Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [103]
“I tremble to hear it.” And did, in fact, shudder.
The school came in sight. Bunny stood at the bottom of the steps holding a sheet of paper. Quoyle dreaded the things she brought from school, that she showed him with her lip stuck out: bits of pasta glued on construction paper to form a face, pipe cleaners twisted into flowers, crayoned houses with quadrate windows, brown trees with broccoli heads never seen in Newfoundland. School iconography, he thought.
“That’s how Miss Grandy says to do it.”
“But Bunny, did you ever see a brown tree?”
“Marty makes her trees brown. And I’m gonna.”
Quoyle to Wavey. “Billy says I must get a boat built over the winter. He says I should go to Alvin Yark.”
A nod at hearing her uncle’s name.
“He’s a good boat builder,” she said in her low voice. “He’d make you a good one.”
“I thought I would go over on Saturday,” said Quoyle. “And ask. Take the girls. Will you and Herry come with us? Is that a good day?”
“The best,” she said. “And I’ve got things I’ve been wanting to bring to Aunt Evvie. We’ll have supper with them. Aunt Evvie’s some cook.”
Then Quoyle and Bunny were off to the harbor, but the Rome had been towed to St. John’s by company orders.
“Usually they tell me,” said Diddy Shovel. “A few years back I’d have twisted ‘em like a watch spring, but why bother now?”
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On Saturday the fog was as dense as cotton waste, carried a coldness that ate into the bones. The children like a row of hens in the backseat. Wavey a little dressed up, black shoes glittering on the floor mat. Quoyle’s eyes burned trying to penetrate the mist. Corduroy trousers painfully tight. He made a thousandth vow to lose weight. Houses at the side of the road were lost, the sea invisible. An hour to go ten miles to the Nunny Bag Cove [235] turnoff. Cars creeping the other way, fog lights as dull as dirty saucers.
Nunny Bag Cove was a loop of road crammed with new ranch houses. They could scarcely see them in the mist.
“They had a fire about six years ago,” said Wavey. “The town burned down. Everybody built a new house with the insurance. There was some families didn’t have insurance, five or six I guess, the others shared along with them so it all came out to a new house for everybody. Uncle Al and Auntie Evvie didn’t need such a big house as the old one, so they chipped in.”
“Wait,” said Quoyle. “They built a smaller house than their insurance claim paid for?”
“Umm,” said Wavey. “He had separate insurance on his boat house. Had it insured for the amount as if there was a new long-liner just finished in it.”
“That’s enterprising,” said Quoyle.
“Well, you know, there might have been! Better to guess yes than no. How many have that happened to, and the insurance was only for the building?”
Mrs. Yark, thin arms and legs like iron bars, got them all around the kitchen table, poured the children milk-tea in tiny cups painted with animals, gilt rims. Sunshine had a Gloucester Old Spot pig, Herry a Silver Spangle rooster and hen. A curly homed Dorset sheep for Bunny. The table still damp with recent wiping.
“Chuck, chuck, chuck,” said Herry, finger on the rooster.
“They was old when I was little,” said Wavey.
“Be surprised, m’dear, ‘ow old they is. My grandmother ‘ad them. That’s a long time ago. They come over from England. Once was twelve of them, but all that’s left is the four. The ‘orses and cows are broke, though there’s a number of the saucers. Used to lave some little glassen plates, but they’s broke, too.” Mrs. Yark’s ginger cookies were flying doves with raisin eyes.
Bunny found all the interesting things in the kitchen, a folding bootjack, a tin jelly mold like a castle with pointed towers, a flowered mustache cup with a ceramic bridge at the rim to protect a gentleman’s mustache from sopping.
[236] “You’re lucky you saved these things from the fire,” said Quoyle. Eating more cookies.
“Ah, well,” Mrs. Yark breathed, and Quoyle saw he’d made a mistake.
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Quoyle left the women’s territory, followed Alvin Yark out to the shop. Yark was a