E. Proulx - The Shipping News

“You’re still here. Saving up money for the next leg?” asked the aunt.

“Ah, that, and I’m finishing some serious repair work. I had planned to go up the St. Lawrence to Montreal, but there was a storm and I got blown off course. I’d never intended coming to Newfoundland at all. If I could help it. It was bad luck I hit one of the worst parts of the coast. Bad rocks. Poor Borogove , all that way and her bottom smashed out in Fly-By-Night, a very strange place. That’s where I heard the chin-music boy.”

“I could go take care of Warren,” said Quoyle to the aunt in a low voice. Saw she’d twisted her napkin into a white rope.

“No, no. You stay with Mr. Nutbeem. I’d rather do it myself. Rather be alone.” And got up and went out.

“Her dog died,” said Quoyle.

Nutbeem waved for more lager.

“My treat,” he said, took a fresh breath. But before he started on Fly-By-Night, Quoyle forced an oar in.

“I heard some of Dennis Buggit’s adventures on the Polar Grinder this afternoon. From Mr. Shovel, the harbormaster. He’s quite the storyteller.”

“Oh yes. That was something, wasn’t it? Makes your flesh creep. My pulse races when Jack comes in. Weird chap. Fellow can read your mind.”

“Jack? He didn’t say anything about Jack, just that he was mad when Dennis signed on the ship. It was the way he described the storm and abandoning the ship. A sea story. But he had to stop before he got to the end.”

“My god, Jack’s part is the best part of the story. Well!” Nutbeem leaned back, looked for the waitress with the lager, saw the glass already in front of him.

“As I heard it, Search and Rescue finally gave Dennis and the others up for lost. They picked up two rafts of survivors and all but one of the lifeboats. Six men all tied together with plastic line. Four men still missing. Including Dennis. A week of searching and then they had to call it off. Aircraft, Coast Guard, fishing boats. All this time Jack hardly slept, down by the Coast Guard wharf, pacing back and forth, smoking, waiting for a message. Mrs. Buggit up at the house. Mind you, I wasn’t there. Heard it all from Billy and Tert Card-and Dennis himself, of course. They came out and told Jack they had to abandon the search. It was as if he didn’t hear them. Stood there, they said, like a stone. Then he turns-you know that sharp way Jack turns-and he says ‘He’s alive.’

“Went to his brother William in Misky Bay and says ‘He’s alive and I know where he is. I want to go out for him.’ William, you see, had a new long-liner, very seaworthy. But he was worried about going too far offshore. The sea continued rough, even a week after the storm. Never said he wouldn’t, mind you, he just hesitated the fraction of an instant. That’s all Jack needed. He spun around on his heel and tore back up to Flour Sack Cove. Got a crowd to help him haul his trap skiff out of the water and onto the trailer, and there went Jack, off for the south coast. He drove all night to Owl Bawl, got the skiff in the water, loaded up with his gas cans, and away he went, out to sea alone to find Dennis.

“And he found him. How he knew where to go is beyond logic. Dennis and one other. Both of Dennis’s arms were broken and the other fellow was unconscious. How did he get them both in the skiff? Jack never said a word, according to what I heard, until they got to Owl Bawl. Then he said, ‘If you ever set foot in a boat again I’ll drown you myself.’ Of course, soon as the casts were off his arms, Dennis went out squid jigging with his wife. And Jack shook his fist at him and they don’t speak.”

“How long ago?” asked Quoyle, sending the foam in his glass around in a circle until a vortex formed.

“Oh donkey’s years. Long ago. Before I came here.”

Miles up the coast the aunt looked at wind-stripped shore. As good a place as any. She parked at the top of the dunes and gazed down the shore. Tide coming in. The sun hung on the rim of the sea. Its flattened rays gilded the wet stones. Combers seethed under a strip of corn-yellow sky.

The waves came on and on, crests streaked tangerine, breaking, receding with the knock of rolling cobbles. She opened the back of Quoyle’s station wagon and lifted out the dead dog.

Down past the wrackline, onto hard sand. The fringe of bladder wrack and knot wrack stretched, relaxed, flowed in again on nervous water. The aunt laid Warren on the stones. An incoming wave drenched the sheet.

“You were a good girl, Warren,” said the aunt. “A smart girl, no trouble at all. I was sorry they had to pull your teeth but it was that or you know what. Ha-ha. You got a few good bites in, didn’t you? Many good years although denied bones. Sorry I can’t bury you, but we are in a difficult situation here. Too bad you couldn’t wait until we moved out to the house. And too bad Irene never knew you. Would have liked you, I’m pretty sure.” Thought, Irene Warren. How I miss you. Always will.

She snorted into her handkerchief, waited in the gathering darkness, moving back a few steps at a time as the tide advanced, until Warren floated free, moved west along the shore, edging out and out, riding some unseen tidal rip. The sea looked as though it would sound if struck. Warren gliding away. Sailed out of sight, into the setting sun.

Just like in the old westerns.

And down the bay Quoyle heard Nutbeem’s everlasting story, Tert Card’s twilight gathered in his glass of Demerara.

THE AUNT set out for the house on Friday morning. She was driving her new truck, a navy blue pickup with a silver cap, the extra-passenger cab, a CD player and chrome running boards.

“We need it. Got to have a truck here. Got to get back and forth to my shop. You got a boat, I got a truck. They’ve got the road fixed and the dock in. Upstairs rooms done. There’s an outhouse. For now. Water’s connected to the kitchen. Some of that new black plastic waterline. Later on we can put in a bathroom. He’s working on the roof this week. If the weather holds. But it’s good enough. We might as well get out there. Out of this awful motel. I’ll pick up groceries and kerosene lamps. You come out with the girls-and your boat-tomorrow morning.”

Her gestures and expressions swift, hands clenching suddenly as though on the reins of a fiery horse. Wild to get there.

The aunt was alone in the house. Her footsteps clapping through the rooms, the ring of bowl and spoon on the table. Her house now. Water boiled magnificently in the teakettle. Upstairs. Yet climbing the stairs, entering that room, was as if she ventured into a rough landscape pocked with sinks and karst holes, abysses invisible until she pitched headlong.

The box holding the brother’s ashes was on the floor in the corner.

“All right,” she said, and seized it. Carried it down and through and out. A bright day. The sea glazed, ornamented with gulls. Her shadow streamed away from her. She went into the new outhouse and tipped the ashes down the hole. Hoisted her skirts and sat down. The urine splattered. The thought that she, that his own son and grandchildren, would daily void their bodily wastes on his remains a thing that only she would know.

On Saturday morning Quoyle and his daughters came along, suitcases humped in the backseat, the speedboat swaying behind on the rented trailer. He steered over the smoothed road. Starting where the road ended in the parking lot of the glove factory, the bulldozer had scraped a lane through the tuckamore to the house. New gravel crunched under the tires. Clouds, tined and serrated, and ocean the color of juice. The sun broke the clouds like a trout on the line.