Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [73]
[164] Gaze Island reared from the water as sheer cliff. Half a mile from the formidable island rocks broke the surface, awash with foam.
“That’s the Home Rock. We takes our bearing off it.” He changed course toward the southern tip of the island.
Billy worked through an invisible maze of shoals and sunkers. The boat pointed at a red stone wall, waves smashing at its foot. Quoyle’s dry mouth. They were almost in the foam. Twenty feet from the face of the cliff he still could not see the entrance. Billy headed the boat at a shadow. The sound of the engine multiplied, beat and shouted at them, echoed off the walls that rose above onyx water.
They were in a narrow tickle. Quoyle could reach out and almost touch the rock. The cliff wall opened gradually, the tickle widened, bent left, and came out into a bay enclosed by a hoop of land. Five or six buildings, a white house, a church with a crooked steeple, a slide of clapboard, old stages and tilts. Quoyle had never imagined such a secret and ruined place. Desolate, and the slyness of the hidden tickle gave the sense of a lair.
“Strange place,” said Quoyle.
“Gaze Island. They used to say, over in Killick-Claw, that Gaze Islanders were known for two things-they were all fish dogs, knew how to find fish, and they knew more about volcanoes than anybody in Newfoundland.”
Billy brought his boat up to the beach, cut the engine and raised it. Silence except for the drip of water from the propeller, and the skreel of gulls. Billy hawked and spat, pointed down the land curve to a building set away from the shore.
“There’s our old place.”
Once painted red, greyed it to a dull pink by salt weather. A section of broken fence. Billy seized his bag and jumped out of the boat, bootheels made semicircles in the sand. Secured the line to a pipe hammered into the rock. Quoyle clambered after him. The silence. Only the sound of their boots gritting and the sea murmur.
“There was five families lived here when my dad was a boy, the Prettys, the Pools, the Sops, the Pilleys, the Cusletts. Every family was married with every other family. Boy, they was kind, [165] good people, and the likes of them are gone now. Now it’s every man for himself. And woman, too.”
He tried to lift a fallen section of fence from the weeds, but it broke in his hands and he only cleared away the tangle from the upright section, braced it with rocks.
They walked up to the high gaze that gave the island its name, a knoll on the edge of the cliff with a knot of spruce in one corner, all hemmed around with a low wall of stones. Quoyle, turning, could look down to the cup of harbor, could turn again, look at the open sea, at distant ships heading for Europe or Montreal. Liquid turquoise below. To the north two starched sheet icebergs. There, the smoke of Killick-Claw. Far to the east, almost invisible, a dark band like rolled gauze.
“They could see a ship far out in any direction from here. They’d put the cows up here in the summer. Never a cow in Newfoundland had a better view.”
They walked over the moss and heather to a cemetery. A fence of blunt pickets enclosed crosses and wooden markers, many fallen on the ground, their letters faded by cold light. Billy Pretty knelt in the corner, tugged at wild grass. The top of the wooden marker was cut in three arcs to resemble a stone, the paint still legible:
W. Pretty
born 1897 died 1934
Through the great storms of life he did his best,
God grant him eternal rest.
“That’s me poor father,” said Billy Pretty. “Fifteen was I when he died.” He scraped away, pulling weeds from a coffin-shaped frame that enclosed the grave. It was painted with a design of black and white diamonds, still sharp.
“Painted this up the last time I was over,” said Billy, opening his bag and taking out tins of paint, two brushes, “and I’ll do it again now.”
Quoyle thought of his own father, wondered if the aunt still had his ashes. There had been no ceremony. Should they put up a marker? A faint sense of loss rose in him.
[166] Suddenly he could see his father, see the trail of ground cherry