Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [124]
[282] Smoke coming out of the metal pipe of the old cousin’s shack. The snowmobile’s whine throttled back to stuttered idling.
“Leave it running,” said Dennis.
Worse than Quoyle remembered. The stink was gagging. The old man too weak or befuddled to get to the outhouse. A skeleton trembled before them. The dog near the stove didn’t move. But was alive. Quoyle could not help it. He retched and staggered to the doorway. In the fenced pasture three humps under the snow. Frozen sheep.
“Uncle Nolan,” he heard Dennis say. “It’s Dennis Buggit, Jack Buggit’s boy, from across the bay. My wife’s sent you some bread.” He drew the bread out of the carrier bag. The sweet, homely perfume of bread. The skeleton was upon it, crushing the loaf into his mouth, a muffled howling coming out of the twitching crust.
Dennis came outside, spat. Cleared his throat and spat again.
“Some stinking mess. Poor old bugger’s starving. Christ in the early morning, what a mess. He’d better go into a home, don’t you think? He’s off his rocker. Burning the walls of his house, there. You see where he’s ripping the boards off? He’s your kin, so it’s up to you. What to do with him. They take him away, I’ll come back over, drown the old dog. Half dead anyway.”
“I don’t have any idea what to do about him.”
“Beety will know who to call up about this. She gives time to that Saving Grace place that helps the women. And the Teenage Mothers. Knows all them groups. Her and Wavey.”
“Beety and Wavey?” Quoyle’s face flaming with guilt. He should have looked out for the wretched old cousin the first time he saw him. Didn’t think.
“That Saving Grace, Beety and Wavey started it. Couple years ago. Councilman lived over near us beat his wife up one winter, pushed her out naked-ass in the snow. She come to Beety. Blue with cold, deaf and blood in her ears. Next day Beety calls up Wavey. Wavey knows how to set up them groups, get something started, after she got the special ed group up. Get the Province’s ear, see? Make them pay attention.”
“Some women,” said Quoyle. But thought, oh you should have [283] seen Petal, you should have seen my lovely girl. A preposterous thought, Petal in Killick-Claw, and not funny. She would have screamed, jumped on the next plane out. Never, never to be seen again.
“My son,” said Dennis, “you don’t know the half of it,” and gunned the snowmobile out onto the wind-scoured bay.
35
The Day’s Work
“Day’s Work, consists, at least, of the dead reckoning from
noon to noon, morning and afternoon time sights for longitude,
and a meridian altitude for latitude.”
THE MARINER’S DICTIONARY
“WANT to talk to you, Quoyle.” Jack, shouting down the wire. “Pick you up tomorrer morning. So they know who you are down to Misky Bay.” Bristling cough. Hung up before Quoyle could say anything. If he’d had anything to say.
By January it had always been winter. The sky blended imperceptibly into the neutral-colored ice that covered the ocean, solid near shore, jigsaw floes fifty miles out and heaving on the swells. Snow fell every day, sometimes slow flakes, as if idling between storms. Deepened, deepened; five, eight, eleven feet deep. The roads were channels between muffling banks, metal, wood silenced. And every ten days or so, by Quoyle’s reckoning, another storm.
Jack’s truck heater blasted, yet their breaths iced the side [285] windows. Quoyle scraped with his fingernails to look for the harp seals that began to dot the far ice now like commas and semicolons. Half listening to Jack. Thinking of seals. Wavey’s older brother, Oscar, had a pet seal. Devoted to the local scallops. Jack had things on his mind and talked like a rivet gun. The new groundfish fishing season had opened, a maze of allocations and quotas that threw him into reverse.
“Einstein couldn’t understand it. They’ve made a fucking cockadoodle mess out of it, those twits in Ottawa who don’t know a lumpfish from their