The Shipping News

by Annie Proulx

  Quoyle lay on his back on the floor, blocks piled on his chest, rising and falling as he breathed.

  “That’s boats,” said Sunshine. “Dad is the water and these are my ferryboats. Dad, you are the water.”

  “I feel like it,” said Quoyle. Bunny back to the window, put two blocks on the sill. Looked into tuckamore.

  “Anyway, I’ve been working at it for the past thirteen years. And when your father and mother went, though I never knew your mother, I thought it was a good time to come back to the old place. Or risk never seeing it again. I suppose I’m getting old now, though I don’t feel it. You shouldn’t get down on their level, you know.” Meaning Quoyle on the floor, covered with blocks. “They’ll never respect you.”

  “Aunt,” said Quoyle, his mind floating somewhere between the boats under his chin and the yacht upholstery business. “The woman in your shop. What did you say she studied at university?” He had always played with his children. The first embarrassed pleasure of stacking blocks with Bunny. He took an interest in sand pies.

  “Dawn, you mean? Mrs. Bangs never set foot in a grade school, much less university. Pharology. Science of lighthouses and signal lights. Dawn knows elevations and candlepower, stuff about flashes and blinks and buoys. Bore you silly with it. And you know, she talks about it all day long because it’s slipping out of her head. Use it or lose it. And she’s losing it. Says so herself. But there’s no jobs for her, although the shipping traffic is so heavy you can almost lie awake at night and hear it tearing over the ocean. Why, are you interested in Dawn?” The aunt slid her fingers, feeling the waxy surface.

  “No,” said Quoyle. “I don’t even know her. Wondered, that’s all.”

  A fly crawled on the table, stopped to wipe its mouth with its front legs, then limped on, the hind legs more like skids than moving limbs. The aunt snapped her rag.

  “Why don’t you come by the shop some day next week? Meet Dawn and Mavis. We can have a bite at Skipper Willie’s.”

  “That’s a good idea,” said Quoyle. Glanced at Bunny staring out into tuckamore.

  “What are you looking at, Bunny?” Her scowling gaze.

  “When I grow up,” said Bunny, “I am going to live in a red log cabin and have some pigs. And I will never kill them for their bacon. Because bacon comes from pigs, Dad. Beety told us. And Dennis killed a pig to get its bacon.”

  “Is that right?” said Quoyle, feigning amazement.

  Tuesday, and Quoyle couldn’t get started on the piece. He shoved the page of rain-smeared notes on the Botterjacht under his pile of papers. He was used to reporting resolutions, votes, minutes, bylaws, agendas, statements embroidered with political ornament. Couldn’t describe the varnished wood of Tough Baby. How put down on paper the Melvilles’ savageness? Bunny much on his mind. The door-scratching business in the old kitchen. He shuffled his papers, looked at his watch again and again. Would go into town and take a look at the aunt’s shop. Wanted to ask her about Bunny. Was there a problem or wasn’t there. And insatiable Quoyle was starving anyway.

  Before he started the station wagon the tall woman, Wavey, came to mind. He looked down the road both ways to see if she was walking. Sometimes she went to the school at noon. He thought, maybe, to help in the lunchroom. Didn’t see her. But as he came up over the rise and in sight of Jack’s house, there she was, striding along and swinging a canvas bag. He pulled up, glad she was alone, that he was, too.

  It was books: she worked in the school library twice a week, she said. Her voice somewhat hoarse. She sat straight, feet neatly side by side. They looked at each other’s hands, proving the eye’s affinity for the ring finger; both saw gold. Knew at least one thing about each other.

  Silence, the sea unfolding in pieces. A skiff and bobbing dory, men leaning to reset a cod trap. Quoyle glanced, saw her pale mouth, neck, eyes somewhere between green glass and earth color. Rough hands. Not so young; heading for forty. But that sense of harmony with something, what, the time or place. He didn’t know but felt it. She turned her head, caught him looking. Eyes flicked away again. But both were pleased.

  “I have a daughter starting first grade this fall. Bunny. Her name is Bunny. My youngest daughter is Sunshine, goes to Beety Buggit’s house while I’m at work.” He thought he had to say something. Cleared his throat.

  “I heard that.” Her voice so quiet. As if she was talking to herself.

  At the school driveway she got halfway out the door, murmured something Quoyle did not catch, then strode away. Maybe it was thank-you. Maybe it was stop by and have a cup of tea some day. Her hands swung. She stopped for a moment, took a white, crumpled tissue from her coat pocket, blew her nose. Still Quoyle sat there. Watched her run up the school steps and in through the door. What was wrong with him?

  Just to see the way she walked, a tall woman who walked miles. And Petal had never walked if she could ride. Or lie down.

  15

  The Upholstery Shop

  The knots of the upholsterer are the half-hitch, the slip-knot, the double half-hitch, and the tuft knot.

  THE AUNT’S shop was in the lane behind Wharf Road. An ochre frame building with wooden flourishes and black shutters. Quoyle liked the row of shops, snug from the wind, yet almost on the wharf. The windows wavery with old glass. A bell jingled as he opened the door. The aunt, working a finger-roll edge on a stuffed pad, looked up. Curved needle halted in midmuslin.

  “Here you are,” she said. Looked around as though seeing the shop herself for the first time.

  A woman with Emily Dickinson hair looped over her ears and symmetrically divided by a wide part sat at a sewing machine. The chattering needle slowed, the muslin slid over the table. The woman smiled at Quoyle, showing perfect teeth between violet lips, then her smile faded, a sadness flowed down her face from brow to mouth. A jabot foamed at her throat.

  “Mrs. Mavis Bangs,” said the aunt like a master of ceremonies.

  At another table, a young woman with a helmet of tight brown curls, scissoring expensively into leather.

  “And Dawn Budgel,” said the aunt. The woman tense with concentration, did not look up or stop cutting. There was a smell of leather, dye, size and perfume. The perfume came from Mrs. Bangs whose hands were folded now into each other, who stared at Quoyle. His hand went up to his chin.

  “Well, this is it,” said the aunt. “There’s only the two sewing stations and one cutting table set up now, but as I build up business I hope to have six sewing and two cutting. That’s what I had back in Long Island. I’ve got a sailing fishing boat that’s like a yacht below decks coming up next week—she was built in the States on the West Coast as a salmon-trolling ketch, but now she belongs to a fellow in St. John’s. I’ve seen a few commercial fishing sailboats in the last year or two. Cheap to run, they say. Working sail might be coming back. Don’t I wish.”

  “Dawn here cutting out the chair backs for the dining salon on the Melvilles’ yacht. That color blue matches Mrs. Melville’s eyes. She had it specially dyed down in New York. And Mavis is sewing up the liners that go over the foam rubber. Dawn, this is my nephew I told you about. Works for the paper. We’re just going to run over across the way to Skipper Will’s and get some dinner. Dawn, when you get done cutting you might thread up the other machine with that blue. She had the thread dyed, too.”

  The aunt clicked out the door on her black heels, and Quoyle, slow in closing it behind her, heard Mrs. Bangs say to Dawn, “Not what you thought, is he?”

  A blast of hot oil and scorch came from Skipper Will’s exhaust fan. Inside the fug was worse, fishermen still in bloody oilskins and boots hunched over fries and cod, swigged from cups with dangling strings. Cigarette smoke dissolved in the cloud from the fryer. The waitress bawled to the kitchen. Quoyle could see Skipper Will’s filthy apron surging back and forth like ice in the landwash.

  “Well, Agnis girl, what’ll you ‘ave today?” The waitress beamed at the aunt.

  “I’ll have the stewed cod, Pea
rl. Cuppa tea, of course. This here is my nephew, works for the paper.”

  “Oh yis, I sees him afore. In ‘ere the odder day wit’ Billy. ‘Ad the squidburger.”

  “That I did,” said Quoyle. “Delicious.”

  “Skipper Will, y’know, ‘e invented the squidburger. Y’ll ‘ave it today, m’dear?”

  “Yes,” said Quoyle. “Why not? And tea. With cream.” He had learned about the Skipper’s coffee, a weak but acrid brew with undertones of cod.

  Quoyle folded his napkin into a fan, unfolded it and made triangles of decreasing size. He looked at the aunt.

  “Want to ask you something, Aunt. About Bunny.” Steeled for this conversation. Petal had said a hundred times that Bunny was a “weird kid.” He had denied it. But she was, in fact, different. Something was out of kilter. She was like a kettle of water, simmering and simmering, or in noisy boil before the pot goes dry and cracks, or sometimes cold, with a skim of mineral flowers on the surface.

  “Do you think she’s normal, Aunt?”

  The aunt blew on her tea, looked at Quoyle. Cautious expression. Looked hard at Quoyle as though he were a new kind of leather she might buy.

  “Those bad dreams. And her temper. And—” He stopped. Was sayings things badly.

  “Well,” said the aunt. “Just think of what’s happened. She’s lost members of her family. Moved to a strange place. The old house. New people. Her grandparents, her mother. I’m not sure she understands what’s happened. She says sometimes that they are still in New York. Things are upside down for her. I suppose they are for all of us.”

  “All of that,” said Quoyle drinking his tea savagely, “but there’s something”—and his gut rumbled like a train—“something else. I don’t know how to say it, but that’s what I’m talking about.” The words “personality disorder”—the Mockingburg kindergarten teacher’s words when Bunny pushed other children and hogged the crayons.

  “Give me an example of what you mean.”

  A dreary cloud settled on Quoyle. “Well, Bunny doesn’t like the color of the house. That dark green.” That sounded idiotic. It was what had happened in the kitchen. He could overlook the rest. The stewed cod and the squidburger came. Quoyle bit at the squidburger as though at wrist ropes.

  “The nightmares, for one thing. And the way she cries and yells over nothing. At six, six and a half, a kid shouldn’t behave like that. You remember how she thought she saw a dog the first day we came to the house? Scared stiff of a white dog with red eyes? How we looked and looked and never saw a track nor trace?” Quoyle’s voice roughened. He’d give anything to be away. Yet plowed on.

  “Yes, of course I remember.” The fork scraping away on the aunt’s dish, kitchen heat, the din of knives, swelling laughter. “There was another white dog adventure couple weeks ago. You know that little white stone I had on my garden rock? If you squinted at it it looked like a dog’s head? She come pounding on the door, yelling her head off. I thought something terrible’d happened. Couldn’t get her to stop yelling and tell me what was the matter. At last she holds out her hand. There’s a tiny cut on one finger, tiny, about a quarter of an inch long. One drop of blood. I put a bandage on it and she calmed down. Wouldn’t say how she got the cut. But a couple days later she says to me that she threw away ‘the dog-face stone’ and it bit her. She says it was a dog bite on her finger.”

  The aunt laughed to show it wasn’t anything to have a fit about.

  “That’s what I mean. She imagines these things.” Quoyle had swallowed the squidburger. He was stifled. The aunt was making nothing out of something, sliding away from things that needed to be said. The people behind him were listening. He could feel their attention. Whispered. “Look, I’m concerned. I really am. Worried sick, in fact. Saturday morning when you went to pick up your package? We just came in to make lunch. I was going to heat up some soup. Sunshine was struggling with her boots—you know she wants to take her own boots off. Bunny was getting out the box of crackers for the soup, she was opening the box and the waxed paper inside was crackling when all of a sudden she stops. She stares at the door. She starts to cry. Aunt, I swear she was scared to death. She says, ‘Daddy, the dog is scratching on the door. Lock the door!’ Then she starts to scream. Sunshine, sitting there with one boot in her hands, holding her breath. I should have opened the door to show her there was nothing there, but instead I locked it. You know why? Because I was afraid there might be something there. The force of her fear was that strong.”

  “Tch,” said the aunt.

  “Yes,” said Quoyle. “And the minute I locked it she stopped screaming and picked up the cracker box and took out two crackers. Cool as a cucumber. Now tell me that’s normal. I’d like to hear it. As it is I’m wondering if she shouldn’t go to a child psychologist. Or somebody.”

  “You know, Nephew, I wouldn’t rush to do that. I’d give it some time. There’s other possibilities. What I’m getting at is maybe she is sensitive in a way the rest of us aren’t. Tuned in to things we don’t get. There’s people here like that.” Looked sidewise at Quoyle to see how he took that. That his daughter might glimpse things beyond static reality.

  But Quoyle didn’t believe in strange genius. Feared that loss, the wretchedness of childhood, his own failure to love her enough had damaged Bunny.

  “Why don’t you just wait, Nephew. See how it goes. She starts school in September. Three months is a long time for a child. I agree with you that she’s different, you might say she is a bit strange sometimes, but you know, we’re all different though we may pretend otherwise. We’re all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differentness as we grow up. Bunny doesn’t do that yet.”

  Quoyle exhaled, slid his hand over his chin. A feeling they weren’t talking about Bunny at all. But who, then? The conversation burned off like fog in sunlight.

  The aunt ate her fish, a tangle of bones on the side of the plate that the waitress called the devil’s nail clippings.

  Walked back to the shop. As they came along the sidewalk, through the window he saw the part in Mrs. Bangs’s black hair as she bent over a chair seat prying out tacks with a ripping chisel.

  “So,” the aunt said. “It was good to talk about this. It’s a shame, but I’ve got to stay in late tonight. We’ve got to tack off the banquettes. We’ve got to be done with the lot by next Tuesday, finished and installed. If you’ll pick up the girls. And don’t worry about Bunny. She’s still a little girl.”

  But that had not stopped Guy. She had been Bunny’s age the first time.

  “Yes,” said Quoyle, lightened and rived by a few seconds of happiness. Well, he would wait and see. Anything could happen. “Will you have supper in town or shall we have something for you?”

  “Oh I’ll just get a bite here. You go ahead. You’ll need to get some milk and more ice for the cooler. Don’t get all fussed over nothing.”

  “I won’t,” said Quoyle, “good-bye,” leaning toward the aunt’s soft cheek, faintly scented with avocado oil soap. She meant well. But knew nothing about children and the anguish they suffered.

  16

  Beety’s Kitchen

  “The housewife’s needs are multifarious but most of her requirements are not peculiar and most of what she requires is to be found in the general classifications.”

  THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

  A FINE part of Quoyle’s day came when he picked up his daughters at Dennis and Beety’s house. His part in life seemed richer, he became more of a father, at the same time could expose true feelings which were often of yearning.

  The hill tilting toward the water, the straggled pickets and then Dennis’s aquamarine house with a picture window toward the street. Quoyle pulled pens from his shirt, put them on the dashboard before he went in. For pens got in the way. The door opened into the kitchen. Quoyle stepped around and over children. In the living room, under a tinted photograph of two stout women lolling in ferns, Dennis slouched on leopard-print sofa cushions, watched the fi
shery news. On each side of him crocheted pillows in rainbows and squares. Carpenter at Home.

  The house was hot, smelled of baking bread. But Quoyle loved this stifling yeast-heat, the chatter and child-yelp above the din of the television. Sometimes tears glazed the scene, he felt as though Dennis and Beety were his secret parents although Dennis was his age and Beety was younger.

  Dennis barely looked away from the screen but shouted at the kitchen.

  “Make us some tea, mother.”

  The water faucet gushed into the kettle. A smaller kettle steamed on the white stove. Beety swept at the kitchen table with the side of her hand, set out a loaf of bread. Winnie, the oldest Buggit child, got a stack of plates. As Quoyle sat down Bunny threw herself at him as though he had just arrived from a long, dangerous voyage, hugged, rammed her head against him. Nothing wrong with her. Nothing. Sunshine playing spider with Murchie Buggit, her fingers creeping up his arm, saying tickle, tickle.

  Sitting at the kitchen table with children in his lap, eating bread and yellow bakeapple jam, Quoyle nodded, listened. Dennis was deliberate with the day’s news, Beety had the crazy stories that branched off into others without ever finishing.

  The tablecloth was printed with a design of trumpets and soap bubbles. Dennis said he was disgusted; his buddy Carl had driven into a construction trench across the road up Bone Hill. He was in hospital with a broken neck. Beety put saucers of canned apricots in front of the children. Bunny lifted her spoon, put it down.

  “Seems like he’s marked. He’s the one had a fright, eight, nine years ago. Turned his hair snow-white in a month. He was out fishing, see, with his brother near the Cauldron, and see this limp old thing lying in the water. He thought it was a ghost net, you know, broke loose and come up to the surface. So to it they goes, he gives a poke with his hook, and dear Lord in the morning, this great big tentacle comes up out of the water—” Dennis held his arm above his head, hand curved and menacing, “and seizes him. Seizes him around the arm. He says you never felt such strength. Well, lucky for him he wasn’t alone. His brother grabs up the knife he was using to cut cod and commences sawing at that gripping tentacle, all muscle and the suckers clamped tight enough to leave terrible marks. But he cut it through and got the motor started, his heart half out of his mouth expecting to feel the other tentacles coming down on his shoulder. They was out of there. The university paid them money for that cut-off tentacle. And now he busts his neck going into a ditch in the road. What’s the point!”