The Shipping News

by Annie Proulx

  As usual, the aunt was way out front and running.

  39

  Shining Hubcaps

  “There are still old knots that are unrecorded, and so long as there are new purposes for rope, there will always be new knots to discover.”

  THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

  PACK ice like broken restaurant dishes still in the bay but the boat was finished. The last curl looped out of Yark’s plane. He stood away, slapped the graceful wood, made a palm-sized cloud of dust. Seemed made of saw scraps himself. Humming.

  “Well, that’s she,” he said. “Get some paint on ‘er and there you go.” And while Quoyle and Dennis wrestled the boat onto the trailer, the old man watched but took his ease. His part was finished. His mouth cracked open. Quoyle, guessing what was coming, got there first, roared “Oh the Gandy Goose, it ain’t no use,” sang it to the end, swelling the volume until the lugubrious tune took warmth from his hot throat. Old Yark believed it was a salute, embroidered stories for half an hour before he went up to his tea, the tune still warm in his ears as a hat from behind the stove.

  A platter of fried herrings with bacon rashers and hashed potatoes. A quart jar of mustard. Beety back and forth, stepping over Warren the Second who wished to live forever beneath the tablecloth or with the boots but could not decide. Quoyle and Wavey were supper guests, full of kind laughter and praise for what they ate. Boiled cabbage. And blueberry tarts to finish, with cream. Double helpings from every dish for Quoyle. Although the cabbage would produce gas.

  Sunshine flexed a herring backbone and sang “birch rine, tar twine, cherry wine and turbletine.” Bunny and Marty sharing a chair, arms entwined, each with a bag of candy hearts saved from Valentine’s Day, allowed themselves one each, LUCKY IN LOVE, OH YOU KID.

  At the table, Dennis fidgeted, up and down. Opened a drawer, closed it.

  “What’s the matter with you?” asked Beety. “You’re like a cat with his bum on fire tonight.”

  An offended look from Dennis while Quoyle bit his lip.

  “Don’t know, woman! Seems like I’m looking for something. Don’t know what. That’s one thing.”

  “You want more tea?”

  “No, no, I’s full up.”

  But there were things. No work for weeks, none in sight, he said to Quoyle. Not a good way to live, always anxious about income. Sick of it. Be different if he could do a little fishing. Up again, to pick up the teapot, look in it. Quoyle was lucky to have a job. Wasn’t there more tea to be had?

  “It’s your father’s paper,” said Quoyle. “Can’t you work on the paper? God knows we could use you. Ah, we’re shorthanded every way.” Bungled his spoonful of sugar, spilling half on the good tablecloth.

  “Christ, no! Rather have me arms cut off at the shoulder. I hates messing with little squiddy words, reading and writing and that. Like scuffing through dead flies.” He showed his blunt hands. “We’re talking”—nodded at Beety, whose eyes were cast down at the moment—“about going to Toronto for a year or two. Don’t want to, but we could save up and then come back. There’s good work there for carpenters. There’s nothing here.” Drummed on the table, which set all the children off, small fingers trying to produce the hollow galloping. Dennis glared. Unconvincingly.

  Beety and Wavey scraped the dishes, talked of Toronto. Beety’s voice as limp as a hot rag. How it might be. Would the kids like it. Maybe better if they didn’t. Maybe. Maybe.

  Quoyle could hardly say, don’t go. Knew they would be lost forever if they went, for even the few who came back were altered in temper as a knife reclaimed from the ashes of a house fire. Poor Bunny, if she had to lose Marty. Poor Quoyle, if he had to lose Dennis and Beety.

  When all were yawning, Quoyle carried Herry, more or less asleep on the living room carpet. Sunshine gripped Wavey’s hand because there was ice. The dog was first in the car and tried every seat.

  “Wavey,” said Sunshine, “if you ironed a fish would it be as big as a rug?”

  “I think, bigger,” said Wavey. “If unfolded.”

  Dennis walked out with them. Rust pattered on the ground when Quoyle slammed Wavey’s door.

  “When are you going to get rid of this old clunker?” Morose. Braced his hand against the station wagon until it started to move away. Watched their taillights dwindle, then walked across the road and looked. Nothing to be seen but the lighthouse’s electronic stutter. The sea flat as boards.

  In the sleeping house Quoyle ran a hot bath. He soaked in the water, pinched his nose and slid down into the heat. With gratitude. Fate could have given him Nutbeem’s molasses barrel.

  Out of the tub he rubbed with a towel, wiped off the fulllength mirror on the back of the bathroom door. He looked at his naked self, steam rising from his flesh in the cool air. Saw he was immense. The bull neck, the great jaw and heavy cheek slabs stubbled with coppery bristles. The yellowish freckles. Full shoulders and powerful arms, the hands as hairy as a werewolf’s. Damp fur on the chest, down to the swelling belly. Bulky genitals bright red from the hot bathwater in a nest of reddish hair. Thighs, legs like tree stumps. Yet the effect was more of strength than obesity. He guessed he was at some prime physical point. Middle age not too far ahead, but it didn’t frighten him. It was harder to count his errors now, perhaps because they had compounded beyond counting, or had blurred into his general condition.

  He pulled on the grey nightshirt which was torn under the arms and clung to his wet back. Again, a bolt of joy passed through him. For no reason.

  Came out of sleep to hear the phone ringing. Down to the kitchen, stumbling over a dirty shirt he had dropped. Dennis on the wire.

  “Don’t like to wake you up but thought you ought to know. Mumma called a few minutes ago. He’s not back yet. Been out since four this morning. He should have been back dinnertime. It’s ten o’clock now. Something’s wrong. I called the Search and Rescue. I’m on my way to Mumma’s now. I felt like something was off all day. We’s braced for the worst.”

  “Let me know as soon as you hear anything.” Quoyle shivered in the chilly kitchen. The clock said six minutes past ten. He could not hear the sea.

  At midnight Dennis called again, voice hoarse and drained. As though some long struggle had ended badly.

  “They found the boat. They found him. He’s drownded. They said efforts to resuscitate failed.” No heartbeat, no breath, lying on the rescue ship’s emergency room table. “Looks like he caught his foot in the slingstone line when he threw a lobster trap over. They’re bringing him and the boat in now. You call Billy? I’m taking Mumma down. She wants to be there when they bring him in.”

  In the morning, breakfastless and shaky from seven cups of coffee, heart and stomach aching, Quoyle went to the wharf on his way to Wavey. There was Jack’s skiff tied up beyond the orange Search and Rescue vessel, trucks and cars and a knot of people looking at the boat of the drowned man.

  Wavey fell against him like a cut sapling, tears wetting his shirt. Quoyle backed against the sink in her little kitchen. He said he would drive Herry and Bunny to school to keep balance in their day. Sunshine would stay with Wavey, who, after the brief luxury of Quoyle’s shoulder, was making school lunches. Not to trouble Beety.

  A stillness. Mist the depth of a hand on the water, blurred the jumbled shore. Rock ledges like black metal straps held the sea to the land. Quoyle inhaled, cold air rushed up his nose and he was guilty because Jack was dead and here he was, still breathing.

  Paper-faced Billy had every detail, had gone to the wharf the night before, had put his hand on Mrs. Buggit’s arm, touched Dennis’s shoulder and said he was sorry for their trouble. Had seen Jack brought back to the house and carried in. Helped pull Jack’s clothes off, cover him with a sheet. Observed the matching mole below his left nipple that, when balanced by the eye against the right nipple, suggested punctuation ready for an inscription to be written around the torso.

  Had seen Mrs. Buggit and her sisters with the basins of water and scissors to prep
are Jack for his suit, to shave and tonsure, to clip his nails. An embroidered pillow was ready to put under his head, brought from a trunk, the tissue unfolded. His Voyage Ended. Worked decades before in the north light of the window.

  Quoyle and Benny Fudge leaned on their desks, watching Billy who seemed made of translucent fish bones, whose talk pelted them like handfuls of thrown pebbles.

  “They found the skiff out by the Pook Rock. Jack never set a lobster trap there in his life. Can’t figure it out, what he was doing there. You know that cat he liked so well, called him Skipper. Skipper Tom. Still on the boat. The Search and Rescue comes up along, shines the searchlight and there’s Skipper Tom, prowling back and forth with his tail lashing as if he knowed Jack needed help and couldn’t work out how to give it. They could see Jack clear as day under the water. The line going overboard. He was upside down, just under the boat. The slingstone line of the lobster trap wrapped around his ankle and yanked him overboard. He couldn’t get loose. It was tangled kind of crazy. His hand was jammed in his pocket. He had to of been feeling for his knife, you know, cut himself free. But there wasn’t a knife there. Could be he dropped it or lost it somehow as he went over and didn’t realize. I don’t know if he carried it loose in his pocket, but when I was fishing my knife was in my right pocket and there was a lanyard that secured it to me belt loop. Because if you lose it when you’re upside down under the water like poor Jack, that’s all, you’re gone.” Hoarse as a raven.

  Quoyle imagined Jack’s clothes rippling underwater like silk, his moonstone face and throat and hands glimmering under the sea.

  “Amen,” said Benny Fudge. “There’s many a lobsterman goes that way.”

  “How’s Mrs. Buggit taking it?” Thinking of the woman in the perpetual freeze of sorrow, afloat on the rise and fall of tatted billows.

  “Surprising calm. She said she’s been expecting it since the first week they was married and Jack was thought lost out on the ice. Sealing. She’s been through the agony now three times over. There’s one relief that’s helping her bear up. See, they recovered the body. She can bury Jack. They’ve took him up home to lay him out. Jack will be the first Buggit in a long time to be buried in the earth. It’s a comfort for her to have the body.”

  Stones crowded in close company in the Killick-Claw cemetery, for someone lost at sea did not need six feet of space.

  “They’re laying him out now. The wake is tonight and the burial service tomorrow, Quoyle. You do bring Wavey to poor Jack’s house at seven tonight. Dennis told me to tell you. And asks if you’ll be a pallbearer for poor Jack.”

  “Yes,” said Quoyle. “I will. And we’ll run a special edition this week dedicated to Jack. Billy, we’ll want a front-page obit. From the heart. Who better than you? Talk to everybody. I wonder if there’s any pictures of him. I’ll see if Beety knows. Benny, forget whatever you’re doing. Go down to Search and Rescue and get the details of them finding Jack. Get some shots of his skiff. Play up the cat. What’s his name? Skipper Tom.”

  “What’s going to happen with the Gammy Bird?” said Benny Fudge, tossing lank black hair. “Will it be put to rest?” His big chance slipping away. Even now he played with a piece of string as if it was yarn.

  “No. A paper has a life of its own, an existence beyond earthly owners. We’re going to press tomorrow as usual. Have to work like hell to make it. What time’s the wake, Billy?” Quoyle began to rip up the front page.

  Billy reached for his notebook. “Seven. I don’t know if Dennis can build a coffin or if they’ll have to buy one.”

  Benny Fudge slipped out the door, in his hand the new laptop computer, on his head a mail-order fedora, his face firmed up with new teeth and ambition.

  Thickening mist on the water. Vaporous spirals writhed, the air thickened and filled in, that other world disappeared as if down a funnel leaving only wet rock, the smothered sea and watery air. From a distance the hoarse and muffled call of the foghorn like a bull in a spring meadow bellowing with longing.

  Quoyle was exhausted, keyed up, getting ready for the wake. He squeezed into his black funeral trousers. He’d have to go back to the paper as soon as he could decently leave and finish pasting up Billy’s long piece. They had a fine picture of Jack, ten years younger but looking the same, standing beside his freshly painted skiff. Quoyle had had a big nine-by-twelve print framed for Mrs. Buggit.

  Dreaded seeing Jack lying in his parlor in a froth of knotted doilies. Thought of the corpse as wet, as though they could not dry him off, the seawater running from him in streams, dripping loudly on the polished floor and Mrs. Buggit, worried, stooping to mop it up with a white cloth bunched in her hand.

  His old tweed jacket was too small as well. In the end he gave up and pulled on the enormous oxblood sweater he wore every day. It could not be helped. But would have to buy a new jacket next day for the funeral. Get it in the morning in Misky Bay when he took the paper in to be printed. Tying his good shoes when Wavey called and said Bunny had something to ask.

  Tough little voice. Only the second time he’d talked to her on the phone. She’d never make a living selling insurance.

  “Dad, Wavey says I have to ask you. I want to go to the awake for Uncle Jack. Wavey says you have to say if we can. Dad, you are going and Marty and them is going and Herry and Wavey is going and me and Sunshine has to be with the aunt in her shop full of needles and I don’t want to, I want to go to the awake.

  “Bunny, it’s ‘the wake,’ not ‘the awake.’ And Marty and Murchie and Winnie are going because Jack was their grandfather. Let me talk to Wavey about this.”

  But Wavey thought it was right for them to go.

  Quoyle said there had been too much death in the past year.

  “But everything dies,” said Wavey. “There is grief and loss in life. They need to understand that. They seem to think death is just sleep.”

  Well, said Quoyle, they were children. Children should be protected from knowledge of death. And what about Bunny’s nightmares? Might get worse.

  “But, m’dear, if they don’t know what death is how can they understand the deep part of life? The seasons and nature and creation—”

  He didn’t want her to get going toward God and religion. As she sometimes did.

  “Maybe,” said Wavey, “she has those nightmares because she’s afraid if she sleeps she won’t wake up—like Petal and Warren and her grandparents. Besides, if you look at the departed you’ll never be troubled by the memory. It’s well-known.”

  And so Quoyle agreed. And promised not to say that Jack was sleeping. And he would come along and get them all in the station wagon. In about fifteen minutes.

  The verge of the road crowded with cars and trucks. They had to park far back and walk to the house, toward a roar of voices that carried a hundred feet. A line of people filed through the parlor where, among lace whirligigs, Jack’s coffin rested on black-draped sawhorses. They sidled in, edging through the crowd to the parlor. Quoyle held Bunny’s hand, carried Sunshine. Jack like a photograph of himself, waxy in his unfamiliar suit. His eyelids violet. Actually, thought Quoyle, he did look like he was sleeping. Had to jerk Bunny away.

  Joined the line sifting into the kitchen where there were cakes and braided breads, the steaming kettle, a row of whiskey bottles and small glasses. The talk rose, it was of Jack. The things he had done or might have done.

  Billy Pretty speaking, a glass in his hand. His face gone blood-red with whiskey and the words tumbling out in ecstatic declamation, tossing in the lop of his own talk. “You all know we are only passing by. We only walk over these stones a few times, our boats float a little while and then they have to sink. The water is a dark flower and a fisherman is a bee in the heart of her.”

  Dennis in a serge suit with flared cuffs and Beety with her hand on Mrs. Buggit’s trembling shoulder. A collar of heavy lace imprinting the black silk. Dennis rummaged through boxes and drawers, looking for Jack’s lodge pin. Which was missing, had been mis
sing for years. Now it was needed.

  Children played outside. Quoyle could see Marty in the yard throwing crusts to hens. But Bunny would not go to her, eeled back into the parlor and took up a station beside the coffin.

  “I’ll get her,” said Wavey. For the child’s staring was unnatural. While Dennis showed his mother the pin, found in a cup on the top shelf of the pantry. An enameled wreath and the initial R. She took it, rose and moved slowly toward the parlor. To pin it in Jack’s lapel. The final touch. Leaned over her dead husband. The pin point shook as she tried to pierce the fabric. A respectful silence from the watching mourners. Sudden sobbing from Beety. Wavey tugged Bunny’s hand gently. A fixed gaze on the corpse. She would not come, yanked her hand away.

  A cough like an old engine starting up. Mrs. Buggit dropped the pin into the satin, turned and gripped Dennis’s arm. Her throat frozen, eyes like wooden drawer knobs. Wavey seized Bunny away. Dennis it was who shouted.

  “Dad’s come back to life!”

  And lurched to help his father get his shoulders out of the coffin’s wedge. A roar and screaming. Some stumbled back, some surged forward. Quoyle pushed from the kitchen, saw a knot of arms reaching to help grey Jack back to the present, water dribbling from his mouth with each wrack of his chest. And across the room heard Bunny shout “He woke up!”

  Quoyle drove shaky Dennis to the hospital through the fog, followed the ambulance. They could see Mrs. Buggit’s profile in the howling vehicle. Behind them the whiskey was going fast, there was an immense babble of disbelief and cries of holy miracle. To Quoyle Dennis repeated all that had happened, what he thought, what he felt, what he saw, what the ambulance doctor said as though Quoyle had missed it.

  “They says they’s worried about pneumonia! And brain damage! But I’m not!” Dennis, laughing, pounding the car seat, saying follow that ambulance, his hands full of papers that he’d grabbed up somewhere. He talked like a windmill in high-pitched, whirling sentences. Rustling and sorting papers as they drove. Punching Quoyle’s shoulder.