The Shipping News

by Annie Proulx

  Billy squinted. “Saturday morning,” he said to Quoyle. Eyes like a blue crack of sky. Back to Tert Card, the cramped office. Overhead the cloud masses had merged, taken the form of finegrained scrolls like tide marks on the sand.

  After Billy and Nutbeem went in Quoyle lingered, stood in the cracked road a minute. The long horizon, the lunging, clotted sea like a swinging door opening, closing, opening.

  20

  Gaze Island

  “The Pirate and the Jolly Boat.

  A pirate, having more prisoners than he has room for, tows one boatload astern.

  All knives are taken away, and the boat made fast with the bight of a doubled line. The after end of the line is ring hitched to a stern ringbolt, CLOVE HITCHES are put around each thwart, and the line is rove through the bow ringbolt and brought to deck. They are told to escape if they can. How do they excape?”

  THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

  QUOYLE in Billy Pretty’s skiff. The old man hopped aboard nimbly, set a plastic bag under the seat and yanked the rope. The engine started—waaah—like a trumpet. A blare of wake spilled out behind them. Billy plunged around in a plywood box, dug out a tan plastic contraption, propped it in a corner, sat down and leaned back.

  “Ah. Tis me Back Buddy—gives the spinal column support and comfort.”

  There was nothing to say. Haze on the horizon. The sky a sheet of pearl, and through it filtered a diffuse yellow. The wind filled Quoyle’s mouth, parted and snapped his hair.

  “There’s the Ram and the Lamb,” said Billy, pointing at two rocks just beyond the narrows. The water swilled over them.

  “I like it,” said Quoyle, “that the rocks have names. There’s one down off Quoyle’s Point—”

  “Oh, ay, the Comb.”

  “That’s it, a jagged rock with points sticking up.”

  “Twelve points onto that rock. Or used to be. Was named after the old style of brimstone matches. They used to come in combs, all one piece along the bottom, twelve to a comb. You’d break one off. Sulfur stink. They called them stinkers—a comb of stinkers. Quoyle’s Point got quite a few known sunkers and rocks. There’s the Tea Buns, a whole plateful of little scrapers half a fathom under the water, off to the north of the Comb. Right out the end of the point there’s the Komatik-Dog. You come on it just right it looks for all the world like a big sled dog settin’ on the water, his head up, looking around. They used to say he was waiting for a wreck, that’d he’d come to life and swim out and swallow up the poor drowning people.”

  Bunny, thought Quoyle, never let her see that one.

  Billy pulled his cap down against the glare. “You get together with old Nolan yet?”

  “No, I think I saw him one morning out alone in an old motor dory.”

  “That’s him. A strange one, he. Does everything the old way. Won’t take unemployment. A good fisherman but lives very poor. Keeps to himself. I doubt he can read or write. He’s one of your crowd, some kind of fork kin from the old days. You ought to go down to his wee house for a visit.”

  “I didn’t think we had any relatives still living here. The aunt says they’re all gone.”

  “She’s wrong on this one. Nolan is still very much among the quick, and I hear he’s got it worked up in his head that the house belongs to him.”

  “What house? Our house? The aunt’s house on the point?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “This is a fine time to hear about it,” muttered Quoyle. “Nobody’s said a word to us. He could have come by, you know.”

  “That’s not his way. You want to watch him. He’s the old style of Quoyle, stealthy in the night. They say there’s a smell that comes off him like rot and cold clay. They say he slept with his wife when she was dead and you smell the desecration coming off him. No woman would have him again. Not a one.”

  “Jesus.” Quoyle shuddered. “What do you mean, ‘old style of Quoyle.’ I don’t know the stories.”

  “Better you don’t. Omaloor Bay is called after Quoyles. Loonies. They was wild and inbred, half-wits and murderers. Half of them was low-minded. You should have heard Jack on the phone when he got your letter to come to the Gammy Bird. Called up all your references. Man with a bird’s name. Told Jack you was as good as gold, didn’t rave nor murder.”

  “Partridge,” said Quoyle.

  “We was on pins and needles waiting to see what come in the door. Thought you was going to be a big, wild booger. Big enough, anyway. But you know, the Quoyles only been on the Point there a hundred years or so. Went there in the 1880s or 1890s, dragging that green house miles and miles across the ice, fifty men, a crowd of Quoyles and their cunny kin pulling on the ropes. Dragged it on big runners, spruce poles made into runners. Like a big sled.”

  Out through the narrows and Billy set a seaward course. Quoyle had forgotten his cap again and his hair whipped. The skiff cut into the swell. He felt that nameless pleasure that comes only with a fine day on the water.

  “Ar,” said Billy above the motor and the sound of water rushing off the hull, “speaking of named rocks, we got ‘em all along, boy, thousands and thousands of miles with wash balls and sunkers and known rocks every foot of the way. Newfoundland itself is a great rock in the sea, and the islands stribbled around it are rocks. Famous rocks like the Chain Rock and the Pancake up in St. John’s, both of them above water and steep-to, and there’s old terrors that they’ve blowed up—the Merlin and the Ruby Rock that was in St. John’s narrows. A hundred years ago and more they blew them up. Up along the north shore there’s Long Harry. And mad rocks with the seaweed streeling.

  “I mind to Cape Bonavista there’s Old Harry Rock under two fathoms and he stretches out three mile into the sea and at the far end is a cruel little rise they call Young Harry. In North Broad Cove they’ve Shag Rock and Hell’s Rock. The shag, y’know is the cormorant, the black goose, a stinking black thing that the old people used to say built its nest with dead fish. That’s what they called you if you come from Grand Banks. If you come from Fortune you were a gally, a scarecrow. Down on the Burin Peninsula.” Billy Pretty tossed his head up and sang in a creaky but lilting tenor:

  Fortune gally-baggers and Grand Bank shags

  All stuffed into paper bags.

  When them bags begin to bust

  The Grand Bank shags begin to cuss.

  “You heard that one? Now, to rocks again, Salvage Harbor has a big broad one they call the Baker’s Loaf and on along you’ll find the Cook-room Rock. Funk Islands is snaggy water, reefs and shoals and sunkers. The Cleopatra and Snap Rock. The Fogo Islands, dangerous waters for rocks where many a ship has wrecked. Born and brought up there to find your way through. And sticking out of the water is the Jigger, Old Gappy, Ireland Rock, the Barrack Rock, the Inspector who wants to inspect your bottom.

  “Look there, you can see it now, Gaze Island. Been about three years since I come out here. Where I was born and brought up and lived—when I was ashore—until I was forty years old. I shipped out and worked the freighters when I was young for quite a few years. Then I was in two wrecks and thought if there was going to be another, I wanted it to be in home water. There’s many of my relatives down under this water, so it’s homey, in a way. I come back and fished the shore. Jack Buggit was part of my crowd, even though he come from Flour Cove. His mother was my mother’s cousin. You wouldn’t know it to look at us, but we’re the same age. Both seventy-three. But Jack hardened and I shriveled. The government moved us off Gaze in ‘sixty. But you’ll see how some of them houses is standing just as straight and firm after thirty-odd years empty. Yes, they looks solid enough.”

  “Like our house down on the Point,” said Quoyle. “It was in good shape, endured forty years empty.”

  “It endured more than that,” said Billy.

  Gaze Island reared from the water as sheer cliff. Half a mile from the formidable island rocks broke the surface, awash with foam.

  “That’s the Home Rock. We takes our bearing off i
t.” He changed course toward the southern tip of the island.

  Billy worked through an invisible maze of shoals and sunkers. The boat pointed at a red stone wall, waves smashing at its foot. Quoyle’s dry mouth. They were almost in the foam. Twenty feet from the face of the cliff he still could not see the entrance. Billy headed the boat at a shadow. The sound of the engine multiplied, beat and shouted at them, echoed off the walls that rose above onyx water.

  They were in a narrow tickle. Quoyle could reach out and almost touch the rock. The cliff wall opened gradually, the tickle widened, bent left, and came out into a bay enclosed by a hoop of land. Five or six buildings, a white house, a church with a crooked steeple, a slide of clapboard, old stages and tilts. Quoyle had never imagined such a secret and ruined place. Desolate, and the slyness of the hidden tickle gave the sense of a lair.

  “Strange place,” said Quoyle.

  “Gaze Island. They used to say, over in Killick-Claw, that Gaze Islanders were known for two things—they were all fish dogs, knew how to find fish, and they knew more about volcanoes than anybody in Newfoundland.”

  Billy brought his boat up to the beach, cut the engine and raised it. Silence except for the drip of water from the propeller, and the skreel of gulls. Billy hawked and spat, pointed down the land curve to a building set away from the shore.

  “There’s our old place.”

  Once painted red, greyed it to a dull pink by salt weather. A section of broken fence. Billy seized his bag and jumped out of the boat, bootheels made semicircles in the sand. Secured the line to a pipe hammered into the rock. Quoyle clambered after him. The silence. Only the sound of their boots gritting and the sea murmur.

  “There was five families lived here when my dad was a boy, the Prettys, the Pools, the Sops, the Pilleys, the Cusletts. Every family was married with every other family. Boy, they was kind, good people, and the likes of them are gone now. Now it’s every man for himself. And woman, too.”

  He tried to lift a fallen section of fence from the weeds, but it broke in his hands and he only cleared away the tangle from the upright section, braced it with rocks.

  They walked up to the high gaze that gave the island its name, a knoll on the edge of the cliff with a knot of spruce in one corner, all hemmed around with a low wall of stones. Quoyle, turning, could look down to the cup of harbor, could turn again, look at the open sea, at distant ships heading for Europe or Montreal. Liquid turquoise below. To the north two starched sheet icebergs. There, the smoke of Killick-Claw. Far to the east, almost invisible, a dark band like rolled gauze.

  “They could see a ship far out in any direction from here. They’d put the cows up here in the summer. Never a cow in Newfoundland had a better view.”

  They walked over the moss and heather to a cemetery. A fence of blunt pickets enclosed crosses and wooden markers, many fallen on the ground, their letters faded by cold light. Billy Pretty knelt in the corner, tugged at wild grass. The top of the wooden marker was cut in three arcs to resemble a stone, the paint still legible:

  W. Pretty

  born 1897 died 1934

  Through the great storms of life he did his best,

  God grant him eternal rest.

  “That’s me poor father,” said Billy Pretty. “Fifteen was I when he died.” He scraped away, pulling weeds from a coffin-shaped frame that enclosed the grave. It was painted with a design of black and white diamonds, still sharp.

  “Painted this up the last time I was over,” said Billy, opening his bag and taking out tins of paint, two brushes, “and I’ll do it again now.”

  Quoyle thought of his own father, wondered if the aunt still had his ashes. There had been no ceremony. Should they put up a marker? A faint sense of loss rose in him.

  Suddenly he could see his father, see the trail of ground cherry husks leading from the garden around the edge of the lawn where he walked while he ate them. The man had a passion for fruit. Quoyle remembered purple-brown seckle pears the size and shape of figs, his father taking the meat off with pecking bites, the smell of fruit in their house, litter of cores and peels in the ashtrays, the grape cluster skeletons, peach stones like hens’ brains on the windowsill, the glove of banana peel on the car dashboard. In the sawdust on the basement workbench galaxies of seeds and pits, cherry stones, long white date pits like spaceships. Strawberries in the refrigerator, and in June the car parked on a country road and the father on his knees picking wild strawberries in the weeds. The hollowed grapefruit skullcaps, cracked globes of tangerine peel.

  Other fathers took their sons on fishing and camping trips, but Quoyle and his brother had blueberry expeditions. They whined with rage as the father disappeared into the bushes, leaving them in the sour heat holding plastic containers. One time the brother, face swollen with crying and insect bites, picked only fifteen or twenty berries. The father approached them, arms straining with the weight of two brimming pails. Then the brother began to cry, pointed at Quoyle. Said Quoyle had taken his berries. Liar. Quoyle had picked half a quart, the bottom of his pail decently covered. Got a whipping with a branch torn from a blueberry bush, with the first stroke berries raining. On the way home he stared into the berry pails watching green worms, stink bugs, ants, aphids, limping spiders come creeping up chimneys to the surface of the fruit where they beat the air and wondered. Backs of his thighs on fire.

  The man spent hours in the garden. How many times, thought Quoyle, had his father leaned on his hoe and gazed down the rows of string beans, saying “Some sweet land we got here, boy.” He’d thought it was the immigrant’s patriotic sentiment, but now balanced it against the scoured childhood on a salt-washed rock. His father had been enchanted with deep soil. Should have been a farmer. Guessing at the dead man too late.

  Billy Pretty might have heard him thinking.

  “By rights,” he said, “my dad should have been a farmer. He was a Home boy on his way to Ontario to be hired out to a farmer.”

  “Home boy?” It meant nothing to Quoyle.

  “From a Home. Part orphanage, part a place where they put children if the parents couldn’t keep them, or if they were running wild on the streets. England and Scotland just swept them up by the thousand and shipped them over to Canada. My father was the son of a printer in London, but it was a big family and the father died when he was only eleven. It was because he was a printer’s son that he could read and write very well. His name was not Pretty then. He was born William Ankle. His mother had all the others, you see, so she put him in a Home. There used to be Homes all over the UK. Maybe there still are. The Barnardo Homes, the Sears Home, the National Children’s Homes, the Fegan Home, the Church of England Bureau, the Quarrier Homes and more and more. He was in the Sears Home. They showed him pictures of boys picking big red apples in a sunny orchard, said that was Canada, wouldn’t he like to go? He used to tell us how juicy those apples looked. Yes, he said.

  “So, a few days later he was on this ship, the Aramania, on his way to Canada. This is in 1909. They gave him a little tin trunk with some clothes, a Bible, a brush and comb and a signed photograph of Reverend Sears. He told us about that trip many times. There were three hundred and fourteen children, boys and girls, on that ship, all of them signed on to help farmers. He said many of them were only three or four years old. They had no idea what was happening to them, where they were going. Just little waifs shipped abroad to a life of rural slavery. For you see, he kept in touch with some of the survivors he’d made friends with on the Aramania.”

  “Survivors of what?”

  “The shipwreck, my boy, and how he came here. We spoke of the names of rocks on the way out, you’ll remember, but there’s other things in the sea that’s a mortal danger, and they can never have names because they shift and prowl and vanish.” He pointed at the icebergs on the horizon. “Remember, in 1909 they didn’t have ice patrols and radar and weather faxes. You took your chance in iceberg alley. And my father’s ship, like the Titanic only three years later, ran
onto an iceberg in the bitter June twilight. Right out there, right off Gaze Island. There’s no chart for icebergs. Of those three hundred and fourteen children only twenty-four were saved. Official count was twenty-three. And they were saved because young Joe Sop—that was later Skipper Joe, master of one of the last Banks fishing schooners—come up to the Gaze to get the cow and saw the lights and heard the children screeching and crying as they went into the icy water.

  “He run down to the houses bawling out there was a shipwreck. Every boat in the place put out, there was two widow women pulled oars and saved three children, and they got what they could, but it was too late for most. You only last a little in that water. Freezes the blood in your veins, you go numb and die in the time it would take us to walk back to the old house.

  “Weeks later another shipload of Home children on the way to Canada anchored offshore and sent in a small boat to take the survivors, to send them on to their original destination. But my father didn’t want to go. He’d found a home here with the Prettys and they hid him, told the officials there was a mistake in the count of the saved—only twenty-three. Poor William Ankle was lost. And so my father changed his name to William Pretty and here he grew up and led an independent life. And if it was not happy, he didn’t know it.

  “If he’d gone on with the others he’d likely have gone into a miserable life. You ask me, Canada was built on the slave labor of those poor Home children, worked to the bone, treated like dirt, half starved and crazed with lonesomeness. See, my father kept in touch with three of the boys that lived, and they wrote back and forth. I’ve still got some of those letters—poor wretched boys whose families had cast them off, who survived a shipwreck and the freezing sea, and went on, friendless and alone, to a harsh life.”

  Quoyle’s eyes moist, imagining his little daughters, orphaned, traveling across the cold continent to a savage farmer.

  “Now, mind you, it was never easy at the Prettys’, never easy on Gaze Island, but they had the cows and a bit of hay, and the berries, the fish and their potato patches, and they’d get their flour and bacon in the fall from the merchant over at Killick-Claw, and if it was hard times, they shared, they helped their neighbor. No, they didn’t have any money, the sea was dangerous and men were lost, but it was a satisfying life in a way people today do not understand. There was a joinery of lives all worked together, smooth in places, or lumpy, but joined. The work and the living you did was the same things, not separated out like today.