Shipping News_A Novel

by Annie Proulx

“I made a old-fashioned figgy duff for Railey, Skipper Billy. There’s quite a bit of it on hand. P’raps you’d like to refresh your mouth with some?”

  “I would. And Tert Card is comin’ down to pick us up. He wants an order of the meatballs to go if you got enough.”

  So, a dish of figgy duff with a drop of rum sauce, and coffee.

  “I’m going to open that suitcase,” said Quoyle.

  “Wracker Quoyle, that’s all you can think of, that bloody suitcase. Go ahead and open it. Pick it open with a fork tine or bash it with a rock. And I hope it’s crammed with prizes from the treasure troves of Gaze Island.” Billy held his finger up for more tea.

  ¯

  Quoyle dragged the suitcase under the single wharf light. He found a piece of pipe and jabbed the lock. The pipe clinked against the brass. The lock held. Quoyle looked around for something to pry, a screwdriver or chisel, but there was nothing but stone and broken glass. In frustration he raised the pipe over his shoulder and swung as hard as he could at the lock. A metallic crack and, with a frightful wave of stench, the suitcase sprang open.

  Under the light he saw the ruined eye, the flattened face and blood-stiff mustache of Bayonet Melville on a bed of seaweed. The gelatinous horror slid out onto the wharf.

  22 Dogs and Cats

  “The mesh knot is the ordinary way of tying the SHEET BEND

  when it is made with a netting needle.”

  THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

  “AGNIS have a manly heart, Agnis do,” said Mavis Bangs to Dawn when the aunt went off with her measuring tapes and notebook. “A boldish air, she grasp on things like a man do. That’s from living in the States. All the women down there is boldish. See how she was calm? When the nephew was all jelly? Finding that head. She said he couldn’t drive for two days he was that shocked. I was shocked myself. What with the Mounties coming in and asking. Questions and questions. Poor Agnis.

  “There’s the other thing, too. She’s a Hamm, but she’s a Quoyle. The stories, m’dear. Omond-that was my poor husband-knew them. He come from No Name Cove down the bay from Capsize Cove, that are but one cove from Quoyle’s Point. And that little maid they got is a real Quoyle, tilted like a buoy in a raging sea.”

  Dawn barely heard her. Every time Agnis Hamm’s truck pulled away Dawn was at the electronic typewriter. Stayed late some evenings to get at it. Letter after letter.

  Dear Sirs: I am writing to inquire about the position of Auto Sales with your firm. Although my experience is in shipping traffic…

  Dear Sirs: I am writing in response to your ad for a Spanish-speaking clerk. Although I do not speak Spanish I have a B. E. in Maritime Traffic Engineering and will relocate. I enclose…

  Mavis Bangs kept talking. “Tell you a woman that fished alongside her man was Mrs. Buggit. Put the babies with her sister and out they’d go. She was as strong as a man they said. Mrs. Buggit don’t go out now, only to the clothesline. She suffers from stress incontinence, they calls it. She can’t hold her water. When she stands up or laughs or coughs or whatever. A problem. They was trying to get her to do some exercises, you know, stop and go, stop and go, she said it didn’t make a bit of difference except they noticed the dog would stand in front of the bathroom door when she was in there and act real concerned. She was took bad, you know, when they lost the oldest boy. Jesson. Just like Jack, he was. Stubborn! Couldn’t tell him a thing. What do you think, Dawn, you think it was Mrs. Melville done it? Whose fancy blue leather we all stitched up? Cut off his head? Agnis’s nephew says they was at one another like dogs and cats. Quarreling. And drunk. A woman drunk! And how they went off in the night and didn’t pay Agnis for the work we done? Of course, now it looks like it was she went off in the night and didn’t pay. But to cut a feller’s head off and put it in a suitcase! They say she had to have help, a weak old woman like that.”

  “I don’t know,” said Dawn. The typewriter had a repeat setting. All she had to do was change the name of the addressee and the position and it spit another letter out.

  Dear Sirs: I recently saw your advertisement in The Globe and Mail for a research assistant. Although I do not speak Japanese I am willing to learn…

  Dear Sirs: I recently saw your advertisement in The Globe and Mail for a floral designer. Although I do not arrange flowers I am willing to learn…

  Dear Sirs: I recently saw your advertisement in The Globe and Mail for a position in brokerage operations. Although my training is in marine traffic control I am willing to learn…

  “It’s these wicked people coming in. Nothing is like it was. Such ugly things never happened here. We had some good ways in the old times. They may laugh at them now, but they come out true more often than not. One I will never forget, hardly a girl knows it now, because they don’t make mats any more, but when there was a new mat made, you know, the girls, the young girls would get a cat, see, and they’d put the cat on the new mat, then fold up the sides and hold it in there. There was always a cat. Newfoundlanders like their cats. Then they’d unfold it, and whoever the cat came to, why she was the next one to be married. Now that was as true as the sun rises.”

  The goal was twenty-five letters a week, every week. Out of them a reply must come.

  Dear Sirs: I recently saw your advertisement for a dog groomer. Although my training is in marine traffic control I am willing to relocate…

  “My sister worked on a mat all winter, a pattern of roses and codfish on a blue background. Pretty. There I was, fourteen years old. There was five girls there. Liz, that was my sister, and Kate and Jen and the two Marys. They done the cat up in the mat when it was finished. And you know that cat comes straight to me and jumps in my lap. And strange to say, but I was the next one married. Liz was dead of TB before the summer. Kate never married. Mary Genge went to Boston with her folks, and the other Mary I don’t know. But I married Thomas Munn. On my fifteenth birthday. As was lost at sea in 1957. A beauty of a man. The black hair. You’d feel like a puff of heat when he’d come in a room. I wasted away with crying. I was down to eighty-seven pounds. They didn’t think I would live. But somehow I did. And married Desmond Bangs. Until he went in the air crash. Up in Labrador. I says, ‘I’ll never marry again, for I can’t stand the grief.’ Not like some as cuts their husbands’ heads off and puts ‘em in satchels.”

  Five more and she would have enough for this week. She’d take anything at first, anything just to get away and out. Not to hear Mavis Bangs. To see something besides fishing boats and rock and water!

  I am writing to inquire about the position of visual display person. Although my training is in marine traffic control and upholstery I am willing to learn…

  “You know, all of us girls was good at the needlework. Liz, of course, making the mats, she was a well-known mat maker. Our mam kept sheep for the wool. I can see her now after supper spinning the wool or knitting. Always knitted after dinner. I can see her now, setting there working a pair of thumbies with her wooden skivers clacking away. Said the wool handled easier at night, was lax because the sheep was lying down, see. Taking their sleep. That old spinning wheel come down to me. Worth a fortune. I used to have it out on the lawn. Des painted it up red and yellow, it was a fine ornament. But we’d have to take it in at night, afraid a tourist would steal it. They do that, you know. They’ll take a spinning wheel right out of your yard. I know a woman it happened to. Mrs. Trevor Higgend, goes to my church. What do you think about the nephew, Dawn? You ate supper at their house. Finding a thing like that. You wouldn’t want a man who finds what he found, would you? Nothing good ever happened with a Quoyle.”

  “Never.” The keys rattled. The last one for this week. There could be replies in her mailbox right now.

  I wish to inquire about the position of architectural draughts-person. Although my training is in marine traffic control I am willing to relocate and retrain for a career in architectural draughting…

  ¯

  Quoyle and Wavey side by side, feeling sympathy for eac
h other, Herry breathing down their necks. The car moaned up the hill through the rain, away from the school. They came over the crest. On Quoyle’s side the ocean, bruise grey under the strained wet light.

  Gushing through yellow rain. A row of mailboxes, some fashioned as houses with painted windows. Four ducks swayed along the muddy ruts. Quoyle slowed to a crawl behind them until they dodged into the ditch. Past the Gammy Bird office, past Buggits’ house and on. The square houses painted in marvelous stripes, brave against the rock.

  Wavey’s little house was mint green on the ground floor, then a red sash. The boy’s scarlet pajamas on the clothesline, bright as chile peppers. A pile of tapered logs, sawbuck in a litter of chips and bark, split junks of wood ready to be stacked.

  Two fishermen beside the road, lean and hard as rifles, mending net in the rain, the wet beading their sweaters. Sharp Irish noses, long Irish necks and hair crimped under billed caps. One looked up, his glance sprang from Wavey to Quoyle, searching his face, knowing him. Netting needle in his hand.

  “Uncle Kenny there,” said Wavey to the boy in her low, plangent voice.

  “Dawk,” cried the child.

  There was a new dog in Archie Sparks’s yard, a blue poodle among the plywood swans.

  “Dawk.”

  “Yes, a new dog,” said Wavey. A wooden dog with a rope tail and a tin-can necklace. Mounted on a stick. Eye like a boil.

  In the rearview mirror he saw Wavey’s brother coming along the road toward them. The other man watched from a distance, held the net, his hands stilled.

  Wavey pulled Herry out of the car. He put his face up to the mist, closed his eyes, feeling the droplets touch him like the ends of cold fine hairs. She pulled him toward the door.

  Quoyle held out his hand to the advancing man as he might to an unknown dog stalking toward him.

  “Quoyle,” he said, and the name sounded like an evasion. The fisherman clamped his hand briefly.

  Face like Wavey’s lean face, but rougher. A young man smelling of fish and rain. The scrawn of muscle built to last into the ninth decade.

  “Giving Wavey a ride home, then?”

  “Yes.” His soft hand embarrassed him. A curtain moved in the window of the house behind the rioting wooden zoo.

  “There’s Dad, then, peeping,” said Ken. “You’ll come in and have a cup of tea.”

  “No. No,” said Quoyle. “Got to get back to work. Gave Wavey a ride.”

  “Walking keeps you smart. You’re the one found the suitcase with the head in it. Would of turned me stomach. You’re on the point across,” jerked his chin. “Dad sees you over there through his glass on fine days. Got a new roof on the old house?”

  Quoyle nodded, got back in his car. But his colorless eyes were warm.

  “Going back? I’ll take a ride as far as me net,” said Ken, striding around the nose of the car and thumping into Wavey’s seat.

  Quoyle backed and turned. Wavey was gone, disappeared into her house.

  “You come along any time and see her,” said Ken. “It’s too bad about the boy, but he’s a good little bugger, poor little hangashore.”

  ¯

  “Dear Sirs,” wrote Dawn. “I would like to apply…”

  23 Maleficium

  “The mysterious power that is supposed to reside in

  knots… can be injurious as well as beneficial. “

  QUIPUS AND WITCHES’ KNOTS

  QUOYLE painted. But no matter what they did to the house, he thought, it kept its gaunt look, never altered from that first looming vision behind the scrim of fog. How had it looked, new and raw on Gaze Island, or sliding over the cracking ice? The idea fixed in him that the journey had twisted the house out of true, wrenched the timbers into a rare geometry. And he was still shuddering over the white-haired man’s stiff eye which had sent its dull glare at him.

  The aunt’s interest in fixing up slowed, veered to something private in her own room where she lay on the bed staring at the ceiling for as long as an hour. Or got up with a yawn, a short laugh, said, Well, let’s see now. Coming back from wherever she’d been.

  Weekends came to this: the aunt in her room or stirring something or out for a walk. Quoyle hacking his path to the sea, the children squatting in the moss to watch insects toil up stems. Or he split wood against future cold. Thought of Partridge, fired up to cook new dishes and let the children dabble their fingers in mixes and slops, and sometimes let Bunny use the paring knife. While he hovered.

  In late August a bowl of cleaned squid stood on the kitchen shelf. Quoyle’s intention: calamari linguine when he was done with the painting. Because he owed Partridge a letter. The aunt declared a salad despite fainting lettuce and pale hothouse tomatoes.

  “We could have put in a little garden,” she said. “Raised our own salads at least. The stuff at the markets is not fit to eat. Celery brown with rot, lettuce looks like it’s been boiled.”

  “Wavey,” said Quoyle, “Wavey says Alexanders is better than spinach. You can pick it all along the shore here.”

  “Never heard of it,” said the aunt. “I’m not one for wild plants.”

  “It’s like wild sea parsley,” said Quoyle. “I might put some in the calamari sauce.”

  “Yes,” said the aunt. “You try it. Whatever it is.” But went to scout a suitable garden patch among the rocks. Not too late to sow lettuce seed. Thinking a glass house would be a good thing.

  The day was warm, wind skittering over the bay, wrinkling the water in cat’s-paws. The aunt getting the melancholy odor of turned soil. Quoyle smelled paint to the point of headache.

  “Someone coming,” the aunt said, leaning on the spade. “Walking on the road.”

  Quoyle looked, but there was no one.

  “Where?”

  “Just past the spruce with the broken branch. Broken by the bulldozer, I might add.”

  They stared down the driveway in the direction of the glove factory, the road.

  “I did see somebody,” said the aunt. “I could see his cap and his shoulders. Some fellow.”

  Quoyle went back to his paint pot but the aunt looked and finally drove the shovel into the soil to stand by itself, walked toward the spruce. There was no one. But saw footprints of fishing boots angling away into the tuck-moose path she thought that descended to a wild marsh of tea-colored water and leathery shrubs.

  She sucked in her breath, looked for dog tracks along the edge of the road. And was not sure.

  “It’s the old man,” said Quoyle. “Got to be.”

  “What old man?”

  “Billy Pretty says he’s ‘fork kin’ of the Quoyles. Says he’s a rough old boy. Wouldn’t leave Capsize Cove in the resettlement. Stayed on alone. Billy thinks he might have his back up a little because we’re in the house. I told you this.”

  “No, you didn’t, Nephew. And who in the world might he be?”

  “I remember telling you about it.”

  The aunt wondered cautiously what the name was.

  “I don’t know. One of the old Quoyles. I can’t remember his name. Something Irish.”

  “I don’t believe it. There’s none of ‘ em left. You know, there was Quoyles didn’t have a very good name,” said the aunt. Head turned away.

  “Heard that,” said Quoyle. “Heard Omaloor Bay is called after the Quoyles-like Half-Wit Pond or Six Fingers Harbor or Apricot Ear Brook named for certain other unfortunates. Billy told me how they came here from Gaze Island. Supposed to have dragged the house over the ice.”

  “So they say. Half those stories are a pack of lies. I imagine the Quoyles was as decent as anybody. And I’m sure I don’t know who that fellow you’re talking about could be.”

  Quoyle cleaned his hands of paint, called “Who wants to walk along the shore with me and pick Alexanders?”

  Sunshine found two wild strawberries. Bunny threw bigger and bigger stones in the waves; the gouts of water ever closer until a splash doused her.

  “All right, all right, l
et’s go back to the house. Bunny can change her britches and Sunshine can wash the Alexanders and I will sauté the garlic and onions.”

  But when the sauce was nearly done, discovered there was no linguine, only a package of egg noodles shaped like bows, soft stuff that mounded under the sauce and sent the squid rings sliding to the rims of the plates.

  “You’ve got to plan ahead, Nephew.”

  ¯

  Just before dawn again. Something woke him. The bare room rose above him, grey and cool. He listened to hear if Bunny was calling or crying but heard only silence.

  A circle sped across the ceiling, disappeared. Flashlight beam.

  He got up, went to the seaward window, the husks of flies cracking under his bare feet. Knelt to one side and peered into the dimming night. For a long time he saw nothing. His pupils enlarged in the dark, he saw the sky rinsing with the nacre sheen of approaching light. The sea emerged as a silver negative. Far down in the wiry tuck he saw a spark restlessly twitching, and soon it was gone from his sight.

  ¯

  “We ought to go down there,” Quoyle said. “Look the old man up.

  “I’m sure I don’t want to go ferret out some old fourth cousin with a grudge. We’ve got along this far very well, and it would be better to leave things alone.”

  Quoyle wanted to go. “We’d take the girls, they’d soften an ogre’s heart.”

  Or more likely, harden it, thought the aunt.

  “Come on, Aunt.” He urged.

  But she was cool. “I’ve thought about it, wondering who it could be. There was a crowd of my mother’s cousins in Capsize Cove, but they were her age if not older, grown adults with children, grandchildren of their own when I was a teenager. So if it’s one of them, must be in the late eighties or nineties, probably senile as well. I’d guess the one on the road was somebody from town, maybe walking or hunting, didn’t know we were here.”