The Shipping News

by Annie Proulx

  “Did Wavey know this?”

  “Of course she knew. ‘E made her life some miserable. Rubbed her nose in it, ‘e did. Went off for weeks and months, swarvin’ around. No sir, boy, don’t you worry about ‘Erold. Far as keeping ‘Erold’s memory green and sacred goes, of course ‘e turned into a tragic figure. What else could she do? And then there was the boy. Can’t tell a lad born under those circumstances that ‘is dad was a rat. I know she makes a song and dance about ‘Erold. But ‘ow far does that get ‘er?” He opened the door again.

  “Not far from Herold, I guess.” said Quoyle, who answered rhetorical questions.

  “Depends how you look at it. Evvie’s made bark sail bread. We might as well get the good of it with a cup of tea.” Clapped Quoyle on the arm.

  The seal hunt began in March, a few foreigners out on the Front, the bloody Front off Labrador where the harp seals whelped and moulted in the shelter of hummocky ice. Men had burned and frozen and drowned there for centuries, come to a stop when televised in red color, clubbing.

  Thousands of seals came into the bays as well and excited landsmen put out after them in anything that would work among the ice floes.

  In the 4:00 A.M. fluorescent brightness Jack Buggit drank a last cup of tea, went to the hook behind the stove for his jacket and hood. Hands into wife-knitted thumbies, took the rifle, box of cartridges in his pocket. Shut off the light and felt through the dark to the latch. The door silent behind him.

  The cold air filled his throat like ice water. The sky a net, its mesh clogged with glowing stars.

  Down at the stage he loaded gear into the frost-rimed skiff. Rifle, club—wished he had one of the Norwegian hakapiks, handy tool for getting up onto the ice again if you went in. Well, a fisherman had to take his chance. His sealer’s knife, anti-yellow solution, axe, crushed ice, buckets, nylon broom, line, plastic bags. For Jack pelted on the ice. And it had to be right or it was no good at all.

  Checked the gas. And was out through the bay ice to the ice beyond.

  By full light he was crawling on his belly through jagged knots toward a patch of seals.

  Shot the first harps before eight. Jack glanced briefly at a dulled eye, touched the naked pupil, then turned the fat animal on its back and made a straight and centered cut from jaw to tail. Sixty years and more of practice on the seal meadows. Used to be out with a crowd, none of this Lone Ranger stuff. Remembered Harry Clews, a famous skinner who pelted out the fattest with three quick strokes of the knife. Oh what a bad breath the feller had, indoors they couldn’t abide him. Women put their hands over their noses. Lived in his boat, you might say. The hard life, sealing. And in the end, Harry Clews, expert of a bitter art, was photographed at his trade, put on the cover of a book and reviled the world over.

  He slipped the knife in under the blubber layer and cut the flipper arteries, rolled the seal onto its opened belly on clean slanted ice. Smoked a cigarette while he watched the crimson seep into the snow. Thought, if there is killing there must be blood.

  Now, barehanded, cut away the pelt from the carcass, keeping the blubber layer an even thickness, cut out the flippers and put them aside. The holes small and perfectly matched. He rinsed the pelt in the sea, for the iron-rich blood would stain and ruin it, laid it on clean snow, fur down, not a nick or scrape on it, and turned to the carcass.

  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 cauliflower 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 opening, 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.

  “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 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 s
tocking, 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 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, Tuli 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 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 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 a loop with the small end of the longest strand, and seize all strands together. Lay up aFOUR-STRAND SQUARE SINNET. Surmount it with a largeBUTTON KNOT. COVER the seizing with a leather shoestringTURK’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 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 LANDer,” 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 r
ibband.

  “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.

  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.