The Shipping News (22 page)

The castle rose, flowers and flying buttresses, one of the aunt's bobby pins with a bit of yarn for a pennant. Now the cars metamorphosed to galloping horses with destructive urges. Bunny and Sunshine clicked their tongues for hoofbeats.

“So home I get, all excited, just pour this out fast as I could talk, Warren sitting there at the kitchen table nodding. I noticed the weight loss, looked sort of grey like how you get with a bad headache or when you're really sick. So I said ‘Don't you feel good?' Warren, poor soul! All knotted up. Then just burst out with it. ‘Cancer. All through me. Four to six months. Didn't want to worry you while you were taking your course.'”

The aunt got up, scraping her chair, went to the door to get a breath free from the moral stench of wax.

“Turned out, it was over in three months. First thing I did
when I pulled myself together was get that puppy and name her.” Didn't explain the need to say part of Irene Warren's name fifty times a day, to invoke the happiness that had been. “She didn't get bad tempered until after she was grown. And then it was only strangers. And after a while I rented the storefront space and started in on yacht upholstery. Warren—my Warren—never saw the shop.”

Quoyle lay on his back on the floor, blocks piled on his chest, rising and falling as he breathed.

“That's boats,” said Sunshine. “Dad is the water and these are my ferryboats. Dad, you are the water.”

“I feel like it,” said Quoyle. Bunny back to the window, put two blocks on the sill. Looked into tuckamore.

“Anyway, I've been working at it for the past thirteen years. And when your father and mother went, though I never knew your mother, I thought it was a good time to come back to the old place. Or risk never seeing it again. I suppose I'm getting old now, though I don't feel it. You shouldn't get down on their level, you know.” Meaning Quoyle on the floor, covered with blocks. “They'll never respect you.”

“Aunt,” said Quoyle, his mind floating somewhere between the boats under his chin and the yacht upholstery business. “The woman in your shop. What did you say she studied at university?” He had always played with his children. The first embarrassed pleasure of stacking blocks with Bunny. He took an interest in sand pies.

“Dawn, you mean? Mrs. Bangs never set foot in a grade school, much less university. Pharology. Science of lighthouses and signal lights. Dawn knows elevations and candlepower, stuff about flashes and blinks and buoys. Bore you silly with it. And you know, she talks about it all day long because it's slipping out of her head. Use it or lose it. And she's losing it. Says so herself. But there's no jobs for her, although the shipping traffic is so heavy you can almost lie awake at night and hear it tearing over the ocean. Why, are you interested in Dawn?” The aunt slid her fingers, feeling the waxy surface.

“No,” said Quoyle. “I don't even know her. Wondered, that's all.”

A fly crawled on the table, stopped to wipe its mouth with its front legs, then limped on, the hind legs more like skids than moving limbs. The aunt snapped her rag.

“Why don't you come by the shop some day next week? Meet Dawn and Mavis. We can have a bite at Skipper Willie's.”

“That's a good idea,” said Quoyle. Glanced at Bunny staring out into tuckamore.

“What are you looking at, Bunny?” Her scowling gaze.

“When I grow up,” said Bunny, “I am going to live in a red log cabin and have some pigs. And I will never kill them for their bacon. Because bacon comes from pigs, Dad. Beety told us. And Dennis killed a pig to get its bacon.”

“Is that right?” said Quoyle, feigning amazement.

Tuesday, and Quoyle couldn't get started on the piece. He shoved the page of rain-smeared notes on the Botterjacht under his pile of papers. He was used to reporting resolutions, votes, minutes, bylaws, agendas, statements embroidered with political ornament. Couldn't describe the varnished wood of
Tough Baby.
How put down on paper the Melvilles' savageness? Bunny much on his mind. The door-scratching business in the old kitchen. He shuffled his papers, looked at his watch again and again. Would go into town and take a look at the aunt's shop. Wanted to ask her about Bunny. Was there a problem or wasn't there. And insatiable Quoyle was starving anyway.

Before he started the station wagon the tall woman, Wavey, came to mind. He looked down the road both ways to see if she was walking. Sometimes she went to the school at noon. He thought, maybe, to help in the lunchroom. Didn't see her. But as he came up over the rise and in sight of Jack's house, there she was, striding along and swinging a canvas bag. He pulled up, glad she was alone, that he was, too.

It was books: she worked in the school library twice a week, she said. Her voice somewhat hoarse. She sat straight, feet neatly side by side. They looked at each other's hands, proving the eye's
affinity for the ring finger; both saw gold. Knew at least one thing about each other.

Silence, the sea unfolding in pieces. A skiff and bobbing dory, men leaning to reset a cod trap. Quoyle glanced, saw her pale mouth, neck, eyes somewhere between green glass and earth color. Rough hands. Not so young; heading for forty. But that sense of harmony with something, what, the time or place. He didn't know but felt it. She turned her head, caught him looking. Eyes flicked away again. But both were pleased.

“I have a daughter starting first grade this fall. Bunny. Her name is Bunny. My youngest daughter is Sunshine, goes to Beety Buggit's house while I'm at work.” He thought he had to say something. Cleared his throat.

“I heard that.” Her voice so quiet. As if she was talking to herself.

At the school driveway she got halfway out the door, murmured something Quoyle did not catch, then strode away. Maybe it was thank-you. Maybe it was stop by and have a cup of tea some day. Her hands swung. She stopped for a moment, took a white, crumpled tissue from her coat pocket, blew her nose. Still Quoyle sat there. Watched her run up the school steps and in through the door. What was wrong with him?

Just to see the way she walked, a tall woman who walked miles. And Petal had never walked if she could ride. Or lie down.

15

The Upholstery Shop

The knots of the upholsterer are the half-hitch, the slip-knot, the double half-hitch, and the tuft knot.

THE AUNT'S shop was in the lane behind Wharf Road. An ochre frame building with wooden flourishes and black shutters. Quoyle liked the row of shops, snug from the wind, yet almost on the wharf. The windows wavery with old glass. A bell jingled as he opened the door. The aunt, working a finger-roll edge on a stuffed pad, looked up. Curved needle halted in midmuslin.

“Here you are,” she said. Looked around as though seeing the shop herself for the first time.

A woman with Emily Dickinson hair looped over her ears and symmetrically divided by a wide part sat at a sewing machine. The chattering needle slowed, the muslin slid over the table. The woman smiled at Quoyle, showing perfect teeth between violet lips, then
her smile faded, a sadness flowed down her face from brow to mouth. A jabot foamed at her throat.

“Mrs. Mavis Bangs,” said the aunt like a master of ceremonies.

At another table, a young woman with a helmet of tight brown curls, scissoring expensively into leather.

“And Dawn Budgel,” said the aunt. The woman tense with concentration, did not look up or stop cutting. There was a smell of leather, dye, size and perfume. The perfume came from Mrs. Bangs whose hands were folded now into each other, who stared at Quoyle. His hand went up to his chin.

“Well, this is it,” said the aunt. “There's only the two sewing stations and one cutting table set up now, but as I build up business I hope to have six sewing and two cutting. That's what I had back in Long Island. I've got a sailing fishing boat that's like a yacht below decks coming up next week—she was built in the States on the West Coast as a salmon-trolling ketch, but now she belongs to a fellow in St. John's. I've seen a few commercial fishing sailboats in the last year or two. Cheap to run, they say. Working sail might be coming back. Don't I wish.”

“Dawn here cutting out the chair backs for the dining salon on the Melvilles' yacht. That color blue matches Mrs. Melville's eyes. She had it specially dyed down in New York. And Mavis is sewing up the liners that go over the foam rubber. Dawn, this is my nephew I told you about. Works for the paper. We're just going to run over across the way to Skipper Will's and get some dinner. Dawn, when you get done cutting you might thread up the other machine with that blue. She had the thread dyed, too.”

The aunt clicked out the door on her black heels, and Quoyle, slow in closing it behind her, heard Mrs. Bangs say to Dawn, “Not what you thought, is he?”

A blast of hot oil and scorch came from Skipper Will's exhaust fan. Inside the fug was worse, fishermen still in bloody oilskins and boots hunched over fries and cod, swigged from cups with dangling strings. Cigarette smoke dissolved in the cloud from the fryer. The
waitress bawled to the kitchen. Quoyle could see Skipper Will's filthy apron surging back and forth like ice in the landwash.

“Well, Agnis girl, what'll you ‘ave today?” The waitress beamed at the aunt.

“I'll have the stewed cod, Pearl. Cuppa tea, of course. This here is my nephew, works for the paper.”

“Oh yis, I sees him afore. In ‘ere the odder day wit' Billy. ‘Ad the squidburger.”

“That I did,” said Quoyle. “Delicious.”

“Skipper Will, y'know, ‘e invented the squidburger. Y'll ‘ave it today, m'dear?”

“Yes,” said Quoyle. “Why not? And tea. With cream.” He had learned about the Skipper's coffee, a weak but acrid brew with undertones of cod.

Quoyle folded his napkin into a fan, unfolded it and made triangles of decreasing size. He looked at the aunt.

“Want to ask you something, Aunt. About Bunny.” Steeled for this conversation. Petal had said a hundred times that Bunny was a “weird kid.” He had denied it. But she was, in fact, different. Something was out of kilter. She was like a kettle of water, simmering and simmering, or in noisy boil before the pot goes dry and cracks, or sometimes cold, with a skim of mineral flowers on the surface.

“Do you think she's normal, Aunt?”

The aunt blew on her tea, looked at Quoyle. Cautious expression. Looked hard at Quoyle as though he were a new kind of leather she might buy.

“Those bad dreams. And her temper. And—” He stopped. Was sayings things badly.

“Well,” said the aunt. “Just think of what's happened. She's lost members of her family. Moved to a strange place. The old house. New people. Her grandparents, her mother. I'm not sure she understands what's happened. She says sometimes that they are still in New York. Things are upside down for her. I suppose they are for all of us.”

“All of that,” said Quoyle drinking his tea savagely, “but there's something”—and his gut rumbled like a train—“something
else. I don't know how to say it, but that's what I'm talking about.” The words “personality disorder”—the Mockingburg kindergarten teacher's words when Bunny pushed other children and hogged the crayons.