The Shipping News (8 page)

“Aunt, I don't think I can drive on this. It doesn't look like it goes anywhere.”

“There's tire tracks on it,” she said, pointing to cleated tread
marks. Quoyle turned onto the sumpy road. Churned mud. The tire marks disappeared. Must have turned around, thought Quoyle, wanting to do the same and try tomorrow. Or had dropped in a bottomless hole.

“When are we gonna get there?” said Bunny, kicking the back of the seat. “I'm tired of going somewhere. I want to be there. I want to put on my bathing suit and play on the beach.”

“Me too.” Both throwing themselves rhythmically against the seat.

“It's too cold. Only polar bears go swimming now. But you can throw stones in the water. On the map, Aunt, how long is this road?” Hands ached from days of clenching.

She breathed over the map awhile. “From the main road to Capsize Cove is seventeen miles.”

“Seventeen miles of this!”

“And then,” as if he hadn't spoken, “eleven more to Quoyle's Point. To the house. Whatever's left of it. They show this road on the map, but in the old days it wasn't there. There was a footpath. See, folks didn't drive, nobody had cars then. Go places in the boat. Nobody had a car or truck. That paved main highway we come up on is all new.” Yet the signature of rock written against the horizon in a heavy hand; unchanged, unchanging.

“Hope we don't get to Capsize Cove and discover we've got an eleven-mile hike in front of us.” The rasp of his nylon sleeve on the wheel.

“We might. Then we'll just turn around.” Her expression was remote. The bay seemed to be coming out of her mind, a blue hallucination.

Quoyle and the road in combat. Car Disintegrates on Remote Goatpath. Dusk washed in, the car struggled up a grade. They were on the edge of cliffs. Below, Capsize Cove, the abandoned houses askew. Fading light. Ahead, the main track swallowed in distance.

Quoyle pulled onto the shoulder, wondered if anybody had ever gone over the edge, metal jouncing on rocks. The side track down to the ruined cove steep, strewn with boulders. More gully than road.

“Well, we're not going to make the Point tonight,” he said. “This is as far as I think we should drive until we can get a look at the road in daylight.”

“You don't want to go back out to the highway, do you?” cried the aunt in her hot voice. So close to the beginning of everything.

“Yeah,” said Bunny. “I want to go to a motel with
TV
and hamburgers and chips that you can eat in bed. And lights that go down, down, down when you turn the knob. And you can turn the television off and on with that thing without getting out of bed.”

“I want fried chicken in the bed,” said Sunshine.

“No,” said Quoyle. “We're going to stick it out right here. We've got a tent in the back and I'm going to set it up beside the car and sleep in it. That's the plan.” He looked at the aunt. It had been her idea. But she bent over her purse, rummaging for something private. Her old hair flattened and crushed.

“We've got air mattresses, we've got sleeping bags. We blow up the air mattresses and fold down the backseat and spread them out, put the sleeping bags on them and there you are, two nice comfortable beds. Aunt will have one and you two girls can share the other. I don't need an air mattress. I'll put my sleeping bag on the tent floor.” He seemed to be asking questions.

“But I'm so starved,” moaned Bunny. “I hate you, Dad! You're dumb!” She leaned forward and hit Quoyle on the back of the head.

“HERE NOW
!” The outraged aunt roared at Bunny. “Take your seat, Miss, and don't ever let me hear you speak to your father like that again or I'll blister your bottom for you.” The aunt let the blood boil up around her heart.

Bunny's face contorted into a tragic mask. “Petal says Dad is dumb.” She hated them all.

“Everybody is dumb about some things,” said Quoyle mildly. He reached back between the seats, his red hand offered to Bunny. To console her for the aunt's shouting. The dog licked his fingers. There was the familiar feeling that things were going wrong.

“Well, I'm not doing that again,” said the aunt, rotating her head, tipping her chin up. “Sleeping in the car. Feel like my neck is welded. And Bunny sleeps as quiet as an eggbeater.”

They walked around in the roky damp, in a silence. The car glazed with salt. Quoyle squinted at the road. It curved, angled away from shoreline and into fog. What he could see of it looked good. Better than yesterday.

The aunt slapped mosquitoes, knotted a kerchief under her chin. Quoyle longed for bitter coffee or a clear view. Whatever he hoped for never happened. He rolled the damp tent.

Bunny's eyes opened as he threw in the tent and sleeping bag, but she sank back to sleep when the car started. Seeing blue beads that fell and fell from a string although she held both ends tightly.

The interior of the station wagon smelled of human hair. An arc showed in the fog, beyond it a second arc of faint prismatic colors.

“Fogbow,” said the aunt. How loud the station wagon engine sounded.

Suddenly they were on a good gravel road.

“Look at this,” said Quoyle. “This is nice.” It curled away. They crossed a concrete bridge over a stream the color of beer.

“For pity's sake,” said the aunt. “It's a wonderful road. But for what?”

“I don't know,” said Quoyle, bringing his speed up.

“Got to be some reason. Maybe people come across from Killick-Claw to Capsize Cove by ferry, and then drive out to Quoyle's Point this way? God knows why. Maybe there's a provincial park. Maybe there's a big hotel,” said the aunt. “But how in the world could they make it up from Capsize Cove? That road is all washed out. And Capsize Cove is dead.”

They noticed sedgy grass in the centerline, a damp sink where a culvert had dropped, and, in the silted shoulders, hoofprints the size of cooking pots.

“Nobody's driven this fancy road in a long time.”

Quoyle stood on the brakes. Warren yelped as she was thrown against the back of the seat. A moose stood broadside, looming; annoyance in its retreat.

A little after eight they swept around a last corner. The road came to an end in an asphalt parking lot beside a concrete building. The wild barrens pressed all around.

Quoyle and the aunt got out. Silence, except for the wind sharpening itself on the corner of the building, the gnawing sea. The aunt pointed at cracks in the walls, a few windows up under the eaves. They tried the doors. Metal, and locked.

“Not a clue,” said the aunt, “whatever it is. Or was.”

“I don't know what to make of it,” said Quoyle, “but it all stops here. And the wind's starting up again.”

“Oh, without a doubt this building goes with the road. You know,” said the aunt, “if we can scout up something to boil water in, I've got some tea bags in my pocketbook. Let's have a break and think about this. We can use the girls' soda cans to drink out of. I can't believe I forgot to get coffee.”

“I've got my camping frying pan with me,” said Quoyle. “Never been used. It was in my sleeping bag. I slept on it all night.”

“Let's try it,” said the aunt, gathering dead spruce branches festooned with moss, blasty boughs she called them, and the moss was old man's whiskers. Remembering the names for things. Heaped the boughs in the lee of the building.

Quoyle got the water jug from the car. In fifteen minutes they were drinking out of the soda cans, scalding tea that tasted of smoke and orangeade. The aunt drew the sleeve of her sweater down to protect her hand from the hot metal. Fog shuddered against their faces. The aunt's trouser cuffs snapped in the wind. Ochre brilliance suffused the tattered fog, disclosed the bay, smothered it.

“Ah!” shouted the aunt pointing into the stirring mist. “I
saw the house.
The old windows. Double chimneys. As it always was. Over there! I'm telling you I saw it!”

Quoyle stared. Saw fog stirring.

“Right over there. The cove and then the house.” The aunt strode away.

Bunny got out of the car, still in her sleeping bag, shuffling along over the asphalt. “Is this it?” she said, staring at the concrete wall. “It's awful. There's no windows. Where's my room going to
be? Can I have a soda, too? Dad, there's smoke coming out of the can and coming out of your mouth, too. How do you do that, Daddy?”

Half an hour later they struggled together toward the house, the aunt with Sunshine on her shoulders, Quoyle with Bunny, the dog limping behind. The wind got under the fog, drove it up. Glimpses of the ruffled bay. The aunt pointing, arm like that of the shooting gallery figure with the cigar in its metal hand. In the bay they saw a scallop dragger halfway to the narrows, a wake like the hem of a slip showing behind it.

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?”