The Shipping News (24 page)

28

The Skater’s Chain Grip

To rescue someone who has fallen through the ice, the fingers

of the rescuer’s hand and the victim’s hand are bent together in

an opposing grip.

“Fingernails should first be close-pared”

THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

THE AUNT
out for a look around. She’d wanted a breath of air, to get away from Quoyle and his children in the house. To get away from Sunshine’s humming and clattering shoes and piercing questions. The tape from Nutbeem that Bunny played endlessly, running down the batteries. The last days of October, a rattle of guns along the coast as the flights of turr came down ahead of the growing ice. Turbot massed off the shelf to the east. Spent salmon lay deep in river pools under the crusting ice or drifted to the sea.

She came upon a small pond. Remembered it, this water oval surrounded by hurts and laurel, women and children moving across the autumn marsh, bakeapples glowing like honeydrops in the slanting light. Leaky boots, birds fluttering up when the berry pickers drew near. Her mother always loved the marshes despite the nippers. [225] Find a bit of high ground, sleep for a little while under the flying clouds. “Oh,” she said, “I could sleep away the rest of my life.” How much she had slept through, unknowing! And died in a Brooklyn hospital bed of pneumonia believing she was on the barrens in the northern sun.

The aunt let herself remember an October, the pond frozen, ice as colorless as a sadiron’s plate, the clouds in thin rolls like grey pencils in a box. Crowberries encased in ice skins. The wind collapsed. Deepest silence, the vapor of her breath floated from her mouth. Distant soughing of waves. No dead grass trembled, no gull or tun flew. A pearl grey landscape. She was eleven or twelve. Blue knit stockings, her mother’s made-over dress. A boiled wool coat, English, tight under the arms, some castoff funneled through the Pentecostal charity. She had a huge pair of man’s hockey skates, drew them on over her shoes, laced them tightly. A lace broke. She made a granny knot, poked the metal tip through the eyelet, tied bowknots.

The slanted white marks of the first strokes, then curls and loops like unspooling thread. In the windless twilight she hurtled through the cold. Sound of breathing, skate-risp. Alone on the perfect ice in the red afternoon, the clouds like branches, like a thicket of wavering bleeding branches. Alone. And a pork bun in her pocket. Looked up and saw he was there.

He came onto the ice, unbuttoning his pants, sliding gingerly on the soles of his fishing boots. And although there was no place to go but around and around, although she knew he would get her later if not now, she skated away, evaded his lunging for a long time. Maybe ten minutes. A long time.

She stood now and looked at the pond. Small, uninteresting. No reason to go down to it. The sky was not red but almost black in the southwest. Storms on the way. Soon enough there would be frost on the glass, frost-fur on the sills, the edging of frost that gathered on the quilt where the breath condensed, the timbers of the house contracting in the arctic nights with explosive creakings and snappings. As it was, once. Then, the slide of feet, hot breath on her face. And outside the ravenous wind in the cables, slamming down the chimney and sending rims of smoke up around the stove [226] lids. The raw misery of February. And March, April. Snow until late May. Shuddered.

Well, that life had hardened her, she had made her own way along the rough coasts, had patched and mended her sails, replaced chafed gear with strong, fit stuff. She had worked her way off the rocks and shoals. Had managed. Still managed.

The air tingled. Distant ice was moving down. Snow crystals like shreds of clear plastic formed in cloudless sky, came out of nowhere. She trudged back to the house, the cold in her nostrils like a burned smell. Must listen to the weather forecast. That long drive around. They couldn’t put things off much longer.

Inside she hung up her coat, draped her hat over the shoulder, the lined black gloves in the right pocket. Neatly, the fingers inside, the cuffs hanging limp.

The nephew was reading to them. Might as well start some supper. Something simple. Pancakes. And, pouring flour into the bowl, thought about the coming snow. They had to talk about it. The first storm could close the road. He wouldn’t know.

The wind came skirling down over the tuckamore, moaned through the house cables.

“Supper!” called the aunt. How loud her voice was in the half-furnished room.

“What I wouldn’t give right now,” she said suddenly to Quoyle, forking a pancake onto his cold plate, “to be eating a nice dinner at a good restaurant and going to see a good movie. What I wouldn’t give to go out and get on a heated bus tomorrow morning instead of driving that truck all around the bay. I tell you frankly, the winter begins to scare me.”

As if it had been waiting for the season to be pronounced the snow started, flicking a few grains against the windows.

“You see?” said the aunt as if supported by an ally in an argument.

Quoyle chewed his mouthful of pancake, swallowed tea. He’d thought about it.

“I talked to the bulldozer guy, Dennis’s friend. He’ll plow the road for a price. If the snow is more than three inches. Your truck can manage that much.”

[227] “Twenty-eight miles of plowing! What price might that be?”

“A hundred a pop. Barely pay for the gas. Figured on what the storm frequency is, he estimates he’d have to come out a minimum of twice a week. In five months that’s forty plowings. That’s four thousand dollars. Another possibility is Dennis. He said he could ferry us back and forth with his boat until it iced up too much. If we could pay for the gas and his time at, say, ten dollars an hour.”

“Well, that’s a better bargain,” said the aunt.

“I don’t think so. Figure he has to spend two hours a day—it’s twenty minutes across in smooth water. That’s the same as the bulldozer, a hundred a week. And by January the bay will be iced in. I don’t want to risk the girls on a snowmobile going back and forth across the bay. Dennis says there are weak spots. It’s dangerous. Every winter somebody goes through and drowns. You have to know the route. Come to that, I don’t like this long drive for them every day, either.”

“You have been thinking of all the angles,” said the aunt. Dryly. She was used to being the one who figured things out.

He did not say that the day before the capsize he had walked through the bare rooms of the house and guessed her furniture was not coming this year.

“Then,” he said, cutting Sunshine’s pancake with the edge of his fork to quell her screaking knife, “we could shift across the bay for the winter. Consider this place a summer camp. Nutbeem is leaving in a week or two. His trailer. There’s not room for all four of us, but the girls and I could manage. If you could find a room. Or something. Wouldn’t Mrs. Bangs know of something?”

But the aunt was astonished. She had gone for a walk and looked at a pond. Now everything had rushed on like an unlighted train in the dark.

“Let’s sleep on it,” said the aunt.

In the morning five inches of snow and blinding sunlight, a warm wind. Everything dripped and ran. The white blanket on the roof wrinkled, cracked, broke away in ragged cakes that hissed as they slid down and crashed to the ground. By noon only islands of snow on the damp road and in the hollows on the barrens.

[228] “All right,” said the aunt. “I want to think about this a little more.” Now that it was here, it had come too fast.

¯

“Well, I wondered what happened to you,” said Mavis Bangs, the part in her black hair glowing like a wire in the rhomboid of sunlight. “I thought you might be sick. Or have trouble with the truck. M’dear, I was that worried. Or Dawn said maybe it was the snow, but it melted almost as fast as it come, so we didn’t think it was. Anyway, noon I went up to the post office and got your mail.” She pointed at the aunt’s table with her eyes. Importantly. She had jumped into the habit of doing small kindnesses for Agnis Hamm. And would get the mail or pour a cup of tea unbidden. Proffer things with invisible trumpets.

“It was the snow,” said the aunt. “You know how snow sticks to a dirt road.” She shoveled at the letters. “Fact of the matter we decided it would be better to look for something closer in for the winter. The house be more of a camp, you know. He doesn’t want the children to have to travel all that way on school days. So.” She sighed.

Mrs. Bangs saw it in a flash. “Was you looking for a house for the all of yous? I knows the Burkes been talking about selling their place for good and moving to Florida. They go down every winter. Got friends there now. A bungalow. They live in a Florida bungalow with a verandah. Mrs. Burke, Pansy, says they have got two orange trees and a palm right in the front yard. Picks the oranges right off. Can you believe it? Now that is a place I’d like to see before I die. Florida.”

“I been there,” said Dawn. “You can have it. Give me Montreal. Ooh-la-la. Beauty clothes. All those markets, you never saw food like that in your life, movies, boutiques. You can have Miami. Buncha rich Staties.”

“What’s the Burke place, then,” said the aunt offhandedly.

“Well, it’s up on the ridge. The road that goes out to Flour Sack Cove, but at this end. Like if you was to go outside and face the hill and start climbing—if you could climb right over the houses, [229] you know—you’d about come on it. Grey house with blue trim. Very nice kept up. Mrs. Burke is a housekeeper. An old-fashioned kitchen with the daybed and all, but they got conveniences, too. Oil heat. Dishwasher. Washing machine and dryer in the basement. Basement finished off. Nice fresh wallpaper in all the rooms.”

“Umm,” said the aunt. “You think they’d rent?”

“I doubt it. I don’t believe they wants to rent. They been asked. I believe they wants to sell.”

“Well, you know, actually my nephew is going to take that English fellow’s trailer. Works at the paper. Mr. Nutbeem. He’s leaving pretty soon.”

“So you’d want a separate place, then.”

“Ye—es,” said the aunt.

“I believe the Burke place would be too much for one person,” said Mrs. Bangs. “Even if you was prepared to buy it. It’s got nine rooms. Or ten.”

“I’ve put quite a bit of money into the old house. It’s a shame. Just to use it for a camp. But getting back and forth is a problem. Like they say, what can’t be cured must be endured. I’ve took a room at the Sea Gull for the rest of the week while we work something out. Nephew and the girls are staying with Beety and Dennis. Kind of cramped, but they’re making do. Don’t want to get caught by the snow. But let’s not worry about it right now. What have we got on the schedule for today? The black cushions for the
Arrowhead
.”

“Dawn and me’s finished them black cushions Friday afternoon. Shipped ‘em this morning.”

The aunt looked at her mail. “You’re way ahead of me,” she said. She turned over a postcard and read it. “That’s nice,” she said, voice needled with sarcasm. “I thought we’d be seeing the Pakeys on the
Bubble
this week. Now here’s their postcard and they say they can’t risk coming up here at this time of year. Fair weather sailors, they. No, it’s worse. They’re having the job done by Yacht-crafter! Those bums.” The aunt threw down the postcard, picked up a small package.

“Who do I know in Macau? It’s from Macau.” Tore it open.

[230] “What is this?” she said. A packet of American currency fell on the table. Tied with a pale blue cord. Nothing more.

“That blue ...” Mavis Bangs hesitated, put out her hand.

The aunt looked at the blue cord. Untied it and passed it to her. With a significant look. It was not a cord, but a thin strip of pale blue leather.

29

Alvin Yark

“The bight of a rope ... has two meanings in knotting. First,

it may be any central part of a rope, as distinct from the ends

and standing part. Second, it is a curve or arc in a rope no

narrower than a semicircle. This corresponds to the

topographical meaning of the word, a bight being an indentation

in a coast so wide that it may be sailed out of,

on one tack, in any wind.”

THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

THE SINGLE
advantage of the green house was clear at once. Quoyle, yawning and unshaven in a corner of Beety’s kitchen, was combing the snarls out of Sunshine’s hair and surrounded by affairs of toast, cocoa, searches for misplaced clothing and homework when Tert Card walked in, poured himself a cup of coffee. Dennis away and gone an hour before. Card looked at Beety, let her see him licking his mouth and winking like a turkey with pinkeye.

He stood then in front of Sunshine and Quoyle, clawing at his groin as though scorched by red-hot underwear. “Quoyle. Just wanted to let you know you should call Diddy Shovel. Something about a ship fire. You’ll probably want to go straight along. I put [232] the camera in your car. See if there’s a chance for some pix. I’ll tell you, Jack Buggit is some smart. People would rather read about a clogged head on a ship than all the car wrecks in Newfoundland.” Took his time drinking his coffee. Chucked Sunshine under the chin and scratched again before he ambled out.

“I don’t like that yukky man,” said Sunshine. Feeling Quoyle’s anger through the comb.

“In love with himself,” said Beety. “Always has been. And no competition.”

“Like this,” said Murchie Buggit, hands blurred in demented scratching.

“That’s enough,” said Beety. “You look like a dog with bad fleas.”

“So did he.”’ And Sunshine and Murchie screamed with laughter until Murchie choked on toast crumbs and Quoyle had to slap his back.

But before he called the harbormaster the phone rang.

“For you,” said Beety.

“Hello?” He expected Diddy Shovel’s voice.

“Quoyle,” said Billy Pretty, “you stopped by Alvin Yark’s to talk about a boat?”

“No, Billy. I haven’t even been thinking about it to tell you the truth. Kind of busy the last few weeks. And I guess I’m leery of boats after what happened.”

“That’s why you must go right back to ‘em. Now you been christened. Winter is the finest time to build a boat. Alvin build you something and come ice-out I’ll show you the tricks. Since you’ve been brought up away from the boats and are a danger to yourself.”

Quoyle knew he should feel grateful. But felt stupid. “That’s kind of you, Billy. I know I ought to do it.”

“You just go out there to Alvin’s place. You know where his shop is? Get Wavey to show you. Alvin’s her uncle. Her poor dead mother’s oldest brother.”

“Alvin Yark is Wavey’s uncle?” He seemed to be treading a spiral, circling in tighter and tighter.

[233] “Oh yes.”

While his hand was on the phone Quoyle dialed Diddy Shovel. What was the fire, was there a story in it? Bunny slouched into the kitchen with her sweater on backwards. Quoyle tried to pantomime a command to reverse the sweater, aroused the Beethoven scowl.

“Young man,” the great voice boomed, “while you’re fiddling around the
Rome
bums. Cargo ship,
Rome
, six-hundred-foot vessel, Panamanian registered, carrying a load of zinc and lead powder is, let’s see, about twenty miles out and on fire at thirteen hundred hours. Two casualties. The captain and an unidentified. Rest of the crew taken off by helicopter. Twenty-one chaps from Myanmar. Do you know where Myanmar is?”

“No.”

“Right where Burma used to be. Helicopter took most of the crew to Misky Bay Hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation. Ship is in tow, destination Killick-Claw. More than that I do not know.”

“Do you know how I can get out to her?”

“Why bother? Wait until they bring her in. Shouldn’t be too long.”

Yet by three-thirty the ship still had not entered the narrows. Quoyle called Diddy Shovel again.

“Should be here by five. Understand they’ve had some trouble. Towing cable parted and they had to rig another.”

¯

Wavey came down the steps pulling at the sleeves of her homemade coat, the color of slushy snow. She got in, glanced at him. A slight smile. Looked away.

Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.

“I’ve got to go down to the harbor. So we can pick up the kids and I’ll bring you and young Herold straight back. I can drop Bunny off at Beety’s for an hour or take her with me. They’re [234] towing in a ship that had a fire. Two men dead, including the captain. The others in the hospital. Diddy Shovel says.”

“I tremble to hear it.” And did, in fact, shudder.

The school came in sight. Bunny stood at the bottom of the steps holding a sheet of paper. Quoyle dreaded the things she brought from school, that she showed him with her lip stuck out: bits of pasta glued on construction paper to form a face, pipe cleaners twisted into flowers, crayoned houses with quadrate windows, brown trees with broccoli heads never seen in Newfoundland. School iconography, he thought.

“That’s how Miss Grandy says to do it.”

“But Bunny, did you ever see a brown tree?”

“Marty makes her trees brown. And I’m gonna.”

Quoyle to Wavey. “Billy says I must get a boat built over the winter. He says I should go to Alvin Yark.”

A nod at hearing her uncle’s name.

“He’s a good boat builder,” she said in her low voice. “He’d make you a good one.”

“I thought I would go over on Saturday,” said Quoyle. “And ask. Take the girls. Will you and Herry come with us? Is that a good day?”

“The best,” she said. “And I’ve got things I’ve been wanting to bring to Aunt Evvie. We’ll have supper with them. Aunt Evvie’s some cook.”

Then Quoyle and Bunny were off to the harbor, but the
Rome
had been towed to St. John’s by company orders.

“Usually they tell me,” said Diddy Shovel. “A few years back I’d have twisted ‘em like a watch spring, but why bother now?”

¯

On Saturday the fog was as dense as cotton waste, carried a coldness that ate into the bones. The children like a row of hens in the backseat. Wavey a little dressed up, black shoes glittering on the floor mat. Quoyle’s eyes burned trying to penetrate the mist. Corduroy trousers painfully tight. He made a thousandth vow to lose weight. Houses at the side of the road were lost, the sea invisible. An hour to go ten miles to the Nunny Bag Cove [235] turnoff. Cars creeping the other way, fog lights as dull as dirty saucers.

Nunny Bag Cove was a loop of road crammed with new ranch houses. They could scarcely see them in the mist.

“They had a fire about six years ago,” said Wavey. “The town burned down. Everybody built a new house with the insurance. There was some families didn’t have insurance, five or six I guess, the others shared along with them so it all came out to a new house for everybody. Uncle Al and Auntie Evvie didn’t need such a big house as the old one, so they chipped in.”

“Wait,” said Quoyle. “They built a smaller house than their insurance claim paid for?”

“Umm,” said Wavey. “He had separate insurance on his boat house. Had it insured for the amount as if there was a new long-liner just finished in it.”

“That’s enterprising,” said Quoyle.

“Well, you know, there might have been! Better to guess yes than no. How many have that happened to, and the insurance was only for the building?”

Mrs. Yark, thin arms and legs like iron bars, got them all around the kitchen table, poured the children milk-tea in tiny cups painted with animals, gilt rims. Sunshine had a Gloucester Old Spot pig, Herry a Silver Spangle rooster and hen. A curly homed Dorset sheep for Bunny. The table still damp with recent wiping.

“Chuck, chuck, chuck,” said Herry, finger on the rooster.

“They was old when I was little,” said Wavey.

“Be surprised, m’dear, ‘ow old they is. My grandmother ‘ad them. That’s a long time ago. They come over from England. Once was twelve of them, but all that’s left is the four. The ‘orses and cows are broke, though there’s a number of the saucers. Used to lave some little glassen plates, but they’s broke, too.” Mrs. Yark’s ginger cookies were flying doves with raisin eyes.

Bunny found all the interesting things in the kitchen, a folding bootjack, a tin jelly mold like a castle with pointed towers, a flowered mustache cup with a ceramic bridge at the rim to protect a gentleman’s mustache from sopping.

[236] “You’re lucky you saved these things from the fire,” said Quoyle. Eating more cookies.

“Ah, well,” Mrs. Yark breathed, and Quoyle saw he’d made a mistake.

¯

Quoyle left the women’s territory, followed Alvin Yark out to the shop. Yark was a small man with a paper face, ears the size of half-dollars, eyes like willow leaves. He spoke from lips no more than a crack between the nose and chin.

“So you wants a boat. A motorboat?”

“Just a small boat, yes. I want something to get around the bay—not too big. Something I can handle by myself. I’m not very good at it.”

A cap slewed sideways on his knotty head. He wore a pair of coveralls bisected by a zipper with double tabs, one dangling at his crotch, the other at his breastbone. Under the coveralls he wore a plaid shirt, and over everything a cardigan with more zippers.

“Outboard rodney, I suppose ‘ud do you. Fifteen, sixteen foot. Put a little seven-‘orsepower motor on ‘er. Something like that,” he said pointing at a sturdy boat with good lines resting on a pair of sawhorses.

“Yes,” said Quoyle. Knew enough to recognize he was looking at something good.

“Learn yer young ones to row innit when they gits a little stouter.”

They went into the dull gloom of the shop.

“Ah,” said Yark. “I ‘as a one or two to finish up, y’know,” pointing to wooden skeletons and half-planked sides. “Says I might ‘elp Nige Feam wid ‘is long-liner this winter. But if I gets out in the woods, you know, and finds the timber, it’ll go along. Something by spring, see, by the time the ice goes. If I goes in the woods and finds the right sticks you know, spruce, var. See, you must find good uns, your stem, you wants to bring it down with a bit of a ‘ollow to it, stempost and your knee, and deadwoods a course, and breast’ook. You has to get the right ones. Your timbers, you know. [237] There’s some around ’ere steams ’em. I wouldn’t set down in a steam timber boat. Weak.”

“I thought you’d have the materials on hand,” said Quoyle.

“No, boy, I doesn’t build with dry wood. The boat takes up the water if ‘er’s made out of dry wood, you know, and don’t give it up again. But you builds with green wood and water will never go in the wood. I never builds with dry wood.”