Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [139]
“Jack,” called Beety, “what are you fidgeting at in there?” She set out a tall white cake plastered with pink icing. Candy letters spelled “Welcome Agnis.” Quoyle ate two slices and tried for a third but it went to Billy Pretty who came in late with snow in his hair. Stood near the stove. Importantly. Every man in the room looked at him. Though he had said nothing.
“Marine forecast don’t say much, but I tell you it’s shaping up for a good one. Snowing hard. I’d say gusting to thirty knots anyway. Out of the east and backing. I’d say she’s going to be a regular screecher. Listen at it.” And as the accordion’s lesser wind wheezed and died they heard the shriek of air around the corner of the house.
“Must be one of them polar lows they can’t see coming until it’s gone. I’d better say my greetings and get off home. I don’t like the feel of it,” said Billy through cake.
Nor did anyone else.
“I’m going to bore up home, buddy,” shouted Jack to Quoyle. “Y’know, I felt it coming. Smash me boat to drumsticks if I don’t [317] haul her up. Mother’ll go with Dennis.” And pointed at his wife, at Dennis. Understood.
By nine o’clock the uneasy guests had gone, thinking of drifted roads and damaged boats.
“Looks like you brought it with you, Aunt.” They sat in the kitchen, surrounded by plates, the aunt with her noggin of whiskey. A skeleton of forks in the sink.
“Oh, don’t ever say that. Don’t ever tell somebody they brings a storm. Worst thing you can say.” But seemed glad.
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A pendulum clock brought from the equator to a northern country will run fast. Arctic rivers cut deepest into their right banks, and hunters lost in the north woods unconsciously veer to the right as the earth turns beneath their feet. And in the north the dangerous storms from the west often begin with an east wind. All of these things are related to the Coriolis, the reeling gyroscopic effect of the earth’s spin that creates wind and flow of weather, the countering backwashes and eddies of storms.
“Backing wind, foul weather,” Billy Pretty said to himself, steering sideways down a hill. The wind angling to the north now.
He had seen wind hounds a few days before, lozenges of light in a greasy sky. Imagined wind in his inner eye, saw its directions in the asymmetrical shapes of windstars on old maps, roses of wind whose elongated points pictured prevailing airs. The storm star for his coast included a backing point that shifted from the northeast to the southwest.
By midnight the wind was straight out of the west and he heard the moan leap to bellowing, a terrible wind out of the catalog of winds. A wind related to the Blue Norther, the frigid Blaast and the Landlash. A cousin to the Bull’s-eye squall that started in a small cloud with a ruddy center, mother-in-law to the Vinds-gnyr of the Norse sagas, the three-day Nor’easters of maritime New England. An uncle wind to the Alaskan Williwaw and Ireland’s wild Doinionn. Stepsister to the Koshava that assaults the Yugoslavian plains with Russian snow, the Steppenwind, and the violent [318] Buran from the great open steppes of central Asia, the Crivetz, the frigid Viugas and Purgas of Siberia, and from the north of Russia the ferocious Myatel. A blood brother of the prairie Blizzard, the Canadian arctic screamer known simply as Northwind, and the Pittarak smoking down off Greenland’s ice fields. This nameless wind scraping the Rock with an edge like steel.
Billy mumbled prayers in his pillow for poor souls caught on the waves tonight, riding a sea striped with mile-long ribbons of foam. The stiff tankers, old trawlers with bad hulls would break apart.
At last he had to get up. The electricity was out. He fumbled in the dark, found the flashlight and shone it through the window. Could see nothing inches away but snow hurling at velocities that made the air glow.
Cautiously he opened the door, felt it leap as the wind smote it. And wrestled it closed. A fan of snow across his