Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [62]
Sitting at the kitchen table with children in his lap, eating bread and yellow bakeapple jam, Quoyle nodded, listened. Dennis was deliberate with the day’s news, Beety had the crazy stories that branched off into others without ever finishing.
The tablecloth was printed with a design of trumpets and soap bubbles. Dennis said he was disgusted; his buddy Carl had driven into a construction trench across the road up Bone Hill. He was in hospital with a broken neck. Beety put saucers of canned apricots in front of the children. Bunny lifted her spoon, put it down.
“Seems like he’s marked. He’s the one had a fright, eight, nine years ago. Turned his hair snow-white in a month. He was out fishing, see, with his brother near the Cauldron, and see this limp old thing lying in the water. He thought it was a ghost net, you know, broke loose and come up to the surface. So to it they goes, he gives a poke with his hook, and dear Lord in the morning, this great big tentacle comes up out of the water—” Dennis held his arm above his head, hand curved and menacing, “and seizes him. Seizes him around the arm. He says you never felt such strength. Well, lucky for him he wasn’t alone. His brother grabs up the knife he was using to cut cod and commences sawing at that gripping tentacle, all muscle and the suckers clamped tight enough [138] to leave terrible marks. But he cut it through and got the motor started, his heart half out of his mouth expecting to feel the other tentacles coming down on his shoulder. They was out of there. The university paid them money for that cut-off tentacle. And now he busts his neck going into a ditch in the road. What’s the point!”
Bunny down and whispering to Beety, getting the bacon from the refrigerator to show Quoyle. The famous bacon from the pig that Dennis had killed. Quoyle widened his eyes and raised his brows to show Bunny he was deeply impressed. But listened to Dennis.
“I never learned nothing about fishing from Dad. He loves fishing—but he loves it for himself. He tried to keep me away from it, tried to keep all of us off the water. It had the effect, see, of Jesson getting in with Uncle Gordon’s crowd, and me just wanting to be on the water. Oh, I wanted to be a carpenter, right enough, but I wanted to fish, too,” he went on dreamily. “Proper thing. There’s something to it you can’t describe, something like opening a present every time you haul up the net. You never know what’s going to be in it, if it will make you rich or put you under the red line, sculpins or dogfish. So I wanted to fish. Because the Buggits are all water dogs, you know. All of us. Even the girls. Marge is a sailboat instructor in Ontario. Eva’s the social director for a cruise ship. Oh, you can’t keep us off the boats. But Dad tried his damndest.”
“He was afraid for you.”
“Yes, that. And it’s like he knows something, like he knows something about the Buggits and the sea. Dad’s got the gift. He knew when Jesson’s boat went down, just like he knew where to go to find me when the Polar Grinder was damaged. I’ll never forget the time with poor Jesson. You know, Jesson was Mumma’s favorite. Always was, from the day he was born.”
Quoyle knew how that was.
“Very sudden Dad got up from the table. He’d been sitting there beside the shortwave radio, we’s all sitting there, and he said lesson’s gone,’ and went across the road to his shop—where the Gammy Bird office is now—and stayed there by himself all night. [139] There was the northern lights that night, so beautiful you couldn’t believe it, these colored strings shooting out, it was like a web. And in the morning there was these—well, like silver threads was on everything, rigging, houses, telephone wires. Had to come from the northern lights. And mother said it was Jesson’s doing as he was in passage from his