E. Proulx - The Shipping News

Certain wheels had turned, certain cogs enmeshed. Quoyle went on Saturday afternoon, as usual, to Alvin Yark’s, Wavey and the children with him. Wavey turned to the backseat. Looked at Bunny, not as adults look at children, checking guilt or comprehension, fingernails, zipped jackets and hats, but as one adult may look at another. Saying a few things without words. Took Bunny’s hand and squeezed it.

“How do you do, how do you do,” said Herry, who always caught connections.

The car achieved some sort of interior balance on the way to Nunny Bag Cove, a rare harmony of feeling that soothed all the passengers.

Wavey and her Auntie Evvie were hooking a floor mat with a design of seabirds copied from a calendar. Wavey worked at the puffin. Bunny went with her storybook to the rocker at the window. Here the Yark cat, when the glass wasn’t frosty, watched boats as though they were water rats. Sunshine and Herry shook toys from Herry’s red backpack. Though later Sunshine was pulled to the women, the flicking hooks jerking up loops of wool, inventing turrs and caplin. She got the sneeze-provoking smell of burlap backing. Wavey aimed a wink. Sunshine moved in, put her finger on the puffin. Dying to try it.

“This way,” said Wavey, hand closing over the child’s, guiding the hook to seize the pale wool. Bunny turned the pages and smoothed the cat with her stockinged foot. A storm of purring. She looked up.

“Petal was in a car accident in New York and she can’t come here. Because she can never wake up. I could wake her up but it’s too far away. So when I’m grown up I might go there.”

What brought that on, wondered Wavey.

In the shop Yark fretted. The snow was deep, storms and gales raged still, but the ice was breaking up, seal were moving into the bays, the cod and turbot spawning, herring were on the dodge. He felt change and life, the old seasonal longing to get out. Take a few seal. Or shoot at icebergs. Anyway, get moving. But his eyes were too weak for that, watered in the light from snow blindness twenty years earlier, even though his wife had put tea compresses over his eyes. The reason he had to work now in a darkened shop. During the past weeks he had set and wedged the keel into floor blocks, leveled, braced, and immovably secured the boat’s backbone.

“Now it’ll start to look like something. Today we marks out the main timbers.”

With his scraped and worn tape he measured back from the top of the stem along an invisible line, muttered to Quoyle. He calculated the midpoint of the hull length and marked the keel a second time a few inches forward of the midpoint mark. Measured from the sternpost to mark the afterhook placement. Quoyle tidied up rows of chisels and saws, peered out the sawdust-coated window at the bay ice. Still the measurements were not over. Yark calculated the position of the bottom of the counter up from the timberline by rules and patterns he carried in his head.

“Leave me take that saw, boy,” said the old man. His words seemed to come out of a mouthful of snow. Quoyle handed the saw, the chisel, the saw, the chisel, leaned over the work watching Yark notch the timberline to take the timber pairs. At last he could help set in the timbers, holding them while the old man fastened them to the floor with stout braces he called spur shores.

“Now we notches the sternpost, my son.” Bolted on the counter, the metal biting into the wood with its fast grip. Put his hands on his hips and leaned back, groaning. “Might as well quit while we’re ahead. Wavey come?”

“Yes. And the kids.”

“You needs kids about. Keeps you young.” Cleared his throat and spat in the shavings. “When are you two going to do the deed?”

He switched off the light, turned in the gloom of the shop and looked at Quoyle. Quoyle wasn’t sure which deed he meant. The crack that was Yark’s mouth elongated, not a smile so much as a forcing apart of seams that went with the blunt question. To force Quoyle’s seams apart. And other forced seams implicit.

Quoyle’s exhalation that of someone doing heavy work.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Is it the boy?”

Quoyle shook his head. How to say it? That he loved Petal, not Wavey, that all the capacity for love in him had burned up in one fast go. The moment had come and the spark ignited, and for some it never went out. For Quoyle, who equated misery with love. All he felt with Wavey was comfort and a modest joy.

But said, “It’s Herold. Her husband. He’s always in her mind. She’s very deeply attached to his memory.”

“ ‘Erold Prowse!” The old man closed the door. “Let me tell you something about ‘Erold Prowse. There was a sigh of relief went up in some places when he was lost. You’ve heard of the tomcat type of feller, eh? That was ‘Erold. He sprinkled his bastards up and down the coast from St. John’s to Go Aground. It was like a parlor game down in Misky Bay to take a squint at babies and young children, see if they looked like ‘Erold. ‘Appen they often did.”

“Did Wavey know this?”

“Of course she knew. ‘E made her life some miserable. Rubbed her nose in it, ‘e did. Went off for weeks and months, swarvin’ around. No sir, boy, don’t you worry about ‘Erold. Far as keeping ‘Erold’s memory green and sacred goes, of course ‘e turned into a tragic figure. What else could she do? And then there was the boy. Can’t tell a lad born under those circumstances that ‘is dad was a rat. I know she makes a song and dance about ‘Erold. But ‘ow far does that get ‘er?” He opened the door again.

“Not far from Herold, I guess.” said Quoyle, who answered rhetorical questions.

“Depends how you look at it. Evvie’s made bark sail bread. We might as well get the good of it with a cup of tea.” Clapped Quoyle on the arm.

The seal hunt began in March, a few foreigners out on the Front, the bloody Front off Labrador where the harp seals whelped and moulted in the shelter of hummocky ice. Men had burned and frozen and drowned there for centuries, come to a stop when televised in red color, clubbing.

Thousands of seals came into the bays as well and excited landsmen put out after them in anything that would work among the ice floes.

In the 4:00 AM fluorescent brightness Jack Buggit drank a last cup of tea, went to the hook behind the stove for his jacket and hood. Hands into wife-knitted thumbies, took the rifle, box of cartridges in his pocket. Shut off the light and felt through the dark to the latch. The door silent behind him.

The cold air filled his throat like ice water. The sky a net, its mesh clogged with glowing stars.

Down at the stage he loaded gear into the frost-rimed skiff. Rifle, club-wished he had one of the Norwegian hakapiks, handy tool for getting up onto the ice again if you went in. Well, a fisherman had to take his chance. His sealer’s knife, anti-yellow solution, axe, crushed ice, buckets, nylon broom, line, plastic bags. For Jack pelted on the ice. And it had to be right or it was no good at all.

Checked the gas. And was out through the bay ice to the ice beyond.

By full light he was crawling on his belly through jagged knots toward a patch of seals.

Shot the first harps before eight. Jack glanced briefly at a dulled eye, touched the naked pupil, then turned the fat animal on its back and made a straight and centered cut from jaw to tail. Sixty years and more of practice on the seal meadows. Used to be out with a crowd, none of this Lone Ranger stuff. Remembered Harry Clews, a famous skinner who pelted out the fattest with three quick strokes of the knife. Oh what a bad breath the fetter had, indoors they couldn’t abide him. Women put their hands over their noses. Lived in his boat, you might say. The hard life, sealing. And in the end, Harry Clews, expert of a bitter art, was photographed at his trade, put on the cover of a book and reviled the world over.