Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [77]
“I wouldn’t have known it was a cemetery. It looks very old.”
“Oh yes. Very old indeed. ‘Tis the cemetery of the Quoyles.”
Satisfied with the effect on Quoyle whose mouth hung open, head jerked back like a snake surprised by a mirror.
“They were wrackers they say, come to Gaze Island centuries ago and made it their evil lair. Pirate men and women that lured ships onto the rocks. When I was a kid we’d dig in likely places. Turn over stones, see if there was a black box below.”
“Here!” Quoyle’s hair bristled. The winding tickle, the hidden harbor.
“See over here, them flat rocks all laid out? That’s where your house stood as was dragged away over the ice to Quoyle’s Point [172] with a wrangle-gangle mob of islanders behind them. For over the years others came and settled. Drove the Quoyles away. Though the crime that finally tipped the scales was their disinclination to attend Pentecostal services. Religion got a strong grip on Gaze Island in that time, but it didn’t touch the Quoyles. So they left, took their house and left, bawling out launchin’ songs as they went.”
“Dear God,” said Quoyle. “Does the aunt know all this?”
“Ar, she must. She never told you?”
“Quiet about the past,” said Quoyle, shaking his head, thinking, no wonder.
“Truth be told,” said Billy, “there was many, many people here depended on shipwracks to improve their lots. Save what lives they could and then strip the vessel bare. Seize the luxuries, butter, cheese, china plates, silver coffeepots and fine chests of drawers. There’s many houses here still has treasures that come off wracked ships. And the pirates always come up from the Caribbean water to Newfoundland for their crews. A place of natural pirates and wrackers.”
They walked back to the gaze for another look, Quoyle trying to imagine himself as a godless pirate spying for prey or enemy.
Billy shouted when he saw the gauzy horizon had become a great billowing wall less than a mile away, a curtain of fog rolling over maroon water.
“Get going, boy,” shouted Billy, slipping and sliding down the path to the harbor beach, his paint cans knocking together. Quoyle panted after him.
The motor blatted and in a few minutes they were inside the tickle.
21
Poetic Navigation
“Fog ... The warm water of the Gulf Stream penetrating high
latitudes is productive of fog, especially in the vicinity of
the Grand Banks where the cold water of the Labrador
Current makes the contrast in the temperatures of adjacent
waters most striking.”
THE MARINER’S DICTIONARY
WHEN they came again into the maze of rocks the fog bank was two thousand yards away.
“Give us ten minutes to get clear of the rocks and the currents and take a course on Killick-Claw and we’ll be all right,” said Billy, steering the boat through a crooked course Quoyle could only guess at.
“These was the rocks the Quoyles lured ships onto.” Shouted. Quoyle thought he felt the haul of the current sweeping along the cliffs, stared into the water as though looking for waterlogged hulks in the depths. They cut around a fissured rock that Billy called the Net-Man.
“ ‘Cause you’d lose something, floats or pots or a good piece of line and it was uncanny how it’d end up wrapped around the [174] Net-Man. Some kind of swirly current carried things onto it, I suppose, and they stuck in the clefts.”
“There’s something on it now,” said Quoyle. “Something like a box. Hold on, Billy, it’s a suitcase.” Billy came around the gurgling rock, handed Quoyle a gaff hook.
“Be quick about it.” The suitcase was stranded high on a rock, washed up by the now-retreating tide. It rested on a small shelf, as though someone had just set it down. Quoyle hooked the rope handle and yanked. The weight of the suitcase sent it tumbling into the sea. As it bobbed to the surface he clawed with the hook, drew it near. At last he could reach over and grip the handle. Heavy, but he got it aboard.