Shipping News_A Novel

by Annie Proulx

  ¯

  “Cockadoodle Christ, you’re worse than the gulls.” Jack, watching Quoyle shovel herring into a bucket.

  “I could eat the boatload.”

  “If you wasn’t getting out the paper you ought to take up fishing. You’re drawn to it. I see that. What’s good, you know, you bring a little stove in the boat, frying pan and some salt pork, you can have you the best you ever ate. Why you never see a fisherman take a bag of lunch out. Even if he goes hungry now and then. Nothing made ashore that’s as good as what you pull out of the sea. You’ll come out with me one time.”

  Two weeks later the herring were unaccountably gone and the Gammy Bird took a temporary dive in size while Billy and Quoyle and Dennis helped Jack overhaul his lobster pots, build a few new ones. And Benny Fudge went to Misky Bay to have all his teeth pulled.

  “I don’t know if I’ll be fishing lobster for meself or all of yous.”

  “I wish I was going out,” said Billy. “Oh there’s money in lobster. But you can’t get a license. Only way anyone here could have a license for lobster is if you turned yours over to Dennis, here.”

  “I’m ready,” said Dennis.

  “Won’t be tomorrow,” said Jack. Short and hard. Jealous of his fishing rights. He was. And wanted to keep his last son ashore.

  “Come a nice day we’ll have a big lobster boil, eh?” said Billy. “Even if we have to buy them off somebody down at No Name Cove. Too bad there isn’t some kind of occasion to celebrate.” Winked at Dennis, rolled his eyes at Quoyle.

  “There is,” said Quoyle. “The aunt’s coming back this Saturday and we’re having a welcome home party at my house. But I doubt there’ll be lobster.”

  Jack had a pile of stones at the corner of his shack. Anchors for the lobster pots, he said. Slingstones.

  38 The Sled Dog Driver’s Dream

  “A leash for a large dog of rawhide belt lacing. Taper and skive

  four thongs, form a loop with the small end of the longest

  strand, and seize all strands together. Lay up a FOUR- STRAND

  SQUARE SINNET. Surmount it with a large BUTTON KNOT.

  Cover the seizing with a leather shoestring TURK’S HEAD.”

  THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

  ALVIN YARK’S sweater zipper rattled as he hooked his worn measure out of the pocket. Time to get to the work. Had got cleaned out the day before with a quart of steeped she-var needles, had moved his bowels and was ready now to move the earth. Marked the keel with his pencil stub for the timber pairs, still uncut from curved planks. The window showed empty road. Humming, singing, he turned to the overhead rack that ran the length of the shop and pulled down wood ribbands, tacked them the length of the frame, from forehook to midship bend to the afterhook timbers. And there was the boat.

  “ ‘E missed the best part, did Quoyle. Missed seeing ‘er come out of nothing.” Checked the window again. Nothing but April water streaked with white like flashing smiles, like lace tablecloths snapping open in slow motion. Clots of froth bobbed against the pilings. Beyond the headland, bergy bits, pans and floes, a disintegrating berg like a blue radiator in the restless water.

  At last the mud-throwing hump of Quoyle’s station wagon moved into Yark’s view. He stopped in the doorway, the oxblood sweater caught on a nail. Picked fussily at the wool loop where another would have yanked, said he had to be back in good time. For the aunt’s welcome home supper. He and Wavey had spent the morning, he said, making enough fish chowder to sink a tanker and Alvin and Evvie had better come to help put it away.

  “I enjoys a bit of a time,” said Yark. “Agnis in or comin’ in?”

  Quoyle had picked up the aunt in Deer Lake at noon. She looked fit. Full of energy and ideas.

  But Quoyle dreamed, thoughts somewhere else. He picked up the wrong tool when Yark pointed.

  “Hundred things going on,” he mumbled. The Lifestyles page was on his mind. Mail pouring in. They’d never run another birdhouse plan but what was the cure for homesick blues? Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. “I’m coming back some day,” they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore.

  Yark half-sang his interminable ditty, “Oh the Gandy Goose, it ain’t no use, cause every nut and bolt is loose, she’ll go to the bottom just like the Bruce, the Gandy Goose, and kill a NewfoundLANDer,” while he transferred the measurements to the rough boards.

  “You’ll ‘ave your boat next Saddy. She’ll be finished.” Thank God, thought Quoyle. Man Escapes Endless Song. A pale brown spider raced along the top ribband.

  “Weather coming on. I see the spiders is lively all day and my knees is full of crackles. Well, let’s cut them timbers. ‘Oh it was the Bruce, who brought the moose, they lives so good out in the spruce.’ ”

  Quoyle looked at his boat. The timbers were the real stuff of it, he thought, mistaking the fact for the idea. For the boat had existed in Yark’s mind for months.

  As Yark sawed and shaped, Quoyle leaned the timbers against the wall. Their curves made him think of Wavey, the lyre-shape of hip swelling from waist, taut thighs like Chinese bridges. If he and Wavey married, would Petal be in the bed with them? Or Herold Prowse? He imagined the demon lovers coupling, biting and growling, while he and Wavey crouched against the footboard with their eyes squeezed shut, fingers in their ears.

  The twilight drew in, their breaths huffed white as they set and braced the timbers.

  “It ain’t no use, it ain’t no use, I gots to get some tea into my caboose,” sang Yark as they stepped from gloom into green afterglow. Sea and sky like tinted glass. The lighthouse on the point slashed its stroke, house windows flowered pale orange.

  “Hear that?” said Yark, stopping on the path. Arm out in warning, fingers splayed.

  “What?” Only the sucking draw of the sea below. He wanted to get home.

  “The sea. Heard a big one. She’s building a swell.” They stood below the amber sky, listening. The tuckamore all black tangle, the cliff a funeral stele.

  “There! See that!” Yark gripped Quoyle’s wrist, drew his arm out to follow his own, pointing northeast into the bay. Out on the darkling water a ball of blue fire glimmered. The lighthouse flash cut across the bay, revealed nothing, and in the stunned darkness behind it the strange glow rolled, rolled and faded.

  “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 dogteam 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 accordion be tween 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’ house 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.