E. Proulx - The Shipping News

Bunny sat on Quoyle’s shoulders, hands clutched under his chin as he stumped through the tuckamore. The house was the green of grass stain, tilted in fog. She endured her father’s hands on her knees, the smell of his same old hair, his rumbles that she weighed a ton, that she choked him. The house rocked with his strides through a pitching ocean of dwarf birch. That color of green made her sick.

“Be good now,” he said, loosing her fingers. Six years separated her from him, and every day was widening water between her outward-bound boat and the shore that was her father. “Almost there, almost there,” Quoyle panted, pitying horses.

He set her on the ground. She ran with Sunshine up and down the curve of rock. The house threw their voices back at them, hollow and unfamiliar.

The gaunt building stood on rock. The distinctive feature was a window flanked by two smaller ones, as an adult might stand with protective arms around children’s shoulders. Fan lights over the door. Quoyle noticed half the panes were gone. Paint flaked from wood. Holes in the roof. The bay rolled and rolled.

“Miracle it’s standing. That roofline is as straight as a ruler,” the aunt said. Trembling.

“Let’s see how it is inside,” said Quoyle. “For all we know the floors have fallen into the cellar.”

The aunt laughed. “Not likely,” she shouted joyfully. “There isn’t any cellar.” The house was lashed with cable to iron rings set in the rock. Streaks of rust, notched footholds in the stone like steps, crevices deep enough to hide a child. The cables bristled with broken wires.

“Top of the rock not quite level,” the aunt said, her sentences flying out like ribbons on a pole. “Before my time, but they said it rocked in storms like a big rocking chair, back and forth. Made the women sick, afraid, so they lashed it down and it doesn’t move an inch but the wind singing through those cables makes a noise you don’t forget. Oh, do I remember it in the winter storms. Like a moaning.” For the house was garlanded with wind. “That’s one reason I was glad when we moved over to Capsize Cove. There was a store at Capsize and that was a big thing. But then we shifted down the coast to Catspaw, and a year later we were off to the States.” Told herself to calm down.

Rusted twenty-penny nails; planks over the ground-floor windows. Quoyle hooked his fingers under the window planks and heaved. Like pulling on the edge of the world.

“There’s a hammer in the car,” he said. “Under the seat. Maybe a pry bar. I’ll go back and get them. And the food. We can make a picnic breakfast.”

The aunt was remembering a hundred things. “I was born here,” she said. “Born in this house.” Other rites had occurred here as well.

“Me too,” said Sunshine, blowing at a mosquito on her hand. Bunny slapped at it. Harder than necessary.

“No you weren’t. You were born in Mockingburg, New York. There’s smoke over there,” she said, looking across the bay. “Something’s on fire.”

“It’s chimney smoke from the houses in Killick-Claw. They’re cooking their breakfasts over there. Porridge and hotcakes. See the fishing boat out in the middle of the bay? See it going along?”

“I wanna see it,” said Sunshine. “I can’t see it. I can’t SEE it.”

“You stop that howling or you’ll see your bottom warmed,” said the aunt. Face red in the wind.

Quoyle remembered himself crying “I can’t see it,” to a math teacher who turned away, gave no answers. The fog tore apart, light charged the sea like blue neon.

The wood, hardened by time and corroding weather, clenched the nails fast. They came out crying. He wrenched the latch but could not open the door until he worked the tire iron into the crack and forced it.

Dark except for the blinding rectangle streaming through the open door. Echo of boards dropping on rock. Light shot through glass in slices, landed on the dusty floors like strips of yellow canvas. The children ran in and out the door, afraid to go into the gloom alone, shrieking as Quoyle, levering boards outside, gave ghostly laughs and moans, “Huu huu huu.”

Then inside, the aunt climbing the funneled stairs, Quoyle testing floorboards, saying be careful, be careful. Dust charged the air and they were all sneezing. Cold, must; canted doors on loose hinges. The stair treads concave from a thousand shuffling climbs and descents. Wallpaper poured backwards off the walls. In the attic a featherbed leaking bird down, ticking mapped with stains. The children rushed from room to room. Even when fresh the rooms must have been mean and hopeless.

“That’s one more dollar for me!” shrieked Bunny, whirling on gritty floor. But through the windows the cool plain of sea.

Quoyle went back out. The wind as sweet in his nose as spring water in a thirsty mouth. The aunt coughing and half-crying inside.

“There’s the table, the blessed table, the old chairs, the stove is here, oh my lord, there’s the broom on the wall where it always hung,” and she seized the wooden handle. The rotted knot burst, straws shot out of the binding wire and the aunt held a stick. She saw the stovepipe was rusted through, the table on ruined legs, the chairs unfit.

“Needs a good scurrifunging. What mother always said.”

Now she roved the rooms, turned over pictures that spit broken glass. Held up a memorial photograph of a dead woman, eyes half open, wrists bound with strips of white cloth. The wasted body lay on the kitchen table, coffin against the wall.

“Aunt Eltie. She died of TB.” Held up another of a fat woman grasping a hen.

“Auntie Pinkie. She was so stout she couldn’t get down to the chamber pot and had to set it on the bed before she could pee.” Square rooms, lofty ceilings. Light dribbled like water through a hundred sparkling holes in the roof, caught on splinters. This bedroom. Where she knew the pattern of cracks on the ceiling better than any other fact in her life. Couldn’t bear to look. Downstairs again she touched a paint-slobbered chair, saw the foot knobs on the front legs worn to rinds. The floorboards slanted under her feet, wood as bare as skin. A rock smoothed by the sea for doorstop. And three lucky stones strung on a wire to keep the house safe.

Outside, an hour later, Quoyle at his fire, the aunt taking things out of the food box; eggs, a crushed bag of bread, butter, jam. Sunshine crowded against the aunt, her hands following, seizing packets. The child unwrapped the butter, the aunt spread it with a piece of broken wood for a knife, stirred the shivering eggs in the pan. The bread heel for the old dog. Bunny at the landwash casting peckled stones. As each struck, foaming lips closed over it.

They sat beside the fire. The smoky stingo like an offering from some stone altar, the aunt thought, watched the smolder melt into the sky. Bunny and Sunshine leaned against Quoyle. Bunny ate a slice of bread rolled up, the jelly poised at the end like the eye of a toaster oven, watched the smoke gyre.

“Dad. Why does smoke twist around?”

Quoyle tore circles of bread, put pinches of egg atop and said “Here comes a little yellow chicken to the ogre’s lair,” and made the morsels fly through the air and into Sunshine’s mouth. And the children were up and off again, around the house, leaping over the rusted cables that held it to the rock.

“Dad,” panted Bunny, clacking two stones together. “Isn’t Petal going to live with us any more?”

Quoyle was stunned. He’d explained that Petal was gone, that she was asleep and could never wake up, choking back his own grief, reading aloud from a book the undertaker had supplied, A Child’s Introduction to Departure of a Loved One .