Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [74]
Other fathers took their sons on fishing and camping trips, but Quoyle and his brother had blueberry expeditions. They whined with rage as the father disappeared into the bushes, leaving them in the sour heat holding plastic containers. One time the brother, face swollen with crying and insect bites, picked only fifteen or twenty berries. The father approached them, arms straining with the weight of two brimming pails. Then the brother began to cry, pointed at Quoyle. Said Quoyle had taken his berries. Liar. Quoyle had picked half a quart, the bottom of his pail decently covered. Got a whipping with a branch torn from a blueberry bush, with the first stroke berries raining. On the way home he stared into the berry pails watching green worms, stink bugs, ants, aphids, limping spiders come creeping up chimneys to the surface of the fruit where they beat the air and wondered. Backs of his thighs on fire.
The man spent hours in the garden. How many times, thought Quoyle, had his father leaned on his hoe and gazed down the rows of string beans, saying “Some sweet land we got here, boy.” He’d thought it was the immigrant’s patriotic sentiment, but now balanced it against the scoured childhood on a salt-washed rock. His father had been enchanted with deep soil. Should have been a farmer. Guessing at the dead man too late.
Billy Pretty might have heard him thinking.
“By rights,” he said, “my dad should have been a farmer. He was a Home boy on his way to Ontario to be hired out to a farmer.”
[167] “Home boy?” It meant nothing to Quoyle.
“From a Home. Part orphanage, part a place where they put children if the parents couldn’t keep them, or if they were running wild on the streets. England and Scotland just swept them up by the thousand and shipped them over to Canada. My father was the son of a printer in London, but it was a big family and the father died when he was only eleven. It was because he was a printer’s son that he could read and write very well. His name was not Pretty then. He was born William Ankle. His mother had all the others, you see, so she put him in a Home. There used to be Homes all over the UK. Maybe there still are. The Barnardo Homes, the Sears Home, the National Children’s Homes, the Fegan Home, the Church of England Bureau, the Quarrier Homes and more and more. He was in the Sears Home. They showed him pictures of boys picking big red apples in a sunny orchard, said that was Canada, wouldn’t he like to go? He used to tell us how juicy those apples looked. Yes, he said.
“So, a few days later he was on this ship, the Aramania, on his way to Canada. This is in 1909. They gave him a little tin trunk with some clothes, a Bible, a brush and comb and a signed photograph of Reverend Sears. He told us about that trip many times. There were three hundred and fourteen children, boys and girls, on that ship, all of them signed on to help farmers. He said many of them were only three or four years old. They had no idea what was happening to them, where they were going. Just little waifs shipped abroad to a life of rural slavery. For you see, he kept in touch with some of the survivors he’d made friends with on the Aramania.”
“Survivors of what?”
“The shipwreck, my boy, and how he came here. We spoke of the names of rocks on the way