The Shipping News

by Annie Proulx

  “Yeah,” said Bunny. “I want to go to a motel with TV and hamburgers and chips that you can eat in bed. And lights that go down, down, down when you turn the knob. And you can turn the television off and on with that thing without getting out of bed.”

  “I want fried chicken in the bed,” said Sunshine.

  “No,” said Quoyle. “We’re going to stick it out right here. We’ve got a tent in the back and I’m going to set it up beside the car and sleep in it. That’s the plan.” He looked at the aunt. It had been her idea. But she bent over her purse, rummaging for something private. Her old hair flattened and crushed.

  “We’ve got air mattresses, we’ve got sleeping bags. We blow up the air mattresses and fold down the backseat and spread them out, put the sleeping bags on them and there you are, two nice comfortable beds. Aunt will have one and you two girls can share the other. I don’t need an air mattress. I’ll put my sleeping bag on the tent floor.” He seemed to be asking questions.

  “But I’m so starved,” moaned Bunny. “I hate you, Dad! You’re dumb!” She leaned forward and hit Quoyle on the back of the head.

  “HERE NOW!” The outraged aunt roared at Bunny. “Take your seat, Miss, and don’t ever let me hear you speak to your father like that again or I’ll blister your bottom for you.” The aunt let the blood boil up around her heart.

  Bunny’s face contorted into a tragic mask. “Petal says Dad is dumb.” She hated them all.

  “Everybody is dumb about some things,” said Quoyle mildly. He reached back between the seats, his red hand offered to Bunny. To console her for the aunt’s shouting. The dog licked his fingers. There was the familiar feeling that things were going wrong.

  “Well, I’m not doing that again,” said the aunt, rotating her head, tipping her chin up. “Sleeping in the car. Feel like my neck is welded. And Bunny sleeps as quiet as an eggbeater.”

  They walked around in the roky damp, in a silence. The car glazed with salt. Quoyle squinted at the road. It curved, angled away from shoreline and into fog. What he could see of it looked good. Better than yesterday.

  The aunt slapped mosquitoes, knotted a kerchief under her chin. Quoyle longed for bitter coffee or a clear view. Whatever he hoped for never happened. He rolled the damp tent.

  Bunny’s eyes opened as he threw in the tent and sleeping bag, but she sank back to sleep when the car started. Seeing blue beads that fell and fell from a string although she held both ends tightly.

  The interior of the station wagon smelled of human hair. An arc showed in the fog, beyond it a second arc of faint prismatic colors.

  “Fogbow,” said the aunt. How loud the station wagon engine sounded.

  Suddenly they were on a good gravel road.

  “Look at this,” said Quoyle. “This is nice.” It curled away. They crossed a concrete bridge over a stream the color of beer.

  “For pity’s sake,” said the aunt. “It’s a wonderful road. But for what?”

  “I don’t know,” said Quoyle, bringing his speed up.

  “Got to be some reason. Maybe people come across from Killick-Claw to Capsize Cove by ferry, and then drive out to Quoyle’s Point this way? God knows why. Maybe there’s a provincial park. Maybe there’s a big hotel,” said the aunt. “But how in the world could they make it up from Capsize Cove? That road is all washed out. And Capsize Cove is dead.”

  They noticed sedgy grass in the centerline, a damp sink where a culvert had dropped, and, in the silted shoulders, hoofprints the size of cooking pots.

  “Nobody’s driven this fancy road in a long time.”

  Quoyle stood on the brakes. Warren yelped as she was thrown against the back of the seat. A moose stood broadside, looming; annoyance in its retreat.

  A little after eight they swept around a last corner. The road came to an end in an asphalt parking lot beside a concrete building. The wild barrens pressed all around.

  Quoyle and the aunt got out. Silence, except for the wind sharpening itself on the corner of the building, the gnawing sea. The aunt pointed at cracks in the walls, a few windows up under the eaves. They tried the doors. Metal, and locked.

  “Not a clue,” said the aunt, “whatever it is. Or was.”

  “I don’t know what to make of it,” said Quoyle, “but it all stops here. And the wind’s starting up again.”

  “Oh, without a doubt this building goes with the road. You know,” said the aunt, “if we can scout up something to boil water in, I’ve got some tea bags in my pocketbook. Let’s have a break and think about this. We can use the girls’ soda cans to drink out of. I can’t believe I forgot to get coffee.”

  “I’ve got my camping frying pan with me,” said Quoyle. “Never been used. It was in my sleeping bag. I slept on it all night.”

  “Let’s try it,” said the aunt, gathering dead spruce branches festooned with moss, blasty boughs she called them, and the moss was old man’s whiskers. Remembering the names for things. Heaped the boughs in the lee of the building.

  Quoyle got the water jug from the car. In fifteen minutes they were drinking out of the soda cans, scalding tea that tasted of smoke and orangeade. The aunt drew the sleeve of her sweater down to protect her hand from the hot metal. Fog shuddered against their faces. The aunt’s trouser cuffs snapped in the wind. Ochre brilliance suffused the tattered fog, disclosed the bay, smothered it.

  “Ah!” shouted the aunt pointing into the stirring mist. “I saw the house. The old windows. Double chimneys. As it always was. Over there! I’m telling you I saw it!”

  Quoyle stared. Saw fog stirring.

  “Right over there. The cove and then the house.” The aunt strode away.

  Bunny got out of the car, still in her sleeping bag, shuffling along over the asphalt. “Is this it?” she said, staring at the concrete wall. “It’s awful. There’s no windows. Where’s my room going to be? Can I have a soda, too? Dad, there’s smoke coming out of the can and coming out of your mouth, too. How do you do that, Daddy?”

  Half an hour later they struggled together toward the house, the aunt with Sunshine on her shoulders, Quoyle with Bunny, the dog limping behind. The wind got under the fog, drove it up. Glimpses of the ruffled bay. The aunt pointing, arm like that of the shooting gallery figure with the cigar in its metal hand. In the bay they saw a scallop dragger halfway to the narrows, a wake like the hem of a slip showing behind it.

  Bunny sat on Quoyle’s shoulders, hands clutched under his chin as he stumped through the tuckamore. The house was the green of grass stain, tilted in fog. She endured her father’s hands on her knees, the smell of his same old hair, his rumbles that she weighed a ton, that she choked him. The house rocked with his strides through a pitching ocean of dwarf birch. That color of green made her sick.

  “Be good now,” he said, loosing her fingers. Six years separated her from him, and every day was widening water between her outward-bound boat and the shore that was her father. “Almost there, almost there,” Quoyle panted, pitying horses.

  He set her on the ground. She ran with Sunshine up and down the curve of rock. The house threw their voices back at them, hollow and unfamiliar.

  The gaunt building stood on rock. The distinctive feature was a window flanked by two smaller ones, as an adult might stand with protective arms around children’s shoulders. Fan lights over the door. Quoyle noticed half the panes were gone. Paint flaked from wood. Holes in the roof. The bay rolled and rolled.

  “Miracle it’s standing. That roofline is as straight as a ruler,” the aunt said. Trembling.

  “Let’s see how it is inside,” said Quoyle. “For all we know the floors have fallen into the cellar.”

  The aunt laughed. “Not likely,” she shouted joyfully. “There isn’t any cellar.” The house was lashed with cable to iron rings set in the rock. Streaks of rust, notched footholds in the stone like steps, crevices deep enough to hide a child. The cables bristled with broken wires.

  “Top of the rock not quite level,” the aunt said, her
sentences flying out like ribbons on a pole. “Before my time, but they said it rocked in storms like a big rocking chair, back and forth. Made the women sick, afraid, so they lashed it down and it doesn’t move an inch but the wind singing through those cables makes a noise you don’t forget. Oh, do I remember it in the winter storms. Like a moaning.” For the house was garlanded with wind. “That’s one reason I was glad when we moved over to Capsize Cove. There was a store at Capsize and that was a big thing. But then we shifted down the coast to Catspaw, and a year later we were off to the States.” Told herself to calm down.

  Rusted twenty-penny nails; planks over the ground-floor windows. Quoyle hooked his fingers under the window planks and heaved. Like pulling on the edge of the world.

  “There’s a hammer in the car,” he said. “Under the seat. Maybe a pry bar. I’ll go back and get them. And the food. We can make a picnic breakfast.”

  The aunt was remembering a hundred things. “I was born here,” she said. “Born in this house.” Other rites had occurred here as well.

  “Me too,” said Sunshine, blowing at a mosquito on her hand. Bunny slapped at it. Harder than necessary.

  “No you weren’t. You were born in Mockingburg, New York. There’s smoke over there,” she said, looking across the bay. “Something’s on fire.”

  “It’s chimney smoke from the houses in Killick-Claw. They’re cooking their breakfasts over there. Porridge and hotcakes. See the fishing boat out in the middle of the bay? See it going along?”

  “I wanna see it,” said Sunshine. “I can’t see it. I can’t SEE it.”

  “You stop that howling or you’ll see your bottom warmed,” said the aunt. Face red in the wind.

  Quoyle remembered himself crying “I can’t see it,” to a math teacher who turned away, gave no answers. The fog tore apart, light charged the sea like blue neon.

  The wood, hardened by time and corroding weather, clenched the nails fast. They came out crying. He wrenched the latch but could not open the door until he worked the tire iron into the crack and forced it.

  Dark except for the blinding rectangle streaming through the open door. Echo of boards dropping on rock. Light shot through glass in slices, landed on the dusty floors like strips of yellow canvas. The children ran in and out the door, afraid to go into the gloom alone, shrieking as Quoyle, levering boards outside, gave ghostly laughs and moans, “Huu huu huu.”

  Then inside, the aunt climbing the funneled stairs, Quoyle testing floorboards, saying be careful, be careful. Dust charged the air and they were all sneezing. Cold, must; canted doors on loose hinges. The stair treads concave from a thousand shuffling climbs and descents. Wallpaper poured backwards off the walls. In the attic a featherbed leaking bird down, ticking mapped with stains. The children rushed from room to room. Even when fresh the rooms must have been mean and hopeless.

  “That’s one more dollar for me!” shrieked Bunny, whirling on gritty floor. But through the windows the cool plain of sea.

  Quoyle went back out. The wind as sweet in his nose as spring water in a thirsty mouth. The aunt coughing and half-crying inside.

  “There’s the table, the blessed table, the old chairs, the stove is here, oh my lord, there’s the broom on the wall where it always hung,” and she seized the wooden handle. The rotted knot burst, straws shot out of the binding wire and the aunt held a stick. She saw the stovepipe was rusted through, the table on ruined legs, the chairs unfit.

  “Needs a good scurrifunging. What mother always said.”

  Now she roved the rooms, turned over pictures that spit broken glass. Held up a memorial photograph of a dead woman, eyes half open, wrists bound with strips of white cloth. The wasted body lay on the kitchen table, coffin against the wall.

  “Aunt Eltie. She died of TB.” Held up another of a fat woman grasping a hen.

  “Auntie Pinkie. She was so stout she couldn’t get down to the chamber pot and had to set it on the bed before she could pee.”

  Square rooms, lofty ceilings. Light dribbled like water through a hundred sparkling holes in the roof, caught on splinters. This bedroom. Where she knew the pattern of cracks on the ceiling better than any other fact in her life. Couldn’t bear to look. Downstairs again she touched a paint-slobbered chair, saw the foot knobs on the front legs worn to rinds. The floorboards slanted under her feet, wood as bare as skin. A rock smoothed by the sea for doorstop. And three lucky stones strung on a wire to keep the house safe.

  Outside, an hour later, Quoyle at his fire, the aunt taking things out of the food box; eggs, a crushed bag of bread, butter, jam. Sunshine crowded against the aunt, her hands following, seizing packets. The child unwrapped the butter, the aunt spread it with a piece of broken wood for a knife, stirred the shivering eggs in the pan. The bread heel for the old dog. Bunny at the landwash casting peckled stones. As each struck, foaming lips closed over it.

  They sat beside the fire. The smoky stingo like an offering from some stone altar, the aunt thought, watched the smolder melt into the sky. Bunny and Sunshine leaned against Quoyle. Bunny ate a slice of bread rolled up, the jelly poised at the end like the eye of a toaster oven, watched the smoke gyre.

  “Dad. Why does smoke twist around?”

  Quoyle tore circles of bread, put pinches of egg atop and said “Here comes a little yellow chicken to the ogre’s lair,” and made the morsels fly through the air and into Sunshine’s mouth. And the children were up and off again, around the house, leaping over the rusted cables that held it to the rock.

  “Dad,” panted Bunny, clacking two stones together. “Isn’t Petal going to live with us any more?”

  Quoyle was stunned. He’d explained that Petal was gone, that she was asleep and could never wake up, choking back his own grief, reading aloud from a book the undertaker had supplied, A Child’s Introduction to Departure of a Loved One.

  “No, Bunny. She’s gone to sleep. She’s in heaven. Remember, I told you?” For he had protected them from the funeral, had never said the word. Dead.

  “And she can’t get up again?”

  “No. She’s sleeping forever and she can never get up.”

  “You cried, Daddy. You put your head on the refrigerator and cried.”

  “Yes,” said Quoyle.

  “But I didn’t cry. I thought she would come back. She would let me wear her blue beads.”

  “No. She can’t come back.” And Quoyle had given away the blue beads, all the heaps of chains and beads, the armfuls of jewel-colored clothes, the silly velvet cap sewed over with rhinestones, the yellow tights, the fake red fox coat, even the half-empty bottles of Trésor, to the Goodwill store.

  “If I was asleep I would wake up,” said Bunny, walking away from him and around the house.

  She was alone back there, the stunted trees pressing at the foot of the rock. A smell of resin and salt. Behind the house a ledge. A freshet plunged into a hole. The color of the house on this side, away from the sun, was again the bad green. She looked up and the walls swelled out as though they were falling. Turned again and the tuckamore moved like legs under a blanket. There was a strange dog, white, somehow misshapen, with matted fur. The eyes gleamed like wet berries. It stood, staring at her. The black mouth gaped, the teeth seemed packed with stiff hair. Then it was gone like smoke.

  She shrieked, stood shrieking, and when Quoyle ran to her, she climbed up on him, bellowing to be saved. And though later he beat through the tuckamore with a stick for half an hour they saw no dog, nor sign. The aunt said in the old days when the mailman drove a team and men hauled firewood with dogs, everyone kept the brutes. Perhaps, she said doubtfully, some wild tribe had descended from those dogs. Warren snuffled without enthusiasm, refused to take a scent.

  “Don’t go wandering off by yourselves, now. Stay with us.” The aunt made a face at Quoyle that meant—what? That the child was nervy.

  She looked down the bay, scanned the shoreline, the fiords, thousand-foot cliffs over creamy water. The same birds still flew from
them like signal flares, razored the air with their cries. Darkening horizon.

  The old place of the Quoyles, half ruined, isolated, the walls and doors of it pumiced by stony lives of dead generations. The aunt felt a hot pang. Nothing would drive them out a second time.

  6

  Between Ships

  Oh make ‘er fast and stow yer gear,

  Leave ‘er, Johnny, leave ‘er!

  An tie ‘er up to the bloomin pier,

  It’s time for we to leave ‘er!

  OLD SONG

  THE FIRE was dying. Dominoed coals gave off the last heat. Bunny lay plastered against Quoyle under the wing of his jacket. Sunshine squatted on the other side of the fire piling pebbles on top of each other. Quoyle heard her murmuring to them, “Get up there, honey, you want the pancakes?” She could not stack more than four before they fell.

  The aunt ticked off points on her fingers, drew lines on the rock with a burned stick. But they could not live in the house, said Quoyle, perhaps for a long time. They could live in the house, said the aunt, the words lunging at something, but it would be hard. Ah, even if the house was like new, said Quoyle, he couldn’t drive back and forth on that road every day. The first part of the road was god-awful.

  “Get a boat.” The aunt, dreamily, as though she meant a schooner for the trade winds. “With a boat you don’t need the road.”

  “What about stormy weather? Winter?” Quoyle heard his own idiotic voice. He did not want a boat, shied from the thought of water. Ashamed he could not swim, couldn’t learn.

  “Rare the storm a Newfoundlander couldn’t cross the bay in,” said the aunt. “In the winter, the snowmobile.” Her stick grated on the rock.

  “A road still might be better,” said Quoyle imagining coffee roaring out of a spigot and into his cup.

  “Well, granted we can’t live in the house for a while, maybe two or three months,” said the aunt, “we can find a place to rent in Killick-Claw where you’ll be near your newspaper work until the house is fixed. Let’s drive up this afternoon, get a couple of motel rooms and see if we can find a house to rent, line up some carpenters to start on this place. Want a babysitter or a play school for the girls. I’ve got my own work to do, you know. Locate a work space, get set up. That wind is coming stronger.” The coals fountained sparks.