Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [94]
He was surprised to see it was almost dusk. In a way he was glad, because it meant he could go to bed soon and get some sleep. He was tremendously tired. The rising and falling billows would be deliciously soft to sink into. This was something he’d worked out. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before, but the yellow man was not dead. Sleeping. Resting. And in a minute Quoyle thought he would roll over too and get some sleep. As soon as they shut the lights out. But the hard light was shining directly into his swollen eyes and Jack Buggit was wrenching him away from the hot box and onto a pile of cold fish.
“Jesus Cockadoodle Christ! I knowed somebody was out here. Felt it.” He threw a tarpaulin over Quoyle.
“I told you that damn thing would drown you. How long you been in the water? Couldn’t be too long, boy, can’t live in this too long.
But Quoyle couldn’t answer. He was shaking so hard his heels [213] drummed on the fish. He tried to tell Jack to get the hot box so he could get warm again, but his jaw wouldn’t work.
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Jack half-dragged him, half-shoved him into Mrs. Buggit’s perfect kitchen. “Here’s Quoyle I fished out of the bloody drink,” he said.
“If you knew how many Jack has saved,” she said. “How many.” All but one. She got Quoyle’s clothes off, laid hot-water bottles on his thighs and wrapped a blanket around him. She made a mug of steaming tea and forced spoonsful of it between his teeth with the swift competence of practice. Jack mumbled a cup of rum would do more good.
In twenty minutes his jaw was loose enough and his mind firm enough to choke out the sinking of the boat, the illusion of the hot box, to take in the details of the Buggit domicile. To have a second cup of tea loaded with sugar and evaporated milk.
“That’s a nice oolong,” said Mrs. Buggit. Rum couldn’t come near it for saving grace.
Everything in the house tatted and doilied in the great art of the place, designs of lace waves and floe ice, whelk shells and sea wrack, the curve of lobster feelers, the round knot of cod-eye, the bristled commas of shrimp and fissured sea caves, white snow on black rock, pinwheeled gulls, the slant of silver rain. Hard, tortured knots encased picture frames of ancestors and anchors, the Bible was fitted with sheets of ebbing foam, the clock’s face peered out like a bride’s from a wreath of worked wildflowers. The knobs of the kitchen dresser sported tassels like a stripper in a bawd house, the kettle handle knitted over in snake-ribs, the easy chairs wore archipelagoes of thread and twine flung over the reefs of arms and backs. On a shelf a 1961 Ontario phone book.
Mrs. Buggit stood against the Nile green wall, moved forward to the stove to refill the kettle, her hands like welded scoops. Great knobby knuckles and scarred fingers. The boiling water gushing into the teapot. Mrs. Buggit was bare armed in a cotton dress. The house breathed tropical heat and the torpor of comfort.
She had a voice built up from calling into the wind and stating [214] strong opinions. In this house Jack shrank to the size of a doll, his wife grew enormous in the waxy glitter and cascade of flowers. She searched Quoyle’s face as though she had known him once. His teeth clattered less against the mug. The shudders that had racked him from neck to arch eased.
“You’ll warm,” she said, though she herself could not, coming at him with a hot brick for his feet. A mottled, half-grown dog stirred on the mat, cocked her ears briefly.
Jack, like many men who spend their days in hard physical labor, went slack when he sat in an easy chair, sprawled and spread as if luxury jellied his muscles.
“It was your build there, all that fat, y’know, that’s what insulated you all them hours, kept you floating. A thin man would of died.”
Then Quoyle remembered the yellow man and told his story again, beginning with the