Shipping News_A Novel

by Annie Proulx

  Billy Pretty’s eyes had fallen on a square of Astroturf which he took for a bit of doormat until he saw cigar dog turds. Stared.

  “That’s for my wife’s little spaniel. Great system. Doggie makes doo-doo on the simulated grass, you throw overboard-see the loop on the corner for the line?-and presto, tow until it’s squeaky clean again. Great invention. The design dates back to the fifteenth century. The boat, of course, not the doo-doo rug. They’re the boats you see in Rembrandt’s marvelous paintings. They were royal barges. Henry the Eighth had one, Elizabeth I had one. A royal barge. She was named Das Knie when we saw her-means ‘The Knee,’ and I had to get down on one knee to persuade my darling, darling wife to let me buy it-” he paused for Quoyle’s laugh. “Had the same name when the princess bought it-absolutely nobody ever changed it since this sordid German industralist had it after the war. My beloved wife thought it should be named after her, but I called her Tough Baby. When I saw what her true character was. This boat will be strong a hundred years from now. Built in Haarlem. Nine years in the building. She’s utterly utterly indestructible. just incredibly massive. The frames are seven and an eighth by six inches on eleven-inch centers.”

  Billy Pretty whistled and raised his eyebrows. The man’s hair plastered against his yellow scalp. Drops hanging from the brims of Billy’s and Quoyle’s hats like moonstone trim. Quoyle scribbling on his pad, bent over to keep the rain off. Useless.

  “The planking-nobody can believe the planking-select grade oak, two and three-sixteenths inches thick with double planking at the bottom. The reason? Because of her shallow home waters, full of sandbars, spits, shifting channels. Unbelievable. The Zuider Zee. Treacherous, treacherous water. You absolutely go aground all the time. The decking isn’t flimsy, either. Believe it or not, you are standing on inch and three-quarters teak from pre-World War II Burma! You couldn’t buy the wood that’s in this boat anywhere in the world today for any amount of money. It’s just completely gone today.” The pitching voice went on and on. Quoyle saw Billy’s hands rammed in his pockets.

  “You wretched bastard, who are you talking to?” cried a raw high voice. The drenched man kept talking as though he hadn’t heard.

  “Let’s see, there’s a crew of four. She’s cutter rigged, two thousand square foot of working sail, takes three incredibly strong men to handle the mains’l and they’re always getting these sort of hernias and ruptures. Always quitting and jumping ship. It weighs a thousand pounds. The sail, I mean. And she’s slow. Slow because she’s heavy. But very, very sturdy.” Without a pause he shouted, “I’m talking to the local press about the boat!” Nose wrinkled like a snarling dog.

  “Tell them what happened in Hurricane Bob!”

  The words poured down with the rain. Quoyle put his sodden notes away, stood with his wet hand over his wet chin. The white-haired man’s chest hair showed through the wet silk of his shirt like grey knots. He seemed not to notice the rain. Quoyle saw purple scars on his hands, a ruby the size of a cherry tomato on his ring finger. Could smell the liquor.

  “The absolutely marvelous carving. The carving is everywhere, these incredible master carvers worked on it for nine years. All the animals known. Zebras, moose, dinosaurs, aurochs, marine iguana, wolverines, we’ve had internationally known wildlife biologists on board here to identify all the incredible species. And the birds. Utterly, utterly bizarre. It was built for Hitler as I suppose you know, but he never set foot on it. There were a thousand delays. Deliberate delays. The extraordinary Dutch Resistance.” Words spattering, drops bouncing off the deck.

  “Tell them what happened in Hurricane Bob.”

  “I think my dear wife is trying to get our attention,” the wet man said. “Just step in the cabin here and take a look at the interior. You’ll adore it. As ornate as the carving is outside, they really went wild in there.” He held a door open, sucked in his stomach to let them pass. Quoyle stumbled in thick carpet. A fire burned in a brick fireplace; there was a satinwood mantle inlaid with orchids worked in mother-of-peal, opal, jasper. Quoyle could not take it in, was conscious of patina, a lamp. Everything looked rare. There was something repellent in the room’s beauty, but he didn’t know what. Conscious of warping sea-damp, corrosive salt. A woman in a food-splotched bathrobe, hair the color of sewage foam, sat on the sofa. Her hands clashed in bracelets, rings. Feet stretched out, blunt purple ankles. Holding a glass cut with the initial M. Cellos sobbed, imparted a sense of drama. Quoyle saw the CD case on the coffee table, “Breakfast in Satin Sheets.” The woman put down the glass. Wet and yellow lips.

  “Bayonet, tell them what happened in Hurricane Bob.” She ordered the man, did not look at Quoyle or Billy Pretty.

  “Her beam is sixteen foot eleven,” said the white-haired man taking a glass marked with a J from the mantle. The ice cubes were nearly melted but he drank from it anyway. “There’s the Hoogarsjacht, and the Boeierjacht-”

  “There’s the hockeyjacht and the schnockyjacht and the malarkeyjacht,” said the woman. “There’s the poppycock and the stockyblock. If you don’t tell them what happened in Hurricane Bob, then I will.”

  The man drank. The hems of his trousers dripped.

  Billy Pretty coaxed the woman, lest she draw blood. “Now, m’dear, just tell us what happened in Hurricane Bob. We’re anxious to hear it.”

  The woman’s mouth opened but no sound came out. Fixed the man with her stare. He sighed, spoke in a weary singsong.

  “Oh. Kay. Keep happiness in the fucking family. We were moored at White Crow Harbor north of Bar Harbor. That’s in Maine you know, in the United States. Way up the coast from Portland. Actually there are two Portlands, but the other is on the West Coast. Oregon. Down below British Columbia. Well, Tough Baby sort of slipped her moorings at the height of this incredible storm. The sea absolutely went mad. You’ve seen how Tough Baby is built. Utterly massive. Utterly heavy. Utterly built for punishment. Well! She smashed seventeen boats to matchsticks. Seventeen.”

  The woman leaned her head back and cawed.

  “Didn’t stop there. You’ve seen she’s flat bottomed. Built to go aground. After she absolutely made kindling out of White Crow’s finest afloat, the waves kept shoving her on the beach. Like some incredible battering ram. In she’d come. Wham!”

  “Wham!” said the woman. The bathrobe gaped. Quoyle saw bruises on the flesh above her knees.

  “Out she’d float. She got among the beach houses. These were not your butchers’ and bakers’ beach houses, no, these were some of the most beautiful houses on the coast designed by internationally known architects.”

  “That’s right. That’s right!” Urged him, a dog through a flaming hoop.

  “Pounded twelve beach houses, the docks and boathouses, into rubble, absolute rubble. In she’d come. Wham!”

  “Wham!”

  “Out she’d go. Pulverized them. Brought them down. Wilkie Fritz-Change was trying to sleep in the guest room of one of those houses-he’d been ambassador to some little eastern European hot spot and was recuperating from a breakdown at Jack and Daphne Gershom’s beach house-and he barely escaped with his life. He said later he thought they were firing cannon at him. And the most extraordinary thing was that the only damage she sustained in this completely mad and uncontrollable rampage was a cracked lee board. Not a dent, not a scratch on her.”

  The woman, mouth full, shut her eyes, nodded her head. But was bored, now. Tired of these people.

  Quoyle imagined the heavy vessel hurling itself onto its neighbors, pounding houses and docks. He cleared his throat.

  “What brings you to Killick-Claw? A holiday voyage?”

  The white-haired man eager to go on. “ Holiday? Up here? On the most utterly desolate and miserable coast in the world? Wild horses couldn’t drag me. I’d rather cruise the roaring forties off Tierra del Fuego in a garbage scow. No, we’re being reupholstered, aren’t we?” A deadly sarcasm whittled his voice to a point. “Silver here, my darling wife, insists on the
services of a particular yacht upholsterer. Among thousands. Lived on Long Island, a mere seven miles from our summer place. Now we have to chase up to this godforsaken rock. All the way from the Bahamas to get the dining salon reupholstered. How can anyone live here? My god, we even had to bring the leather with us.”

  From the way he said the woman’s metal name Quoyle thought it was changed from a stodgier “Alice” or “Bernice.”

  “Yacht upholsterer? I didn’t know there were such things.”

  “Oh absolutely. Think about it. Yachts are full of these incredible, bizarre irregular spaces, utterly weird benches and triangular tables. Thousands and thousands of dollars to upholster the dinette alone in a unique yacht like this. Everything custom fitted. And of course every boat is different. Some of the more select yachts have leather walls or ceilings. I’ve seen leather floors-remember that, Silver? Biscuit Paragon’s yacht, wasn’t it? Cordovan leather floor tiles. Unbelievable. Of course you fall down a lot.”

  “What’s his name?” asked Quoyle. “A local yacht upholsterer would interest our readers.”

  “Oh, it’s not a him,” said the woman. “It’s Agnis. Agnis Hamm, ‘ Hamm ’s Custom Yacht Interiors and Upholstery.’ Tiresome woman, but an absolute angel with the upholsterer’s needle.” She laughed.

  Billy Pretty shifted. “Well, thank-you folks-Bayonet and Silver-”

  “Melville. As in Herman Melville.” The man pouring another drink, shivering, perhaps because he was wet. They shook the man’s hand, Billy Pretty held the woman’s cold fingers. Out of the hot cabin into the rain. The wet suitcase was probably ruined.

  Inside the cabin heard voices turn loud. Go on, the woman said, get out of here, leave, see how far you get, detestable bastard. Be a tour guide again. Go on. Go. Go on.

  14 Wavey

  In Wyoming they name girls Skye. In Newfoundland

  it’s Wavey.

  A SATURDAY afternoon. Quoyle was spattered with turquoise drops from painting the children’s room. Sat at the table with cup and saucer, a plate of jelly doughnuts.

  “Well, Aunt,” he said, “you are in the yacht upholstery business.” Sucking at the tea. “I thought all along it was sofas.”

  “Did you see my sign?” The aunt sanded a bureau, rubbed the wood with hissing paper, sling of flesh under her upper arm trembling.

  Bunny and Sunshine, under the table with cars and a cardboard road that unfolded in racetrack curves. Bunny put a block on the road. “That’s the moose,” she said. “Here comes Daddy. Rrrr. Bee bee-beep. The moose don’t care.” She crashed the car into the block of wood.

  “I want to do that!” said Sunshine, reaching for the block and the car.

  “Get your own. This is mine. “There was scrabbling, the knock of skull on table leg and Sunshine’s howl.

  “Crybaby!” Bunny scrambled out from under the table and threw the block and car at Sunshine.

  “Here, now!” said the aunt.

  “Calm down, Bunny.” Quoyle lifted Sunshine into his lap, inspected the red mark on her forehead, kissed it, swayed back and forth. Across the room Bunny damned all three with killing eyes. Quoyle’s smile signaled his disinterest in glares. But it seemed to him the sounds of his children were screaming and scraping. When would they start to be gentle?

  “The shop is sixes and sevens at the moment, but at least the sewing machines are set. Getting experienced help is the big problem, but I’m training two women, Mrs. Mavis Bangs and Dawn Budgel. Mavis is an older woman, widow, you know, but Dawn’s only twenty-six. Went to university, scholarships and all. Absolutely no work in her field. She’s been doing lumpfish processing at the fish plant to fill in-when there’s work-and then scraping along on unemployment insurance. That’s the lumpfish caviar.” Didn’t care for it herself.

  “No, I didn’t see the shop. I interviewed two of your customers, I’m writing about their boat. The Melvilles. It was a surprise. No idea you were a yacht upholsterer.”

  “Oh yes. I’ve been waiting for my equipment to come. Opened the shop about ten days ago. I started the yacht upholstery, you see, after my friend died. In 1979. What these days they’d call a ‘significant other.’ Warren. That’s who I named the dog after. In the postal service. Warren was, not the dog.” She laughed. Her face flashed elusive expressions. Didn’t tell Quoyle that Warren had been Irene Warren. Dearest woman in the world. How could he understand that? He couldn’t.

  “I swear until today I never knew such a thing existed. I would have been less surprised if you’d been a nuclear physicist.” It came to him he knew nearly nothing of the aunt’s life. And hadn’t missed the knowledge.

  “You know, you’re very easily surprised for a newsman. It’s all simple and logical. I grew up beside the sea, saw more boats than cars, though sure, none of them were yachts. My first job in the States was in a coat factory, sewing coats. The years Warren and I were together we lived on a houseboat, moored it at different marinas on the Long Island shore.

  “We got a special rate at Lonelybrook, the marina we were at longest. And if we got tired of seeing the same familiar boats, on Sundays we could drive away to some other harbor, look at their boats, have a dinner. It was like a hobby, like bird-watching. Warren would say ‘What do you think about going for a ride, look at some boats?’ We dreamed we’d have a nice little ketch someday, cruise around, but it never happened. Always intended to come back here, back to the old house, with Warren, but we put it off, you know. So for me, coming back is a little bit in Warren’s memory.” More than that.

  “I reupholstered an old chair we had on the houseboat, nice lines to it but a sort of mustard brown with the piping all frayed and thready. Got a good upholstery fabric, a dark blue with a red figure in it, took off the old upholstery and used it for a pattern. Just took my time stitching and fitting and pressing. It came out perfect. And I enjoyed doing it. Always liked sewing, working with my hands. Warren thought it was nice. So I did one in leather. That was something, working up leather. This real dark red, burgundy I guess you’d say. The only thing was I didn’t get the welting as perfect as I should have. It pooched out a little here and there. And I had a lot of trouble with the tufting. Made me sick to look at how that beautiful leather was spoiled. Because to me it was spoiled. So Warren says-knew I enjoyed it-says ‘Why don’t you take a workshop in leather upholstery? Some kind of a course?’

  “And Warren was the one that noticed the ad in Upholstery Review. Got me the subscription for Christmas. A reader. Read anything came into the house, the toothpaste boxes and wine labels. Used to buy a bottle of wine for Friday night supper. Books! My dear, that houseboat was filled with books. So this ad was for a summer course-Advanced Upholstery Techniques-at a school down in North Carolina. Warren wrote off for the brochure. I was just horrified at the cost, and I didn’t want to go off alone for a whole summer. It was an eight-week course. But Warren said ‘You can’t tell, Agnis, you might never get the chance to do this again.’ Upshot was, I decided I would.”

  Sunshine squirmed out of Quoyle’s arms and got the blocks. She put one on the road under the table, glanced triumphantly at Bunny. Who swung her legs. Shutting first one eye and then the other, making Sunshine and Quoyle and the aunt hop back and forth. Until it seemed something appeared on the edge of her vision, something out in the tuckamore, a gliding shadow. Something white! That disappeared.

  The aunt was rolling, telling Her Story. The romantic version. “It was at college in a little town on Pamlico Sound. There was about fifty people there from all over. A woman from Iowa City who wanted to specialize in museum restoration using antique brocades and rare fabrics. A man who did doll furniture. A furniture designer who kept saying he wanted the experience. I wrote to Warren, glad I came. Told them I didn’t have a specialty, just liked working with leather and wanted to improve at it.”

  She put the sandpaper aside and wiped the tabletop with a waxy rag, long swipes that picked up the dust. Bunny sidled along the wall, came to Quoyl
e, needing his proximity. Squeezed his arm with both hands.

  “About halfway through the course this instructor, he works with the Italian furniture designers, said ‘Agnis, I’ve got a tough one for you.’ It was a little twenty-foot fiberglass cruiser that be longed to the school’s janitor. He’d just bought a used boat. My job to fit and upholster the odd-shaped cushions that were settees in the daytime and berths at night. There was a triangular bar that he wanted upholstered in tufted black leather, the tufting spelling out the boat’s name which was, as I remember, Torquemada. I persuaded him that wouldn’t look as well as a classic diamond pattern of pleated tufting with a smart padded bumper at the upper rim. I said he could have the boat’s name etched on a brass plate to hang behind the bar, or a nice wood sign. He said go for it. It worked.

  “I put in some curves, scrolled and rolled edges, gathers and pleats-a very sumptuous style that suited the fellow’s dream. Really, there’s quite an art to it, and I was upholstering beyond myself. Pure luck.” She pried open a tin. Yellow wax. The smell of housekeeping and industry.

  “Instructor said I had a touch for boat work, that yacht upholstery paid. Said you got to see some great boats and met a lot of interesting people.” Clear enough the aunt let a stranger’s praise change her life.

  Quoyle was on the floor with his daughters, building a bridge over the road, a town, a city crowded with block cars and roaring engines. Patiently rebuilding bridges that fell as trucks caromed.

  “Dad, make a castle. Make a castle in the road.” He would do anything they told him.

  “On the bus on the way back to Long Island I worked it all out, how I could start up my own little business. I sketched out the sign-Hamm’s Yacht Upholstery-with a full-rigged sailing ship under the letters. I intended to rent a storefront down by the wharf at Mussle Harbor. I made a list of the equipment I needed-an industrial-grade sewing machine, button press, pair of padded trestles, taking-down tools-tack lifters and ripping chisels, rebuilding tools-hide strainers, webbing stretchers. I told myself to start small, just get the leather I needed for each job so’s I wouldn’t tie up a lot of money in leathers.”