Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [140]
“Blow the hair off a dog,” he said. And his own dog, Elvis, twisted her ears, the skin on her back shuddered.
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In the Burkes’ house the aunt marked the beating of the sea, a pummeling sound that traveled up through the legs of the bed. Up the road Mrs. Buggit recognized the squealing gasps of a drowning son. Herry, rigid in his blankets, experienced immensity, became a solitary ant in a vast hall. And down in St. Johns in his white bed the old cousin trembled with pleasure at what he had conjured with wind-knots.
But Bunny went up the howling chimney, sailed against the wind and across the bay to the rock where the green house strained [319] against the cables. She lay on stone, looked up. A shingle lifted, tore away. A course of bricks flew off the chimney like cards. Each of the taut cables shouted a different bull-roarer note, the mad bass driving into rock, the house beams and timbers vibrating. The walls chattered, shot nails onto the heaving floors. The house strained toward the sea.
A crack, a whistle as a cable snapped. Glass burst. The house slewed on grating sills. The cables shrilled.
Bunny watched, flat on her back, arms outstretched like a staked prisoner and powerless to move. The house lifted at the freed corner, fell, lifted. Glass broke. A second cable parted. Now the entire back of the house rose as if the building curtsied, then dropped. Cracking beams, scribbles of glass, inside the pots and pans and beds and bureaus skidding over the floors, a drawer of spoons and forks down the tilt, the stairs untwisting.
A burst of wind wrenched the house to the east. The last cables snapped, and in a great, looping roll the house toppled.
Shrieking. Awake. Scrambling across the floor to get away. The wind outside proving the nightmare. Quoyle lurched through the door, grasped the kicking child. He was frightened for his daughter. Who was mad with fear.
Yet in ten minutes she was calm, swallowed a cup of warm milk, listened to Quoyle’s rational explanation of wind noises that caused nightmare, told him she could go back to sleep if Warren the Second slept on the bed. When he asked cautiously what she had dreamed, she couldn’t remember.
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At the Gammy Bird Quoyle ran a special issue, OUR BATTERED COAST, featuring shots of boats in the street, marooned snowplows. A thousand stories, said Billy Pretty in a worn voice. Ships lost, more than forty men and three women and one child drowned between the Grand Banks and the St. Lawrence Seaway, boats crippled and cargoes lost. Benny Fudge brought in photographs of householders digging out their buried pickups.
The weather service predicted a heat wave.
On Monday it came, a shimmering day of heat, the land [320] streaming with melting snow and talk of global warming. A riddled iceberg scraped past the point. Quoyle in shirtsleeves, squinting his way through glare. When he could shunt thoughts of Bunny onto a siding, he felt spasms of joy. For no reason that he could think of except the long daylight, or the warmth, or because the air was so clear and sweet he felt he was just learning to breathe.
Late in the morning the newsroom door opened. There was Wavey. Who never came there. She beckoned. Whispered in his ear, her breath delicious against his cheek. The auburn braid a rope of shining hairs which he had experienced undone. Yellow paint on her knuckle, faint scent of turpentine.
“Dad says you must come by this noon. He wants to show you something.” But said she didn’t know what. Some kind of men’s business. For Archie was an expert at dividing the