The Shipping News

by Annie Proulx

  “Father’d get those pathetic letters, sometimes six months after they was written, and he’d read them out loud here and the tears would stream down people’s faces. Oh, how they wanted to get their hands on those hard Ontario farmers. There was never a one from Gaze Island that voted for confederation with Canada! My father would of wore a black armband on Confederation Day. If he’d lived that long.

  “One of those boys, Lewis Thorn, never had a bed of his own, had to sleep in the musty hay, had no shoes or boots and wrapped his feet in rags. They fed him potato peels and crusts, what they’d give to the pig. They beat him every day until he was the color of a dark rainbow, yellow and red and green and blue and black. He worked from lantern light to lantern light while the farmer’s children went to school and socials. His hair grew down his back, all matted with clits and tangles. He tried to trim it with a handsickle. You can guess how that looked. He was lousy and dirty. The worst was the way they made fun of him, scorned him because he was a Home boy, jeered and made his life hell. In the end they cheated him of his little wage and finally turned him adrift in the Ontario winter when he was thirteen. He went on to another farmer who was worse, if can be. Never, never once in the years he worked on the farms—and he slaved at it because he didn’t know anything else until he was killed in an accident when he was barely twenty— never once did anyone say a kind word to him since he got off the ship in Montreal. He wrote to my father that only his letters kept him from taking his life. He had to steal the paper he wrote on. He planned to come out to Newfoundland but he died before he could.

  “The other two had a miserable time of it as well. Oh I remember our dad lying on the daybed and stretching out his feet and telling us about those poor lonely boys, slaves to the cruel Canadian farmers. He’d say, ‘Count your blessings that you’re in a snug harbor.’

  “My father taught all his children to read and write. In the winter when the fishing was over and the storms wrapped Gaze Island, my father would hold school right down there in the kitchen of the old house. Yes, every child on this island learned to read very well and write a fine hand. And if he got a bit of money he’d order books for us. I’ll never forget one time, I was twelve years old and it was November, 1933. Couple of years before he died of TB. Hard, hard times. You can’t imagine. The fall mail boat brought a big wooden box for my father. Nailed shut. Cruel heavy. He would not open it, saved it for Christmas. We could hardly sleep nights for thinking of that box and what it might hold. We named everything in the world except what was there. On Christmas Day we dragged that box over to the church and everybody craned their necks and gawked to see what was in it. Dad pried it open with a screech of nails and there it was, just packed with books. There must have been a hundred books there, picture books for children, a big red book on volcanoes that gripped everybody’s mind the whole winter—it was a geological study, you see, and there was plenty of meat in it. The last chapter in the book was about ancient volcanic activity in Newfoundland. That was the first time anybody had ever seen the word Newfoundland in a book. It just about set us on fire—an intellectual revolution. That this place was in a book. See, we thought we was all alone in the world. The only dud was a cookbook. There was not one single recipe in that book that could be made with what we had in our cupboards.

  “I never knew how he paid for those books or if they were a present, or what. One of the three boys he wrote to on the farms moved to Toronto when he grew up and became an elevator operator. He was the one who picked the books out and sent them. Perhaps he paid for them, too. I’ll never know.”

  The new paint gleamed on the wood, the fresh letters black and sharp.

  “Well, I wonder if I’ll make it out here again upright or lying down. I’d better have my stone carved deep because there’s nobody to paint me up every few years except some nephews and nieces down in St. John’s.”

  Quoyle wondering about William Ankle. “What did it mean, what your father said about the tall, quiet woman. You said it about Wavey Prowse. Something your father used to say. A poem or a saying.”

  “Ar, that? Let’s see. Used to say there was four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman. It was just a thing he said. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know where he got it.”

  “You were never married Billy?”

  “Between you and me, I had a personal affliction and didn’t want anybody to know.”

  Quoyle’s hand to his chin.

  “Half that stuff,” said Billy, “that sex stuff Nutbeem and Tert Card spews out, I don’t know what they mean. What there could be in it.” What he knew was that women were shaped like leaves and men fell.

  He pointed down the slope, away from the sea.

  “Another cemetery there. An old cemetery.” A plot lower down enclosed with beach rubble. They walked toward it. Straggling wildness. A few graves marked with lichened cairns, the rest lost in impenetrable tangle. Billy’s brilliant eyes fixed Quoyle, waiting for something.

  “I wouldn’t have known it was a cemetery. It looks very old.”

  “Oh yes. Very old indeed. ‘Tis the cemetery of the Quoyles.”

  Satisfied with the effect on Quoyle whose mouth hung open, head jerked back like a snake surprised by a mirror.

  “They were wrackers they say, come to Gaze Island centuries ago and made it their evil lair. Pirate men and women that lured ships onto the rocks. When I was a kid we’d dig in likely places. Turn over stones, see if there was a black box below.”

  “Here!” Quoyle’s hair bristled. The winding tickle, the hidden harbor.

  “See over here, them flat rocks all laid out? That’s where your house stood as was dragged away over the ice to Quoyle’s Point with a wrangle-gangle mob of islanders behind them. For over the years others came and settled. Drove the Quoyles away. Though the crime that finally tipped the scales was their disinclination to attend Pentecostal services. Religion got a strong grip on Gaze Island in that time, but it didn’t touch the Quoyles. So they left, took their house and left, bawling out launchin’ songs as they went.”

  “Dear God,” said Quoyle. “Does the aunt know all this?”

  “Ar, she must. She never told you?”

  “Quiet about the past,” said Quoyle, shaking his head, thinking, no wonder.

  “Truth be told,” said Billy, “there was many, many people here depended on shipwracks to improve their lots. Save what lives they could and then strip the vessel bare. Seize the luxuries, butter, cheese, china plates, silver coffeepots and fine chests of drawers. There’s many houses here still has treasures that come off wracked ships. And the pirates always come up from the Caribbean water to Newfoundland for their crews. A place of natural pirates and wrackers.”

  They walked back to the gaze for another look, Quoyle trying to imagine himself as a godless pirate spying for prey or enemy.

  Billy shouted when he saw the gauzy horizon had become a great billowing wall less than a mile away, a curtain of fog rolling over maroon water.

  “Get going, boy,” shouted Billy, slipping and sliding down the path to the harbor beach, his paint cans knocking together. Quoyle panted after him.

  The motor blatted and in a few minutes they were inside the tickle.

  21

  Poetic Navigation

  “Fog . . . The warm water of the Gulf Stream penetrating high latitudes is productive of fog, especially in the vicinity of the Grand Banks where the cold water of the Labrador Current makes the contrast in the temperatures of adjacent waters most striking.”

  THE MARINER’S DICTIONARY

  WHEN they came again into the maze of rocks the fog bank was two thousand yards away.

  “Give us ten minutes to get clear of the rocks and the currents and take a course on Killick-Claw and we’ll be all right,” said Billy, steering the boat through a crooked course Quoyle could only guess at.

  “These was the rocks the Quoyles lured ships
onto.” Shouted. Quoyle thought he felt the haul of the current sweeping along the cliffs, stared into the water as though looking for waterlogged hulks in the depths. They cut around a fissured rock that Billy called the Net-Man.

  “ ‘Cause you’d lose something, floats or pots or a good piece of line and it was uncanny how it’d end up wrapped around the Net-Man. Some kind of swirly current carried things onto it, I suppose, and they stuck in the clefts.”

  “There’s something on it now,” said Quoyle. “Something like a box. Hold on, Billy, it’s a suitcase.” Billy came around the gurgling rock, handed Quoyle a gaff hook.

  “Be quick about it.” The suitcase was stranded high on a rock, washed up by the now-retreating tide. It rested on a small shelf, as though someone had just set it down. Quoyle hooked the rope handle and yanked. The weight of the suitcase sent it tumbling into the sea. As it bobbed to the surface he clawed with the hook, drew it near. At last he could reach over and grip the handle. Heavy, but he got it aboard. Billy said nothing, worked the throttled boat through the sunkers.

  The suitcase was black with seawater. Expensive looking but with a rope handle. There was something about it. He tried the latches but it was locked. The fog came on them, thick, blotting out everything. Even Billy in the back of the boat was faded and insubstantial. Directionless, no horizon nor sky.

  “By God, Quoyle, you’re a wracker! You’re a real Quoyle with your gaff, there.”

  “It’s locked. We’ll have to pick it open when we get back.”

  “That might take a little while,” said Billy. “We’ll have to smell our way in. We’re not out of the rocks yet. We’ll just marl along until we gets clear of them.”

  Quoyle strained his eyes until they stung and saw nothing. Uneasiness came over him, that crawling dread of things unseen. The ghastly unknown tinctured by thoughts of pirate Quoyles. Ancestors whose filthy blood ran in his veins, who murdered the shipwrecked, drowned their unwanted brats, fought and howled, beards braided in spikes with burning candles jammed into their hair. Pointed sticks, hardened in the fire.

  A rock loomed on the starboard bow, a great tower in twisting vapor.

  “Ah, just right. ‘Tis the Home Rock. Now we’re on a straight run. We’ll smell Killick-Claw’s smoke pretty soon and sniff along in.”

  “Billy, we saw the Home Rock on the way to the island. It was just a low rock barely a foot out of the water. This thing is enormous. It can’t be the same rock.”

  “Yes, it is. She sticks up a little more now because tide’s going out, and she’s in the fog. It’s fog-loom makes it look big to you. It’s an optical illusion, is the old fog-loom. Makes a dory look like an oil tanker.”

  The boat muttered through the blind white. Quoyle clenched the gunwales and despaired. Billy said he could smell the chimneys of Killick-Claw, fifteen miles across the water, and something else, something rotten and foul.

  “I don’t like that stink. Like a whale washed up on a beach the third week of hot weather. It seems to get stronger as we go. Maybe there is a dead whale floating along in the fog. You listen for the bell buoy that marks the Ram and the Lamb. We could easy miss the entrance in this fog.”

  After nearly an hour Billy said he heard the rut of the shore, the waves breaking on stone, and then a pair of needle-shaped rocks rose in the gloom of fog and encroaching night.

  “Whoa,” said Billy Pretty. “That’s the Knitting Pins. We’re east of Killick-Claw by a bit. But not far from Desperate Cove. What do y’think, put in there and wait until the fog lifts before heading back up the coast? Oh, there used to be a good little restaurant in Desperate Cove. Let’s see now if I can remember how to get in. I never come in here by water since I was a boy.”

  “For God’s sake, Billy, this water is full of rocks.” Another foaming mass of black reared from the fog. But Billy knew his way by a rhyme pulled from the old days when poor men sailed by memory, without charts, compass or lights.

  When the Knitting Pins you is abreast,

  Desperate Cove bears due west.

  Behind the Pins you must steer

  ’Til The Old Man’s Shoe does appear.

  The tickle lies just past the toe,

  It’s narrow, you must slowly go.

  The old man brought the boat around behind the Knitting Pins and felt his way along current and sucking tide.

  “There’s a dozen tricks to find your way—listen for the rut of the shore, call out and hear the echo off the cliffs, feel the run of current beneath you—or smell the different flavors of the coves. Me dad could name a hundred miles of coast by the taste of air.”

  A hump of rock, the sound of licking water, then a slow putter along a breaking ridge of rock. In amazement Quoyle heard a car door slam, heard the engine start and the vehicle drive away. He could see nothing. But in a minute a glow on a stagehead showed and Billy brought the boat up, climbed out and slipped a mooring line over a bollard.

  “That stink,” he said, “is coming from the suitcase.”

  “It’s probably the leather,” said Quoyle. “Starting to rot. How far to the restaurant? I don’t want to leave it here.”

  “The place was right across the road. The tourists come in the summer with their cameras, you know, ar, they’ll sit here all day long and watch the water. It’s like it’s a strange animal, they can’t take their eyes off it.”

  “You’d know why if you came from Sudbury or New Jersey,” said Quoyle.

  “Here. It’s here. I can smell cooking oil stronger than the stink of that suitcase. You leave that suitcase outside.”

  There were no customers, the waitress and the cook sitting companionably at one of the tables, both tatting lace doilies. A smell of bread, the daily baking for the next day.

  “Girl, we’re that starved,” said Billy.

  “Skipper Billy! Give me a start coming in out of the fog that way.”

  The cook put her tatting aside and stood next to the chalkboard.

  “That’s all there is now,” she said, erasing COD CHEEKS, erasing SHRIMP DINNER. “There’s fried squid, m’dear and meatballs. You know that moose Railey got, Skipper Billy? Well, we ground up so much of it like hamburger, you know, and I was wantin’ to get the freezer emptied out so I made it up in meatballs this morning in a gravy. It come out good. Mashed potato?” All vertical lines, her face riven, the dark pleats of her skirt.

  Billy telephoned Tert Card, leaned against the wall with a toothpick in his teeth.

  “Me and Quoyle is down to Desperate Cove, fogbound. I’m going to leave my boat here if you can get us a ride back to Killick-Claw. He’s got his car over there and I left my truck down the wharf. Yeah. I’ll get it tomorrow. Wracker Quoyle here picked a valise off the Net-Man. We don’t know. It’s locked. Fog’s that thick, so you go easy. There’s no hurry. We’re eating dinner over here. Yep. No, she made Railey’s moose up into meatballs. Ar, I’ll tell her.”

  Quoyle had the squid and a side dish of onion hash. The squid were stuffed with tiny pink shrimp, laid on a bed of sea parsley. Billy worked at his platter of meatballs. The waitress brought them hot rolls with butter and partridgeberry jam.

  The cook stuck her long face out of the kitchen.

  “I made a old-fashioned figgy duff for Railey, Skipper Billy. There’s quite a bit of it on hand. P’raps you’d like to refresh your mouth with some?”

  “I would. And Tert Card is comin’ down to pick us up. He wants an order of the meatballs to go if you got enough.”

  So, a dish of figgy duff with a drop of rum sauce, and coffee.

  “I’m going to open that suitcase,” said Quoyle.

  “Wracker Quoyle, that’s all you can think of, that bloody suitcase. Go ahead and open it. Pick it open with a fork tine or bash it with a rock. And I hope it’s crammed with prizes from the treasure troves of Gaze Island.” Billy held his finger up for more tea.

  Quoyle dragged the suitcase under the single wharf light. He found a piece of pipe and jabbed the lock.
The pipe clinked against the brass. The lock held. Quoyle looked around for something to pry, a screwdriver or chisel, but there was nothing but stone and broken glass. In frustration he raised the pipe over his shoulder and swung as hard as he could at the lock. A metallic crack and, with a frightful wave of stench, the suitcase sprang open.

  Under the light he saw the ruined eye, the flattened face and blood-stiff mustache of Bayonet Melville on a bed of seaweed. The gelatinous horror slid out onto the wharf.

  22

  Dogs and Cats

  ‘The mesh knot is the ordinary way of tying the SHEET BEND when it is made with a netting needle.”

  THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

  “AGNIS have a manly heart, Agnis do,” said Mavis Bangs to Dawn when the aunt went off with her measuring tapes and notebook. “A boldish air, she grasp on things like a man do. That’s from living in the States. All the women down there is boldish. See how she was calm? When the nephew was all jelly? Finding that head. She said he couldn’t drive for two days he was that shocked. I was shocked myself. What with the Mounties coming in and asking. Questions and questions. Poor Agnis.

  “There’s the other thing, too. She’s a Hamm, but she’s a Quoyle. The stories, m’dear. Omond—that was my poor husband— knew them. He come from No Name Cove down the bay from Capsize Cove, that are but one cove from Quoyle’s Point. And that little maid they got is a real Quoyle, tilted like a buoy in a raging sea.”

  Dawn barely heard her. Every time Agnis Hamm’s truck pulled away Dawn was at the electronic typewriter. Stayed late some evenings to get at it. Letter after letter.