Shipping News_A Novel

by Annie Proulx

  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 east-southeast 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?

  He gripped the handles of the cooler, rested his upper breast on the cover. Blood from his forehead or hairline but he didn’t dare let go of the box to reach up and touch the wound. He could not remember being struck. The boat must have caught him as it went over.

  The waves seemed mountainous but he rose and fell with them like a chip, watched for the green curlers that shoved him under, the lifting sly crests that drove saltwater into his nose.

  The tide had been almost out when he saw the dead man, perhaps two hours ago. It must be on the turn now. His watch was gone. But wasn’t there an hour or so of slack between low water and the turn of the tide? He knew little about the currents in the bay. The moon in its last quarter meant the smaller neap tide. There were, Billy said, complex waters along the west side, shoals and reefs and grazing sunkers. He feared the wind would force him five miles up to the narrows and then out to sea, heading for Ireland on a beer cooler. If only he were nearer to the west shore, the lee shore, where the water was smoother and he might kick his way toward the rock.

  A long time passed, hours, he thought. He could not feel his legs. When he rose high on the waves he tried to gauge where he was. The west shore seemed nearer now, but despite the wind and incoming tide, he was moving toward the end of the point.

  Later he was surprised to glimpse the cairn he had walked around that morning. Must be in some rip current that was carrying him along the shore toward land’s end, toward the caves, toward the dead man. Ironic if he ended up sliding in and out of a booming water cave, companion to the man in yellow.

  “Not while I have this hot box,” he said aloud, for he had begun to think the red cooler was filled with glowing charcoal. He deduced it because when he raised his chin from the cover his jaw chattered uncontrollably, and when he rested it back against the box the chattering ceased. Only a wonderful heat could have that effect.

  He was surprised to see it was almost dusk. In a way he was glad, because it meant he could go to bed soon and get some sleep. He was tremendously tired. The rising and falling billows would be deliciously soft to sink into. This was something he’d worked out. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before, but the yellow man was not dead. Sleeping. Resting. And in a minute Quoyle thought he would roll over too and get some sleep. As soon as they shut the lights out. But the hard light was shining directly into his swollen eyes and Jack Buggit was wrenching him away from the hot box and onto a pile of cold fish.

  “Jesus Cockadoodle Christ! I knowed somebody was out here. Felt it.” He threw a tarpaulin over Quoyle.

  “I told you that damn thing would drown you. How long you been in the water? Couldn’t be too long, boy, can’t live in this too long.

  But Quoyle couldn’t answer. He was shaking so hard his heels drummed on the fish. He tried to tell Jack to get the hot box so he could get warm again, but his jaw wouldn’t work.

  ¯

  Jack half-dragged him, half-shoved him into Mrs. Buggit’s perfect kitchen. “Here’s Quoyle I fished out of the bloody drink,” he said.

  “If you knew how many Jack has saved,” she said. “How many.” All but one. She got Quoyle’s clothes off, laid hot-water bottles on his thighs and wrapped a blanket around him. She made a mug of steaming tea and forced spoonsful of it between his teeth with the swift competence of practice. Jack mumbled a cup of rum would do more good.

  In twenty minutes his jaw was loose enough and his mind firm enough to choke out the sinking of the boat, the illusion of the hot box, to take in the details of the Buggit domicile. To have a second cup of tea loaded with sugar and evaporated milk.

  “That’s a nice oolong,” said Mrs. Buggit. Rum couldn’t come near it for saving grace.

  Everything in the house tatted and doilied in the great art of the place, designs of lace waves and floe ice, whelk shells and sea wrack, the curve of lobster feelers, the round knot of cod-eye, the bristled commas of shrimp and fissured sea caves, white snow on black rock, pinwheeled gulls, the slant of silver rain. Hard, tortured knots encased picture frames of ancestors and anchors, the Bible was fitted with sheets of ebbing foam, the clock’s face peered out like a bride’s from a wreath of worked wildflowers. The knobs of the kitchen dresser sported tassels like a stripper in a bawd house, the kettle handle knitted over in snake-ribs, the easy chairs wore archipelagoes of thread and twine flung over the reefs of arms and backs. On a shelf a 1961 Ontario phone book.

  Mrs. Buggit stood against the Nile green wall, moved forward to the stove to refill the kettle, her hands like welded scoops. Great knobby knuckles and scarred fingers. The boiling water gushing into th
e teapot. Mrs. Buggit was bare armed in a cotton dress. The house breathed tropical heat and the torpor of comfort.

  She had a voice built up from calling into the wind and stating strong opinions. In this house Jack shrank to the size of a doll, his wife grew enormous in the waxy glitter and cascade of flowers. She searched Quoyle’s face as though she had known him once. His teeth clattered less against the mug. The shudders that had racked him from neck to arch eased.

  “You’ll warm,” she said, though she herself could not, coming at him with a hot brick for his feet. A mottled, half-grown dog stirred on the mat, cocked her ears briefly.

  Jack, like many men who spend their days in hard physical labor, went slack when he sat in an easy chair, sprawled and spread as if luxury jellied his muscles.

  “It was your build there, all that fat, y’know, that’s what insulated you all them hours, kept you floating. A thin man would of died.”

  Then Quoyle remembered the yellow man and told his story again, beginning with the walk on the point and ending with the light in his eyes.

  “At the ovens?” Jack went to the telephone in a wedge of space under the stairs to call the Coast Guard. Quoyle sat, his ears ringing. Mrs. Buggit was talking to him.

  “People with glasses don’t get on with dogs,” she said. “A dog has to see your eyes clear to know your heart. A dog will wait for you to smile, he’ll wait a month if need be.”

  “The Newfoundland dog,” said shuddering Quoyle, still weak with the lassitude of drowning.

  “The Newfoundland dog! The Newfoundland dog isn’t in it. That’s not the real dog of this place. The real dog, the best dog in the world that ever was, is the water dog. This one here, Batch, is part water dog, but the pure ones all died out. They were all killed generations ago. Ask Jack, he’ll tell you about it. Though Jack’s a cat man. It’s me as likes the dogs. Batch is from Billy Pretty’s Elvis. Jack’s got his cat, you know, Old Tommy, goes out in the boat with him. Just as good a fisherman.”

  And at last, Billy Pretty and Tert Card told, the Coast Guard informed of the yellow man, Quoyle’s tea mug emptied. Jack went down to the stage to clean and ice his fish. Had saved, now let the wife restore.

  Quoyle followed Mrs. Buggit up to the guest room. She handed him the replenished hot-water bottles.

  “You want to go to Alvin Yark for the next one,” she said.

  Before he fell asleep he noticed a curious pleated cylinder near the door. It was the last thing he saw.

  In the morning, ravenous with hunger, euphoric with life, he saw the cylinder was a doorstop made from a mail-order catalog, a thousand pages folded down and glued, and imagined Mrs. Buggit working at it day after winter day while the wind shaved along the eaves and the snow fell, while the fast ice of the frozen bay groaned and far to the north the frost smoke writhed. And still she patiently folded and pasted, folded and pasted, the kettle steaming on the stove, obscuring the windows. As for Quoyle, the most telling momento of his six-hour swim were his dark blue toenails, dyed by his cheap socks.

  ¯

  And when her house was empty again, Quoyle gone and the teapot scalded and put away on the shelf, the floor mopped, she went outside to hang Quoyle’s damp blanket, to take in yesterday’s forgotten, drenty wash. Although it was still soft September, the bitter storm that took Jesson boiled up around her. Eyes blinked from the glare; stiff fingers pulled at the legs of Jack’s pants, scraped the fur of frost growing out of the blue blouse. Then inside again to fold and iron, but always in earshot the screech of raftering ice beyond the point, the great bergs toppling with the pressure, the pans rearing hundreds of feet high under the white moon and cracking, cracking asunder.

  27 Newsroom

  “Galley news, unfounded rumours circulated about a vessel.”

  THE MARINER’S DICTIONARY

  TWO DAYS after Quoyle’s spill, Billy Pretty grinning into the newsroom in the afternoon, an old leather flying helmet on his head, the straps swinging, wearing his wool jacket in grey and black squares, face the color of fog.

  “They got your drowned man, Quoyle, Search and Rescue got him out of the cave. But he was a bit of a disappointment.” Taking a scrap of paper from his pocket, unfolding it. “And it’s a page, one story which I’ve worked out in my head on the way over here. Should have been your story, proper thing, but I’ve wrote it up already. That was a survival suit he was floating in. Carried up to the ovens by the currents. There was a fellow from No Name Cove washed up in there years ago.”

  “What do you mean, he was a disappointment?”

  “They couldn’t tell who he was. At first. Bit of a problem.”

  “Well don’t plague us, Billy Pretty. What?” Tert Card roaring away.

  “No head.”

  “The suitcase?” said Quoyle stupidly. “The head in the suitcase? Mr. Melville?”

  “Yes indeed, Mr. Melville of the suitcase. They think. The Mounties and the Coast Guard is howling like wolves at the moon right this minute. Burning up the telephone wires to the States, bulletins and alarms. But probably come to nothing. They said it looks like the body was put in the suit after the head was cut off.

  “How do they know?” Tert Card.

  “Because the body was inserted in five pieces. Divided up like a pie, he was.”

  Billy Pretty at his computer pounding out the sentences.

  MISSING BODY OF MAN FOUND

  GRUESOME DISCOVERY IN OVENS

  “I don’t know why I never get any good stories,” said Nutbeem. “Just the sordid. Just the nastiest stuff for Nutbeem, vile stuff that can’t be described except in winking innuendo and allusion. I really won’t miss this stuff. The nicest bit I’ve got is a list of offenses charged against the mayor of Galliambic. He won a hundred thousand in the Atlantic Lottery two weeks ago and celebrated by molesting fourteen students in one week. He’s charged with indecent assault, gross indecency and buggery. Here’s a depraved lad of twenty-nine went around to the Goldenvale Rest Home and persuaded a seventy-one-year-old lady to come along in his truck for a visit to the shopping mall in Misky Bay. Drove straightaway to the shrubbery and raped her so badly she needed surgery. They took him to the lockup and on court appearance day we all know what he did.”

  “Tore off all his clothes,” droned Quoyle, Billy Pretty and Tert Card in chorus.

  “More priests connected with the orphanage. It’s up to nineteen awaiting trial now. Here’s a doctor at the No Name Medical Clinic charged with sexual assault against fourteen female patients-‘provocative fondling of breasts and genitals’ is how they put it. The choirmaster in Misky Bay pled guilty on Monday to sexual assault and molestation of more than a hundred boys over the past twelve years. Also in Misky Bay an American tourist arrested for fondling young boys at the municipal swimming pool. ‘He kept feeling my bum and my front,’ said a ten-year-old victim. And here in Killick-Claw a loving dad is charged with sexually assaulting two of his sons and his teenage daughter in innumerable incidents between 1962 and the present. Buggery, indecent assault and sexual intercourse. Here’s another family lover, big strapping thirty-five-year-old fisherman spends his hours ashore teaching his little four-year-old daughter to perform oral sex and masturbate him.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” said Quoyle, appalled. “This can’t be all in one week.”

  “One week?” said Nutbeem. “I’ve got another bloody page of them.

  “That’s what sells this paper,” said Tert Card. “Not columns and home hints. Nutbeem’s sex stories with names and dates whenever possible. That was Jack’s genius, to know people wanted this stuff. Of course every Newf paper does it now, but Gammy Bird was first to give names and grisly details.”

  “I don’t wonder it depresses you, Nutbeem. Is it worse here than other places? It seems worse.”

  Billy in his corner scribbled, chair turned away. That stuff.

  “I don’t know if it’s worse, or just more openly publicized. Perhaps the priest thing is worse. A lot of abus
ive priests in these little outports where they were trusted by naive parents. But I’ve heard it said-cynically-that sexual abuse of children is an old Newf tradition.”

  “There’s an ugly thing to say,” said Tert Card. “I’d say a Brit tradition.” Scratching his head until showers of dandruff fell into the computer keys.

  “What happens to sex offenders here, then? Some rehab program? Or they just simmer in prison?”

  “Don’t know,” said Nutbeem.

  “Might make a good story,” said Quoyle.

  “Yes,” said Nutbeem in a droning voice as though his mainspring were winding down. “It might. If I could get at it before I go. But I can’t. The Borogove’s almost ready and I’ve got to get out before the ice.” A great cracking yawn. “Burned out on this, anyway.”

  “You better say something to Jack,” Tert Card swelling up.

  “Oh, he knows.”

  “What have you got, Quoyle, car wreck or boat wreck? You got to have something. Seems you’re out interviewing for the damn shipping news every time there’s a car wreck. Or maybe driving around with Mrs. Prowse? Quoyle, you doing that? You’re out of the office more than Jack.”

  “I’ve got Harold Nightingale,” said Quoyle. “Photo of Harold at the empty dock. It’s on your computer. Slugged ‘Good-bye to All That.’ ”

  GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT

  There are some days it just doesn’t pay to get up. Harold Nightingale of Port Anguish knows this better than anyone. It’s been a disastrous fishing season for Port Anguish fishermen. Harold Nightingale has caught exactly nine cod all season long. “Two years ago,” he said, “we took 170,000 pounds of cod off Bumpy Banks. This year-less than zero. I dunno what I’m going to do. Take in washing, maybe.”