The Shipping News

by Annie Proulx

  “That’s a weather light. Seen them many times. Bad weather coming.” Although the trickster sky was clear.

  Cars and trucks parked along the road in front of the Burkes’ house, and through the window he could see people in the kitchen. He stepped into music. Wavey playing “Joe Lard” on her accordion and Dennis thumping at a guitar. Who was singing? Beety pulled pans out of the oven, shouted a joke. A burst of laughter. Mavis Bangs told Mrs. Buggit about a woman in St. John’s who suffered from a caked breast. Ken and his buddy leaned against the wall with their arms folded, watching the others. For they were in a Toronto of the mind, at a sophisticated party instead of an old kitchen scuff.

  “Dad.” Bunny, pulling at Quoyle, his jacket half off, whispering urgently. “I been waiting and waiting for you to come home. Dad, you got to come up to my room and see what Wavey got for us. Come on, Dad. Right now. Please.” On fire about something. He hoped it wasn’t crayons. Dreaded more broccoli trees. The refrigerator was covered with them.

  Quoyle let himself be dragged through the company, eyes catching Wavey’s eyes, catching Wavey’s smile, oh, aimed only at him, and upstairs to Bunny’s room. On the stairs an image came to him. Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some invoke night perfume. Some had centers as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swallowed. And among the common bull’s-eyes and peppermints a few rare ones; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought calm and gentle pleasure. Were his fingers closing on that one?

  Herry and Sunshine were lying on the floor. Marty pushed a bowl of water toward a husky puppy. White fur, the tail curled up like a fern. The puppy galloped at Bunny, seized the loop of her shoelace and pulled.

  “It’s a white dog.” Could hardly say it. Watched her from the corner of his eye.

  “She’s a sled dog, Dad. Wavey got her for me from her brother who raises sled dogs.”

  “Ken? Ken raises sled dogs?” He knew it wasn’t Ken, but was groping to understand this. Man Very Surprised to See White Dog in Daughter’s Chamber.

  “No, the other brother. Oscar. That’s got the pet seal. Remember we saw the pet seal, Dad? But Ken drove us over. And Oscar’s going to show me how to train her when she gets big enough. And I’m going to race her, Dad. If she wants to. And I’m going to ask Skipper Al if he’ll help me make a komatik. That’s the sled, Dad. We saw one at Oscar’s. I’m going to be a dog-team racer when I grow up.”

  “Me too,” said Sunshine.

  “That’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever heard. My dog-team kids. Have you named her yet?”

  “Warren,” said Bunny. “Warren the Second.”

  “Warren the Second,” said Herry.

  Quoyle saw his life might be spent in the company of dynastic dogs named Warren.

  “Dad,” whispered Bunny, “Herry’s getting a dog too, it’s Warren the Second’s brother. Tomorrow. But don’t tell him. Because it’s a secret.”

  Quoyle went downstairs to hug the aunt and then Wavey. Because he was so close then, and in bravado, he kissed her. A great true embrace. Her teeth bruised his lip. The accordian between them huffed a crazy chord. A roar and clapping at this public intimacy. As good as an announcement. Wavey’s father sat at the table, one hand on his thigh, the other tapping cigarette ash into a saucer. A lopsided smile at Quoyle. A wink of approval rather than complicity. That must be where Wavey got her little winks. But Jack was in the pantry looking out the window at the dark.

  “Jack,” called Beety, “what are you fidgeting at in there?” She set out a tall white cake plastered with pink icing. Candy letters spelled “Welcome Agnis.” Quoyle ate two slices and tried for a third but it went to Billy Pretty who came in late with snow in his hair. Stood near the stove. Importantly. Every man in the room looked at him. Though he had said nothing.

  “Marine forecast don’t say much, but I tell you it’s shaping up for a good one. Snowing hard. I’d say gusting to thirty knots anyway. Out of the east and backing. I’d say she’s going to be a regular screecher. Listen at it.” And as the accordion’s lesser wind wheezed and died they heard the shriek of air around the corner of the house.

  “Must be one of them polar lows they can’t see coming until it’s gone. I’d better say my greetings and get off home. I don’t like the feel of it,” said Billy through cake.

  Nor did anyone else.

  “I’m going to bore up home, buddy,” shouted Jack to Quoyle. “Y’know, I felt it coming. Smash me boat to drumsticks if I don’t haul her up. Mother’ll go with Dennis.” And pointed at his wife, at Dennis. Understood.

  By nine o’clock the uneasy guests had gone, thinking of drifted roads and damaged boats.

  “Looks like you brought it with you, Aunt.” They sat in the kitchen, surrounded by plates, the aunt with her noggin of whiskey. A skeleton of forks in the sink.

  “Oh, don’t ever say that. Don’t ever tell somebody they brings a storm. Worst thing you can say.” But seemed glad.

  A pendulum clock brought from the equator to a northern country will run fast. Arctic rivers cut deepest into their right banks, and hunters lost in the north woods unconsciously veer to the right as the earth turns beneath their feet. And in the north the dangerous storms from the west often begin with an east wind. All of these things are related to the Coriolis, the reeling gyroscopic effect of the earth’s spin that creates wind and flow of weather, the countering backwashes and eddies of storms.

  “Backing wind, foul weather,” Billy Pretty said to himself, steering sideways down a hill. The wind angling to the north now.

  He had seen wind hounds a few days before, lozenges of light in a greasy sky. Imagined wind in his inner eye, saw its directions in the asymmetrical shapes of windstars on old maps, roses of wind whose elongated points pictured prevailing airs. The storm star for his coast included a backing point that shifted from the northeast to the southwest.

  By midnight the wind was straight out of the west and he heard the moan leap to bellowing, a terrible wind out of the catalog of winds. A wind related to the Blue Norther, the frigid Blaast and the Landlash. A cousin to the Bull’s-eye squall that started in a small cloud with a ruddy center, mother-in-law to the Vinds-gnyr of the Norse sagas, the three-day Nor’easters of maritime New England. An uncle wind to the Alaskan Williwaw and Ireland’s wild Doinionn. Stepsister to the Koshava that assaults the Yugoslavian plains with Russian snow, the Steppenwind, and the violent Buran from the great open steppes of central Asia, the Crivetz, the frigid Viugas and Purgas of Siberia, and from the north of Russia the ferocious Myatel. A blood brother of the prairie Blizzard, the Canadian arctic screamer known simply as Northwind, and the Pittarak smoking down off Greenland’s ice fields. This nameless wind scraping the Rock with an edge like steel.

  Billy mumbled prayers in his pillow for poor souls caught on the waves tonight, riding a sea striped with mile-long ribbons of foam. The stiff tankers, old trawlers with bad hulls would break apart.

  At last he had to get up. The electricity was out. He fumbled in the dark, found the flashlight and shone it through the window. Could see nothing inches away but snow hurling at velocities that made the air glow.

  Cautiously he opened the door, felt it leap as the wind smote it. And wrestled it closed. A fan of snow across his kitchen floor, his naked footprint in it. Every window in the house rattled, and outside a cacophony of rolling buckets, slapping rope, snapping tarpaulins against the roar. The wires between his house and the utility pole keened discordancies that made his scalp crawl. The cold was straight from the glaciers, racing down the smoking ocean. He thrust junks of wood onto the coals, but the chimney barely drew. The wind, he thought, was blowing so hard it was like a cap over the chimney. If that was possible.

  “Blow the hair off a dog,” he said. And his own dog, Elvis, twisted her ears, the skin on her back shuddered.

  In the Burkes’ h
ouse the aunt marked the beating of the sea, a pummeling sound that traveled up through the legs of the bed. Up the road Mrs. Buggit recognized the squealing gasps of a drowning son. Herry, rigid in his blankets, experienced immensity, became a solitary ant in a vast hall. And down in St. Johns in his white bed the old cousin trembled with pleasure at what he had conjured with wind-knots.

  But Bunny went up the howling chimney, sailed against the wind and across the bay to the rock where the green house strained against the cables. She lay on stone, looked up. A shingle lifted, tore away. A course of bricks flew off the chimney like cards. Each of the taut cables shouted a different bull-roarer note, the mad bass driving into rock, the house beams and timbers vibrating. The walls chattered, shot nails onto the heaving floors. The house strained toward the sea.

  A crack, a whistle as a cable snapped. Glass burst. The house slewed on grating sills. The cables shrilled.

  Bunny watched, flat on her back, arms outstretched like a staked prisoner and powerless to move. The house lifted at the freed corner, fell, lifted. Glass broke. A second cable parted. Now the entire back of the house rose as if the building curtsied, then dropped. Cracking beams, scribbles of glass, inside the pots and pans and beds and bureaus skidding over the floors, a drawer of spoons and forks down the tilt, the stairs untwisting.

  A burst of wind wrenched the house to the east. The last cables snapped, and in a great, looping roll the house toppled.

  Shrieking. Awake. Scrambling across the floor to get away. The wind outside proving the nightmare. Quoyle lurched through the door, grasped the kicking child. He was frightened for his daughter. Who was mad with fear.

  Yet in ten minutes she was calm, swallowed a cup of warm milk, listened to Quoyle’s rational explanation of wind noises that caused nightmare, told him she could go back to sleep if Warren the Second slept on the bed. When he asked cautiously what she had dreamed, she couldn’t remember.

  At the Gammy Bird Quoyle ran a special issue, OUR BATTERED COAST, featuring shots of boats in the street, marooned snowplows. A thousand stories, said Billy Pretty in a worn voice. Ships lost, more than forty men and three women and one child drowned between the Grand Banks and the St. Lawrence Seaway, boats crippled and cargoes lost. Benny Fudge brought in photographs of householders digging out their buried pickups.

  The weather service predicted a heat wave.

  On Monday it came, a shimmering day of heat, the land streaming with melting snow and talk of global warming. A riddled iceberg scraped past the point. Quoyle in shirtsleeves, squinting his way through glare. When he could shunt thoughts of Bunny onto a siding, he felt spasms of joy. For no reason that he could think of except the long daylight, or the warmth, or because the air was so clear and sweet he felt he was just learning to breathe.

  Late in the morning the newsroom door opened. There was Wavey. Who never came there. She beckoned. Whispered in his ear, her breath delicious against his cheek. The auburn braid a rope of shining hairs which he had experienced undone. Yellow paint on her knuckle, faint scent of turpentine.

  “Dad says you must come by this noon. He wants to show you something.” But said she didn’t know what. Some kind of men’s business. For Archie was an expert at dividing the affairs of life into men’s business and women’s business. An empty cupboard and a full plate were the man’s business, a full cupboard and an empty plate the concern of the woman.

  He was leaning on his fence when Quoyle drove up. Must have heard the station wagon start up half a mile away, for the exhaust system was shot. Quoyle knew he should have walked the distance, needed the exercise, but it was quicker to drive. He’d start walking tomorrow if the weather was good.

  Archie leaned, his wooden zoo behind him, held old-fashioned binoculars. A cigarette in his mouth. Years ago the first thing he’d seen through the binoculars had been the Buggit boys out on the grainy ice, copying, jumping from one pan to another. Could see the snot running from their noses. Never a miss for an hour. Then Jesson fell short, clenched the edge of the ice, the other one tried to haul him up. Archie was out there with his boat in a few minutes, saving the boy, yanking him out of the sishy drift. At the time, thought it was lucky he had those binoculars. But later saw it for an omen. No one could stop the hand of fate. Jesson was born to be drowned.

  He raised the binoculars now as Quoyle came toward him, scanned the far shore, examined Quoyle’s Point as illustration for what he had to say.

  “You know, I believe your ‘ouse is gone. Take a look.” Held out the binoculars.

  Quoyle standing on snow-rived rock. Moved the binoculars slowly back and forth. And again.

  Archie reeked of cigarettes. His face fissured with thousands of fine lines, black curved hairs growing out of his ears and nostrils. The fingers orange. Couldn’t speak without coughing.

  “No, you won’t find ‘er for she’s not there. I looked out for ‘er this morning, but she’s not where she was. Thought you might want to go along down and see if she was just tipped over or sailed away. Was some shocking ‘ard wind we ‘ad. How many years was them cables ‘olding ‘er down?”

  Quoyle didn’t know. Since before the aunt’s time, what sixty-four years and many more. Since the old Quoyles dragged the house across the ice.

  “She’ll take it hard if it’s gone,” he said. “After all the work.” And even though he knew his secret path was still there, felt as if he’d lost the place where the whiskey jacks flitted through the tunnels among the spruce branches, the place where he jumped down onto the beach. As if he’d lost silence. Now there was only town. The Quoyles on the shift again.

  Thanked Archie and shook his hand.

  “Good thing I had the binoculars.” Archie drew on his cigarette, wondered what shrouded meaning might be in this.

  Beety said yes, Dennis was cutting wood for his buddy Carl who still couldn’t lift more than a fork, had to wear a collarlike thing around his neck. Yes he had the snowmobile. Though the snow was spotty. Down the highway by the blue marker; Quoyle’d see the truck parked on the side of the road. Not far from where they’d been cutting after Christmas. There was a wood path going in. He’d find it. Sure he would.

  Dennis in a fan of raw stumps and Quoyle had to shout above the chain saw’s racketing idle. He said his house was missing. And they were up the road for the track through slumping drifts, past the Capsize Cove turnoff. Gravel showing through. Past the glove factory. Whiskey jacks there, anyway. The smell of resin and exhaust. Trickle of melt water.

  The great rock stood naked. Bolts fast in the stone, a loop of cable curled like a hawser. And nothing else. For the house of the Quoyles was gone, lifted by the wind, tumbled down the rock and into the sea in a wake of glass and snow crystals.

  “All our work and money and it’s just away like that? To stand forty years empty, and then go in the flicker of an eyelid! Just when we had it fixed up.” The aunt in her shop, sniveling into a tissue. A silence. “What about the outhouse?”

  He could hardly believe what he heard. The house gone and she asked about the crapper.

  “I didn’t notice it, Aunt. But I didn’t make a special effort to look, either. The dock is still there. We could build a little camp out there, use it on fine weekends and in the summer, you know. I’ve been thinking we could buy the Burkes’ house. It’s a nice house and it’s convenient. It’s big enough. Nine rooms, Aunt.”

  “I’ll get over this,” she said. “I’ve always been good at it. Getting over things.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know some of the things you’ve managed to get over.”

  “Oh, my boy, you couldn’t even guess.” Shaking her head, the stiff smile.

  That sometimes irked. Quoyle blurted, “I know about what my father did. To you. When you were kids. The old cousin told me, old Nolan Quoyle.”

  He did know. The aunt hauled in her breath. The secret of her whole life.

  Didn’t know what to say, so she laughed. Or something like it. Then sobbed into her pal
ms while the nephew said there, there, patting her shoulder as if she were Bunny or Sunshine. And it was Quoyle who thought of a cup of tea. Should have kept his mouth shut.

  She straightened up, the busy hands revived. Pretending he’d never said a thing. Was already throwing out ideas like Jack pitched fish.

  “We’ll build a new place. Like you say, a summer place. I’d as soon live in town the rest of the year. Fact, I was thinking of it.”

  “We’ll have to make some money first. Before we can build anything out on the point. And I don’t know how much I can put into it. I’m thinking I’d like to buy the Burke house.”

  “Well,” said the aunt, “money to rebuild out on the point isn’t a problem. There’s the insurance, you know.”

  “You had insurance on the green house?” Quoyle incredulous. He was not insurance-minded.

  “Of course. First thing I did when we moved up last year. Fire, flood, ice, act of God. This was an act of God if I ever saw one. If I was you I’d ask the Burkes about that house. It’ll be a good roomy house for you. For children and all. For I suppose that you and Wavey have about come to that point. Though you haven’t said.”

  Quoyle almost nodded. Dipped his chin. Thought while the aunt talked.

  “But I’ve got other plans.” Making some of it up as she went along. Couldn’t live with the nephew now. Who knew what he knew.

  “I’ve been thinking about that building where my shop is. I’ve looked into buying it. Get it for a song. I’ve got to expand the work space. And upstairs is nice and snug with a view of the harbor. It could make a handsome apartment. And I wouldn’t be going into it alone. Mavis—Mavis Bangs, you know Mavis—wants to go partners in the business. She’s got a little money set aside. Oh, this’s all we talked about all winter. And it makes sense if we both live upstairs over the shop. So that’s what I’m thinking we’ll do. In a way it’s a blessing the old place is gone.”