The Shipping News

16 Beety’s Kitchen

A FINE part of Quoyle’s day came when he picked up his daughters at Dennis and Beety’s house. His part in life seemed richer, he became more of a father, at the same time could expose true feelings which were often of yearning.

The hill tilting toward the water, the straggled pickets and then Dennis’s aquamarine house with a picture window toward the street. Quoyle pulled pens from his shirt, put them on the dashboard before he went in. For pens got in the way. The door opened into the kitchen. Quoyle stepped around and over children. In the living room, under a tinted photograph of two stout women lolling in ferns, Dennis slouched on leopard-print sofa cushions, watched the fishery news. On each side of him crocheted pillows in rainbows and squares. Carpenter at Home.

The house was hot, smelled of baking bread. But Quoyle loved this stifling yeast-heat, the chatter and child-yelp above the din of the television. Sometimes tears glazed the scene, he felt as though Dennis and Beety were his secret parents although Dennis was his age and Beety was younger.

Dennis barely looked away from the screen but shouted at the kitchen.

“Make us some tea, mother.”

The water faucet gushed into the kettle. A smaller kettle steamed on the white stove. Beety swept at the kitchen table with the side of her hand, set out a loaf of bread. Winnie, the oldest Buggit child, got a stack of plates. As Quoyle sat down Bunny threw herself at him as though he had just arrived from a long, dangerous voyage, hugged, rammed her head against him. Nothing wrong with her. Nothing. Sunshine playing spider with Murchie Buggit, her fingers creeping up his arm, saying tickle, tickle.

Sitting at the kitchen table with children in his lap, eating bread and yellow bakeapple jam, Quoyle nodded, listened. Dennis was deliberate with the day’s news, Beety had the crazy stories that branched off into others without ever finishing.

The tablecloth was printed with a design of trumpets and soap bubbles. Dennis said he was disgusted; his buddy Carl had driven into a construction trench across the road up Bone Hill. He was in hospital with a broken neck. Beety put saucers of canned apricots in front of the children. Bunny lifted her spoon, put it down.

“Seems like he’s marked. He’s the one had a fright, eight, nine years ago. Turned his hair snow-white in a month. He was out fishing, see, with his brother near the Cauldron, and see this limp old thing lying in the water. He thought it was a ghost net, you know, broke loose and come up to the surface. So to it they goes, he gives a poke with his hook, and dear Lord in the morning, this great big tentacle comes up out of the water-” Dennis held his arm above his head, hand curved and menacing, “and seizes him. Seizes him around the arm. He says you never felt such strength. Well, lucky for him he wasn’t alone. His brother grabs up the knife he was using to cut cod and commences sawing at that gripping tentacle, all muscle and the suckers clamped tight enough to leave terrible marks. But he cut it through and got the motor started, his heart half out of his mouth expecting to feel the other tentacles coming down on his shoulder. They was out of there. The university paid them money for that cut-off tentacle. And now he busts his neck going into a ditch in the road. What’s the point!”

Bunny down and whispering to Beety, getting the bacon from the refrigerator to show Quoyle. The famous bacon from the pig that Dennis had killed. Quoyle widened his eyes and raised his brows to show Bunny he was deeply impressed. But listened to Dennis.

“I never learned nothing about fishing from Dad. He loves fishing-but he loves it for himself. He tried to keep me away from it, tried to keep all of us off the water. It had the effect, see, of Jesson getting in with Uncle Gordon’s crowd, and me just wanting to be on the water. Oh, I wanted to be a carpenter, right enough, but I wanted to fish, too,” he went on dreamily. “Proper thing. There’s something to it you can’t describe, something like opening a present every time you haul up the net. You never know what’s going to be in it, if it will make you rich or put you under the red line, sculpins or dogfish. So I wanted to fish. Because the Buggits are all water dogs, you know. All of us. Even the girls. Marge is a sailboat instructor in Ontario. Eva’s the social director for a cruise ship. Oh, you can’t keep us off the boats. But Dad tried his damndest.”

“He was afraid for you.”

“Yes, that. And it’s like he knows something, like he knows something about the Buggits and the sea. Dad’s got the gift. He knew when Jesson’s boat went down, just like he knew where to go to find me when the Polar Grinder was damaged. I’ll never forget the time with poor Jesson. You know, Jesson was Mumma’s favorite. Always was, from the day he was born.”

Quoyle knew how that was.

“Very sudden Dad got up from the table. He’d been sitting there beside the shortwave radio, we’s all sitting there, and he said lesson’s gone,’ and went across the road to his shop-where the Gammy Bird office is now-and stayed there by himself all night. There was the northern lights that night, so beautiful you couldn’t believe it, these colored strings shooting out, it was like a web. And in the morning there was these-well, like silver threads was on everything, rigging, houses, telephone wires. Had to come from the northern lights. And mother said it was Jesson’s doing as he was in passage from his earthly body.”

“After Jesson, he started the paper, right?”

“About right. But you know, Dad don’t really run Gammy Bird, Tert Card does. The paper is there, you know, and he started it, he decides more or less what goes in it. But he’ll phone in, make up some story about being sick, then go out fishing. Everybody knows what he’s doing.”

“Oh, he runs it,” said Quoyle. “Tert Card dances his tune, I think.”

“Eat your apricots, Bunny,” said Beety, gathering empty saucers.

But Bunny whispered to Quoyle, “Apricots look like little teeny-weeny behinds, Dad. Little fairies’ bottoms. I don’t want to eat them.” And sniveled.

While Dennis talked, a short, wrinkled man came to the doorway, leaned against the frame. He looked like a piece of driftwood, but for his mauve face. Wore a shirt spattered with hibiscus flowers the size of pancakes. Beety gave him a mug of tea, slathered marg on bread which the old man swallowed in one go.

“Alfred!” said Dennis. “Skipper Alfred, come on and sit down. This here is Quoyle, works at the paper. Comes back with Agnis Hamm to the old house on Quoyle’s point.”

“Yis,” said the old man. “I remembers the Quoyles and their trouble. They was a savage pack. In the olden days they say Quoyles nailed a man to a tree by ‘is ears, cut off ‘is nose for the scent of blood to draw the nippers and flies that devoured ‘im alive. Gone now, except for the odd man, Nolan, down along Capsize Cove. I never thought a one of the others would come back, and here there’s four of them, though one’s a Hamm and the other three never set foot on the island of Newfoundland. But the one I come to see is the carpenter maid.”

Dennis pointed at Bunny.

“So, you’re the maid was goin’ to put on the roof with your little hammer.”

“I was going to help Daddy,” whispered Bunny.

“Right enough. ‘Tis very few that helps their fathers nowadays, lad or maid. So I’ve brought you a bit of encouragement, like.” He handed Bunny a small brass square, the marks worn but still visible.

“You are thinking to yourself ‘what is that thing?’ Well, ‘tis a simple matter. Help you make straight lines and straight cuts. With this and a saw and a hammer and some nails and a bit of timber you can make a hundred little things. I had it when I was your age and I made a box with a lid first thing, six pieces and two bits of leather for the hinges. Wasn’t I a proud thing?”

“What do you say, Bunny?” hissed Quoyle.

“I want to make a box with a lid and two bits of hinges.”

Everyone laughed except Quoyle, watching Bunny, who flushed red with mortification.

“Then,” said Quoyle, “we’ll say thank-you Skipper Alfred for the fine square and get off to home if there’s going to be time for after-dinner carpentry.” Had she heard what he said about the man nailed to a tree?

And in the car, made Bunny put the square flat on the floor in case of a catastrophic ditch in the road.