The Shipping News

by Annie Proulx

  “Let’s go berrying this weekend,” said the aunt. “Just over a ways was well-known berrying grounds when I was young. We’ll make jam, after. Berrying is pleasure to all. Maybe you’ll want to bring Wavey Prowse?”

  “That’s an idea,” said Quoyle.

  She said she would be glad—as if he’d invited her to a party.

  “Ken will bring me across—wants to see your new roof.”

  Ken looked less at the roof than at Quoyle and his daughters; joked with the aunt. Gave Herry a good-bye touch on the shoulder. “Well, I’m off. Business in Misky Bay, so might’s well go around the point. Shall I come along later, then?” Eyes like a thornbush, stabbing everything at once. In a hurry to get it all.

  “All right,” said Wavey. “Thank you, boy.” Her berry pails had rope handles finished in useful knots.

  The aunt, the little girls, Quoyle, Wavey and Herry walked overland to the berry grounds beyond the glove factory, their pails and buckets rattling, clatter of stones on the path, Sunshine saying, Carry me. The sun laid topaz wash over barrens. Ultramarine sky. The sea flickered.

  Wavey in toast-colored stockings, a skirt with mended seams. Quoyle wore his plaid shirt, rather tight.

  “People used to come here for miles with their berry boxes and buckets,” said the aunt over her shoulder. “They’d sell the berries, you see, in those days.”

  “Still do,” Wavey said. “Agnis girl, last fall they paid ninety dollars a gallon for bakeapples. My father made a thousand dollars on his berries last year. City people want them. And there’s some still makes berry ocky if they can get the partridge berries.”

  “Berry ocky! There was an awful drink,” said the aunt. “We’ll see what we get,” and looked sidewise at Wavey, taking in the rough hands and cracked shoes, Herry’s face like a saucer of skim milk. But a pretty boy, they said, with his father’s beauty only a little distorted. As though malleable features had been pressed with a firm hand.

  The sea glowed, transparent with light. Wavey and Quoyle picked near each other. Her hard fingers worked through the tufted plants, the finger and thumb gathering two, seven, rolling them back into the cupped palm, then dropping them into the pail, a small sound as the berries fell. Walked on her knees. A bitter, crushed fragrance. Quoyle blew chaff away. A hundred feet away Herry and Sunshine and Bunny, rolling like dogs on the cushiony ground. The aunt roved, her white kerchief shrank to a dot. As the pickers spread out they disappeared briefly in hollows or behind rises. The sea hissed.

  The aunt called to Quoyle. “Yoo-hoo. Forgot the lunch basket. Back by the glove factory. You get it, I’ll watch the children.”

  “Come with me,” said Quoyle to Wavey. Urgent. She looked away at Herry.

  “They’re playing. Come on. We’ll go along the shore. It will be faster walking on the stones than going through the tuckamore. We’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

  “All right.”

  And she was away on her strong legs, Quoyle stumbling after, running to catch up. The ocean twitched like a vast cloth spread over snakes.

  Quoyle swung the basket, walked along the shore past broken bladder wrack, knot wrack, horn wrack and dead-man’s-fingers, green sausageweed and coralweed, mats of dulse and in their thousands, crushed clumps of bristly bryozoan, long brown rips of kelp, a blackening coastal string looped by the last week’s storm.

  Wavey climbed and sprang along the rocks, kicked through the heaped wrack. Quoyle picking his way more slowly, beer bottles clinking in the basket.

  “Look,” he said. At the mouth of the bay a double-towered iceberg.

  “It’s tilting.”

  Wavey stood on a rock, curled her fingers and raised her fists to her eyes as though they were binoculars. The ice mass leaned as though to admire its reflection in the waves, leaned until the southern tower was at the angle of a pencil in a writing hand, the northern tower reared over it like a lover. Soundlessly the distant towers came together, plunged under the water. A fountain of displaced water.

  Quoyle below the rock. Suddenly he clasped his hands around her ankles. She felt the heat of his hands through her brown stockings, did not move. Prisoner on the rock. Looked down. Quoyle’s face was pressed against her legs. She could see white scalp through snarled reddish hair, fingers curved firm around her ankles hiding her shoes except the pointed toes, the leather perforated in an ornate curl like a Victorian mustache, his heavy wrists and beyond them the sweater cuffs, a bit of broken shell caught in the wool, dog’s hair on the sleeves. She did not move. There was a sense of a curtain, of a hand on the rope that could pull it open. Quoyle inhaled the scent of cotton stockings, a salt and seaweed female smell that made him reckless. His fingers unfurled, the hands drew back. She felt the absence. Quoyle staring hard at her. “Come down. Come down.” He held out his arms. No mistaking what he meant. Transfixed, she hardly breathed. One flicker of movement and he’d be all over her, pulling her clothes up, wrenching the brown stockings and pressing her down on the stones with the shore flies crawling on bare skin, Quoyle, entering her, ramming his great chin into the side of her neck. And afterwards some silent agreement, some sore complicity, betrayal. She burst out.

  “Do you know how he died? My husband? Herold Prowse? I’ll tell you. He’s in the sea. He’s down at the bottom. I never come beside the sea without thinking—’Herold’s there.’ Old Billy tell you about it, did he?”

  She slid down the rock, safe now, protected by grief. Quoyle stood away, hands dangling, looking at her. The words gushed.

  “Herold was a roustabout on the Sevenseas Hector. First decent job he ever had. Wonderful money, steady work. Everything coming fine for us. Biggest, safest oil rig in the world. Three weeks off, three weeks on. He was out on it when it went over. The telephone. Early in the morning. January 29, 1981. I was up and dressed, but lay down again because I felt so bad. I was carrying Herry. A lady’s voice come on the phone and she says, she says to me, ‘Oh Mrs. Prowse. We have to inform you that they are reporting the Sevenseas Hector went over in the storm and the men are considered missing.’ Went over in the storm, she said. At first they claimed it was because the storm was so bad.

  “But there was other oil rigs out there only a dozen miles away and they stayed up. Sevenseas Ajax and Deep Blue 12. They didn’t have any trouble. Storms like that one comes along every winter. It wasn’t a century storm, comes along once every hundred years. Ninety-seven men missing, and not a single body did they ever recover. They saw some of them in a sinking lifeboat, the seas breaking over them and then they was gone.

  “It come out little by little. Like a nightmare that gets worse and you can’t wake up. The government didn’t have any safety rules for these things. The design of the rig was bad. Nobody on the rig knew who was in charge. Was it the tool pusher or the master? Most of the men on board didn’t know nothing about the sea. Geologists and cementers, derrickmen, mud watchers, drillers, welders and fitters, they was after the oil, no attention to the water or weather. Didn’t even understand the weather reports that come to them. Didn’t know enough to close the deadlights when the seas worked up. The glass in the ballast room portlight was weak. The control panel shorted out if water got in it. A sea broke the portlight, come in and drenched the control panel. They wasn’t properly trained. No operation manuals. So when the panel went out and they tried to adjust the ballast by hand with some little brass rods they got it all wong, did it backwards, they sent it into a tilt. Just like that iceberg. Over it went. And the lifeboats wasn’t any good, and most of the men never made it to the boats because the public address system went out when the control panel failed. The lawyer said it was falling dominoes.

  “So, not to hurt your feelings, but that’s how it is. I was thinking of it watching that iceberg go down. I think of it every single time I’m at the edge of the water, I look along the shore, half afraid, half hoping that I’ll see Herold’s drowned body in the seaweed. Though it’s years, now.”

  Quoyle liste
ned. Would he have to bring her to the prairies? And what of Petal’s essence riding under his skin like an injected vaccine against the plague of love? What was the point of touching Wavey’s dry hand?

  They came up the path and onto the barrens, looked toward the pale dot that was the aunt’s kerchief, the jumping children like fleas.

  Quoyle behind her. Without looking Wavey knew exactly where he was.

  Warmth, deep sky, the silence except for their children’s far voices. Then, sharply, as a headache can suddenly stop, something yielded, long griefs eased. She turned. Quoyle was so close. She started to say something. Her freckled, rough skin flushed. She fell, or he pulled her down. They rolled over the massed cushions of berry plants, clinging, they rolled, hot arms and legs, berries and leaves, mouths and tears and stupid words.

  But when the sea heaved below she heard it, thought of Herold’s handsome bones tangled in ghost nets. And shoved Quoyle away. Was up and running toward the aunt, the girls and poor fatherless Herry, the picnic basket bumping against her legs. If Quoyle wanted anything at all he must follow.

  Wavey ran to get away, then for the sake of running, and at last because there was nothing else to do. It would look undecided to change her pace, as though she did not know what she wanted. It seemed always that she had to keep on performing pointless acts.

  Quoyle lay in the heather and stared after her, watching the folds of her blue skirt erased by the gathering distance. The aunt, the children, Wavey. He pressed his groin against the barrens as if he were in union with the earth. His aroused senses imbued the far scene with enormous importance. The small figures against the vast rock with the sea beyond. All the complex wires of life were stripped out and he could see the structure of life. Nothing but rock and sea, the tiny figures of humans and animals against them for a brief time.

  The sharpness of his gaze pierced the past. He saw generations like migrating birds, the bay flecked with ghost sails, the deserted settlements vigorous again, and in the abyss nets spangled with scales. Saw the Quoyles rinsed of evil by the passage of time. He imagined the aunt buried and gone, himself old, Wavey stooped with age, his daughters in faraway lives, Herry still delighted by wooden dogs and colored threads, a grizzled Herry who would sleep in a north room at the top of the house or in the little room under the stairs.

  A sense of purity renewed, a sense of events in trembling balance flooded him.

  Everything, everything seemed encrusted with portent.

  25

  Oil

  “If there is a vibration from the outside that tilts all your pictures askew, hang them from a single wire which passes through both screw eyes and makes fast to two picture hooks.

  THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

  THE BAY crawled with whitecaps like maggots seething in a broad wound. A rough morning. Quoyle jumped down the steps. He would drive. But walked first down to the dock to look at the water. The boat charged against the tire bumpers. The waves pouring onshore had a thick look to them, a kind of moody rage. Looked at his watch. If he stepped on it there was enough time for a cup of tea and a plate of toast at the Bawk’s Nest. Clean up the oil piece then down to Misky Bay to the marine archives. Check boats in the harbor. Supposed to be a schooner there from the West Coast.

  Sat at the counter dunking toast into the mug. A folded slice at a time into his maw.

  “Quoyle! Quoyle, come back here.” Billy Pretty and Tert Card were in a booth at the back, plates and cups spread over the Formica table, Tert Card’s cigarette ends stubbed out in his saucer.

  “Well, look what the cat dragged in,” said Card, giving off whiffs of irritation as strong as after-shave lotion. He was suffering from canker sores in his mouth although he wore knot charms against them. They came with winter. They came when he accidentally bit the inside of his mouth while chewing a bit of boiled pork. He had pulled down his lip that morning and peered into the mirror, revolted by the white rims of three sores like infected punctures. Daubed on a clot of baking power. No pickles, no black coffee for a few days. And now leaned over a cup of milky tea.

  Quoyle ordered more toast. Double grape jelly. Wondered if he should get fried potatoes.

  “All we need’s Nutbeem and we won’t have to go to work.” Billy minced his egg into fish hash.

  “Like I say, the hope of this place,” Tert Card, digging at wax in his ear with the nail of his little finger, “is oil. When they discovered the McGonigle field in 1980 I bought stock, indeed I did. A golden flood is ahead when she starts producing. The petrodollars. Oh, my boy, when the ship comes in I’ll be away to Florida.”

  “The McGonigle?” asked Quoyle.

  “Can’t believe you’re ignorant that they discovered the largest oil reserve in Canada right off our shores, out under the Grand Banks, billions and billions of barrels of oil. That’s the McGonigle oil field. We’re all going to be rich. Jobs all over the place, dividends for stockholders, manufacturing, housing and supplies. The biggest development project in the country. It’s to be golden days.”

  In the booth in front of them a scrawny man with a mustache like a bar code glanced over his shoulder at Card. Quoyle thought he might be one of the supervisors at the fish plant. He was eating oatmeal with a side dish of bologna.

  Billy Pretty snorted. “The only ones getting the jobs and the economic benefits is down to St. John’s, I thank you. You watch, by the time they’re ready to start pumping the oil out, they’ll have the nuclear fusion worked out, make all the clean electricity anybody could ever want out of plain water. Newfoundland will be spiked again.”

  Quoyle passed a triangle of toast spread with plenty of grape jelly to Billy. How frail the old man looked, he thought, in close quarters with rumpy Tert Card.

  “No, boy, they’ll never get that fusion going. It’s oil. Newfoundland is going to be the richest place in the world. It’s a new era. We’ll be rolling in money.”

  Billy Pretty turned to Quoyle. “This is the oil hysteria you’re hearing.” Then back to Tert Card. “What you’ll have is the international oil companies skimming the cream off the pot. How much is going to trickle down to the outports? It’s outsiders will get the gold. There’s drugs and crime here now, and prostitutes waggling their red behinds, and it’s only started. Vandalism, stealing and smashing.”

  “That’s right,” said the fish plant supervisor, his oatmeal eaten, the bologna swallowed, puffing the first cigarette and ready to expand. “Look how they burned down the old lighthouse right here in Killick-Claw. Look how they smashed up Fisheries office.”

  “And,” said Billy, swiveling to include his ally, “alcoholism, moral degradation of the lowest kind. Divorce and cruelty and abandoned children moping along the roadside. Pollution! The sea bottom strewn with clits of wires and barrels and broken metal that’ll tear up any trawl. And to come? Terrible oil spills will kill off the few midget cod that’s left, destroy the fishery entirely, scum the landwash with a black stinking ooze, ruin boats and harbors. The shipping lanes will be clogged with the oil tankers and supply boats.” Trembled a dribble of tea into his cup.

  “He’s away and gone,” mocked Tert Card, examining the black knob of wax on his nail. “He’s seen the Nile.”

  Billy Pretty cast his eyes at Quoyle and the fish plant man, opened his mouth to say what he had to say.

  Beside him Tert Card swayed, pantomimed playing a violin.

  “I’ll have an order of fried potatoes and bologna,” said Quoyle to the waitress. Billy sucked in a breath.

  “I seen the cod and caplin go from millions of tons taken to two or three bucketsful. Seen fishing go from seasonal, inshore, small boats to the deep water year-round factory ships and draggers. Now the fish is all gone and the forests is cut down. Ruined and wrecked! No wonder there’s ghosts here. It’s the dead pried out of their ground by bulldozers!”

  The fish plant man got a word in. “They used to say ‘A man’s set up in life if he’s got a pig, a punt and a potato patch.’ What do
they say now? Every man for himself.”

  “That’s right,” said Billy. “It’s chasing the money and buying plastic speedboats and snowmobiles and funny dogs from the mainland. It’s hanging around the bars, it’s murders and stealing. It’s tearing off your clothes and pretending you’re loony. It used to be a happy life here. See, it was joyful. It was a joyful life. You wouldn’t know what I’m speaking of, Tert Card, you with your terrible need to go to Florida. Why waste my breath.” Held the teapot over his cup but nothing came out.

  Tert Card’s mouth had been waiting a chance. He spoke to all, included the sweating waitress, the cook whose head showed in the order window. “If it was them days now, Mr. Pretty, you’d be dead. You forget the Chinese flu you got a few winters back, in the hospital with it. I seen you in that bed grey as a dead cod, I thought, well, he’s had it. But they give you antibiotics and oxygen and all and you live to bite the hand that saved you. Nobody, nobody in their right mind would go back to them hard, hard times. People was only kind because life was so dirty you couldn’t afford to have any enemies. It was all swim or all sink. A situation that makes people very sweet.” Sucking air over his teeth.

  The cook called from the kitchen, “I say let the fishery go. Let the oilmen have the free hand. Can’t do no worse and might do better.” Laughed to show it was a joke. If necessary.

  “You better not let some of your customers hear you say that or you will be wallpaper paste.” The fish plant man got up, went for a toothpick.

  “I’ll say it to anybody!” Tert Card bellowed. “Oil is strong and fish is weak. There’s no contest. The whole world needs oil. There is big money in oil. There’s too many men fishing and not enough fish. That’s what it comes down to. Now let’s get down to the newsroom and put the bloody paper together. Quoyle, you got your boat story?” Shouting still. A full head of steam up.

  “Go ahead,” said Billy Pretty who had read it, who had listened to Quoyle on the phone talking oil for a week, seen him come back from the Cape Despond spill covered with oil, his notes a greasy wad because he’d plunged in beside the rescuers of ruined seabirds. “You give him that story and we’ll watch Tert Card the Oil King expire of a paroxysm. You’d think he had a million dollars worth of oil stock. Ha, he’s got two shares of Mobil. Two!” Snakey thrust of his head.