Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [47]
He got up and went to it. Would drive it away before it woke the aunt and the girls. It seemed the bird was trying to break from the closed room of sea and rock and sky into the vastness of his bare chamber. The whisper of his feet on the floor. Beyond the glass the sea lay pale as milk, pale the sky, scratched and scribbled with cloud welts. The empty bay, far shore creamed with fog. Quoyle pulled his clothes on and went downstairs.
On the threshold lay three wisps of knotted grass. Some invention of Sunshine’s. He went behind the great rock to which the house was moored and into the bushes. His breath in cold cones.
A faint path angled toward the sea, and he thought it might come out onto the shore north of the new dock. Started down. After a hundred feet the trail went steep and wet, and he slid through wild angelica stalks and billows of dogberry. Did not notice knots tied in the tips of the alder branches.
Entered a band of spruce, branches snarled with moss, whiskey jacks fluttering. The path became a streambed full of juicy rocks. A waterfall with the flattened ocean at its foot. He stumbled, grasping at Alexanders, the leaves perfuming his hands.
Fountains of blackflies and mosquitoes around him. Quoyle saw a loop of blue plastic. He picked it up, then a few feet farther along spied a sodden diaper. A flat stick stamped “5 POINTS Popsicle [104] Pete.” When he came on a torn plastic bag he filled it with debris. Tin cans, baby-food jars, a supermarket meat tray, tom paper cajoling the jobless reader.
... perhaps you are not quite confident that you can successfully complete the full program in Fashion Merchandising. Well, I can make you a special offer that will make it easier for you. Why not try just Section One of the course to begin with. This does not involve you in a long-term commitment and it will give you the opportunity to ...
Plastic line, the unfurled cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper, pink tampon inserters.
Behind him a profound sigh, the sigh of someone beyond hope or exasperation. Quoyle turned. A hundred feet away a fin, a glistening back. The Minke whale rose, glided under the milky surface. He stared at the water. Again it appeared, sighed, slipped under. Roiling fog arms flew fifty feet above the sea.
A texture caught his eye, knots and whorls down in the rock. The object was pinched in a cleft. He worked it back and forth and then jerked at it. Held it on his palm. Intricate knots in wire, patterned spirals and loops. Wires broken where he had tom the thing loose from the rock. He turned it over, saw a corroded fastening pin. And, turning it this way and that, he caught the design, saw a fanciful insect with double wings and plaited thorax. The wire not wire but human hair—straw, rust, streaky grey. The hair of the dead. Something from the green house, from the dead Quoyles. He threw the brooch, with revulsion, into the pulsing sea.
Climbing again toward the house, he reached the spruce trees, heard a rough motor. A boat veered toward the shore and he thought it was Dennis until he saw the scabbed paint, fray and grime. The dory idled. The man in the stem cut the motor, raised the propeller. Drifted in the fog. The man’s head was down, white stubble and gapped mouth. His jacket crudely laced with thrummy twine. Old and strong. Jerked up a line of whelk pots. Nothing. He lowered the propeller, pulled again and again on the greasy rope. The engine settled into a ragged beat. In a minute man and [105] boat were eaten by mist. The motor faded south in the direction of the glove factory, the ruins of Capsize Cove.
Quoyle clawed up. Thought that if he got in there with axe and saw, set some pressure-treated steps in the steepest pitches, built a bridge over the wet spots, gravel and moss—it would be