Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [100]
The wind came skirling down over the tuckamore, moaned through the house cables.
“Supper!” called the aunt. How loud her voice was in the half-furnished room.
“What I wouldn’t give right now,” she said suddenly to Quoyle, forking a pancake onto his cold plate, “to be eating a nice dinner at a good restaurant and going to see a good movie. What I wouldn’t give to go out and get on a heated bus tomorrow morning instead of driving that truck all around the bay. I tell you frankly, the winter begins to scare me.”
As if it had been waiting for the season to be pronounced the snow started, flicking a few grains against the windows.
“You see?” said the aunt as if supported by an ally in an argument.
Quoyle chewed his mouthful of pancake, swallowed tea. He’d thought about it.
“I talked to the bulldozer guy, Dennis’s friend. He’ll plow the road for a price. If the snow is more than three inches. Your truck can manage that much.”
[227] “Twenty-eight miles of plowing! What price might that be?”
“A hundred a pop. Barely pay for the gas. Figured on what the storm frequency is, he estimates he’d have to come out a minimum of twice a week. In five months that’s forty plowings. That’s four thousand dollars. Another possibility is Dennis. He said he could ferry us back and forth with his boat until it iced up too much. If we could pay for the gas and his time at, say, ten dollars an hour.”
“Well, that’s a better bargain,” said the aunt.
“I don’t think so. Figure he has to spend two hours a day—it’s twenty minutes across in smooth water. That’s the same as the bulldozer, a hundred a week. And by January the bay will be iced in. I don’t want to risk the girls on a snowmobile going back and forth across the bay. Dennis says there are weak spots. It’s dangerous. Every winter somebody goes through and drowns. You have to know the route. Come to that, I don’t like this long drive for them every day, either.”
“You have been thinking of all the angles,” said the aunt. Dryly. She was used to being the one who figured things out.
He did not say that the day before the capsize he had walked through the bare rooms of the house and guessed her furniture was not coming this year.
“Then,” he said, cutting Sunshine’s pancake with the edge of his fork to quell her screaking knife, “we could shift across the bay for the winter. Consider this place a summer camp. Nutbeem is leaving in a week or two. His trailer. There’s not room for all four of us, but the girls and I could manage. If you could find a room. Or something. Wouldn’t Mrs. Bangs know of something?”
But the aunt was astonished. She had gone for a walk and looked at a pond. Now everything had rushed on like an unlighted train in the dark.
“Let’s sleep on it,” said the aunt.
In the morning five inches of snow and blinding sunlight, a warm wind. Everything dripped and ran. The white blanket on the roof wrinkled, cracked, broke away in ragged cakes that hissed as they slid down and crashed to the ground. By noon only islands of snow on the damp road and in the hollows on the barrens.
[228] “All right,” said the aunt. “I want to think about this a little more.” Now that it was here, it had come too fast.
¯
“Well, I wondered what happened to you,” said Mavis Bangs, the part in her black hair glowing like a wire in the rhomboid of sunlight. “I thought you might be sick. Or have trouble with the truck. M’dear, I was that worried. Or Dawn said maybe it was the snow, but it melted almost as fast as it come, so we didn’t think it was. Anyway, noon I went up to the post office and got your mail.” She pointed at the aunt’s table with her eyes. Importantly. She had jumped into the habit of doing small kindnesses for Agnis Hamm. And would get the mail or pour a cup of tea unbidden. Proffer things with invisible trumpets.
“It was the snow,” said the aunt. “You know how snow sticks