Shipping News_A Novel

by Annie Proulx

  The aunt leaned on her elbow. Chin on the heel of her hand. “As you get older you find out the place where you started out pulls at you stronger and stronger. I never wanted to see Newfoundland again when I was young, but the last few years it’s been like an ache, just a longing to go back. Probably some atavistic drive to finish up where you started. So in a way I’m starting again, too. Going to move my little business up there. It wouldn’t hurt you to ask about a job.”

  He thought of calling Partridge, telling him. The inertia of grief rolled through him. He couldn’t do it. Not now.

  Woke at midnight, swimming up from aubergine nightmare. Petal getting into a bread truck. The driver is gross, a bald head, mucus suspended from his nostrils, his hands covered with some unspeakable substance. Quoyle has the power to see both sides of the truck at once. Sees the hands reaming up under Petal’s dress, the face lowering into her oaken hair, and all the time the truck careening along highways, swaying over bridges without railings. Quoyle is somehow flying along beside them, powered by anxiety. Clusters of headlights flicker closer. He struggles to reach Petal’s hand, to pull her out of the bread truck, knowing what must come (wishing it for the driver who has metamorphosed into his father) but cannot reach her, suffers agonizing paralysis though he strains. The headlights close. He shouts to tell her death is imminent, but is voiceless. Woke up pulling at the sheet.

  For the rest of the night he sat in the living room with a book in his lap. His eyes went back and forth, he read, but comprehended nothing. The aunt was right. Get out of here.

  ¯

  It took half an hour to get a phone number for Partridge.

  “Goddamn! I was just thinking about you the other day.” Partridge’s voice came fresh in the wires. “Wondering what the hell ever happened to old Quoyle! When you going to come out and visit? You know I quit the papers, don’t you? Yeah, I quit ‘em.” The thought of Mercalia on the road alone, he said, made him go to the truck driver school himself.

  “We’re a driving team, now. Bought a house two years ago. Planning on buying our own rig pretty soon, doing independent contracting. These trucks are sweet-double bunk, little kitchenette. Air-conditioned. We sit up there over the traffic, look down on the cars. Making three times the money I was. Don’t miss newspapers at all. So what’s new with you, still working for Punch?”

  It only took ten or eleven minutes to tell Partridge everything, from falling in one-way love to riding the nightmares, to leaning over a tableful of maps with the aunt.

  “Son of a bitch, Quoyle. You been on the old roller coaster. You had the full-course dinner. Least you got your kids: Well, I’ll tell you. I’m out of the newspaper game but still got some contacts. See what I come up with. Gimme the names of the nearest towns again?”

  There was only one, with the curious name of Killick-Claw.

  ¯

  Partridge back on the line two days later. Pleased to be fixing Quoyle’s life up again. Quoyle made him think of a huge roll of newsprint from the pulp mill. Blank and speckled with imperfections. But beyond this vagueness he glimpsed something like a reflection of light from a distant hubcap, a scintillation that meant there was, in Quoyle’s life, the chance of some brilliance. Happiness? Good luck? Fame and fortune? Who knows, thought Partridge. He liked the rich taste of life so well himself he wished for an entree or two for Quoyle.

  “Amazes me how the old strings still pull. Yeah, there’s a paper up there. A weekly. They looking for somebody, too. You interested, I’ll give you the name I got. Want somebody to cover the shipping news. Guess it’s right on the coast. Want somebody with maritime connections if possible. Quoyle, you got maritime connections?”

  “My grandfather was a sealer.”

  “Jesus. You always come at me out of left field. Anyway, it works out, you got to handle work permits and immigration and all that. Deal with those guys. O.k. Managing editor’s name is Tertius Card. Got a pencil? Give you the number.”

  Quoyle wrote it down.

  “Well, good luck. Let me know how it goes. And listen, any time you want to come out here, stay with Mercalia and me, you just come on. This is a real good place to make money.”

  But the idea of the north was taking him. He needed something to brace against.

  A month later they drove away in his station wagon. He took a last look in the side mirror at the rented house, saw the empty porch, the forsythia bush, the neighbor’s flesh-colored slips undulating on the line.

  ¯

  And so Quoyle and the aunt in the front seat, the children in the back, and old Warren sometimes with the suitcases, sometimes clambering awkwardly up to sit between Bunny and Sunshine. They made her paper hats from napkins, tied the aunt’s scarf around her hairy neck, fed her French fries when the aunt wasn’t looking.

  Fifteen hundred miles, across New York, Vermont, angling up through Maine ’s mauled woods. Across New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on three-lane highways, trouble in the center lane, making the aunt clench her hands. In North Sydney plates of oily fish for supper, and no one who cared, and in the raw morning, the ferry to Port-Aux-Basques. At last.

  ¯

  Quoyle suffered in the upholstery, the aunt strode the deck, stopped now and then to lean on the rail above the shuddering water. Or stood spraddle-legged, hands knotted behind her back, facing wind. Her hair captured under a babushka, face a stone with little intelligent eyes.

  She spoke of the weather with a man in a watch cap. They talked awhile. Someone else reel footing along, said, Rough today, eh? She worried about Warren, down in the station wagon, tossing up and down. Wouldn’t know what to make of it. Never been to sea. Probably thought the world was coming to an end and she all alone, in a strange car. The man in the watch cap said, “Don’t worry, dog’ll sleep the ‘ole way across. That’s ‘ow dogs are.”

  The aunt looked out, saw the blue land ahead, her first sight of the island in almost fifty years. Could not help tears.

  “Comin’ ‘ome, eh?” said the man in the watch cap. “Yar, that’s ‘ow it takes you.”

  This place, she thought, this rock, six thousand miles of coast blind-wrapped in fog. Sunkers under wrinkled water, boats threading tickles between ice-scabbed cliffs. Tundra and barrens, a land of stunted spruce men cut and drew away.

  How many had come here, leaning on the rail as she leaned now. Staring at the rock in the sea. Vikings, the Basques, the French, English, Spanish, Portuguese. Drawn by the cod, from the days when massed fish slowed ships on the drift for the passage to the Spice Isles, expecting cities of gold. The lookout dreamed of roasted auk or sweet berries in cups of plaited grass, but saw crumpling waves, lights flickering along the ship rails. The only cities were of ice, bergs with cores of beryl, blue gems within white gems, that some said gave off an odor of almonds. She had caught the bitter scent as a child.

  Shore parties returned to ship blood-crusted with insect bites. Wet, wet, the interior of the island, they said, bog and marsh, rivers and chains of ponds alive with metal-throated birds. The ships scraped on around the points. And the lookout saw shapes of caribou folding into fog.

  Later, some knew it as a place that bred malefic spirits. Spring starvation showed skully heads, knobbed joints beneath flesh. What desperate work to stay alive, to scrob and claw through hard times. The alchemist sea changed fishermen into wet bones, sent boats to drift among the cod, cast them on the landwash. She remembered the stories in old mouths: the father who shot his oldest children and himself that the rest might live on flour scrapings; sealers crouched on a floe awash from their weight until one leaped into the sea; storm journeys to fetch medicines-always the wrong thing and too late for the convulsing hangashore.

  She had not been in these waters since she was a young girl, but it rushed back, the sea’s hypnotic boil, the smell of blood, weather and salt, fish heads, spruce smoke and reeking armpits, the rattle of wash-ball rocks in hissing wave, turrs, the crackery taste of brewis, the bedroom under the eaves.


  But now they said that hard life was done. The forces of fate weakened by unemployment insurance, a flaring hope in offshore oil money. All was progress and possession, all shove and push, now. They said.

  Fifteen she was when they had moved from Quoyle’s Point, seventeen when the family left for the States, a drop in the tides of Newfoundlanders away from the outports, islands and hidden coves, rushing like water away from isolation, illiteracy, trousers made of worn upholstery fabric, no teeth, away from contorted thoughts and rough hands, from desperation.

  And her dad, Harold Hamm, dead the month before they left, killed when a knot securing a can hook failed. Off-loading barrels of nails. The corner of the sling drooped, the barrel came down. Its iron-rimmed chine struck the nape of his neck, dislocated vertebrae and crushed the spinal column. Paralyzed and fading on the dock, unable to speak; who knew what thoughts crashed against the washline of his seizing brain as the kids and wife bent over, imploring Father, Father. No one said his name, only the word father, as though fatherhood had been the great thing in his life. Weeping. Even Guy, who cared for no one but himself.

  So strange, she thought, going back there with a bereaved nephew and Guy’s ashes. She had taken the box from sobbing Quoyle, carried it up to the guest room. Lay awake thinking she might pour Guy into a plastic supermarket bag, tie the loop handles, and toss him into the dumpster.

  Only a thought.

  Wondered which had changed the most, place or self? It was a strong place. She shuddered. It would be better now. Leaned on the rail, looking into the dark Atlantic that snuffled at the slope of the past.

  5 A Rolling Hitch

  “A Rolling Hitch will suffice to tie a broom that has no groove,

  provided the surface is not too slick.”

  THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

  ON THE floor behind the seat Warren groaned. Quoyle steered up the west coast of the Great Northern Peninsula along a highway rutted by transport trucks. The road ran between the loppy waves of the Strait of Belle Isle and mountains like blue melons. Across the strait sullen Labrador. Trucks ground east in caravans, stainless steel cabs beaded with mist. Quoyle almost recognized the louring sky. As though he had dreamed this place once, forgot it later.

  The car rolled over fissured land. Tuckamore. Cracked cliffs in volcanic glazes. On a ledge above the sea a murre laid her single egg. Harbors still locked in ice. Tombstone houses jutting from raw granite, the coast black, glinting like lumps of silver ore.

  Their house, the aunt said, crossing her fingers, was out on Quoyle’s Point. The Point, anyway, still on the map. A house empty for forty-four years. She scoffed, said it could not still stand, but inwardly believed something had held, that time had not cheated her of this return. Her voice clacked. Quoyle, listening, drove with his mouth open as though to taste the subarctic air.

  On the horizon icebergs like white prisons. The immense blue fabric of the sea, rumpled and creased.

  “Look,” said the aunt. “Fishing skiffs.” Small in the distance. Waves bursting against the headlands. Exploding water.

  “I remember a fellow lived in a wrecked fishing boat,” the aunt said. “Old Danny Something-or-other. It was hauled up on the shore far enough out of the storm and he fixed it up. Little chimney sticking up, path with a border of stone. Lived there for years until one day when he was sitting out in front mending net and the rotten hull collapsed and killed him.”

  The highway shriveled to a two-lane road as they drove east, ran under cliffs, passed spruce forest fronted by signs that said NO CUTTING. Quoyle appraised the rare motels they passed with the eye of someone who expected to sleep in one of them.

  ¯

  The aunt circled Quoyle’s Point on the map. On the west side of Omaloor Bay the point thrust into the ocean like a bent thumb. The house, whether now collapsed, vandalized, burned, carried away in pieces, had been there. Once.

  The bay showed on the map as a chemist’s pale blue flask into which poured ocean. Ships entered the bay through the neck of the flask. On the eastern shore the settlement of Flour Sack Cove, three miles farther down the town of Killick-Claw, and along the bottom, odds and ends of coves. The aunt rummaged in her black flapjack handbag for a brochure. Read aloud the charms of Killick-Claw, statistics of its government wharf, fish plant, freight terminal, restaurants. Population, two thousand. Potential unlimited.

  “Your new job’s in Flour Sack Cove, eh? That’s right across from Quoyle’s Point. Looks about two miles by water. And a long trip by road. Used to be a ferry run from Capsize Cove to Killick Claw every morning and night. But I guess it’s closed down now. If you had a boat and a motor you could do it yourself.”

  “How do we get out to Quoyle’s Point?” he asked.

  There was a road off the main highway, the aunt said, that showed as a dotted line on the map. Quoyle didn’t like the look of the dotted line roads they passed. Gravel, mud, washboard going nowhere.

  They missed the turnoff, drove until they saw gas pumps. A sign. IGS STORE. The store in a house. Dark room. Behind the counter they could see a kitchen, teakettle spitting on the stove. Bunny heard television laughter.

  Waiting for someone to appear, Quoyle examined bear-paw snowshoes. Walked around, looking at the homemade shelves, open boxes of skinning knives, needles for mending net, cones of line, rubber gloves, potted meats, a pile of adventure videos. Bunny peered through the freezer door at papillose frost crowding the ice cream tubs.

  A man, sedge-grass hair sticking out from a cap embroidered with the name of a French bicycle manufacturer, came from the kitchen; chewed something gristly. Trousers a sullen crookedness of wool. The aunt talked. Quoyle modeled a sealskin hat for his children, helped them choose dolls made from clothespins. Inked faces smiled from the heads.

  “Can you tell us where the road to Capsize Cove is?”

  Unsmiling. Swallowed before answering.

  “Be’ind you aways. Like just peasin’ out of the main road. On a right as you go back. Not much in there now.” He looked away. His Adam’s apple a hairy mound in his neck like some strange sexual organ.

  Quoyle at a rack of comic books, studied a gangster firing a laser gun at a trussed woman. The gangsters always wore green suits. He paid for the dolls. The man’s fingers dropped cold dimes.

  ¯

  Up and down the highway three times before they spied a ruvid strip tilting away into the sky.

  “Aunt, I don’t think I can drive on this. It doesn’t look like it goes anywhere.”

  “There’s tire tracks on it,” she said, pointing to cleated tread marks. Quoyle turned onto the sumpy road. Churned mud. The tire marks disappeared. Must have turned around, thought Quoyle, wanting to do the same and try tomorrow. Or had dropped in a bottomless hole.

  “When are we gonna get there?” said Bunny, kicking the back of the seat. “I’m tired of going somewhere. I want to be there. I want to put on my bathing suit and play on the beach.”

  “Me too.” Both throwing themselves rhythmically against the seat.

  “It’s too cold. Only polar bears go swimming now. But you can throw stones in the water. On the map, Aunt, how long is this road?” Hands ached from days of clenching.

  She breathed over the map awhile. “From the main road to Capsize Cove is seventeen miles.”

  “Seventeen miles of this!”

  “And then,” as if he hadn’t spoken, “eleven more to Quoyle’s Point. To the house. Whatever’s left of it. They show this road on the map, but in the old days it wasn’t there. There was a footpath. See, folks didn’t drive, nobody had cars then. Go places in the boat. Nobody had a car or truck. That paved main highway we come up on is all new.” Yet the signature of rock written against the horizon in a heavy hand; unchanged, unchanging.

  “Hope we don’t get to Capsize Cove and discover we’ve got an eleven-mile hike in front of us.” The rasp of his nylon sleeve on the wheel.

  “We might. Then we’ll just turn around.” Her expre
ssion was remote. The bay seemed to be coming out of her mind, a blue hallucination.

  Quoyle and the road in combat. Car Disintegrates on Remote Goatpath. Dusk washed in, the car struggled up a grade. They were on the edge of cliffs. Below, Capsize Cove, the abandoned houses askew. Fading light. Ahead, the main track swallowed in distance.

  Quoyle pulled onto the shoulder, wondered if anybody had ever gone over the edge, metal jouncing on rocks. The side track down to the ruined cove steep, strewn with boulders. More gully than road.

  “Well, we’re not going to make the Point tonight,” he said. “This is as far as I think we should drive until we can get a look at the road in daylight.”

  “You don’t want to go back out to the highway, do you?” cried the aunt in her hot voice. So close to the beginning of everything.

  “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.