Shipping News_A Novel

by Annie Proulx

  “I’ll find something else,” said Quoyle. With every breath a charge of snowflakes in the nostrils. The headache was a dull background throb.

  “It’s too bad,” said Billy Pretty, silvered with snow, changing color with the season. “It’s too bad.” That seemed to cover everything.

  Quoyle squinted at the sky where nothing could be seen but the billions of tossing flakes stirred by a rigorous wind.

  “It’s a stepmother’s breath,” said Billy.

  34 Dressing Up

  Sailors once wore their hair in queues worked two ways; laid

  up into rattails, or platted in four-strand square sinnets. The

  final touch called for a pickled eelskin chosen from the brine

  cask. The sailor carefully rolled the eelskin back (as a

  condom is rolled), then worked it up over his queue and

  seized it. For dress occasions he finished it off with a red

  ribbon tied in a bow.

  “QUOYLE, finish that up and I’ll take you round the corner to the Heavy Weather and buy you a hot grog.” Tert Card, morose and white, staring with hatred at the ice-bound bay. For it had gone very still and cold. Pancakes of submerged ice joined with others into great sheets, the rubbery green ice thickened, ah ice foot fastened onto the shore, binding the sea with the land. Liquid became solid, solid was buried under crystals. A level plain stretched nearly to the mouth of the bay. He watched the ice breaker gnawing through, cutting a jagged path of black water.

  “I suppose I can.” Reluctant. Didn’t want to drink with Tert Card but thought no one else would. A quick one. “Let me call Beety and say I’ll be a little late.” But wanted to collect his daughters and go home to the Burkes’ house, a squeaky, comfortable house with many cupboards in unlikely corners. The strangest thing in the place was a lampshade that crackled modestly as the bulb warmed. There was a bathroom with a handmade copper tub wide enough for Quoyle. The first tub he’d ever fit in. Spare rooms for visitors. If any came.

  “Then we’ll have a glutch or two, or two,” grinned Tert Card, the devil plucking at the strings of his throat as if it were a guitar. “Follow me.” The vehicles groaned through the cold.

  The Heavy Weather was a long room with a filthy linoleum floor and the smell of a backed-up toilet, vomit, stale smoke and liquor. This was where Tert Card drank, the place he scrawled home from, barely able to get up the steps and into his house. Quoyle thought he probably shouted at home. Or worse. The few times he’d seen the wife she looked a bent thing and the children shrank when he said hello to them. For he noticed small children.

  Fluorescent halos. A solid row of backs at the bar. Silhouettes of men in caps with earflaps that came down when wanted. Showing each other photographs of boats. The talk was of insurance and unemployment and going away to find work. Quoyle and Tert Card sat at a side table littered with wadded napkins. A smoldering ashtray. Behind them two old slindgers in overcoats and pulled-down Donegal caps, all mufflers and canes and awkward knees. They sat close together on a long bench. Each, a hand on the glass. It might have been a village pub across the water, thought Quoyle.

  “What’ll you have?” Tert Card, leaning on the table until it rocked. “What’ll you have, don’t tell me, don’t tell me, it’s going to be screech and Pepsi.” And off he went with his hand worrying his pocket for money.

  And back again in the gloom.

  They drank. Tert Card’s throat worked thirstily and he swallowed again, lifting the cracking arm and beckoning, thrusting two fingers.

  “I seen worse than this.” He meant the weather. “Two years ago how thick the ice was around the shore. The icebreakers was running full clock. And the storms broke your heart. Just a few years ago, first week in December we had screeching bitter winds, fifty-foot waves thrashing around, it was like the bottom of the ocean was going to come up. You should have seen the way Billy sat in his corner shaking alive, scrammed with cold. Then a week or two later the heaviest rain anybody ever see. Floods and destruction. The Lost Man dam broke. I don’t know how many millions of dollars damage it did. December storms are the most treacherous, changeable and cruel. You can go from the warm breeze to the polar blizzard in ten minutes.”

  On the wall a fisherman’s calendar showed the last page. The bare tables reflected. Tert Card’s angry yawn. Dark outside, the longest dark of the night. The weather report seeped from a radio behind the bar. A warming trend. Above-normal temperatures forecast.

  “That’s the weather we get now. Storm, then cold, then warm. A yo-yo, up and down, coldest, warmest, strongest wind, highest tide. Like some Yank advertising company in charge of it all.”

  An old man, in his eighties, guessed Quoyle, and still working, why not, brought them new drinks. His hair cropped to silver stubble, eyes silvery, too, curved as lunettes, the grey shine of a drop under his nose catching the light. A mustache like spruce needles. Mouth agape, an opening into the skull, showing white tongue and gums, staring stupidly at the money Tert Card thrust.

  “Be telling you something,” said Tert Card. “Jack and Billy Pretty already knows. I’m leaving, see. I had enough of Killick-Claw. New Year’s Day. They wants me down to St. John’s, put out the newsletter for the oil rig suppliers. I got the phone call yesterday. Applied a year ago. Oh, there’s a waiting list. They only skim the cream. You bet I’m glad to go. If I play me cards right, maybe I’ll get to the States, to Texas and the head office. Though it’s Florida I loves. I’ll think of you, Quoyle, wonder if you’re still up here. See, I’m leaving New Year’s Day. I bet you’ll be the next one to go. You’ll go back to the States. Jack and Billy will have to put out the Gammy Bird themselves. If they can.”

  “How will your wife like the city?”

  “Wife! She’s not going down there. She’s staying right here, right at home. Stay home where she belongs. All her family’s here. She’ll stay right here. A woman stays at home. She’ll stay here.” Outraged at the idea it could be any different. But when he signaled for new drinks Quoyle got up, said he was off to his children. A parting shot from Tert Card.

  “You know Jack’s having Billy take up my job. They’ll probably put you on the women’s stuff, Quoyle, and hire a new feller to do the shipping news and the wrecks. I believe your days is numbered.” And his hand went into his shirt and clawed.

  ¯

  Quoyle was surprised by a fever that swept in with the December storms, as though the demonic energy released by wind and wave passed into the people along the coast. Everywhere he went, saws and rasps, click of knitting pins, great round puddings soaking in brandy, faces painted on clothespin dolls, stuffed cats made from the tops of old stockings.

  Bunny talked about the pageant at school. She was doing something with Marty. Quoyle braced for an hour of memorized Yule poems. Did not like Christmas. Thought of the time his brother tore the wrappings off a complete set of Matchbox cars, the tiny intricate vehicles in wonderful colors. He must have gotten some toy, too, but remembered only the flat soft packages that were pajamas or the brown and blue knit shirts his mother bought. “You grow so fast,” she accused. Her eyes went back to the moderate-sized brother sending the Alfa Romeo into the red double-decker bus.

  He still wasn’t over it now and resented the hectoring radio voices counting down shopping days, exhorting listeners to plunge into debt. But liked the smell of fir trees. And had to go to the school pageant. Which wasn’t a pageant.

  ¯

  The auditorium was jammed. A sweep of best clothes, old men in camphor-stinking black jackets that gnawed their underarms, women in silk and fine wools in the colors of camel, cinnabar, cayenne, bronze, persimmon, periwinkle, Aztec red. Imported Italian pumps. Hair crimped and curled, lacquered into stiff clouds. Lipstick. Red circles of rouge. The men with shaved jowls. Neckties like wrapping paper, children in sugar pink and cream. The puff of scented bodies, a murmur like bees over a red field.

  Quoyle, carrying Sunshine, could not see Wavey. They s
at beside Dennis who was alone in the third row. Beety probably, thought Quoyle, helping in the kitchen. Recognized the old bar tender from the Heavy Weather in front of him, a couple of slindgers from the wharves, now with their tan hair wetted and combed, faces swelled with drink and the excitement of being in a crowd. A row of bachelor fishermen waiting to hear of jobs away. The slippery boys. Whole truckloads of clans and remote kin squeezing into folding chairs. Sunshine stood on her chair and made a game of waving to people she didn’t know. He could not spot Wavey and Herry. A smell of face powder. She’d said they would be there. He kept looking.

  The principal, dressed in her brown suit, came on the stage, a spotlight wavered across her feet and the junior choir began. Shrill, pure voices flooded over the audience.

  It was not what he thought. Yes, children lisped comic or religious poems to thunderous applause. But it was not just schoolchildren. People from the town and the outlying coves came onstage as well. Benny Fudge, the black-haired rager who led the attack on poor Nutbeem’s boat-for he was “poor Nutbeem” now-sang “The Moon Shines Bright” in a fruity tenor and finished with two measures of finger snapping and clogging.

  “When I was a kid they came around at night and sang outside the door,” whispered Dennis. “Old Sparky Fudge, Benny’s granddad, you see, had a renowned voice. Lost off the Mummy Banks.”

  Then Bunny and Marty stood alone on the edge of the stage.

  “Hi Bunny!” screamed Sunshine. “Hi Marty!” A ripple of laughter.

  “Quiet, now,” whispered Quoyle. The child like coiled wire.

  Bunny and Marty wore matching red jumpers. Beety had let them sit at the sewing machine and stitch the long side seams. Quoyle could see Bunny’s knees trembling. Her hands clenched. They began to sing something Quoyle had heard seeping from behind a door, a haunting little tune in a foreign language which he guessed was an African tongue. How had they learned it? He and Dennis mopped at their eyes and snorted with embarrassment.

  “Pretty good,” croaked Quoyle.

  “Oh, aye,” said Dennis in a robber chiefs voice.

  Quoyle remembered Nutbeem’s tape. Had the children memorized some pagan song of unknown meaning from that tape? He hoped so.

  A woman, perhaps seventy, glowing hair in a net like a roll of silver above her forehead came smiling onto the stage. Bunched cheeks over her smile like two hills above the valley. Eyes swimming behind lenses. A child ran out and placed a soccer ball on the floor behind her.

  “Oh, this is good,” said Dennis, nudging Quoyle. “Auntie Sofier’s chicken act.”

  She stood still a few seconds, long old arms in her jersey, the tweed skirt to the knees. Yellow stockings, and on her feet red slippers. Suddenly one of the legs scratched at the stage, the arms became wings, and, with a crooning and cackling, Auntie Sofier metamorphosed into a peevish hen protecting an egg.

  Quoyle laughed until his throat ached. Though he had never found hens amusing.

  Then Wavey and Herry. The boy wore a sailor suit, clacked across the stage in tap shoes. Wavey, in her grey, homemade dress sat on a chair, the accordion across her breast like a radiator grill. The few false notes. Wavey said something that only the boy heard. A strained silence. Then, “One, two, three,” said Wavey and commenced. The hornpipe rolled into the audience and at once hundreds of right heels bounced against the floor, the boy rattled his way up and down the blank boards. Quoyle clapped, they all clapped and shouted until Herry ran forward and bowed from the waist as his mother had taught him, smiling and smiling through the hinges of his face.

  The showstopper was Beety.

  The black cane appeared first from behind the curtain and a roar went up in the audience. She came out jauntily. Strutted. Wore dance tights and tunic covered with sequins and glass bugles, rondels, seed beads, satinas and discs, crow beads, crystal diamonds, cat’s-eyes, feather drops and barrels, sputniks and pearls, fluted twists, bumpy-edges and mother-of-pearl teardrops. She had only to breathe to send shimmering prisms at them. A topper that took the light like a boomerang. Leaned on the cane. Twirled the hat on one finger, flipped it in a double somersault and caught it square on her head.

  “We all know Billy Pretty’s ways,” she said, voice charged with tricks and amusements, a tone Quoyle’d never heard. He glanced at Dennis who leaned forward, mouth half open, as eager as anyone for her next word.

  “Proper thing to save a dollar, eh Billy?”

  The audience, laughing, twisted around in their seats to stare at Billy who sat near the back, strangling. The cane twirled.

  “Yes, we knows ‘is ways. But ‘ow many knows the time last winter, February it was, time we ‘ad that silver thaw when Billy wanted to ‘ave the old grandfather clock in ‘is kitchen repaired? It was like this, m’dears.” The cane walked around. “Billy called up Leander Mesher.”

  The audience creaked and twisted in their seats again to look at the grocer whose hobby was repairing antique watches.

  “Leander’s been known to fix a few watches at ‘is kitchen table. The old kind. There may be a few ‘ere remember them. You used to wind them up. Every day. S’elp me, it’s true! Every day. Life was terrible ‘ard in the old days. So! Calls Leander up on the telephone. It was a local call. No charge.” She became an uncanny Billy Pretty, hooped over the phone.

  “ ‘Leander,’ he says. ‘Leander, what would you ask to repair me old grandfather clock that’s ‘ere in me kitchen the ‘undred years past. I winds it up with a key. It is not battery operated.’

  “ ‘Ah,’ says Leander. ‘Could be about a hundred and ten dollars. The cost comes in getting it ‘ere. Pickup and delivery. Got to charge fifty each way. Got to ‘ire two strong lads, gas and oil for the truck. Insurance. Air in the tires.’

  “ ‘There’s no cost to air in the tires,’ says Billy.

  “ ‘Where ‘ave you been, Billy? ‘Tis called ‘inflation.’

  “Well, m’dears, Billy thought about it a bit. We knows ‘e lives up on the ‘ill and Leander’s ‘ouse is down at the bottom and in between a dozen streets. Billy ‘as it all figured out. ‘E’ll carry the clock down to Leander ’imself. Save fifty dollars. Leander can bring it back. Uphill. After all, it’s not that it’s all that ‘eavy, being mostly an empty space for the pendulum, but it’s awkward. Very awkward.” She measured off the dimensions of the grandfather clock, reaching high with the cane to touch the wooden dove that everyone knew topped Billy’s clock, widening her arms, stooping and dusting a bit of lint from the carved fruitwood foot. Quoyle twisted around, saw Billy roaring with pleasure at the resurrection of his clock on the stage. Someone in the audience went TICK TOCK.

  “ ‘E gets a good length of rope, you see, knotted and looped around nicely where ‘is arms’ll go. And ‘oists ‘er up on ‘is back and out the door! ‘Eading for Leander’s.” Now she was Billy teetering down the steep, icy hill.

  “ ‘Awful slick,’ says our Billy.” Taking careful little steps.

  “Now, down near the bottom of the hill is where Auntie Fizzard lives, ninety years old, isn’t that right m’dear?”

  And everyone stretched forward to see the elderly lady in the front row who raised thick canes in tremulous salute and drew cheers and clapping.

  “Ninety years old, and there she goes, got ‘er galoshes on with the little bit of fur around the tops, ‘as frosters pounded in the ‘eels so’s she won’t slip, wearing ‘er black winter coat and a woolly knitted hat, got a cane in each ‘and, and each cane got a red rubber tip on the end. She couldn’t fall down if she was pushed. She thinks.” Now Beety was Auntie Fizzard, inching along, casting fierce glances to the left and the right, watching for those who push ninety-year-old women.

  “Up at the top of the ‘ill…” The audience roared.

  “Up at top of the ‘ill you might say there was a bit of trouble. First our Billy runs a few little steps to the right and slides, then ‘e catches and trips to the left and ‘e slips, and ‘e goes straight on and ‘e skids, and
then the ‘ill is steeper and the ice glares like water, and ‘e’s on his way, then over ‘e goes, clock-side down and picking up speed like ‘e’s on a big komatik ‘e can’t steer.

  “Poor Auntie Fizzard ‘ears the ‘issing noise and she glances up, but ‘tis too late, the clock clips ‘er and belts ‘er into the snowbank. There’s an awful silence. Then Billy gets up and starts to haul ‘is precious clock out of the snow, get it on ‘is back again. ‘E’s still got a few steps to take to Leander’s souse, you see. Glances over and sees Auntie Fizzard’s boots sticking out of the snow. Sees them frisk around a bit, then ‘ere comes Auntie Fizzard out of the snow, ‘er ‘at crooked, one cane buried until spring, black coat with so much snow on it’s white.

  “ ‘You! You Billy Pretty!’ She blasted ‘im.” The cane twirled. “Says,”-a long, long pause-”says, ‘Why don’t you wear a wristwatch like everybody else?’ “

  A tremendous roar from the audience. Young men tossed their watches into the air.

  “Ah, she’s something, she’s something, isn’t she?” Dennis pounding Quoyle’s back, leaning forward to touch old Mrs. Fizzard’s shoulder.

  “Not a word of truth in it,” she screamed, purple with laughing. “But how she makes you think there was! Oh, she’s terrible good!”

  ¯

  And a few days later Quoyle gave Wavey a clear glass teapot, a silk scarf printed with a design of blueberries. He’d ordered them both through the mail from a museum shop in the States. She gave him a sweater the color of oxblood shoe polish. Had knitted it in the evenings. It was not too small. Their faces close enough for breath to mingle. Yet Quoyle was thinking of the only gift that Petal ever gave him. She had opened dozens of presents from him. A turquoise bracelet, a tropical-fish tank, a vest beaded with Elvis Presley’s visage, canary eyes and sequin lips. She opened the last box, glanced at him. Sitting with his hands dangling, watching her.