Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [81]
Five more and she would have enough for this week. She’d take anything at first, anything just to get away and out. Not to hear Mavis Bangs. To see something besides fishing boats and rock and water!
I am writing to inquire about the position of visual display person. Although my training is in marine traffic control and upholstery I am willing to learn ...
“You know, all of us girls was good at the needlework. Liz, of course, making the mats, she was a well-known mat maker. Our mam kept sheep for the wool. I can see her now after supper spinning the wool or knitting. Always knitted after dinner. I can see her now, setting there working a pair of thumbies with her wooden skivers clacking away. Said the wool handled easier at night, was lax because the sheep was lying down, see. Taking their sleep. That old spinning wheel come down to me. Worth a fortune. I used to have it out on the lawn. Des painted it up red and yellow, it was a fine ornament. But we’d have to take it in at night, afraid a tourist would steal it. They do that, you know. They’ll take a spinning wheel right out of your yard. I know a woman it happened to. Mrs. Trevor Higgend, goes to my church. What do you think about the nephew, Dawn? You ate supper at their house. Finding a thing like that. You wouldn’t want a man who finds what he found, would you? Nothing good ever happened with a Quoyle.”
“Never.” The keys rattled. The last one for this week. There could be replies in her mailbox right now.
I wish to inquire about the position of architectural draughts-person. Although my training is in marine traffic control I am [183] willing to relocate and retrain for a career in architectural draughting ...
¯
Quoyle and Wavey side by side, feeling sympathy for each other, Herry breathing down their necks. The car moaned up the hill through the rain, away from the school. They came over the crest. On Quoyle’s side the ocean, bruise grey under the strained wet light.
Gushing through yellow rain. A row of mailboxes, some fashioned as houses with painted windows. Four ducks swayed along the muddy ruts. Quoyle slowed to a crawl behind them until they dodged into the ditch. Past the Gammy Bird office, past Buggits’ house and on. The square houses painted in marvelous stripes, brave against the rock.
Wavey’s little house was mint green on the ground floor, then a red sash. The boy’s scarlet pajamas on the clothesline, bright as chile peppers. A pile of tapered logs, sawbuck in a litter of chips and bark, split junks of wood ready to be stacked.
Two fishermen beside the road, lean and hard as rifles, mending net in the rain, the wet beading their sweaters. Sharp Irish noses, long Irish necks and hair crimped under billed caps. One looked up, his glance sprang from Wavey to Quoyle, searching his face, knowing him. Netting needle in his hand.
“Uncle Kenny there,” said Wavey to the boy in her low, plangent voice.
“Dawk,” cried the child.
There was a new dog in Archie Sparks’s yard, a blue poodle among the plywood swans.
“Dawk.”
“Yes, a new dog,” said Wavey. A wooden dog with a rope tail and a tin-can necklace. Mounted on a stick. Eye like a boil.
In the rearview mirror he saw Wavey’s brother coming along the road toward them. The other man watched from a distance, held the net, his hands stilled.
Wavey pulled Herry out of the car. He put his face up to the [184] mist, closed his eyes, feeling the droplets touch him like the ends of cold fine hairs. She pulled him toward the door.
Quoyle held out his hand to the advancing man as he might to an unknown dog stalking toward him.
“Quoyle,” he said, and the