Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [46]
Smooth walls and ceilings, the joint compound still showing trowel marks, the fresh window sills, price stickers on the smudgy window glass. A smell of wood. Mattresses leaned against a wall. The girls’ room. Bunny piled wood shavings on her head.
“Hey, Dad, look at my curly hair, Daddy, look at my curly hair. Dad! I got curly hair.” Shrill and close to tears. Quoyle picked at melted cheese on her shirt.
In the kitchen the aunt ran water into a sink, turned on the gas stove to show.
“I’ve made a nice pot of stewed cod,” she said. “Dennis brought a loaf of Beety’s homemade bread. I got bowls and spoons before I came over, butter and some staples. Perishables in that ice cooler. You’ll have to bring ice over. I don’t know when we can get a gas refrigerator in here. Nephew, you’ll have to manage with the air mattress and sleeping bag in your room for a while. But the girls’ve got bed frames and box springs.”
Quoyle and Bunny put a table together of planks and sawhorses.
“This is heavy,” said Bunny, horsing up one end of a plank, panting in mock exhaustion.
“Yes,” said Quoyle, “but you are very strong.” His stout, homely child with disturbing ways, but a grand helper with boards and stones and boxes. Not interested in the things of the kitchen unless on a platter.
Dennis came down from the roof, grinned at Quoyle. There was nothing in him of Jack Buggit except eyes darting to the horizon, measuring cuts of sky.
“Great bread,” said Quoyle, folding a slice into his mouth.
“Yeah, well, Beety makes bread every day, every day but Sunday. So.”
[102] “And good fish,” said the aunt. “All we need’s string beans and salad.”
“So,” said Dennis. “The caplin run’ll be soon. Get a garden in. Caplin’s good fertilizer.”
In the afternoon Quoyle and Bunny wiped at the lumpy joint compound with wet sponges until the seams were smooth. Bunny intent, the helpful child. But glancing in every corner. On the roof Dennis hammered. The aunt sanded windowsills, laid a primer coat.
In the last quarter-light Quoyle walked with Dennis down to the new dock. On the way they passed the aunt’s amusement garden, a boulder topped with silly moss like hair above a face. Scattered through the moss a stone with a bull’s-eye, a shell, bits of coral, white stone like the silhouette of an animal’s head.
The wood of the new dock was resinous and fragrant. Water slapped beneath. Curdled foam.
“Tie your boat up now, can’t you?” said Dennis. “Pick up a couple old tires so she don’t rub.”
Dennis slipped the mooring lines, jumped into his own boat, and hummed into the dusk on curling wake. The lighthouses on the points began to wink. Quoyle went up the rock to the house, toward windows flooded with orange lamplight. Turned, glanced again across the bay, saw Dennis’s wake like a white hair.
In the kitchen the aunt shuffled cards, dealt them around.
“We’d play night after night when I was a girl,” she said. “Old games. Nobody knows them now. French Boston, euchre, jambone, scat, All-Fours. I know every one.”
Slap, slap, the cards.
“We’ll play All-Fours. Now, every jack turned up by the dealer counts a point for him. Here we are, clubs are trumps.”
But the children couldn’t understand and dropped their cards. Quoyle wanted his book. The aunt’s blood boiled up.
“Everlasting whining!” What had she expected? To reconstruct some rare evening from her ancient past? Laughed at herself.
So Quoyle told his daughters stories in the dim bedroom, of explorer cats sighting new lands, of birds who played cards and lost them in the wind, of pirate girls and buried treasure.
[103] Downstairs again, looked at the aunt at the table, home at last. Her glass of whiskey empty.
“It’s quiet,” said Quoyle, listening.
“There’s the sea.” Like a door opening and closing. And the cables’ vague song.
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Quoyle woke in the empty room. Grey light. A sound of hammering. His heart. He lay