The Shipping News

by Annie Proulx

  “Went to his brother William in Misky Bay and says ‘He’s alive and I know where he is. I want to go out for him.’ William, you see, had a new long-liner, very seaworthy. But he was worried about going too far offshore. The sea continued rough, even a week after the storm. Never said he wouldn’t, mind you, he just hesitated the fraction of an instant. That’s all Jack needed. He spun around on his heel and tore back up to Flour Sack Cove. Got a crowd to help him haul his trap skiff out of the water and onto the trailer, and there went Jack, off for the south coast. He drove all night to Owl Bawl, got the skiff in the water, loaded up with his gas cans, and away he went, out to sea alone to find Dennis.

  “And he found him. How he knew where to go is beyond logic. Dennis and one other. Both of Dennis’s arms were broken and the other fellow was unconscious. How did he get them both in the skiff? Jack never said a word, according to what I heard, until they got to Owl Bawl. Then he said, ‘If you ever set foot in a boat again I’ll drown you myself.’ Of course, soon as the casts were off his arms, Dennis went out squid jigging with his wife. And Jack shook his fist at him and they don’t speak.”

  “How long ago?” asked Quoyle, sending the foam in his glass around in a circle until a vortex formed.

  “Oh donkey’s years. Long ago. Before I came here.”

  Miles up the coast the aunt looked at wind-stripped shore. As good a place as any. She parked at the top of the dunes and gazed down the shore. Tide coming in. The sun hung on the rim of the sea. Its flattened rays gilded the wet stones. Combers seethed under a strip of corn-yellow sky.

  The waves came on and on, crests streaked tangerine, breaking, receding with the knock of rolling cobbles. She opened the back of Quoyle’s station wagon and lifted out the dead dog.

  Down past the wrackline, onto hard sand. The fringe of bladder wrack and knot wrack stretched, relaxed, flowed in again on nervous water. The aunt laid Warren on the stones. An incoming wave drenched the sheet.

  “You were a good girl, Warren,” said the aunt. “A smart girl, no trouble at all. I was sorry they had to pull your teeth but it was that or you know what. Ha-ha. You got a few good bites in, didn’t you? Many good years although denied bones. Sorry I can’t bury you, but we are in a difficult situation here. Too bad you couldn’t wait until we moved out to the house. And too bad Irene never knew you. Would have liked you, I’m pretty sure.” Thought, Irene Warren. How I miss you. Always will.

  She snorted into her handkerchief, waited in the gathering darkness, moving back a few steps at a time as the tide advanced, until Warren floated free, moved west along the shore, edging out and out, riding some unseen tidal rip. The sea looked as though it would sound if struck. Warren gliding away. Sailed out of sight, into the setting sun.

  Just like in the old westerns.

  And down the bay Quoyle heard Nutbeem’s everlasting story, Tert Card’s twilight gathered in his glass of Demerara.

  11

  A Breastpin of Human Hair

  In the nineteenth century jewelers made keepsake ornaments from the hair of the dead, knotting long single hairs into arabesqued roses, initials, singing birds, butterflies.

  THE AUNT set out for the house on Friday morning. She was driving her new truck, a navy blue pickup with a silver cap, the extra-passenger cab, a CD player and chrome running boards.

  “We need it. Got to have a truck here. Got to get back and forth to my shop. You got a boat, I got a truck. They’ve got the road fixed and the dock in. Upstairs rooms done. There’s an outhouse. For now. Water’s connected to the kitchen. Some of that new black plastic waterline. Later on we can put in a bathroom. He’s working on the roof this week. If the weather holds. But it’s good enough. We might as well get out there. Out of this awful motel. I’ll pick up groceries and kerosene lamps. You come out with the girls—and your boat—tomorrow morning.”

  Her gestures and expressions swift, hands clenching suddenly as though on the reins of a fiery horse. Wild to get there.

  The aunt was alone in the house. Her footsteps clapping through the rooms, the ring of bowl and spoon on the table. Her house now. Water boiled magnificently in the teakettle. Upstairs. Yet climbing the stairs, entering that room, was as if she ventured into a rough landscape pocked with sinks and karst holes, abysses invisible until she pitched headlong.

  The box holding the brother’s ashes was on the floor in the corner.

  “All right,” she said, and seized it. Carried it down and through and out. A bright day. The sea glazed, ornamented with gulls. Her shadow streamed away from her. She went into the new outhouse and tipped the ashes down the hole. Hoisted her skirts and sat down. The urine splattered. The thought that she, that his own son and grandchildren, would daily void their bodily wastes on his remains a thing that only she would know.

  On Saturday morning Quoyle and his daughters came along, suitcases humped in the backseat, the speedboat swaying behind on the rented trailer. He steered over the smoothed road. Starting where the road ended in the parking lot of the glove factory, the bulldozer had scraped a lane through the tuckamore to the house. New gravel crunched under the tires. Clouds, tined and serrated, and ocean the color of juice. The sun broke the clouds like a trout on the line.

  “A ladder house,” said Sunshine, seeing the scaffolding.

  “Dad, I thought it was going to be a new house,” said Bunny. “That Dennis was making it new. But it’s the same one. It’s ugly, Dad. I hate green houses.” She glared at him. Had he tricked her?

  “Dennis fixed up the inside. We can paint the house another color later on. First we have to fix up the holes and weak spots.”

  “Red, Dad. Let’s paint it red.”

  “Well, the aunt has the say. It’s mostly her house, you know. She might not be crazy about red.”

  “Let’s paint her red, too,” said Bunny. Laughed like a hyena.

  Quoyle pulled in beside the aunt’s truck. He’d wrestle with the trailer and the boat on Sunday. Dennis Buggit on the roof, tossing shingles into the wind. The aunt opened the door and cried “Ta-TA!”

  Smooth walls and ceilings, the joint compound still showing trowel marks, the fresh window sills, price stickers on the smudgy window glass. A smell of wood. Mattresses leaned against a wall. The girls’ room. Bunny piled wood shavings on her head.

  “Hey, Dad, look at my curly hair, Daddy, look at my curly hair. Dad! I got curly hair.” Shrill and close to tears. Quoyle picked at melted cheese on her shirt.

  In the kitchen the aunt ran water into a sink, turned on the gas stove to show.

  “I’ve made a nice pot of stewed cod,” she said. “Dennis brought a loaf of Beety’s homemade bread. I got bowls and spoons before I came over, butter and some staples. Perishables in that ice cooler. You’ll have to bring ice over. I don’t know when we can get a gas refrigerator in here. Nephew, you’ll have to manage with the air mattress and sleeping bag in your room for a while. But the girls’ve got bed frames and box springs.”

  Quoyle and Bunny put a table together of planks and sawhorses.

  “This is heavy,” said Bunny, horsing up one end of a plank, panting in mock exhaustion.

  “Yes,” said Quoyle, “but you are very strong.” His stout, homely child with disturbing ways, but a grand helper with boards and stones and boxes. Not interested in the things of the kitchen unless on a platter.

  Dennis came down from the roof, grinned at Quoyle. There was nothing in him of Jack Buggit except eyes darting to the horizon, measuring cuts of sky.

  “Great bread,” said Quoyle, folding a slice into his mouth.

  “Yeah, well, Beety makes bread every day, every day but Sunday. So.”

  “And good fish,” said the aunt. “All we need’s string beans and salad.”

  “So,” said Dennis. “The caplin run’ll be soon. Get a garden in. Caplin’s good fertilizer.”

  In the afternoon Quoyle and Bunny wiped at the lumpy joint compound with wet sponges until the seams were smooth. Bunny intent,
the helpful child. But glancing in every corner. On the roof Dennis hammered. The aunt sanded windowsills, laid a primer coat.

  In the last quarter-light Quoyle walked with Dennis down to the new dock. On the way they passed the aunt’s amusement garden, a boulder topped with silly moss like hair above a face. Scattered through the moss a stone with a bull’s-eye, a shell, bits of coral, white stone like the silhouette of an animal’s head.

  The wood of the new dock was resinous and fragrant. Water slapped beneath. Curdled foam.

  “Tie your boat up now, can’t you?” said Dennis. “Pick up a couple old tires so she don’t rub.”

  Dennis slipped the mooring lines, jumped into his own boat, and hummed into the dusk on curling wake. The lighthouses on the points began to wink. Quoyle went up the rock to the house, toward windows flooded with orange lamplight. Turned, glanced again across the bay, saw Dennis’s wake like a white hair.

  In the kitchen the aunt shuffled cards, dealt them around.

  “We’d play night after night when I was a girl,” she said. “Old games. Nobody knows them now. French Boston, euchre, jambone, scat, All-Fours. I know every one.”

  Slap, slap, the cards.

  “We’ll play All-Fours. Now, every jack turned up by the dealer counts a point for him. Here we are, clubs are trumps.”

  But the children couldn’t understand and dropped their cards. Quoyle wanted his book. The aunt’s blood boiled up.

  “Everlasting whining!” What had she expected? To reconstruct some rare evening from her ancient past? Laughed at herself.

  So Quoyle told his daughters stories in the dim bedroom, of explorer cats sighting new lands, of birds who played cards and lost them in the wind, of pirate girls and buried treasure.

  Downstairs again, looked at the aunt at the table, home at last. Her glass of whiskey empty.

  “It’s quiet,” said Quoyle, listening.

  “There’s the sea.” Like a door opening and closing. And the cables’ vague song.

  Quoyle woke in the empty room. Grey light. A sound of hammering. His heart. He lay in his sleeping bag in the middle of the floor. The candle on its side. Could smell the wax, smell the pages of the book that lay open beside him, the dust in the floor cracks. Neutral light illumined the window. The hammering again and a beating shadow in the highest panes. A bird.

  He got up and went to it. Would drive it away before it woke the aunt and the girls. It seemed the bird was trying to break from the closed room of sea and rock and sky into the vastness of his bare chamber. The whisper of his feet on the floor. Beyond the glass the sea lay pale as milk, pale the sky, scratched and scribbled with cloud welts. The empty bay, far shore creamed with fog. Quoyle pulled his clothes on and went downstairs.

  On the threshold lay three wisps of knotted grass. Some invention of Sunshine’s. He went behind the great rock to which the house was moored and into the bushes. His breath in cold cones.

  A faint path angled toward the sea, and he thought it might come out onto the shore north of the new dock. Started down. After a hundred feet the trail went steep and wet, and he slid through wild angelica stalks and billows of dogberry. Did not notice knots tied in the tips of the alder branches.

  Entered a band of spruce, branches snarled with moss, whiskey jacks fluttering. The path became a streambed full of juicy rocks. A waterfall with the flattened ocean at its foot. He stumbled, grasping at Alexanders, the leaves perfuming his hands.

  Fountains of blackflies and mosquitoes around him. Quoyle saw a loop of blue plastic. He picked it up, then a few feet farther along spied a sodden diaper. A flat stick stamped “5 POINTS Popsicle Pete.” When he came on a torn plastic bag he filled it with debris. Tin cans, baby-food jars, a supermarket meat tray, torn paper cajoling the jobless reader.

  . . . perhaps you are not quite confident that you can successfully complete the full program in Fashion Merchandising. Well, I can make you a special offer that will make it easier for you. Why not try just Section One of the course to begin with. This does not involve you in a long-term commitment and it will give you the opportunity to . . .

  Plastic line, the unfurled cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper, pink tampon inserters.

  Behind him a profound sigh, the sigh of someone beyond hope or exasperation. Quoyle turned. A hundred feet away a fin, a glistening back. The Minke whale rose, glided under the milky surface. He stared at the water. Again it appeared, sighed, slipped under. Roiling fog arms flew fifty feet above the sea.

  A texture caught his eye, knots and whorls down in the rock. The object was pinched in a cleft. He worked it back and forth and then jerked at it. Held it on his palm. Intricate knots in wire, patterned spirals and loops. Wires broken where he had torn the thing loose from the rock. He turned it over, saw a corroded fastening pin. And, turning it this way and that, he caught the design, saw a fanciful insect with double wings and plaited thorax. The wire not wire but human hair—straw, rust, streaky grey. The hair of the dead. Something from the green house, from the dead Quoyles. He threw the brooch, with revulsion, into the pulsing sea.

  Climbing again toward the house, he reached the spruce trees, heard a rough motor. A boat veered toward the shore and he thought it was Dennis until he saw the scabbed paint, fray and grime. The dory idled. The man in the stern cut the motor, raised the propeller. Drifted in the fog. The man’s head was down, white stubble and gapped mouth. His jacket crudely laced with thrummy twine. Old and strong. Jerked up a line of whelk pots. Nothing. He lowered the propeller, pulled again and again on the greasy rope. The engine settled into a ragged beat. In a minute man and boat were eaten by mist. The motor faded south in the direction of the glove factory, the ruins of Capsize Cove.

  Quoyle clawed up. Thought that if he got in there with axe and saw, set some pressure-treated steps in the steepest pitches, built a bridge over the wet spots, gravel and moss—it would be a beauty of a walk down to the sea. Some part of this place as his own.

  “We thought the gulls had carried you off.” The smell of coffee, little kid hubbub, the aunt in her ironed blue jeans, hair done up in a scarf, buttering toast for Sunshine.

  “Dennis was here in his truck. He’s got to go cut wood with his father-in-law. Said bad weather was coming, you might want to get the rest of the shingles on. Says it ought to take a day, day and a half. Left you his carpenter’s belt. Wasn’t sure if you had tools. Said there’s five or six more squares under that sheet of plastic. He’s not sure when he’ll be able to get back. Maybe by Wednesday. Look what he brought the girls.”

  Two small hammers with hand-whittled handles lay on the table. The throats of the handles painted, one with red stripes, the other with blue.

  But Quoyle felt a black wing fold him in its reeking pit. He had never been on a roof, never put down a shingle. He poured a cup of coffee, slopping it in the saucer, refused the toast made from Dennis’s wife’s bread.

  Went to the foot of the ladder, looked up. A tall house. How tall, he didn’t know. Steep pitch of roof. In all Newfoundland the roofs were flat, but the Quoyles had to have a wild pitch.

  He took a breath and began to climb.

  The aluminum ladder bounced and sang as he went up. He climbed slowly, gripped the rungs. At the edge of the roof he looked down to see how bad it was. The rock glinted cruelly with mica. He raised his eyes to the roof. Tar paper stapled down. New shingles halfway. There was a wooden brace nailed above the shingles. Crouch on the brace and nail the shingles? The worst part would be getting up to the brace. Slowly he got back down to the ground. He heard Sunshine laughing in the kitchen, the tap of the small hammer. Sweet earth beneath his feet!

  But buckled on Dennis’s carpenter’s belt, the pouch heavy with roofing nails, the hammer knocking his leg as he climbed. Halfway up he thought of the shingles, went back down and got three.

  Now climbed with only one hand, the other clenching the asphalt pieces. At the top of the ladder he had a bad moment. The ladder rose up several ru
ngs above the roof and he had to step off to the side onto the roof, to crawl up with the deep air beneath him.

  He crouched awkwardly on the brace, saw that Dennis put the shingles on in tiers that he could reach comfortably, then set the brace in a new position. The tops of the spruces were like stains in the fog below. He could hear the slow pound of the sea. He did nothing for a few minutes. It wasn’t so bad.

  Quoyle put his three shingles up behind him on the slant. Took one, slowly butted it to Dennis’s last, taking care to maintain the five-inch reveal. He got a few nails out of the apron, gingerly eased the hammer from under his buttock, got it out of the leather loop. He nailed the shingle. As he pounded the third nail home he heard a sliding sound, saw the two loose shingles he had carried up, slipping down. He stopped them with his hammer. Placed a shingle, nailed it. The third. It was not difficult, only awkward and breathless.

  Now Quoyle balanced half a square of shingles on his shoulder, climbed back. It was easier, and he got up the roof without crawling, laid the shingles over the ridge and set to work. He glanced at the sea once or twice, saw the profile of a tanker on the horizon like a water snake floating in ease.

  He was on the last row. It was fast now because he could straddle the ridge. The nails sank into the wood.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  He heard Bunny’s voice, glanced toward the ground, but the glance stopped high. She stood on one of the rungs above the roof level, straining to put her foot on the roof. She held the hammer with the red-striped neck. Quoyle saw in a tiny vivid window that Bunny was going to put her foot on the roof, was going to step forward onto the edge of the steep pitch as though on a level path, was going to fall, to pinwheel shrieking to the rock.