The Shipping News (9 page)

“I wanna see it,” said Sunshine. “I can't see it. I can't
SEE
it.”

“You stop that howling or you'll see your bottom warmed,” said the aunt. Face red in the wind.

Quoyle remembered himself crying “I can't see it,” to a math teacher who turned away, gave no answers. The fog tore apart, light charged the sea like blue neon.

The wood, hardened by time and corroding weather, clenched the nails fast. They came out crying. He wrenched the latch but could not open the door until he worked the tire iron into the crack and forced it.

Dark except for the blinding rectangle streaming through the open door. Echo of boards dropping on rock. Light shot through glass in slices, landed on the dusty floors like strips of yellow canvas. The children ran in and out the door, afraid to go into the gloom alone, shrieking as Quoyle, levering boards outside, gave ghostly laughs and moans, “Huu huu huu.”

Then inside, the aunt climbing the funneled stairs, Quoyle testing floorboards, saying be careful, be careful. Dust charged the air and they were all sneezing. Cold, must; canted doors on loose hinges. The stair treads concave from a thousand shuffling climbs and descents. Wallpaper poured backwards off the walls. In the attic a featherbed leaking bird down, ticking mapped with stains. The children rushed from room to room. Even when fresh the rooms must have been mean and hopeless.

“That's one more dollar for me!” shrieked Bunny, whirling on gritty floor. But through the windows the cool plain of sea.

Quoyle went back out. The wind as sweet in his nose as spring water in a thirsty mouth. The aunt coughing and half-crying inside.

“There's the table, the blessed table, the old chairs, the stove is here, oh my lord, there's the broom on the wall where it always hung,” and she seized the wooden handle. The rotted knot burst, straws shot out of the binding wire and the aunt held a stick. She saw the stovepipe was rusted through, the table on ruined legs, the chairs unfit.

“Needs a good scurrifunging. What mother always said.”

Now she roved the rooms, turned over pictures that spit broken glass. Held up a memorial photograph of a dead woman, eyes half open, wrists bound with strips of white cloth. The wasted body lay on the kitchen table, coffin against the wall.

“Aunt Eltie. She died of TB.” Held up another of a fat woman grasping a hen.

“Auntie Pinkie. She was so stout she couldn't get down to the chamber pot and had to set it on the bed before she could pee.”

Square rooms, lofty ceilings. Light dribbled like water through a hundred sparkling holes in the roof, caught on splinters. This bedroom. Where she knew the pattern of cracks on the ceiling better than any other fact in her life. Couldn't bear to look. Downstairs again she touched a paint-slobbered chair, saw the foot knobs on the front legs worn to rinds. The floorboards slanted under her feet, wood as bare as skin. A rock smoothed by the sea for doorstop. And three lucky stones strung on a wire to keep the house safe.

Outside, an hour later, Quoyle at his fire, the aunt taking things out of the food box; eggs, a crushed bag of bread, butter, jam. Sunshine crowded against the aunt, her hands following, seizing packets. The child unwrapped the butter, the aunt spread it with a piece of broken wood for a knife, stirred the shivering eggs in the pan. The bread heel for the old dog. Bunny at the landwash casting peckled stones. As each struck, foaming lips closed over it.

They sat beside the fire. The smoky stingo like an offering from some stone altar, the aunt thought, watched the smolder melt into the sky. Bunny and Sunshine leaned against Quoyle. Bunny ate a slice of bread rolled up, the jelly poised at the end like the eye of a toaster oven, watched the smoke gyre.

“Dad. Why does smoke twist around?”

Quoyle tore circles of bread, put pinches of egg atop and said “Here comes a little yellow chicken to the ogre's lair,” and made the morsels fly through the air and into Sunshine's mouth. And the children were up and off again, around the house, leaping over the rusted cables that held it to the rock.

“Dad,” panted Bunny, clacking two stones together. “Isn't Petal going to live with us any more?”

Quoyle was stunned. He'd explained that Petal was gone, that she was asleep and could never wake up, choking back his own grief, reading aloud from a book the undertaker had supplied, A Child's
Introduction to Departure of a Loved One.

“No, Bunny. She's gone to sleep. She's in heaven. Remember,
I told you?” For he had protected them from the funeral, had never said the word. Dead.

“And she can't get up again?”

“No. She's sleeping forever and she can never get up.”

“You cried, Daddy. You put your head on the refrigerator and cried.”

“Yes,” said Quoyle.

“But I didn't cry. I thought she would come back. She would let me wear her blue beads.”

“No. She can't come back.” And Quoyle had given away the blue beads, all the heaps of chains and beads, the armfuls of jewel-colored clothes, the silly velvet cap sewed over with rhinestones, the yellow tights, the fake red fox coat, even the half-empty bottles of Trésor, to the Goodwill store.

“If I was asleep I would wake up,” said Bunny, walking away from him and around the house.

She was alone back there, the stunted trees pressing at the foot of the rock. A smell of resin and salt. Behind the house a ledge. A freshet plunged into a hole. The color of the house on this side, away from the sun, was again the bad green. She looked up and the walls swelled out as though they were falling. Turned again and the tuckamore moved like legs under a blanket. There was a strange dog, white, somehow misshapen, with matted fur. The eyes gleamed like wet berries. It stood, staring at her. The black mouth gaped, the teeth seemed packed with stiff hair. Then it was gone like smoke.

She shrieked, stood shrieking, and when Quoyle ran to her, she climbed up on him, bellowing to be saved. And though later he beat through the tuckamore with a stick for half an hour they saw no dog, nor sign. The aunt said in the old days when the mailman drove a team and men hauled firewood with dogs, everyone kept the brutes. Perhaps, she said doubtfully, some wild tribe had descended from those dogs. Warren snuffled without enthusiasm, refused to take a scent.

“Don't go wandering off by yourselves, now. Stay with us.”
The aunt made a face at Quoyle that meant—what? That the child was nervy.

She looked down the bay, scanned the shoreline, the fiords, thousand-foot cliffs over creamy water. The same birds still flew from them like signal flares, razored the air with their cries. Darkening horizon.

The old place of the Quoyles, half ruined, isolated, the walls and doors of it pumiced by stony lives of dead generations. The aunt felt a hot pang. Nothing would drive them out a second time.

6

Between Ships

Oh make ‘er fast and stow yer gear,

Leave ‘er, Johnny, leave ‘er!

An tie ‘er up to the bloomin pier,

It's time for we to leave ‘er!

OLD SONG

THE FIRE was dying. Dominoed coals gave off the last heat. Bunny lay plastered against Quoyle under the wing of his jacket. Sunshine squatted on the other side of the fire piling pebbles on top of each other. Quoyle heard her murmuring to them, “Get up there, honey, you want the pancakes?” She could not stack more than four before they fell.

The aunt ticked off points on her fingers, drew lines on the rock with a burned stick. But they could not live in the house, said Quoyle, perhaps for a long time. They
could
live in the house, said the aunt, the words lunging at something, but it would be hard. Ah, even if the house was like new, said Quoyle, he couldn't drive back and forth on that road every day. The first part of the road was god-awful.

“Get a boat.” The aunt, dreamily, as though she meant a schooner for the trade winds. “With a boat you don't need the road.”

“What about stormy weather? Winter?” Quoyle heard his own idiotic voice. He did not want a boat, shied from the thought of water. Ashamed he could not swim, couldn't learn.

“Rare the storm a Newfoundlander couldn't cross the bay in,” said the aunt. “In the winter, the snowmobile.” Her stick grated on the rock.

“A road still might be better,” said Quoyle imagining coffee roaring out of a spigot and into his cup.

“Well, granted we can't live in the house for a while, maybe two or three months,” said the aunt, “we can find a place to rent in Killick-Claw where you'll be near your newspaper work until the house is fixed. Let's drive up this afternoon, get a couple of motel rooms and see if we can find a house to rent, line up some carpenters to start on this place. Want a babysitter or a play school for the girls. I've got my own work to do, you know. Locate a work space, get set up. That wind is coming stronger.” The coals fountained sparks.

“What is your work anyway, Aunt? I'm embarrassed to say I don't know. I mean, I never thought to ask.” Had blundered into the unlikely journey knowing nothing, breathing grief like a sour gas. Hoped for oxygen soon.

“Understandable under the circumstances,” said the aunt. “Upholstery.” Showed her yellow, callused fingers. “I had the tools and fabric crated up and shipped. Should be here next week. You know, we ought to make a list while we're right here of the work to be done on this place. Needs a new roof, chimney repair. Have you got any paper?” She knew he had a boxful.

“Back in the car. I'll go back and get my notebook. Come on, Bunny, sit here. You can keep my place warm.”

“See if you can find those crackers on the front seat. I think Bunny would perk up if she had a cracker.” The child scowled. There's a sweet expression, thought the aunt. Felt the wind hard off the bay. A roll of cloud on the edge of the sea and the black and white waves like a grim tweed.

“Let's see,” said the aunt. She had thrown new wood on the fire and the flames sprang about under the gusting wind. “Window glass, insulation, tear out the walls, new wallboard, a new door, a storm door, repair the chimneys, stovepipe, new waterline from the spring. Can these children abide an outhouse?” Quoyle hated the thought of their small bottoms clapped onto the roaring seat of a two-holer. Nor did he like the idea for his own hairy rump.