The Shipping News

by Annie Proulx

  They wheedled barbiturate prescriptions from winking doctors, stockpiled the capsules. When there were enough, the father dictated, the mother typed a suicide farewell, proclamation of individual choice and self-deliverance—sentences copied from the newsletters of The Dignified Exit Society. Named incineration and strewing as choice of disposal.

  It was spring. Sodden ground, smell of earth. The wind beat through twigs, gave off a greenish odor like struck flints. Coltsfoot in the ditches; furious dabs of tulips stuttering in gardens. Slanting rain. Clock hands leapt to pellucid evenings. The sky riffled like cards in a chalk-white hand.

  Father turned off the water heater. Mother watered the houseplants. They swallowed their variegated capsules with Silent Nite herbal tea.

  With his last drowsy energy the father phoned the paper and left a message on Quoyle’s answering machine. “This is your father. Calling you. Dicky don’t have a phone at that place. Well. It’s time for your mother and I to go. We made the decision to go. Statement, instructions about the undertaker and the cremation, everything else, on the dining room table. You’ll have to make your own way. I had to make my own way in a tough world ever since I came to this country. Nobody ever gave me nothing. Other men would of given up and turned into bums, but I didn’t. I sweated and worked, wheeled barrows of sand for the stonemason, went without so you and your brother could have advantages, not that you’ve done much with your chances. Hasn’t been much of a life for me. Get ahold of Dicky and my sister Agnis Hamm, and tell them about this. Agnis’s address is on the dining room table. I don’t know where the rest of them are. They weren’t—” A beep sounded. The message space was filled.

  But the brother, a spiritual sublieutenant in the Church of Personal Magnetism, did have a phone and Quoyle had his number. Felt his gut contract when the hated voice came through the receiver. Clogged nasals, adenoidal snorts. The brother said he could not come to rites for outsiders.

  “I don’t believe in those asshole superstitions,” he said. “Funerals. At CPM we have a cocktail party. Besides, where did you find a minister to say a word for suicides?”

  “Reverend Stain is part of their Dignified Exit meeting group. You ought to come. At least help me clean out the basement. Father left something like four tons of old magazines down there. Look, I had to see our parents being carried out of the house.” Almost sobbed.

  “Hey, Lardass, did they leave us anything?”

  Quoyle knew what he meant.

  “No. Big mortgage on the house. They spent their savings. I think that’s a major reason why they did this. I mean, I know they believed in dignified death, but they’d spent everything. The grocery chain went bankrupt and his pension stopped. If they’d kept on living they’d have had to go out and get jobs, clerking in the 7-Eleven or something. I thought Mother might have a pension too, but she didn’t.”

  “Are you kidding? You’ve got to be dumber than I thought. Hey, Barfbag, if there’s anything send my share to me. You got my address.” He hung up.

  Quoyle put his hand over his chin.

  Nor did Agnis Hamm, his father’s sister, come to the ceremony. Sent Quoyle a note on blue paper, her name and address in raised letters, pressed with a mail-order device.

  Can’t make the service. But I’m coming through next month, around the 12th. Will pick up your father’s ashes, as per instructions, meet you and your family. We’ll talk then. Your loving aunt, Agnis Hamm.

  But by the time the aunt arrived, orphaned Quoyle was again recast by circumstance, this time as an abandoned and cuckolded husband, a widower.

  “Pet, I need to talk to you,” he’d pled in brimful voice. Knew about her latest, an unemployed real estate agent who pasted his bumpers with mystic signs, believed newspaper horoscopes. She was staying with him, came home for clothes once in a while. Or less. Quoyle mumbled greeting card sentiments. She looked away from him, caught her own reflection in the bedroom mirror.

  “Don’t call me ‘Pet.’ Bad enough to have a stupid name like Petal. They should have named me something like ‘Iron’ or ‘Spike.’”

  “ ‘Iron Bear?’ ” Showed his teeth in a smile. Or rictus.

  “Don’t be cute, Quoyle. Don’t try to pretend everything’s funny and wonderful. Just let me alone.” Turned from him, clothes over her arm, hanger hooks like the necks and heads of dried geese. “See, it was a joke. I didn’t want to be married to anybody. And I don’t feel like being a mama to anybody either. It was all a mistake and I mean it.”

  One day she was gone, didn’t show up for work at Northern Security. The manager called Quoyle. Ricky Something.

  “Yeah, well, I’m pretty concerned. Petal wouldn’t just ‘take off’ as you put it without saying something to me.” From his tone of voice Quoyle knew Petal had slept with him. Given him stupid hopes.

  A few days after this conversation Ed Punch tipped his head toward his office as he walked past Quoyle’s desk. It always happened that way.

  “Have to let you go,” he said, eyes casting yellow, tongue licking.

  Quoyle’s eyes went to the engraving on the wall. Could just make out the signature under the hairy neck: Horace Greeley.

  “Business slump. Don’t know how much longer the paper can hold on. Cutting back. Afraid there’s not much chance of taking you back this time.”

  At six-thirty he opened his kitchen door. Mrs. Moosup sat at the table writing on the back of an envelope. Mottled arms like cold thighs.

  “Here you are!” she cried. “Hoped you’d come in so’s I don’t have to write all this stuff down. Tires your hand out. My night to go to the acupuncture clinic. Really helps. First, Ms. Bear says you should pay me my wages. Owes me for seven weeks, comes to three-oh-eight-oh dollars. ‘Preciate a check right now. Got bills to pay same as everybody else.”

  “Did she phone?” said Quoyle. “Did she say when she’d be back? Her boss wants to know.” Could hear the television in the other room. A swell of maracas, tittering bongos.

  “Didn’t phone. Come rushing in here about two hours ago, packed up all her clothes, told me a bunch of things to tell you, took the kids and went off with that guy in the red Geo. You know who I mean. That one. Said she was going to move to Florida with him, tell you she’ll mail you some papers. Quit her job and she is gone. Called up her boss and says ‘Ricky, I quit.’ I was standing right here when she said it. Said for you to write me out a check right away.”

  “I can’t handle this,” said Quoyle. His mouth was full of cold hot dog. “She took the kids? She’d never take the kids.” Runaway Mom Abducts Children.

  “Well, be that as it may, Mr. Quoyle, she took ‘em. May be wrong on this, but it sounded like the last thing she said was they were going to leave the girls with some people in Connecticut. The kids were excited getting a ride in that little car. You know they hardly ever go anywhere. Crave excitement. But she was real clear about the check. My check.” The colossal arms disappearing into her coat’s dolman sleeves, tweed flecked with purple and gold.

  “Mrs. Moosup, there’s about twelve dollars in my checking account. An hour ago I was fired. Your pay was supposed to come from Petal. If you are serious about three-oh-eight-oh, I will have to cash in our CDs to pay you. I can’t do it until tomorrow. But don’t worry, you’ll get paid.” He kept eating the withered hot dogs. What next.

  “That’s what she always said,” said Mrs. Moosup bitterly. “That’s why I’m not so cut up about this. It’s no fun working if you don’t get paid.”

  Quoyle nodded. Later, after she was gone, he called the state police.

  “My wife. I want my children back,” Quoyle said into the phone to a rote voice. “My daughters, Bunny and Sunshine Quoyle. Bunny is six and Sunshine is four and a half.” They were his. Reddish hair, freckles like chopped grass on a wet dog. Sunshine’s wee beauty in her frowst of orange curls. Homely Bunny. But smart. Had Quoyle’s no-color eyes and reddish eyebrows, the left one crooked and notched with a scar from the time she fe
ll out of a grocery cart. Her hair, crimpy, cut short. Big-boned children.

  “They both look like that furniture that’s built out of packing crates,” Petal wisecracked. The nursery school director saw untamed troublemakers and expelled first Bunny, then Sunshine. For pinching, pushing, screaming and demanding. Mrs. Moosup knew them for brats who whined they were hungry and wouldn’t let her watch her programs.

  But from the first moment that Petal raved she was pregnant, threw her purse on the floor like a dagger, kicked her shoes at Quoyle and said she’d get an abortion, Quoyle loved, first Bunny, then Sunshine, loved them with a kind of fear that if they made it into the world they were with him on borrowed time, would one day run a wire into his brain through terrible event. He never guessed it would be Petal. Thought he’d already had the worst from her.

  The aunt, in a black and white checked pantsuit, sat on the sofa, listened to Quoyle choke and sob. Made tea in the neverused pot. A stiff-figured woman, gingery hair streaked with white. Presented a profile like a target in a shooting gallery. A buff mole on her neck. Swirled the tea around in the pot, poured, dribbled milk. Her coat, bent over the arm of the sofa, resembled a wine steward showing a label.

  “You drink that. Tea is a good drink, it’ll keep you going. That’s the truth.” Her voice had a whistling harmonic as from the cracked-open window of a speeding car. Body in sections, like a dress form.

  “I never really knew her,” he said, “except that she was driven by terrible forces. She had to live her life her own way. She said that a million times.” The slovenly room was full of reflecting surfaces accusing him, the teapot, the photographs, his wedding ring, magazine covers, a spoon, the television screen.

  “Drink some tea.”

  “Some people probably thought she was bad, but I think she was starved for love. I think she just couldn’t get enough love. That’s why she was the way she was. Deep down she didn’t have a good opinion of herself. Those things she did—they reassured her for a little while. I wasn’t enough for her.”

  Did he believe that pap, the aunt wondered? She guessed that this was Quoyle’s invention, this love-starved Petal. Took one look at the arctic eyes, the rigidly seductive pose of Petal’s photograph, Quoyle’s silly rose in a water glass beside it, and thought to herself, there was a bitch in high heels.

  Quoyle had gasped, the phone to his ear, loss flooding in like the sea gushing into a broken hull. They said the Geo had veered off the expressway and rolled down a bank sown with native wildflowers, caught on fire. Smoke poured from the real estate agent’s chest, Petal’s hair burned. Her neck broken.

  Newspaper clippings blew out of the car, along the highway; reports of a monstrous egg in Texas, a fungus in the likeness of Jascha Heifetz, a turnip as large as a pumpkin, a pumpkin as small as a radish.

  The police, sorting through singed astrology magazines and clothes, found Petal’s purse crammed with more than nine thousand dollars in cash, her calendar book with a notation to meet Bruce Cudd on the morning before the accident. In Bacon Falls, Connecticut. There was a receipt for seven thousand dollars in exchange for “personal services.” Looked like she had sold the children to Bruce Cudd, the police said.

  Quoyle, in his living room, blubbing through red fingers, said he could forgive Petal anything if the children were safe.

  Why do we weep in grief, the aunt wondered. Dogs, deer, birds suffered with dry eyes and in silence. The dumb suffering of animals. Probably a survival technique.

  “You’re good-hearted,” she said. “Some would curse her mangled body for selling the little girls.” The milk on the verge of turning. Tan knobs in the sugar bowl from wet coffee spoons.

  “I will never believe that, that she sold them. Never,” cried Quoyle. His thigh clashed against the table. The sofa creaked.

  “Maybe she didn’t. Who knows?” The aunt soothed. “Yes, you’re good-hearted. You take after Sian Quoyle. Your poor grandfather. I never knew him. Dead before I was born. But I saw the picture of him many times, the tooth of a dead man hanging on a string around his neck. To keep toothache away. They believed in that. But he was very good-natured they said. Laughed and sang. Anybody could fool him with a joke.”

  “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.

  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.

  “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.

  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 t
o 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. Though the ferry heaved toward Newfoundland, his chance to start anew.

  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.