Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [14]
There was only one, with the curious name of Killick-Claw.
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Partridge back on the line two days later. Pleased to be fixing Quoyle’s life up again. Quoyle made him think of a huge roll of newsprint from the pulp mill. Blank and speckled with imperfections. But beyond this vagueness he glimpsed something like a reflection of light from a distant hubcap, a scintillation that meant there was, in Quoyle’s life, the chance of some brilliance. Happiness? Good luck? Fame and fortune? Who knows, thought Partridge. He liked the rich taste of life so well himself he wished for an entree or two for Quoyle.
“Amazes me how the old strings still pull. Yeah, there’s a paper up there. A weekly. They looking for somebody, too. You interested, I’ll give you the name I got. Want somebody to cover the shipping news. Guess it’s right on the coast. Want somebody with maritime connections if possible. Quoyle, you got maritime connections?”
“My grandfather was a sealer.”
“Jesus. You always come at me out of left field. Anyway, it works out, you got to handle work permits and immigration and all that. Deal with those guys. O.k. Managing editor’s name is Tertius Card. Got a pencil? Give you the number.”
Quoyle wrote it down.
“Well, good luck. Let me know how it goes. And listen, any time you want to come out here, stay with Mercalia and me, you just come on. This is a real good place to make money.”
But the idea of the north was taking him. He needed something to brace against.
A month later they drove away in his station wagon. He took a last look in the side mirror at the rented house, saw the empty porch, the forsythia bush, the neighbor’s flesh-colored slips undulating on the line.
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[31] And so Quoyle and the aunt in the front seat, the children in the back, and old Warren sometimes with the suitcases, sometimes clambering awkwardly up to sit between Bunny and Sunshine. They made her paper hats from napkins, tied the aunt’s scarf around her hairy neck, fed her French fries when the aunt wasn’t looking.
Fifteen hundred miles, across New York, Vermont, angling up through Maine’s mauled woods. Across New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on three-lane highways, trouble in the center lane, making the aunt clench her hands. In North Sydney plates of oily fish for supper, and no one who cared, and in the raw morning, the ferry to Port-Aux-Basques. At last.
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Quoyle suffered in the upholstery, the aunt strode the deck, stopped now and then to lean on the rail above the shuddering water. Or stood spraddle-legged, hands knotted behind her back, facing wind. Her hair captured under a babushka, face a stone with little intelligent eyes.
She spoke of the weather with a man in a watch cap. They talked awhile. Someone else reel footing along, said, Rough today, eh? She worried about Warren, down in the station wagon, tossing up and down. Wouldn’t know what to make of it. Never been to sea. Probably thought the world was coming to an end and she all alone, in a strange car. The man in the watch cap said, “Don’t worry, dog’ll sleep the ‘ole way across. That’s ‘ow dogs are.”
The aunt looked out, saw the blue land ahead, her first sight of the island in almost fifty years. Could not help tears.
“Comin’ ‘ome, eh?” said the man in the watch cap. “Yar, that’s ‘ow it takes you.”
This place, she thought, this rock, six thousand miles of coast blind-wrapped in fog. Sunkers under wrinkled water, boats threading tickles between ice-scabbed cliffs. Tundra and barrens, a land of stunted spruce men cut and drew away.
How many had come here, leaning on the rail as she leaned now. Staring at the rock in the sea. Vikings, the Basques, the French, English, Spanish, Portuguese. Drawn by the cod, from the days when massed fish slowed ships on the drift for the passage to [33] the Spice Isles, expecting cities of