Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [82]
Face like Wavey’s lean face, but rougher. A young man smelling of fish and rain. The scrawn of muscle built to last into the ninth decade.
“Giving Wavey a ride home, then?”
“Yes.” His soft hand embarrassed him. A curtain moved in the window of the house behind the rioting wooden zoo.
“There’s Dad, then, peeping,” said Ken. “You’ll come in and have a cup of tea.”
“No. No,” said Quoyle. “Got to get back to work. Gave Wavey a ride.”
“Walking keeps you smart. You’re the one found the suitcase with the head in it. Would of turned me stomach. You’re on the point across,” jerked his chin. “Dad sees you over there through his glass on fine days. Got a new roof on the old house?”
Quoyle nodded, got back in his car. But his colorless eyes were warm.
“Going back? I’ll take a ride as far as me net,” said Ken, striding around the nose of the car and thumping into Wavey’s seat.
Quoyle backed and turned. Wavey was gone, disappeared into her house.
“You come along any time and see her,” said Ken. “It’s too bad about the boy, but he’s a good little bugger, poor little hangashore.”
¯
“Dear Sirs,” wrote Dawn. “I would like to apply ...”
23
Maleficium
“The mysterious power that is supposed to reside in
knots ... can be injurious as well as beneficial. “
QUIPUS AND WITCHES’ KNOTS
QUOYLE painted. But no matter what they did to the house, he thought, it kept its gaunt look, never altered from that first looming vision behind the scrim of fog. How had it looked, new and raw on Gaze Island, or sliding over the cracking ice? The idea fixed in him that the journey had twisted the house out of true, wrenched the timbers into a rare geometry. And he was still shuddering over the white-haired man’s stiff eye which had sent its dull glare at him.
The aunt’s interest in fixing up slowed, veered to something private in her own room where she lay on the bed staring at the ceiling for as long as an hour. Or got up with a yawn, a short laugh, said, Well, let’s see now. Coming back from wherever she’d been.
Weekends came to this: the aunt in her room or stirring [186] something or out for a walk. Quoyle hacking his path to the sea, the children squatting in the moss to watch insects toil up stems. Or he split wood against future cold. Thought of Partridge, fired up to cook new dishes and let the children dabble their fingers in mixes and slops, and sometimes let Bunny use the paring knife. While he hovered.
In late August a bowl of cleaned squid stood on the kitchen shelf. Quoyle’s intention: calamari linguine when he was done with the painting. Because he owed Partridge a letter. The aunt declared a salad despite fainting lettuce and pale hothouse tomatoes.
“We could have put in a little garden,” she said. “Raised our own salads at least. The stuff at the markets is not fit to eat. Celery brown with rot, lettuce looks like it’s been boiled.”
“Wavey,” said Quoyle, “Wavey says Alexanders is better than spinach. You can pick it all along the shore here.”
“Never heard of it,” said the aunt. “I’m not one for wild plants.”
“It’s like wild sea parsley,” said Quoyle. “I might put some in the calamari sauce.”
“Yes,” said the aunt. “You try it. Whatever it is.” But went to scout a suitable garden patch among the rocks. Not too late to sow lettuce seed. Thinking a glass house would be a good thing.
The day was warm, wind skittering over the bay, wrinkling the water in cat’s-paws. The aunt getting the melancholy odor of turned soil. Quoyle smelled paint to the point of headache.
“Someone coming,” the aunt said, leaning on the spade. “Walking on the road.”
Quoyle looked, but there was no one.
“Where?”
“Just past the spruce with the broken branch. Broken by the bulldozer, I might add.”
They stared down the driveway in the direction of the glove factory, the road.
“I did see somebody,” said the aunt. “I could see his cap and his shoulders. Some fellow.”
Quoyle went back to his paint pot but the aunt looked and finally drove the shovel into the soil to stand