Shipping News_A Novel

by Annie Proulx

  That evening Quoyle talked to the aunt on the phone, didn’t know he would set her in motion. A screech over the wire like a sea gull. She caught an early plane, would not be turned back, and in the morning the principal saw three generations of Quoyles advancing up the frozen driveway. The aunt’s new St. John’s hairstyle like a helmet, Quoyle’s chin jutting, and Bunny between.

  Got an earful from the aunt. But it was Quoyle who smoothed things out, explained in a reasonable voice, coaxed the principal and Bunny into mutual apologies and promises. Easy enough for the principal who knew that Mrs. Lumbull was moving to Grand Falls to open a Christian bookstore. Hard for Bunny who still measured events on a child’s scale of fair and unfair.

  ¯

  Certain wheels had turned, certain cogs enmeshed. Quoyle went on Saturday afternoon, as usual, to Alvin Yark’s, Wavey and the children with him. Wavey turned to the backseat. Looked at Bunny, not as adults look at children, checking guilt or comprehension, fingernails, zipped jackets and hats, but as one adult may look at another. Saying a few things without words. Took Bunny’s hand and squeezed it.

  “How do you do, how do you do,” said Herry, who always caught connections.

  The car achieved some sort of interior balance on the way to Nunny Bag Cove, a rare harmony of feeling that soothed all the passengers.

  Wavey and her Auntie Evvie were hooking a floor mat with a design of seabirds copied from a calendar. Wavey worked at the puffin. Bunny went with her storybook to the rocker at the window. Here the Yark cat, when the glass wasn’t frosty, watched boats as though they were water rats. Sunshine and Herry shook toys from Herry’s red backpack. Though later Sunshine was pulled to the women, the flicking hooks jerking up loops of wool, inventing turrs and caplin. She got the sneeze-provoking smell of burlap backing. Wavey aimed a wink. Sunshine moved in, put her finger on the puffin. Dying to try it.

  “This way,” said Wavey, hand closing over the child’s, guiding the hook to seize the pale wool. Bunny turned the pages and smoothed the cat with her stockinged foot. A storm of purring. She looked up.

  “Petal was in a car accident in New York and she can’t come here. Because she can never wake up. I could wake her up but it’s too far away. So when I’m grown up I might go there.”

  What brought that on, wondered Wavey.

  ¯

  In the shop Yark fretted. The snow was deep, storms and gales raged still, but the ice was breaking up, seal were moving into the bays, the cod and turbot spawning, herring were on the dodge. He felt change and life, the old seasonal longing to get out. Take a few seal. Or shoot at icebergs. Anyway, get moving. But his eyes were too weak for that, watered in the light from snow blindness twenty years earlier, even though his wife had put tea compresses over his eyes. The reason he had to work now in a darkened shop. During the past weeks he had set and wedged the keel into floor blocks, leveled, braced, and immovably secured the boat’s backbone.

  “Now it’ll start to look like something. Today we marks out the main timbers.”

  With his scraped and worn tape he measured back from the top of the stem along an invisible line, muttered to Quoyle. He calculated the midpoint of the hull length and marked the keel a second time a few inches forward of the midpoint mark. Measured from the sternpost to mark the afterhook placement. Quoyle tidied up rows of chisels and saws, peered out the sawdust-coated window at the bay ice. Still the measurements were not over. Yark calculated the position of the bottom of the counter up from the timberline by rules and patterns he carried in his head.

  “Leave me take that saw, boy,” said the old man. His words seemed to come out of a mouthful of snow. Quoyle handed the saw, the chisel, the saw, the chisel, leaned over the work watching Yark notch the timberline to take the timber pairs. At last he could help set in the timbers, holding them while the old man fastened them to the floor with stout braces he called spur shores.

  “Now we notches the sternpost, my son.” Bolted on the counter, the metal biting into the wood with its fast grip. Put his hands on his hips and leaned back, groaning. “Might as well quit while we’re ahead. Wavey come?”

  “Yes. And the kids.”

  “You needs kids about. Keeps you young.” Cleared his throat and spat in the shavings. “When are you two going to do the deed?”

  He switched off the light, turned in the gloom of the shop and looked at Quoyle. Quoyle wasn’t sure which deed he meant. The crack that was Yark’s mouth elongated, not a smile so much as a forcing apart of seams that went with the blunt question. To force Quoyle’s seams apart. And other forced seams implicit.

  Quoyle’s exhalation that of someone doing heavy work.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Is it the boy?”

  Quoyle shook his head. How to say it? That he loved Petal, not Wavey, that all the capacity for love in him had burned up in one fast go. The moment had come and the spark ignited, and for some it never went out. For Quoyle, who equated misery with love. All he felt with Wavey was comfort and a modest joy.

  But said, “It’s Herold. Her husband. He’s always in her mind. She’s very deeply attached to his memory.”

  “ ‘Erold Prowse!” The old man closed the door. “Let me tell you something about ‘Erold Prowse. There was a sigh of relief went up in some places when he was lost. You’ve heard of the tomcat type of feller, eh? That was ‘Erold. He sprinkled his bastards up and down the coast from St. John’s to Go Aground. It was like a parlor game down in Misky Bay to take a squint at babies and young children, see if they looked like ‘Erold. ‘Appen they often did.”

  “Did Wavey know this?”

  “Of course she knew. ‘E made her life some miserable. Rubbed her nose in it, ‘e did. Went off for weeks and months, swarvin’ around. No sir, boy, don’t you worry about ‘Erold. Far as keeping ‘Erold’s memory green and sacred goes, of course ‘e turned into a tragic figure. What else could she do? And then there was the boy. Can’t tell a lad born under those circumstances that ‘is dad was a rat. I know she makes a song and dance about ‘Erold. But ‘ow far does that get ‘er?” He opened the door again.

  “Not far from Herold, I guess.” said Quoyle, who answered rhetorical questions.

  “Depends how you look at it. Evvie’s made bark sail bread. We might as well get the good of it with a cup of tea.” Clapped Quoyle on the arm.

  ¯

  The seal hunt began in March, a few foreigners out on the Front, the bloody Front off Labrador where the harp seals whelped and moulted in the shelter of hummocky ice. Men had burned and frozen and drowned there for centuries, come to a stop when televised in red color, clubbing.

  Thousands of seals came into the bays as well and excited landsmen put out after them in anything that would work among the ice floes.

  In the 4:00 AM fluorescent brightness Jack Buggit drank a last cup of tea, went to the hook behind the stove for his jacket and hood. Hands into wife-knitted thumbies, took the rifle, box of cartridges in his pocket. Shut off the light and felt through the dark to the latch. The door silent behind him.

  The cold air filled his throat like ice water. The sky a net, its mesh clogged with glowing stars.

  Down at the stage he loaded gear into the frost-rimed skiff. Rifle, club-wished he had one of the Norwegian hakapiks, handy tool for getting up onto the ice again if you went in. Well, a fisherman had to take his chance. His sealer’s knife, anti-yellow solution, axe, crushed ice, buckets, nylon broom, line, plastic bags. For Jack pelted on the ice. And it had to be right or it was no good at all.

  Checked the gas. And was out through the bay ice to the ice beyond.

  By full light he was crawling on his belly through jagged knots toward a patch of seals.

  Shot the first harps before eight. Jack glanced briefly at a dulled eye, touched the naked pupil, then turned the fat animal on its back and made a straight and centered cut from jaw to tail. Sixty years and more of practice on the seal meadows. Used to be out with a crowd, none o
f this Lone Ranger stuff. Remembered Harry Clews, a famous skinner who pelted out the fattest with three quick strokes of the knife. Oh what a bad breath the fetter had, indoors they couldn’t abide him. Women put their hands over their noses. Lived in his boat, you might say. The hard life, sealing. And in the end, Harry Clews, expert of a bitter art, was photographed at his trade, put on the cover of a book and reviled the world over.

  He slipped the knife in under the blubber layer and cut the flipper arteries, rolled the seal onto its opened belly on clean slanted ice. Smoked a cigarette while he watched the crimson seep into the snow. Thought, if there is killing there must be blood.

  Now, barehanded, cut away the pelt from the carcass, keeping the blubber layer an even thickness, cut out the flippers and put them aside. The holes small and perfectly matched. He rinsed the pelt in the sea, for the iron-rich blood would stain and ruin it, laid it on clean snow, fur down, not a nick or scrape on it, and turned to the carcass.

  Grasped and cut the windpipe, worked out the lungs, stomach, gut, keeping the membrane intact, cut up through the pelvic bone, then worked the sharp knife cautiously around the anus, never nicking the thin gut. And gently pulled the whole intact mass away from the carcass. Tossed buckets of seawater to cool and wash the meat. A pool in the body cavity.

  He carried the pelt twenty feet away to a clean patch, laid it fur side up, swept the waterdrops off with his broom, then worked anti-yellow into the fur and along the edges. Perfect. That’s she, by god, he said to himself.

  ¯

  Wavey came at suppertime one evening to the Burkes’ house. Carried a basket, Herry swinging along behind her, scratched the edge of the road with a stick. Sea still light under iridescent cauli flower clouds. She opened the Burkes’ kitchen door, went in where Quoyle boiled spaghetti water. Of course she had walked, she said. In the basket she showed a seal flipper pie.

  “You said you never ate it yet. It’s good. From the shoulder joint, you know. Not really the flippers. From a seal Ken got. His last seal, he says. He’s away to Toronto soon.” She would not stay. So Quoyle stuffed his children into their jackets, left the pie on the table for a few minutes to drive her home. Pulled up in front of the picket fence. Her hand on the basket handle, his hand on hers. The heat of her hand lasted all the way back to the Burkes’ house.

  The pie was heavy with rich, dark meat in savory gravy. But Sunshine ate only the crust, itching to get back to her crayons. A pinpoint cross above a page of undulating lines. “It’s Bunny,” she said. “Flying over the water.” And laughed with her mouth wide open, showing small teeth.

  In the night Quoyle finished the whole thing and licked the pan with a tongue like a dishclout. Was still standing with the pan in his hand when the kitchen door opened and Wavey came in again.

  “Herry’s sleeping at Dad’s,” she said. “And I’m sleeping here.” Breathless with running.

  Real Newfoundland kisses that night, flavored with seal flipper pie.

  ¯

  Three or four days later he was still thinking about seal flipper pie. Remembered the two raw eggs Petal gave him. That he had invested with pathetic meaning.

  “Petal,” said Quoyle to Wavey, “hated to cook. Hardly ever did.” Thought of the times he had fixed dinner for her, set out his stupid candles, folded the napkins as though they were important, waited and finally ate alone, the radio on for company. And later dined with the children, shoveling in canned spaghetti, scraping baby food off small chins.

  “Once she gave me two eggs. Raw eggs for a present.” He had made an omelet of them, hand-fed her as though she were a nestling bird. And saved the shells in a paper cup on top of the kitchen cabinet. Where they still must be.

  “Sure, she must have made a bit of toast from time to time.”

  “She wasn’t home much. She worked-in the daytime. And at night and weekends-I guess she was out with her boyfriends. I know she was out with them.”

  “Boyfriends!”

  He would say it. “Petal went with men. She liked other men,” said Quoyle. “A lot.” Unclear whether he meant the degree of liking or the number of men. Wavey knew, hissed through her teeth. Hadn’t she guessed there was a nick in the edge of that axe? The way Quoyle talked of his love, but never the woman? Could pull out one from her own skein of secrets.

  “You know,” she said, “Herold.” Thought of Herold stumbling in at dawn smelling of cigarettes, rum and other flesh, coming naked into the clean sheets, pubic hair sticky and matted from his busy night. “It’s just cunt juice, woman,” he’d said, “now shut up.” She exhaled, said “Herold,” again.

  “Um,” said Quoyle.

  “Herold,” said Wavey, “was a womanizer. He treated me body like a trough. Come and swill and slobber in me after them. I felt like he was casting vomit in me when he come to his climax. And I never told that but to you.”

  A long silence. Quoyle cleared his throat. Could he look at her? Almost.

  “I know something now I didn’t know a year ago,” said Quoyle. “Petal wasn’t any good. And I think maybe that is why I loved her.”

  “Yes,” said Wavey. “Same with Herold. It’s like you feel to yourself that’s all you deserve. And the worse it gets the more it seems true, that you got it coming to you or it wouldn’t be that way. You know what I mean?”

  Quoyle nodded. Kept on nodding and breathing through pursed lips in a whistling way as though considering something. While handsome Herold and ravishing Petal scuttled in and out of ratholes of memory. Something like that.

  ¯

  Quoyle couldn’t get used to the sight of Benny Fudge knitting. Wolf down his sandwich and haul out the stocking, ply the needles for half an hour as rapidly as the aunt. No sooner done with the blue stuff than he was tearing into white wool, some kind of a coat, it looked like.

  Quoyle tried to make a joke about it. “If you could write like you knit.” Benny looked up, hurt.

  “More than knitting. Benny was champion net mender. He knows the twine needle better’n he knows his wife, isn’t that right, Benny?” Billy winked at Quoyle.

  “In a different way,” said Benny, black hair falling over his face as he bent to the work.

  His writing was not that bad, either, said Quoyle, mollifying. Billy nodded, still on the subject of knitters and busy hands.

  “Jack knits a little still, not like he used to of course. He was a good knitter. But he never had the grip on it Benny does. Benny’s like that transport driver, you know, drove a container truck between St. John’s and Montreal?”

  Quoyle thought of Partridge. He’d call him up that night. Tell him. What? That he could gut a cod while he talked about advertising space and printing costs? That he was wondering if love came in other colors than the basic black of none and the red heat of obsession?

  “This driver used to barrel right across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, had his arms sticking through the steering wheel, knitting away like a machine. Had a proper gansey knit by the time he got to Montreal, sell it for good money as a Newf fisherman’s authentic handicraft.”

  “Might as well,” said Benny Fudge. “Happen to know what he got for one?”

  “No. But I can tell you about the time buddy was ripping along down the Trans-Canada knitting about as fast as the truck was going when this Mountie spies him. Starts to chase after him, doing a hundred and forty km per. Finally gets alongside, signs the transport feller to stop, but he’s so deep in his knitting he never notices.”

  One of Billy’s jokes. Quoyle smiled faintly.

  “Mountie flashes his light, finally has to shout out the window, ‘Pull over! Pull over!’ So the great transport knitter looks at the Mountie, shakes his head a bit and says, ‘Why no sir, ‘tis a cardigan.’ ”

  Benny Fudge didn’t crack a smile. But Billy screeched like rusty metal.

  ¯

  At the end of the seal hunt Jack switched to herring. He had his herring trap.

  That was what Quoyle loved best, it seeme
d, sitting on the stony shore out of the wind behind a rock, holding the grill of silvery herring over coals. These cold picnics on the lip of the sea. Wavey made a table from a piece of driftwood and a few stones. Herry trailed rubbery seaweed. The sun warmed a grassy bit of sheep pasture where Bunny and Sunshine raced across the slope.

  “Wavey!” Sunshine’s shrill voice. “Wavey, did you bring marshmallows?”

  “Yes, maid. The little ones.”

  The Maids in the Meadow thought Quoyle, looking at his daughters. And as though something dropped in place, he matched Billy’s father’s verse with his life. The Demon Lover. The Stouthearted Woman. Maids in the Meadow. The Tall and Quiet Woman.

  Then Bunny ran at them with her hands cupped. Always an arrow flying to the target. A stiff, perfect bird, as small as a stone in a child’s hand. Folded legs.

  “A dead bird,” said Wavey. “The poor thing’s neck is broken.” For the head lolled. She said nothing about sleep nor heaven. Bunny laid it on a rock, went back to look at it twenty times.

  The herrings smoked, the children dodged around, saying Dad, Dad, when are they ready. Dad, said Herry. And put his pie-face up, roaring at his own cleverness.