Shipping News_A Novel

by Annie Proulx

  To get the nine cod Mr. Nightingale spent $423 on gas, $2,150 on licenses, $4,670 on boat repair and refit, $1,200 on new nets. To make matters worse, he has suffered the worst case of sea-pups in his 31 years of fishing. “Wrists swelled up to my elbows,” he said. Last Friday Harold Nightingale had enough. He told his wife he was going out to haul his traps for the last time. He wrote out an advertisement for his boat and gear and asked her to place it in the Gammy Bird.

  He and his four-man crew spent the morning hauling traps (all were empty) and were on their way back in when the wind increased slightly. A moderate sea built up and several waves broke over the aft deck. Just outside the entrance of Port Anguish harbor the boat heeled over to starboard and did not recover. Skipper Nightingale and the crew managed to scramble into the dories and abandon the sinking boat. The vessel disappeared beneath the waves and they headed for shore. The boat was not insured.

  “The worst of it is that she sank under the weight of empty traps. I would have taken a little comfort if it had been a load of fish.” On his arrival at home Mr. Nightingale canceled his classified ad.

  “Ha-ha,” said Tert Card. “I remember him calling up about that ad.”

  Quoyle slumped at his desk, thinking of old men standing in the rain, telling him how it had been. Of Harold Nightingale whose lifework ended like a stupid joke.

  He took Partridge’s letter from his pocket and read it again. Yo-yo days up and down the coast, furniture for their new house. Mercalia gave Partridge a camcorder for his birthday. They had a pool and something called the Ultima Chefs Gas Grill-cost 2K. He was seriously into wine tasting, had a wine cellar. Had met Spike Lee at a party. Mercalia teaming to fly. He’d bought her a leather pilot’s jacket and a white silk scarf. For a joke. Found someone to build another clay oven in the backyard. Meat smoker, Columbia River salmon. A three-temperature water bar in the kitchen. They’d installed a great sound system with digital signal processing that could play video laser discs and CDs at the same time in different rooms at different volumes. When was Quoyle going to fly out and visit? Come any time. Any time at all.

  Quoyle refolded the letter, put it in his pocket. The bay was an aluminum tray dotted with paper boats. How short the days were getting. He looked at his watch, astonished how the months had fallen out of it.

  “Nutbeem. Want to go to Skipper Will’s for a squidburger?”

  “Absolutely. Let me finish this para and I’m with you.”

  “Bring me back a takeout of fish and chips.” Tert Card pulling wadded bills from his rayon pants.

  But Billy opened his lunch box with cartoons of Garfield the cat on the cover, gazed in at a jar of stewed cod, slab of bread and marg. Fixed it himself and thought he was the better for it.

  ¯

  Quoyle and Nutbeem hunched over a table in the back. The restaurant redolent of hot oil and stewed tea. Nutbeem poured a stream of teak-colored pekoe into his cup.

  “Have you noticed Jack’s uncanny sense about assignments? He gives you a beat that plays on your private inner fears. Look at you. Your wife was killed in an auto accident. What does Jack ask you to cover? Car wrecks, to get pictures while the upholstery is still on fire and the blood still hot. He gives Billy, who has never married for reasons unknown, the home news, the women’s interest page, the details of home and hearth-must be exquisitely painful to the old man. And me. I get to cover the wretched sexual assaults. And with each one I relive my own childhood. I was assaulted at school for three years, first by a miserable geometry teacher, then by older boys who were his cronies. To this day I cannot sleep without wrapping up like a mummy in five or six blankets. And what I don’t know is if Jack understands what he’s doing, if the pain is supposed to ease and dull through repetitive confrontation, or if it just persists, as fresh as on the day of the first personal event. I’d say it persists.”

  Quoyle called for more rolls, worried the tea bag in the saucer. Would the rolls be enough?

  “Doesn’t he do the same thing to himself? Going out on the sea that claimed his father and grandfather, two brothers, the oldest son and nearly got the younger? It dulls it, the pain, I mean. It dulls it because you see your condition is not unique, that other people suffer as you suffer. There must be some kind of truth in the old saying, misery loves company. That it’s easier to die if others around you are dying.”

  “Cheery thoughts, Quoyle. Have some more tea and stop crushing that repulsive bag. You see what Tert Card had stuck on the back of his trousers this morning?”

  But Quoyle was deciding on two pieces of partridgeberry pie with vanilla ice cream.

  ¯

  At four o’clock he went to get Wavey.

  The cold weather advanced from the north, rain changed to sleet, sleet to snow, fogs became clouds of needlepoint crystals and Quoyle was in an elaborate routine. In the mornings he dropped Sunshine at Beety’s, brought Bunny to school, gave Wavey a ride. At four he reversed. Man Doubles as Chauffeur. Tea in Wavey’s crazy kitchen if he was done for the day. If he had to work late, sometimes they stayed with her. She cut Quoyle’s hair. He stacked her wood on Saturday morning. Sensible to eat dinner at the same table now and then. Closer and closer. Like two ducks swimming at first on opposite sides of the water but who end in the middle, together. It was taking a long time.

  “There’s no need for it,” Mrs. Mavis Bangs whispered to Dawn. “Driving back and forth and giving rides. Those children could ride on the school bus. The school bus would drop the girl at the paper. She could tidy up papers while Agnis’s nephew finished up his work. Whatever he does. Writes things down. Don’t seem too heavy a work for a man, Mrs. Herold Prowse doesn’t need to walk all that way in the weather. She’s got her hooks out for him.”

  “I was thinking, he’s got his out for her. He’s that desperate for somebody to take care of those brats and do the cooking. And the other, if you know what I mean. Big as he is, he’s like he’s starving.”

  ¯

  In Wavey’s kitchen there was a worktable by the window where she applied yellow paint to the miniature dories her father made. Their little stickers on each one, Woodworks of Flour Sack Cove. She sanded and painted Labrador retriever napkin holders, wooden butterflies for tourists to nail on the sides of their houses, sea gulls standing on a single dowel leg. Ken took them to the gift shops up along the coast. On consignment, but they sold well enough.

  “I know it’s just tourist things,” she said, “but they’re not so bad. Decent work that gives a fair living.”

  Quoyle ran his finger over the meticulous joinery and glassy finish. And said he thought they were fine.

  The little house was full of colors, as though inside Wavey’s dry skin an appreciation for riot seethed. Purple chairs, knotted rugs of scarlet and blue, illustrated cupboards and stripes margining the doors. So that, standing in the color she was like an erasing of the human, female form.

  Sunshine liked a cabinet with glass doors. Behind the glass a white tureen, a row of plates with swimming fish around the rims, four green wineglasses. On each of the lower doors Wavey had painted a scene; her own house with its painted fence; her father’s yard of wooden figures. Sunshine opened the father’s door. It made a wheezing squeak. She had to laugh.

  28 The Skater’s Chain Grip

  To rescue someone who has fallen through the ice, the fingers

  of the rescuer’s hand and the victim’s hand are bent together in

  an opposing grip.

  “Fingernails should first be close-pared”

  THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

  THE AUNT out for a look around. She’d wanted a breath of air, to get away from Quoyle and his children in the house. To get away from Sunshine’s humming and clattering shoes and piercing questions. The tape from Nutbeem that Bunny played endlessly, running down the batteries. The last days of October, a rattle of guns along the coast as the flights of turr came down ahead of the growing ice. Turbot massed off the shelf to the east. Spent salmon lay d
eep in river pools under the crusting ice or drifted to the sea.

  She came upon a small pond. Remembered it, this water oval surrounded by hurts and laurel, women and children moving across the autumn marsh, bakeapples glowing like honeydrops in the slanting light. Leaky boots, birds fluttering up when the berry pickers drew near. Her mother always loved the marshes despite the nippers. Find a bit of high ground, sleep for a little while under the flying clouds. “Oh,” she said, “I could sleep away the rest of my life.” How much she had slept through, unknowing! And died in a Brooklyn hospital bed of pneumonia believing she was on the barrens in the northern sun.

  The aunt let herself remember an October, the pond frozen, ice as colorless as a sadiron’s plate, the clouds in thin rolls like grey pencils in a box. Crowberries encased in ice skins. The wind collapsed. Deepest silence, the vapor of her breath floated from her mouth. Distant soughing of waves. No dead grass trembled, no gull or tun flew. A pearl grey landscape. She was eleven or twelve. Blue knit stockings, her mother’s made-over dress. A boiled wool coat, English, tight under the arms, some castoff funneled through the Pentecostal charity. She had a huge pair of man’s hockey skates, drew them on over her shoes, laced them tightly. A lace broke. She made a granny knot, poked the metal tip through the eyelet, tied bowknots.

  The slanted white marks of the first strokes, then curls and loops like unspooling thread. In the windless twilight she hurtled through the cold. Sound of breathing, skate-risp. Alone on the perfect ice in the red afternoon, the clouds like branches, like a thicket of wavering bleeding branches. Alone. And a pork bun in her pocket. Looked up and saw he was there.

  He came onto the ice, unbuttoning his pants, sliding gingerly on the soles of his fishing boots. And although there was no place to go but around and around, although she knew he would get her later if not now, she skated away, evaded his lunging for a long time. Maybe ten minutes. A long time.

  She stood now and looked at the pond. Small, uninteresting. No reason to go down to it. The sky was not red but almost black in the southwest. Storms on the way. Soon enough there would be frost on the glass, frost-fur on the sills, the edging of frost that gathered on the quilt where the breath condensed, the timbers of the house contracting in the arctic nights with explosive creakings and snappings. As it was, once. Then, the slide of feet, hot breath on her face. And outside the ravenous wind in the cables, slamming down the chimney and sending rims of smoke up around the stove lids. The raw misery of February. And March, April. Snow until late May. Shuddered.

  Well, that life had hardened her, she had made her own way along the rough coasts, had patched and mended her sails, replaced chafed gear with strong, fit stuff. She had worked her way off the rocks and shoals. Had managed. Still managed.

  The air tingled. Distant ice was moving down. Snow crystals like shreds of clear plastic formed in cloudless sky, came out of nowhere. She trudged back to the house, the cold in her nostrils like a burned smell. Must listen to the weather forecast. That long drive around. They couldn’t put things off much longer.

  Inside she hung up her coat, draped her hat over the shoulder, the lined black gloves in the right pocket. Neatly, the fingers inside, the cuffs hanging limp.

  The nephew was reading to them. Might as well start some supper. Something simple. Pancakes. And, pouring flour into the bowl, thought about the coming snow. They had to talk about it. The first storm could close the road. He wouldn’t know.

  The wind came skirling down over the tuckamore, moaned through the house cables.

  “Supper!” called the aunt. How loud her voice was in the half-furnished room.

  “What I wouldn’t give right now,” she said suddenly to Quoyle, forking a pancake onto his cold plate, “to be eating a nice dinner at a good restaurant and going to see a good movie. What I wouldn’t give to go out and get on a heated bus tomorrow morning instead of driving that truck all around the bay. I tell you frankly, the winter begins to scare me.”

  As if it had been waiting for the season to be pronounced the snow started, flicking a few grains against the windows.

  “You see?” said the aunt as if supported by an ally in an argument.

  Quoyle chewed his mouthful of pancake, swallowed tea. He’d thought about it.

  “I talked to the bulldozer guy, Dennis’s friend. He’ll plow the road for a price. If the snow is more than three inches. Your truck can manage that much.”

  “Twenty-eight miles of plowing! What price might that be?”

  “A hundred a pop. Barely pay for the gas. Figured on what the storm frequency is, he estimates he’d have to come out a minimum of twice a week. In five months that’s forty plowings. That’s four thousand dollars. Another possibility is Dennis. He said he could ferry us back and forth with his boat until it iced up too much. If we could pay for the gas and his time at, say, ten dollars an hour.”

  “Well, that’s a better bargain,” said the aunt.

  “I don’t think so. Figure he has to spend two hours a day-it’s twenty minutes across in smooth water. That’s the same as the bulldozer, a hundred a week. And by January the bay will be iced in. I don’t want to risk the girls on a snowmobile going back and forth across the bay. Dennis says there are weak spots. It’s dangerous. Every winter somebody goes through and drowns. You have to know the route. Come to that, I don’t like this long drive for them every day, either.”

  “You have been thinking of all the angles,” said the aunt. Dryly. She was used to being the one who figured things out.

  He did not say that the day before the capsize he had walked through the bare rooms of the house and guessed her furniture was not coming this year.

  “Then,” he said, cutting Sunshine’s pancake with the edge of his fork to quell her screaking knife, “we could shift across the bay for the winter. Consider this place a summer camp. Nutbeem is leaving in a week or two. His trailer. There’s not room for all four of us, but the girls and I could manage. If you could find a room. Or something. Wouldn’t Mrs. Bangs know of something?”

  But the aunt was astonished. She had gone for a walk and looked at a pond. Now everything had rushed on like an unlighted train in the dark.

  “Let’s sleep on it,” said the aunt.

  In the morning five inches of snow and blinding sunlight, a warm wind. Everything dripped and ran. The white blanket on the roof wrinkled, cracked, broke away in ragged cakes that hissed as they slid down and crashed to the ground. By noon only islands of snow on the damp road and in the hollows on the barrens.

  “All right,” said the aunt. “I want to think about this a little more.” Now that it was here, it had come too fast.

  ¯

  “Well, I wondered what happened to you,” said Mavis Bangs, the part in her black hair glowing like a wire in the rhomboid of sunlight. “I thought you might be sick. Or have trouble with the truck. M’dear, I was that worried. Or Dawn said maybe it was the snow, but it melted almost as fast as it come, so we didn’t think it was. Anyway, noon I went up to the post office and got your mail.” She pointed at the aunt’s table with her eyes. Importantly. She had jumped into the habit of doing small kindnesses for Agnis Hamm. And would get the mail or pour a cup of tea unbidden. Proffer things with invisible trumpets.

  “It was the snow,” said the aunt. “You know how snow sticks to a dirt road.” She shoveled at the letters. “Fact of the matter we decided it would be better to look for something closer in for the winter. The house be more of a camp, you know. He doesn’t want the children to have to travel all that way on school days. So.” She sighed.

  Mrs. Bangs saw it in a flash. “Was you looking for a house for the all of yous? I knows the Burkes been talking about selling their place for good and moving to Florida. They go down every winter. Got friends there now. A bungalow. They live in a Florida bungalow with a verandah. Mrs. Burke, Pansy, says they have got two orange trees and a palm right in the front yard. Picks the oranges right off. Can you believe it? Now that is a place I�
�d like to see before I die. Florida.”

  “I been there,” said Dawn. “You can have it. Give me Montreal. Ooh-la-la. Beauty clothes. All those markets, you never saw food like that in your life, movies, boutiques. You can have Miami. Buncha rich Staties.”

  “What’s the Burke place, then,” said the aunt offhandedly.

  “Well, it’s up on the ridge. The road that goes out to Flour Sack Cove, but at this end. Like if you was to go outside and face the hill and start climbing-if you could climb right over the houses, you know-you’d about come on it. Grey house with blue trim. Very nice kept up. Mrs. Burke is a housekeeper. An old-fashioned kitchen with the daybed and all, but they got conveniences, too. Oil heat. Dishwasher. Washing machine and dryer in the basement. Basement finished off. Nice fresh wallpaper in all the rooms.”

  “Umm,” said the aunt. “You think they’d rent?”

  “I doubt it. I don’t believe they wants to rent. They been asked. I believe they wants to sell.”

  “Well, you know, actually my nephew is going to take that English fellow’s trailer. Works at the paper. Mr. Nutbeem. He’s leaving pretty soon.”

  “So you’d want a separate place, then.”

  “Ye-es,” said the aunt.

  “I believe the Burke place would be too much for one person,” said Mrs. Bangs. “Even if you was prepared to buy it. It’s got nine rooms. Or ten.”

  “I’ve put quite a bit of money into the old house. It’s a shame. Just to use it for a camp. But getting back and forth is a problem. Like they say, what can’t be cured must be endured. I’ve took a room at the Sea Gull for the rest of the week while we work something out. Nephew and the girls are staying with Beety and Dennis. Kind of cramped, but they’re making do. Don’t want to get caught by the snow. But let’s not worry about it right now. What have we got on the schedule for today? The black cushions for the Arrowhead.”