The Shipping News (48 page)

WEEKS of savage cold. Quoyle was comfortable enough in his sweater and anorak. The old station wagon sputtered and slugged, at last quit in sight of the
Gammy Bird
office. He got out, put his shoulder to it, steering with one hand. Got it rolling, jumped in and turned the key, popped the gearshift. The engine caught for a few seconds, then died again as he rolled up behind Billy's decayed Dodge. Ice in the gas line, he thought. Maybe Billy had some dry gas.

Billy had phone messages. Two calls from the principal of Bunny's school. Call back right away. He dialed, heart in his mouth. Let Bunny be all right.

“Mr. Quoyle. We've had some trouble with Bunny this morning. At recess. I'm sorry to say she pushed one of the teachers,
Mrs. Lumbull. Pushed her very hard. In fact, Bunny knocked her down. She's a large and strong child for her age. No, it was not an accident. By all accounts it was deliberate. I don't need to tell you Mrs. Lumbull is upset and mystified why the child would push her. Bunny will not say why. She's sitting right across from my desk and refuses to speak. Mr. Quoyle, I think you'd better come down and pick her up. Mrs. Lumbull didn't even know Bunny. She's not in her class.”

“Billy, borrow your truck? Got ice in my line.”

Bunny had been moved to the outer office where she sat with her hat and coat on, arms folded, face crimson and set. Wouldn't look at Quoyle. Holding back everything.

The principal with her downy face, wearing the brown wool suit. Fingernails like the bowls of souvenir spoons. Held a pencil as though interrupted in the act of writing. An authoritarian voice, perfected by practice.

“Under the circumstances I have no choice but to suspend Bunny from school until she explains her action and apologizes to Mrs. Lumbull. Now, Bunny, this is your last chance. Your father's here now and I want you to make a clean breast of it. Tell me why you pushed poor Mrs. Lumbull.”

Nothing. Quoyle saw his child's face so full of rage and misery she could not speak.

“Come on,” he said gently, “let's go get in Billy's truck.” Nodded to the principal. Who put her pencil on the desk with a hard sound.

In the truck Bunny bawled.

“You push that teacher?”

“Yes!”

“Why?”

“She's the worst one of all!” And would say no more. So Quoyle drove her to Beety's, thinking here we go again.

“Mrs. Lumbull, eh?” Beety's eyebrows up. “Be willing to bet three cookies you had your reasons.”

“I did,” said Bunny, snorting back tears. Beety pushed Quoyle toward the door. Gave him a little wave.

He heard the story in the afternoon. From Beety by way of Marty.

“Mrs. Lumbull is a float teacher, takes classes when the main teacher is sick or at a conference. Today she took the special ed class. Got ‘em all bundled up, outside. Herry Prowse is in that class. Poor Herry hits the cold air and decides he has to go pee. Tries to tell Mrs. Lumbull. Hopping up and down. You know how Herry talks. Not only does she not understand him—or maybe she does— but she makes him stand at attention against the brick wall to cure his fidgeting and every time he tries to tell her his problem she mimics him, pushes him back. Herry's blubbering away and finally wets his pants and is humiliated. And here comes the avenging angel, Miss Bunny Quoyle, full speed ahead, and rams mean Mrs. Lumbull right behind the knees. The rest is history. If she was mine, Quoyle, I'd give her a medal. But it's going to be tough straightening this out with the school. The principal don't want to hear there's trouble with a teacher. Teachers are hard to get. Even teachers like Mrs. Lumbull. So she'll try to bull it out.”

That evening Quoyle talked to the aunt on the phone, didn't know he would set her in motion. A screech over the wire like a sea gull. She caught an early plane, would not be turned back, and in the morning the principal saw three generations of Quoyles advancing up the frozen driveway. The aunt's new St. John's hairstyle like a helmet, Quoyle's chin jutting, and Bunny between.

Got an earful from the aunt. But it was Quoyle who smoothed things out, explained in a reasonable voice, coaxed the principal and Bunny into mutual apologies and promises. Easy enough for the principal who knew that Mrs. Lumbull was moving to Grand Falls to open a Christian bookstore. Hard for Bunny who still measured events on a child's scale of fair and unfair.

Certain wheels had turned, certain cogs enmeshed. Quoyle went on Saturday afternoon, as usual, to Alvin Yark's, Wavey and
the children with him. Wavey turned to the backseat. Looked at Bunny, not as adults look at children, checking guilt or comprehension, fingernails, zipped jackets and hats, but as one adult may look at another. Saying a few things without words. Took Bunny's hand and squeezed it.

“How do you do, how do you do,” said Herry, who always caught connections.

The car achieved some sort of interior balance on the way to Nunny Bag Cove, a rare harmony of feeling that soothed all the passengers.

Wavey and her Auntie Evvie were hooking a floor mat with a design of seabirds copied from a calendar. Wavey worked at the puffin. Bunny went with her storybook to the rocker at the window. Here the Yark cat, when the glass wasn't frosty, watched boats as though they were water rats. Sunshine and Herry shook toys from Herry's red backpack. Though later Sunshine was pulled to the women, the flicking hooks jerking up loops of wool, inventing turrs and caplin. She got the sneeze-provoking smell of burlap backing. Wavey aimed a wink. Sunshine moved in, put her finger on the puffin. Dying to try it.

“This way,” said Wavey, hand closing over the child's, guiding the hook to seize the pale wool. Bunny turned the pages and smoothed the cat with her stockinged foot. A storm of purring. She looked up.

“Petal was in a car accident in New York and she can't come here. Because she can never wake up. I could wake her up but it's too far away. So when I'm grown up I might go there.”

What brought that on, wondered Wavey.

In the shop Yark fretted. The snow was deep, storms and gales raged still, but the ice was breaking up, seal were moving into the bays, the cod and turbot spawning, herring were on the dodge. He felt change and life, the old seasonal longing to get out. Take a few seal. Or shoot at icebergs. Anyway, get moving. But his eyes were too weak for that, watered in the light from snow blindness twenty years earlier, even though his wife had put tea compresses
over his eyes. The reason he had to work now in a darkened shop.

During the past weeks he had set and wedged the keel into floor blocks, leveled, braced, and immovably secured the boat's backbone.

“Now it'll start to look like something. Today we marks out the main timbers.”

With his scraped and worn tape he measured back from the top of the stem along an invisible line, muttered to Quoyle. He calculated the midpoint of the hull length and marked the keel a second time a few inches forward of the midpoint mark. Measured from the sternpost to mark the afterhook placement. Quoyle tidied up rows of chisels and saws, peered out the sawdust-coated window at the bay ice. Still the measurements were not over. Yark calculated the position of the bottom of the counter up from the timberline by rules and patterns he carried in his head.

“Leave me take that saw, boy,” said the old man. His words seemed to come out of a mouthful of snow. Quoyle handed the saw, the chisel, the saw, the chisel, leaned over the work watching Yark notch the timberline to take the timber pairs. At last he could help set in the timbers, holding them while the old man fastened them to the floor with stout braces he called spur shores.

“Now we notches the sternpost, my son.” Bolted on the counter, the metal biting into the wood with its fast grip. Put his hands on his hips and leaned back, groaning. “Might as well quit while we're ahead. Wavey come?”

“Yes. And the kids.”

“You needs kids about. Keeps you young.” Cleared his throat and spat in the shavings. “When are you two going to do the deed?”

He switched off the light, turned in the gloom of the shop and looked at Quoyle. Quoyle wasn't sure which deed he meant. The crack that was Yark's mouth elongated, not a smile so much as a forcing apart of seams that went with the blunt question. To force Quoyle's seams apart. And other forced seams implicit.

Quoyle's exhalation that of someone doing heavy work.

“I don't know,” he said.

“Is it the boy?”

Quoyle shook his head. How to say it? That he loved Petal,
not Wavey, that all the capacity for love in him had burned up in one fast go. The moment had come and the spark ignited, and for some it never went out. For Quoyle, who equated misery with love. All he felt with Wavey was comfort and a modest joy.

But said, “It's Herold. Her husband. He's always in her mind. She's very deeply attached to his memory.”

“ 'Erold Prowse!” The old man closed the door. “Let me tell you something about ‘Erold Prowse. There was a sigh of relief went up in some places when he was lost. You've heard of the tomcat type of feller, eh? That was ‘Erold. He sprinkled his bastards up and down the coast from St. John's to Go Aground. It was like a parlor game down in Misky Bay to take a squint at babies and young children, see if they looked like ‘Erold. ‘Appen they often did.”

“Did Wavey know this?”

“Of course she knew. ‘E made her life some miserable. Rubbed her nose in it, ‘e did. Went off for weeks and months, swarvin' around. No sir, boy, don't you worry about ‘Erold. Far as keeping ‘Erold's memory green and sacred goes, of course ‘e turned into a tragic figure. What else could she do? And then there was the boy. Can't tell a lad born under those circumstances that ‘is dad was a rat. I know she makes a song and dance about ‘Erold. But ‘ow far does that get ‘er?” He opened the door again.

“Not far from Herold, I guess.” said Quoyle, who answered rhetorical questions.

“Depends how you look at it. Evvie's made bark sail bread. We might as well get the good of it with a cup of tea.” Clapped Quoyle on the arm.