Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [11]
“Drink some tea.”
“Some people probably thought she was bad, but I think she was starved for love. I think she just couldn’t get enough love. [24] That’s why she was the way she was. Deep down she didn’t have a good opinion of herself. Those things she did—they reassured her for a little while. I wasn’t enough for her.”
Did he believe that pap, the aunt wondered? She guessed that this was Quoyle’s invention, this love-starved Petal. Took one look at the arctic eyes, the rigidly seductive pose of Petal’s photograph, Quoyle’s silly rose in a water glass beside it, and thought to herself, there was a bitch in high heels.
¯
Quoyle had gasped, the phone to his ear, loss flooding in like the sea gushing into a broken hull. They said the Geo had veered off the expressway and rolled down a bank sown with native wild flowers, caught on fire. Smoke poured from the real estate agent’s chest, Petal’s hair burned. Her neck broken.
Newspaper clippings blew out of the car, along the highway; reports of a monstrous egg in Texas, a fungus in the likeness of Jascha Heifetz, a turnip as large as a pumpkin, a pumpkin as small as a radish.
The police, sorting through singed astrology magazines and clothes, found Petal’s purse crammed with more than nine thousand dollars in cash, her calendar book with a notation to meet Bruce Cudd on the morning before the accident. In Bacon Falls, Connecticut. There was a receipt for seven thousand dollars in exchange for “personal services.” 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, [25] 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