The Shipping News   ::   Proulx E. Annie

” Looked like she had sold the children to Bruce Cudd, the police said.

Quoyle, in his living room, blubbing through red fingers, said he could forgive Petal anything if the children were safe.

Why do we weep in grief, the aunt wondered. Dogs, deer, birds suffered with dry eyes and in silence. The dumb suffering of animals. Probably a survival technique.

“You’re good-hearted,” she said. “Some would curse her mangled body for selling the little girls.” The milk on the verge of turning. Tan knobs in the sugar bowl from wet coffee spoons.

“I will never believe that, that she sold them. Never,” cried Quoyle. His thigh clashed against the table. The sofa creaked.

“Maybe she didn’t. Who knows?” The aunt soothed. “Yes, you’re good-hearted. You take after Sian Quoyle. Your poor grandfather. I never knew him. Dead before I was born. But I saw the picture of him many times, the tooth of a dead man hanging on a string around his neck. To keep toothache away. They believed in that. But he was very good-natured they said. Laughed and sang. Anybody could fool him with a joke.”

“Sounds simpleminded,” sobbed Quoyle into his teacup.

“Well, if he was, it’s the first I ever heard of it. They say when he went under the ice he called out, ‘See you in heaven.’ ”

“I heard that story,” said Quoyle, salty saliva in his mouth and his nose swelling up. “He was just a kid.”

“Twelve years old. Sealing. He’d got as many whitecoats as any man there before he had one of his fits and went off the ice. Nineteen and twenty-seven.”

“Father told us about him sometimes. But he couldn’t have been twelve. I never heard he was twelve. If he drowned when he was twelve he couldn’t have been my grandfather.”

“Ah, you don’t know Newfoundlanders. For all he was twelve he was your father’s father. But not mine. My mother-your grandmother-that was Sian’s sister Addy, and after young Sian drowned she took up with Turvey, the other brother. Then when he drowned, she married Cokey Hamm, that was my father. Lived in the house on Quoyle’s Point for years-where I was born-then we moved over to Catspaw. When we left in 1946 after my father was killed-”

“Drowned,” said Quoyle. Listening in spite of himself. Blowing his nose into the paper napkin. Which he folded and put on the edge of his saucer.

“No. Afterwards we went over to stinking Catspaw Harbor where we was treated like mud by that crowd. There was an awful girl with a purple tetter growing out of her eyebrow. Threw rocks. And then we came to the States.” She sang “ ‘Terra Nova grieving, for hearts that are leaving.’ That’s all I remember of that little ditty.”

Quoyle hated the thought of an incestuous, fit-prone, seal-killing child for a grandfather, but there was no choice. The mysteries of unknown family.

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When the police burst in, the photographer in stained jockey shorts was barking into the phone. Quoyle’s naked daughters had squirted dish detergent on the kitchen floor, were sliding in it.

“They have not been obviously sexually abused, Mr. Quoyle,” said the voice on the telephone. Quoyle could not tell if a man or a woman was speaking. “There was a video camera. There were blank film cartridges all over the place, but the camera jammed or something. When the officers came in he was on the phone to the store where he bought the camera, yelling at the clerk. The children were examined by a child abuse pediatric specialist. She says there was no evidence that he did anything physical to them except undress them and clip their fingernails and toenails. But he clearly had something in mind.”

Quoyle could not speak.

“The children are with Mrs. Bailey at the Social Services office,” said the mealy voice. “Do you know where that is?”

Sunshine was smeared with chocolate, working a handle that activated a chain of plastic gears. Bunny asleep in a chair, eyeballs rolling beneath violet lids. He lugged them out to the car, squeezing them in his hot arms, murmuring that he loved them.

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“The girls look a lot like Feeny and Fanny used to, my younger sisters,” said the aunt, jerking her head up and down. “Look just like ‘em. Feeny’s in New Zealand now, a marine biologist, knows everything about sharks. Broke her hip this spring. Fanny is in Saudi Arabia. She married a falconer. Has to wear a black thing over her face. Come on over here, you little girls and give your aunt a big hug,” she said.

But the children rushed at Quoyle, gripped him as a falling man clutches the window ledge, as a stream of electric particles arcs a gap and completes a circuit. They smelled of Sierra Free dish detergent scented with calendula and horsemint. The aunt’s expression unfathomable as she watched them. Longing, perhaps.

Quoyle, in the teeth of trouble, saw a stouthearted older woman. His only female relative.

“Stay with us,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.” He waited for the aunt to shake her head, say no, she had to be getting back, could only stay a minute longer.

She nodded. “A few days. Get things straightened up.” Rubbed her palms together as if a waiter had just set a delicacy before her. “You can look at it this way,” she said. “You’ve got a chance to start out all over again. A new place, new people, new sights. A clean slate. See, you can be anything you want with a fresh start. In a way, that’s what I’m doing myself.”

She thought of something. “Would you like to meet Warren?” she asked. “ Warren is out in the car, dreaming of old glories.”

Quoyle imagined a doddering husband, but Warren was a dog with black eyelashes and a collapsed face. She growled when the aunt opened the rear door.

“Don’t be afraid,” said the aunt. “ Warren will never bite anyone again. They pulled all of her teeth two years ago.”



4 Cast Away

“Cast Away, to be forced from a ship by a disaster.”

THE MARINER’S DICTIONARY



QUOYLE’S face the color of a bad pearl. He was wedged in a seat on a ferry pitching toward Newfoundland, his windbreaker stuffed under his cheek, the elbow wet where he had gnawed it.

The smell of sea damp and paint, boiled coffee. Nor any escape from static snarled in the public address speakers, gunfire in the movie lounge. Passengers singing “That’s one more dollar for me,” swaying over whiskey.

Bunny and Sunshine stood on the seats opposite Quoyle, staring through glass at the games room. Crimson Mylar walls, a ceiling that reflected heads and shoulders like disembodied putti on antique valentines. The children yearned toward the water-bubble music.