E. Proulx - The Shipping News

That was what Quoyle loved best, it seemed, sitting on the stony shore out of the wind behind a rock, holding the grill of silvery herring over coals. These cold picnics on the lip of the sea. Wavey made a table from a piece of driftwood and a few stones. Herry trailed rubbery seaweed. The sun warmed a grassy bit of sheep pasture where Bunny and Sunshine raced across the slope.

“Wavey!” Sunshine’s shrill voice. “Wavey, did you bring marshmallows?”

“Yes, maid. The little ones.”

The Maids in the Meadow thought Quoyle, looking at his daughters. And as though something dropped in place, he matched Billy’s father’s verse with his life. The Demon Lover. The Stouthearted Woman. Maids in the Meadow. The Tall and Quiet Woman.

Then Bunny ran at them with her hands cupped. Always an arrow flying to the target. A stiff, perfect bird, as small as a stone in a child’s hand. Folded legs.

“A dead bird,” said Wavey. “The poor thing’s neck is broken.” For the head lolled. She said nothing about sleep nor heaven. Bunny laid it on a rock, went back to look at it twenty times.

The herrings smoked, the children dodged around, saying Dad, Dad, when are they ready. Dad, said Herry. And put his pie-face up, roaring at his own cleverness.

“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.

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.