The Shipping News

by Annie Proulx

  “It’s on my desk,” said Quoyle.

  “I won’t forget this, Billy Pretty,” said Card, spots the size of coasters burning on his cheeks.

  The short parade to Flour Sack Cove, take-out coffee slopping down dashboards, steering wheels gritty with doughnut sugar. Ten minutes later Quoyle handed Card his column, said nothing, watched his eyes zag back and forth. Staff Awaits Paroxysm.

  NOBODY HANGS A PICTURE OF AN OIL TANKER

  There is a 1904 photograph on the wall of the Killick-Claw Public Library. It shows eight schooners in Omaloor Bay heading out to the fishing grounds, their sails spread like white wings. They are beautiful beyond compare. It took great skill and sea knowledge to sail them.

  Today the most common sight on the marine horizon is the low black profile of an oil tanker. Oil, in crude and refined forms, is—bar none—the number one commodity in international trade.

  Another common sight is black oil scum along miles of landwash, like the shoreline along Cape Despond this week. Hundreds of people watched Monday morning as 14,000 metric tons of crude washed onshore from a ruptured tank of the Golden Goose. Thousands of seabirds and fish struggled in the oil, fishing boats and nets were fouled. “This is the end of this place,” said Jack Eye, 87, of Little Despond, who, as a young man, was a dory fisherman with the schooner fleet.

  Our world runs on oil. More than 3,000 tankers prowl the world’s seas. Among them are the largest moving objects ever made by man, the Very Large Crude Carriers, or VLCCs, up to 400 meters in length and over 200,000 deadweight tons. Many of these ships are single hull vessels. Some are old and corroded, structurally weak. One thing is sure. There will be more oil spills, and some will be horrendous.

  Nobody hangs a picture of an oil tanker on their wall.

  Tert Card read it, laid it on the corner of his desk and looked at Quoyle.

  “You too,” he said. “You bloody fucking too.”

  When the newsroom was empty that evening he stood by the window, addressed an absent Quoyle.

  “Keep your bloody American pinko Greenpeace liberalism out of it. Who the hell are you to say this? Oh yes, Mr. Quoyle’s bloody precious column! It’s against our whole effort of development and economic progress.”

  And he rewrote the piece, pasted it up with bold fingers, went out and got drunk. To quell the pain of the irksome canker sores. How could they know he swallowed glassful after glassful to comprehend a harsh and private beauty?

  A day or two later Tert Card brought in a framed picture from a shipping company’s wall calendar. He hung it behind his desk. The gargantuan Quiet Eye nosed through a sunset into Placentia Bay. LARGEST OIL TANKER IN THE WORLD. The first time the door slammed it went askew.

  Quoyle thought it was funny until noon when Card came back from the printer with the ink-smelling bundles of Gammy Bird. Took a copy, turned to see how his Shipping News story came out. His column had been condensed to a caption accompanying the same calendar page photo that hung on Tert Card’s wall.

  PICTURE OF AN OIL TANKER

  More than 3,000 tankers proudly ride the world’s seas. These giant tankers, even the biggest, take advantage of Newfoundland’s deep-water ports and refineries. Oil and Newfoundland go together like ham and eggs, and like ham and eggs they’ll nourish us all in the coming years.

  Let’s all hang a picture of an oil tanker on our wall.

  Quoyle felt the blood drain out of his head; he went dizzy.

  “What have you done!” he shouted at Tert Card, voice an axe.

  “Straightened it out, that’s all. We don’t want to hear that Greenpeace shit.” Tert Card whinnied. Feeling good. His cheap face thrust out.

  “You cut the guts out of this piece! You made it into rotten cheap propaganda for the oil industry. You made me look like a mouthpiece for tanker interests.” He pressed Card into his corner.

  “I told you,” said Nutbeem. “I told you, Quoyle, to watch out, he’ll cobble your work.”

  Quoyle was incensed, some well of anger like a dome of oil beneath innocuous sand, tapped and gushing.

  “This is a column,” bellowed Quoyle. “You can’t change somebody’s column, for Christ’s sake, because you don’t like it! Jack asked me to write a column about boats and shipping. That means my opinion and description as I see it. This”—he shook the paper against the slab cheeks—“isn’t what I wrote, isn’t my opinion, isn’t what I see.”

  “As long as I’m the managing editor,” said Tert Card, rattling like pebbles in a can, “I’ve the right to change anything I don’t think fit to run in the Gammy Bird. And if you don’t think so, I advise you to check it out with Jack Buggit.” Ducked under Quoyle’s raised arms.

  And ran for the door.

  “Don’t think I don’t know you’re all against me.” The thick candle that was Tert Card gone somewhere else with his sputtering light.

  “You’re a surprise, Quoyle,” said Billy Pretty. “I didn’t believe you had that much steam in your boiler. You blew him out of the water.”

  “You know how it is, now,” said Nutbeem. “I tried to tell you on the first day.”

  “You watch, though. By tomorrow he’ll be back afloat on an even keel. Tert Card snaps right back for all he’s a vitrid bugger.”

  “I’m surprised myself,” said Quoyle. “I’m going to call Jack,” he said, “and get this straightened out. Either I’m writing a column or I’m not.”

  “Word of advice, Quoyle. Don’t call Jack. He is out fishing, as I assume you know. He don’t like Gammy Bird business to come into his home, neither. You just leave it alone and let me drop around to the stage tonight or tomorrow night. The crab approach is best with Jack.”

  “Gammy Bird. Tert Card speaking. Oh, yar, Jack.” Tert Card held the phone receiver against his sweatered chest, looked at Quoyle. The morning light unkind.

  “Wants to talk to you.” His tone indicated bad taste or madness on Jack’s part.

  “Hello.” Braced for abuse.

  “Quoyle. Jack Buggit here. You write your column. If you put your foot in a dog’s mess we’ll say it’s because you was brought up in the States. Tert will keep his hands off it. Put him back on.”

  Quoyle held the phone up and motioned to Card. They could hear Jack squawk. Slowly Tert Card turned his back to the room, faced the window, the sea. As the minutes went by he shifted from foot to foot, sat on the edge of his desk, foraged in ears and nostrils. He rocked, switched the phone from one side of his head to the other. At last the phone went quiet and he hung up.

  “All right,” he said blandly, though the red cheeks flamed, “Jack thinks he wants to try running Quoyle’s columns as they come. For now, anyway. So we’ll just go along with that. We’ll go along with that. But he’s got an idea on the car wreck feature. You know there are weeks when we don’t have any good wrecks and have to go into the files. Well, Jack wants to include boat wrecks. He says at the fisherman’s meeting they said there was more than three hundred dangerous boat accidents and vessel losses last year. Quoyle, he wants you to write up boat wrecks and get some photos, same as you do the car wrecks. There’s enough so we’ll always have a fresh disaster.”

  “There’s no doubt about that,” said Quoyle, looking at Tert Card.

  26

  Deadnvan

  “Deadman—An ‘Irish pennant,’ a loose end hanging about the sails or rigging.

  THE MARINER’S DICTIONARY

  THE END of September, tide going out, moon in its last quarter. The first time Quoyle had been alone at the green house. The aunt was in St. John’s for the weekend buying buttons and muslin. Bunny and Sunshine had howled to stay with Dennis and Beety for Marty’s birthday.

  “She’s my best friend, Dad. I wish she was my sister,” Bunny said passionately. “Please please please let us stay.” And in the Flying Squid Gift & Lunchstop she chose a ring made from pearly shell for Marty’s present, a sheet of spotted tissue for wrapping.

  Quoyle came across the bay in hi
s scorned boat on Friday afternoon with a bag of groceries, two six-packs of beer. All of his notes and the typewriter. A stack of books on nineteenth-century shipping regulations and abuses. In the kitchen, stooped to put the beer in the ice cooler under the sink, then thought of ice. He’d meant to get some, but the empty cooler was still empty, still in the boat. It didn’t matter. In the evening he drank the beer as it was, scribbled by the light of the gas lamp.

  On Saturday Quoyle stumped around the underfurnished rooms; dusty air seemed to wrinkle as he moved through it. He split wood until lunch; beer, two cans of sardines and a can of lima beans. In the afternoon he worked at the kitchen table, started on the first draft, banging the keys, swearing when his fingers jammed between them, writing about Samuel Plimsoll and his line.

  “FOR GOD’S SAKE, HELP ME”

  Everybody has seen the Plimsoll lines or loading marks on vessels. They mark the safe load each ship can carry.

  These loading marks came about because of a single concerned individual, Samuel Plimsoll, elected MP from Derby in 1868. Plimsoll fought for the safety of seamen in a time when unscrupulous shipowners deliberately sent overloaded old ships to sea. Plimsoll’s little book, Our Seamen, described bad vessels so heavily laden with coal or iron their decks were awash. The owners knew the ships would sink. They knew the crews would drown. They did it for the insurance.

  Overloading was the major cause of thousands of wrecks each year. Plimsoll begged for a painted load line on all ships, begged that no ship be allowed, under any circumstances, to leave port unless the line was distinctly visible.

  He wrote directly to his readers. “Do you doubt these statements? Then, for God’s sake—oh, for God’s sake, help me to get a Royal Commission to inquire into their truth!” Powerful shipping interests fought him every inch of the way.

  When he stopped the evening was closing in again. Cooked two pounds of shrimp in olive oil and garlic, sucked the meat from the shells. Went down to the dock in the twilight with the last beer, endured the mosquitoes, watching the lights of Killick-Claw come on. The lighthouses on the points stuttering.

  The Old Hag came in the night, saddled and bridled Quoyle. He dreamed again he was on the nightmare highway. A tiny figure under a trestle stretched imploring arms. Petal, torn and bloody. Yet so great was his speed he was carried past. The brakes did not work when he tramped them. He woke for a few minutes, straining his right foot on the dream brake, his neck wet with anxious sweat. The wind moaned through the house cables, a sound that invoked a sense of hopeless abandonment. But he pulled the sleeping bag corner over his upper ear and slept again. Getting used to nightmares.

  By Sunday noon the Plimsoll piece was in shape and he needed a walk. Had never been out to the end of the point. As he pulled the door to behind him a length of knotted twine fell from the latch. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. Then down along the shore and toward the extremity of land.

  Climbed over rocks as big as houses, dropping down their sides into damp rooms with seaweed floors. The stones clenched lost nets, beaten into hairy frazzles of mussel shells and seaweed. Gulls flew up from tidal pools. The rock was littered with empty crab shells still wet with rust-colored body fluids. The shoreline narrowed to cliff. He could go no further that way.

  So, backtracked, climbed up to the heather that covered the slope like shriveled wigs. Deep-gullied stone. Followed caribou paths up onto the tongue of granite that thrust into the sea. To his right the blue circle of Omaloor Bay, on the left the rough shore that reeled miles away to Misky Bay. Ahead of him the open Atlantic.

  His boots rang on the naked stone. Stumbled on juniper roots embedded in fissures, saw veins of quartz like congealed lightning. The slope was riddled with gullies and rises, ledges and plateaus. Far ahead he saw a stone cairn; wondered who had made it.

  It took half an hour to reach this tower, and he walked around it. Thrice the height of a man, the stones encrusted with lichens. Built a long time ago. Perhaps by the ancient Beothuks, extinct now, slain for sport by bored whalers and cod killers. Perhaps a marker for Basque fishermen or wrecker Quoyles luring vessels onto the rocks with false lights. The booming thunge of sea drew him on.

  At last the end of the world, a wild place that seemed poised on the lip of the abyss. No human sign, nothing, no ship, no plane, no animal, no bird, no bobbing trap marker nor buoy. As though he stood alone on the planet. The immensity of sky roared at him and instinctively he raised his hands to keep it off. Translucent thirty-foot combers the color of bottles crashed onto stone, coursed bubbles into a churning lake of milk shot with cream. Even hundreds of feet above the sea the salt mist stung his eyes and beaded his face and jacket with fine droplets. Waves struck with the hollowed basso peculiar to ovens and mouseholes.

  He began to work down the slant of rock. Wet and slippery. He went cautiously, excited by the violence, wondering what it would be like in a storm. The tide still on the ebb in that complex swell and fall of water against land, as though a great heart in the center of the earth beat but twice a day.

  These waters, thought Quoyle, haunted by lost ships, fishermen, explorers gurgled down into sea holes as black as a dog’s throat. Bawling into salt broth. Vikings down the cracking winds, steering through fog by the polarized light of sun-stones. The Inuit in skin boats, breathing, breathing, rhythmic suck of frigid air, iced paddles dipping, spray freezing, sleek back rising, jostle, the boat torn, spiraling down. Millennial bergs from the glaciers, morbid, silent except for waves breaking on their flanks, the deceiving sound of shoreline where there was no shore. Foghorns, smothered gun reports along the coast. Ice welding land to sea. Frost smoke. Clouds mottled by reflections of water holes in the plains of ice. The glare of ice erasing dimension, distance, subjecting senses to mirage and illusion. A rare place.

  As Quoyle descended, he slipped on the treacherous weed, clung to the rock. Reached a shelf where he could stand and crane, glimpse the maelstrom below. Could go no further.

  He saw three things: a honeycomb of caves awash; a rock in the shape of a great dog; a human body in a yellow suit, head under the surface as though delighted in patterns of the sea bottom. Arms and legs spread out like a starfish, the body slid in and out of a small cave, a toy on a string tugged by the sea. Newspaper Reporter Seems Magnet for Dead Men.

  There was no way down to the body unless he leaped into the foam. If he had brought a rope and grapnel . . . He began to climb back up the cliff. It struck him the man might have fallen from where he now climbed. Yet more likely from a boat. Tell someone.

  Up on the headland again he ran. His side aching. Tell someone about the dead man. When he reached the house it would take still another hour to drive around the bay to the RCMP station. Faster in the boat. The wind at his back swept his hair forward so that the ends snapped at his eyes. At first he felt the cold on his neck, but as he trotted over the rock he flushed with heat and had to unzip his jacket. A long time to get to the dock.

  Caught in the urgency of it, that yellow corpse shuttling in and out, he cast free and set straight across the bay for Killick-Claw. As though there were still a chance to save the man. In ten minutes, as he moved out of the shelter of the lee shore and into the wind, he knew he’d made a mistake.

  Had never had his boat in such rough water. The swells came at him broadside from the mouth of the bay, crests like cruel smiles. The boat rolled, rose up, dropped with sickening speed into the troughs. Instinctively he changed course, taking the waves at an angle on his bow. But now he was headed for a point northeast of Killick-Claw. Somewhere he would have to turn and make an eastsoutheast run for the harbor. In his inexperience Quoyle did not understand how to tack a zigzag across the bay, a long run with the wind and waves on his bow and then a short leg with the wind on his quarter. Halfway across he made a sudden turn toward Killick-Claw, presented his low, wide stern to the swell.

  The boat wallowed about and a short length of line slid out from under the seat. It was knotted
at one end, kinked and crimped at the other as if old knots had finally been untied. For the first time Quoyle got it—there was meaning in the knotted strings.

  The boat pitched and plunged headlong, the bow digging into the loud water while the propeller raced. Quoyle was frightened. Each time, he lost the rudder and the boat yawed. In a few minutes his voyage ended. The bow struck like an axe, throwing the stern high. At once a wave seized, threw the boat broadside to the oncoming sea. It broached. Capsized. And Quoyle was flying under water.

  In fifteen terrifying seconds he learned to swim well enough to reach the capsized boat and grasp the stilled propeller shaft. His weight pulled one side of the upturned stern down and lifted the bow a little, enough to catch an oncoming wave that twisted the boat, turned it over and filled it. Quoyle, tumbling through the transparent sea again, saw the pale boat below him, sinking, drifting casually down, the familiar details of its construction and paint becoming indistinct as it passed into the depths.

  He came to the surface gasping, half blinded by some hot stuff in his eyes, and saw bloody water drip.

  “Stupid,” he thought, “stupid to drown with the children so small.” No life jackets, no floating oars, no sense. Up he rose on a swell, buoyed by body fat and a lungful of air. He was floating. A mile and a half from either shore Quoyle was floating in the cold waves. The piece of knotted twine drifted in front of him and about twenty feet away a red box bobbed—the plastic cooler for the ice he’d forgotten. He thrashed to the cooler through a flotilla of wooden matches that must have fallen into the boat from the grocery bag. He remembered buying them. Guessed they would wash up on shore someday, tiny sticks with the heads washed away. Where would he be?