroom under the eaves.

But now they said that hard life was done. The forces of fate weakened by unemployment insurance, a flaring hope in offshore oil money. All was progress and possession, all shove and push, now. They said.

Fifteen she was when they had moved from Quoyle’s Point, seventeen when the family left for the States, a drop in the tides of Newfoundlanders away from the outports, islands and hidden coves, rushing like water away from isolation, illiteracy, trousers made of worn upholstery fabric, no teeth, away from contorted thoughts and rough hands, from desperation.

And her dad, Harold Hamm, dead the month before they left, [34] killed when a knot securing a can hook failed. Off-loading barrels of nails. The corner of the sling drooped, the barrel came down. Its iron-rimmed chine struck the nape of his neck, dislocated vertebrae and crushed the spinal column. Paralyzed and fading on the dock, unable to speak; who knew what thoughts crashed against the washline of his seizing brain as the kids and wife bent over, imploring Father, Father. No one said his name, only the word
father
, as though fatherhood had been the great thing in his life. Weeping. Even Guy, who cared for no one but himself.

So strange, she thought, going back there with a bereaved nephew and Guy’s ashes. She had taken the box from sobbing Quoyle, carried it up to the guest room. Lay awake thinking she might pour Guy into a plastic supermarket bag, tie the loop handles, and toss him into the dumpster.

Only a thought.

Wondered which had changed the most, place or self? It was a strong place. She shuddered. It would be better now. Leaned on the rail, looking into the dark Atlantic that snuffled at the slope of the past.