Shipping News_A Novel

by Annie Proulx

  “Dawn and me’s finished them black cushions Friday afternoon. Shipped ‘em this morning.”

  The aunt looked at her mail. “You’re way ahead of me,” she said. She turned over a postcard and read it. “That’s nice,” she said, voice needled with sarcasm. “I thought we’d be seeing the Pakeys on the Bubble this week. Now here’s their postcard and they say they can’t risk coming up here at this time of year. Fair weather sailors, they. No, it’s worse. They’re having the job done by Yacht-crafter! Those bums.” The aunt threw down the postcard, picked up a small package.

  “Who do I know in Macau? It’s from Macau.” Tore it open.

  “What is this?” she said. A packet of American currency fell on the table. Tied with a pale blue cord. Nothing more.

  “That blue…” Mavis Bangs hesitated, put out her hand.

  The aunt looked at the blue cord. Untied it and passed it to her. With a significant look. It was not a cord, but a thin strip of pale blue leather.

  29 Alvin Yark

  “The bight of a rope… has two meanings in knotting. First,

  it may be any central part of a rope, as distinct from the ends

  and standing part. Second, it is a curve or arc in a rope no

  narrower than a semicircle. This corresponds to the

  topographical meaning of the word, a bight being an indentation

  in a coast so wide that it may be sailed out of,

  on one tack, in any wind.”

  THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

  THE SINGLE advantage of the green house was clear at once. Quoyle, yawning and unshaven in a corner of Beety’s kitchen, was combing the snarls out of Sunshine’s hair and surrounded by affairs of toast, cocoa, searches for misplaced clothing and homework when Tert Card walked in, poured himself a cup of coffee. Dennis away and gone an hour before. Card looked at Beety, let her see him licking his mouth and winking like a turkey with pinkeye.

  He stood then in front of Sunshine and Quoyle, clawing at his groin as though scorched by red-hot underwear. “Quoyle. Just wanted to let you know you should call Diddy Shovel. Something about a ship fire. You’ll probably want to go straight along. I put the camera in your car. See if there’s a chance for some pix. I’ll tell you, Jack Buggit is some smart. People would rather read about a clogged head on a ship than all the car wrecks in Newfoundland.” Took his time drinking his coffee. Chucked Sunshine under the chin and scratched again before he ambled out.

  “I don’t like that yukky man,” said Sunshine. Feeling Quoyle’s anger through the comb.

  “In love with himself,” said Beety. “Always has been. And no competition.”

  “Like this,” said Murchie Buggit, hands blurred in demented scratching.

  “That’s enough,” said Beety. “You look like a dog with bad fleas.”

  “So did he.”’ And Sunshine and Murchie screamed with laughter until Murchie choked on toast crumbs and Quoyle had to slap his back.

  But before he called the harbormaster the phone rang.

  “For you,” said Beety.

  “Hello?” He expected Diddy Shovel’s voice.

  “Quoyle,” said Billy Pretty, “you stopped by Alvin Yark’s to talk about a boat?”

  “No, Billy. I haven’t even been thinking about it to tell you the truth. Kind of busy the last few weeks. And I guess I’m leery of boats after what happened.”

  “That’s why you must go right back to ‘em. Now you been christened. Winter is the finest time to build a boat. Alvin build you something and come ice-out I’ll show you the tricks. Since you’ve been brought up away from the boats and are a danger to yourself.”

  Quoyle knew he should feel grateful. But felt stupid. “That’s kind of you, Billy. I know I ought to do it.”

  “You just go out there to Alvin’s place. You know where his shop is? Get Wavey to show you. Alvin’s her uncle. Her poor dead mother’s oldest brother.”

  “Alvin Yark is Wavey’s uncle?” He seemed to be treading a spiral, circling in tighter and tighter.

  “Oh yes.”

  While his hand was on the phone Quoyle dialed Diddy Shovel. What was the fire, was there a story in it? Bunny slouched into the kitchen with her sweater on backwards. Quoyle tried to pantomime a command to reverse the sweater, aroused the Beethoven scowl.

  “Young man,” the great voice boomed, “while you’re fiddling around the Rome bums. Cargo ship, Rome, six-hundred-foot vessel, Panamanian registered, carrying a load of zinc and lead powder is, let’s see, about twenty miles out and on fire at thirteen hundred hours. Two casualties. The captain and an unidentified. Rest of the crew taken off by helicopter. Twenty-one chaps from Myanmar. Do you know where Myanmar is?”

  “No.”

  “Right where Burma used to be. Helicopter took most of the crew to Misky Bay Hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation. Ship is in tow, destination Killick-Claw. More than that I do not know.”

  “Do you know how I can get out to her?”

  “Why bother? Wait until they bring her in. Shouldn’t be too long.”

  Yet by three-thirty the ship still had not entered the narrows. Quoyle called Diddy Shovel again.

  “Should be here by five. Understand they’ve had some trouble. Towing cable parted and they had to rig another.”

  ¯

  Wavey came down the steps pulling at the sleeves of her homemade coat, the color of slushy snow. She got in, glanced at him. A slight smile. Looked away.

  Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.

  “I’ve got to go down to the harbor. So we can pick up the kids and I’ll bring you and young Herold straight back. I can drop Bunny off at Beety’s for an hour or take her with me. They’re towing in a ship that had a fire. Two men dead, including the captain. The others in the hospital. Diddy Shovel says.”

  “I tremble to hear it.” And did, in fact, shudder.

  The school came in sight. Bunny stood at the bottom of the steps holding a sheet of paper. Quoyle dreaded the things she brought from school, that she showed him with her lip stuck out: bits of pasta glued on construction paper to form a face, pipe cleaners twisted into flowers, crayoned houses with quadrate windows, brown trees with broccoli heads never seen in Newfoundland. School iconography, he thought.

  “That’s how Miss Grandy says to do it.”

  “But Bunny, did you ever see a brown tree?”

  “Marty makes her trees brown. And I’m gonna.”

  Quoyle to Wavey. “Billy says I must get a boat built over the winter. He says I should go to Alvin Yark.”

  A nod at hearing her uncle’s name.

  “He’s a good boat builder,” she said in her low voice. “He’d make you a good one.”

  “I thought I would go over on Saturday,” said Quoyle. “And ask. Take the girls. Will you and Herry come with us? Is that a good day?”

  “The best,” she said. “And I’ve got things I’ve been wanting to bring to Aunt Evvie. We’ll have supper with them. Aunt Evvie’s some cook.”

  Then Quoyle and Bunny were off to the harbor, but the Rome had been towed to St. John’s by company orders.

  “Usually they tell me,” said Diddy Shovel. “A few years back I’d have twisted ‘em like a watch spring, but why bother now?”

  ¯

  On Saturday the fog was as dense as cotton waste, carried a coldness that ate into the bones. The children like a row of hens in the backseat. Wavey a little dressed up, black shoes glittering on the floor mat. Quoyle’s eyes burned trying to penetrate the mist. Corduroy trousers painfully tight. He made a thousandth vow to lose weight. Houses at the side of the road were lost, the sea invisible. An hour to go ten miles to the Nunny Bag Cove turnoff. Cars creeping the other way, fog lights as dull as dirty saucers.

  Nunny Bag Cove was a loop of road crammed with new ranch houses. They could scarcely see them in the mist.

  “They had a fire about six years ago,�
�� said Wavey. “The town burned down. Everybody built a new house with the insurance. There was some families didn’t have insurance, five or six I guess, the others shared along with them so it all came out to a new house for everybody. Uncle Al and Auntie Evvie didn’t need such a big house as the old one, so they chipped in.”

  “Wait,” said Quoyle. “They built a smaller house than their insurance claim paid for?”

  “Umm,” said Wavey. “He had separate insurance on his boat house. Had it insured for the amount as if there was a new long-liner just finished in it.”

  “That’s enterprising,” said Quoyle.

  “Well, you know, there might have been! Better to guess yes than no. How many have that happened to, and the insurance was only for the building?”

  Mrs. Yark, thin arms and legs like iron bars, got them all around the kitchen table, poured the children milk-tea in tiny cups painted with animals, gilt rims. Sunshine had a Gloucester Old Spot pig, Herry a Silver Spangle rooster and hen. A curly homed Dorset sheep for Bunny. The table still damp with recent wiping.

  “Chuck, chuck, chuck,” said Herry, finger on the rooster.

  “They was old when I was little,” said Wavey.

  “Be surprised, m’dear, ‘ow old they is. My grandmother ‘ad them. That’s a long time ago. They come over from England. Once was twelve of them, but all that’s left is the four. The ‘orses and cows are broke, though there’s a number of the saucers. Used to lave some little glassen plates, but they’s broke, too.” Mrs. Yark’s ginger cookies were flying doves with raisin eyes.

  Bunny found all the interesting things in the kitchen, a folding bootjack, a tin jelly mold like a castle with pointed towers, a flowered mustache cup with a ceramic bridge at the rim to protect a gentleman’s mustache from sopping.

  “You’re lucky you saved these things from the fire,” said Quoyle. Eating more cookies.

  “Ah, well,” Mrs. Yark breathed, and Quoyle saw he’d made a mistake.

  ¯

  Quoyle left the women’s territory, followed Alvin Yark out to the shop. Yark was a small man with a paper face, ears the size of half-dollars, eyes like willow leaves. He spoke from lips no more than a crack between the nose and chin.

  “So you wants a boat. A motorboat?”

  “Just a small boat, yes. I want something to get around the bay-not too big. Something I can handle by myself. I’m not very good at it.”

  A cap slewed sideways on his knotty head. He wore a pair of coveralls bisected by a zipper with double tabs, one dangling at his crotch, the other at his breastbone. Under the coveralls he wore a plaid shirt, and over everything a cardigan with more zippers.

  “Outboard rodney, I suppose ‘ud do you. Fifteen, sixteen foot. Put a little seven-‘orsepower motor on ‘er. Something like that,” he said pointing at a sturdy boat with good lines resting on a pair of sawhorses.

  “Yes,” said Quoyle. Knew enough to recognize he was looking at something good.

  “Learn yer young ones to row innit when they gits a little stouter.”

  They went into the dull gloom of the shop.

  “Ah,” said Yark. “I ‘as a one or two to finish up, y’know,” pointing to wooden skeletons and half-planked sides. “Says I might ‘elp Nige Feam wid ‘is long-liner this winter. But if I gets out in the woods, you know, and finds the timber, it’ll go along. Something by spring, see, by the time the ice goes. If I goes in the woods and finds the right sticks you know, spruce, var. See, you must find good uns, your stem, you wants to bring it down with a bit of a ‘ollow to it, stempost and your knee, and deadwoods a course, and breast’ook. You has to get the right ones. Your timbers, you know. There’s some around ’ere steams ’em. I wouldn’t set down in a steam timber boat. Weak.”

  “I thought you’d have the materials on hand,” said Quoyle.

  “No, boy, I doesn’t build with dry wood. The boat takes up the water if ‘er’s made out of dry wood, you know, and don’t give it up again. But you builds with green wood and water will never go in the wood. I never builds with dry wood.”

  30 The Sun Clouded Over

  QUOYLE and his daughters walked from Beety and Dennis’s house to the Sea Gull Inn where the aunt roosted, damp and ruffled. Sunshine, grasping Quoyle’s hand, slipped again and again. Until he saw it was a game, said, stop that.

  The road shone under a moon like a motorcycle headlight. Freezing December fog that coated the world with black ice, the raw cold of the northern coast. Impossible to drive, though earlier he had driven, had made it to Little Despond and back, following up on the oil spill. Closed up. Old Mr. Eye in the hospital with pneumonia. A rim of oil around the cove.

  Through the lobby with its smell of chemical potpourri, to the dining room where the aunt waited. Past empty tables. Bunny walked sedately; Sunshine charged at the aunt, tripped, crash-landed and bawled. So the dinner began with tears. Chill air pouring off the window glass.

  “Poor thing,” said the aunt, inspecting Sunshine’s red knees. The waitress came across the worn carpet, one of her shoes sighing as she walked.

  Quoyle drank a glass of tomato juice that tasted of tin. The aunt swallowed whiskey; glasses of ginger ale. Then turkey soup. In Quoyle’s soup a stringy neck vein floated.

  “I have to say, after the first day of peace and quiet, I’ve missed every one of you. Badly.” The aunt’s face redder than usual, blue eyes teary.

  Quoyle laughed. “We miss you.” Sleeping in Beety and Dennis’s basement. Did miss the aunt’s easy company, her headlong rush at problems.

  “Dad, remember the little red cups with the pictures at Wavey’s auntie’s house?”

  “Yes, I do, Bunny. They were cunning little cups.”

  “I’m writing a letter to Santa Claus to bring us some just like it. At school we are writing to Santa Claus. And I drew a picture of the cups so he would make the right kind. And blue beads. And Marty wrote the same thing. Dad, Marty makes her esses backwards.”

  “I want a boat with a stick and a string,” said Sunshine. “You put the boat in the water and push it with the stick. And it floats away! Then you pull the string and it comes back!” She laughed immoderately.

  “Sounds like the kind of boat I need,” Quoyle eating the cold rolls.

  “And if I get those little red cups,” said Bunny, “I’ll make you a cup of tea, Aunt.”

  “Well, my dear, I’ll drink it with pleasure.”

  “Now, who’s having the scallops,” said the waitress holding a white plate heaped with pallid clumps, a mound of rice, a slice of bleached bread.

  “That was my idea,” said the aunt, frowning at her pale food, whispering to Quoyle. “Should have gone to Skipper Will’s for squidburgers.”

  “When we’re at Beety’s house she makes jowls and britches sometimes,” said Bunny, “which I Love.”

  “And I hate them,” said Sunshine, making a sucking noise in the bottom of her ginger ale glass.

  “You do not. You ate them all.”

  The cod cheeks and chips came.

  “Ahem,” said the aunt, “This is something of an announcement dinner. I’ve got an announcement. Good news and bad news. The good news is that I’ve got a big job that will take most of the winter. The bad news is that it’s in St. John’s. How it came about, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my yacht upholstery affairs. Let’s face it, yacht owners are not as numerous here as on Long Island. Newfoundland is not high in the yachtman’s ports of call. So I’ve been worried. Because I haven’t had much work the last six weeks. If it hadn’t been for the Mystery Money from Macau, no mystery to me, and to think of that strange woman who dismembers her husband but pays her bills, I’d have been pinched. So I put on my thinking cap. Plenty of commercial shipping in Newfoundland. Am I hoisting the wrong flag? Maybe so. Tried out some new names. Hamm’s Yacht Upholstery sure not bringing them in droves. How about, I says to Mrs. Mavis Bangs, what do you think of Hamm’s Maritime Upholstery? Could be yachts, could be tankers, c
ould be anything that floats. She thought it was good. So then I called up refitters and boat repair yards in St. John’s, introduced myself as Agnis Hamm of Hamm’s Maritime Upholstery, and sure enough, there’s a need. Right off the bat, a big job, a cargo ship, the Rome, that had a bad fire. Destroyed the bridge, upholstery in the ward room, crew lounge, everywhere ruined by smoke and water damage. Months of work. So, I’m taking Dawn and Mrs. Mavis Bangs down to St. John’s with me and we’ll work until it is done. They want a rich-colored burgundy Naugahyde. And a royal blue, very smart. Leather is not for everyone. It can mould, you know. Dawn is thrilled to be getting to St. John’s. Bunny, put your napkin in your collar if you’re going to drip ketchup. You’re so sloppy.”

  “Dad,” said Bunny. “I can make something. Skipper Alfred showed me it. It’s ‘The Sun Clouded Over.’ ”

  “Um-hm,” said Quoyle twirling a cod cheek in a stainless steel cup of tartar sauce. “But Aunt, where will you stay? A hotel in St. John’s for a couple of months will cost a fortune.”

  “Watch,” said Bunny, folding a bit of string.

  “That’s the good part,” the aunt said, chewing scallops. “Atlantic Refitters keeps two apartments just for this kind of thing. Mr. Malt-he’s the lad I’m dealing with-says they quite often have to put up experts in certain fields, metal stresses, propeller design, inspectors and such. So we can have one of the company’s apartments at no cost-got a couple of bedrooms. It’s part of the deal. And there’s a work space. Set up the upholstery work. So, Dawn’s brother will help us load everything into the back of my truck. They got the Naugahyde coming in from somewhere, New Jersey I believe. And we’ll be off by the end of next week. All in the change of a name.”