The Shipping News

22 Dogs and Cats

“AGNIS have a manly heart, Agnis do,” said Mavis Bangs to Dawn when the aunt went off with her measuring tapes and notebook. “A boldish air, she grasp on things like a man do. That’s from living in the States. All the women down there is boldish. See how she was calm? When the nephew was all jelly? Finding that head. She said he couldn’t drive for two days he was that shocked. I was shocked myself. What with the Mounties coming in and asking. Questions and questions. Poor Agnis.

“There’s the other thing, too. She’s a Hamm, but she’s a Quoyle. The stories, m’dear. Omond-that was my poor husband-knew them. He come from No Name Cove down the bay from Capsize Cove, that are but one cove from Quoyle’s Point. And that little maid they got is a real Quoyle, tilted like a buoy in a raging sea.”

Dawn barely heard her. Every time Agnis Hamm’s truck pulled away Dawn was at the electronic typewriter. Stayed late some evenings to get at it. Letter after letter.

Dear Sirs: I am writing to inquire about the position of Auto Sales with your firm. Although my experience is in shipping traffic…

Dear Sirs: I am writing in response to your ad for a Spanish-speaking clerk. Although I do not speak Spanish I have a B. E. in Maritime Traffic Engineering and will relocate. I enclose…

Mavis Bangs kept talking. “Tell you a woman that fished alongside her man was Mrs. Buggit. Put the babies with her sister and out they’d go. She was as strong as a man they said. Mrs. Buggit don’t go out now, only to the clothesline. She suffers from stress incontinence, they calls it. She can’t hold her water. When she stands up or laughs or coughs or whatever. A problem. They was trying to get her to do some exercises, you know, stop and go, stop and go, she said it didn’t make a bit of difference except they noticed the dog would stand in front of the bathroom door when she was in there and act real concerned. She was took bad, you know, when they lost the oldest boy. Jesson. Just like Jack, he was. Stubborn! Couldn’t tell him a thing. What do you think, Dawn, you think it was Mrs. Melville done it? Whose fancy blue leather we all stitched up? Cut off his head? Agnis’s nephew says they was at one another like dogs and cats. Quarreling. And drunk. A woman drunk! And how they went off in the night and didn’t pay Agnis for the work we done? Of course, now it looks like it was she went off in the night and didn’t pay. But to cut a feller’s head off and put it in a suitcase! They say she had to have help, a weak old woman like that.”

“I don’t know,” said Dawn. The typewriter had a repeat setting. All she had to do was change the name of the addressee and the position and it spit another letter out.

Dear Sirs: I recently saw your advertisement in The Globe and Mail for a research assistant. Although I do not speak Japanese I am willing to learn…

Dear Sirs: I recently saw your advertisement in The Globe and Mail for a floral designer. Although I do not arrange flowers I am willing to learn…

Dear Sirs: I recently saw your advertisement in The Globe and Mail for a position in brokerage operations. Although my training is in marine traffic control I am willing to learn…

“It’s these wicked people coming in. Nothing is like it was. Such ugly things never happened here. We had some good ways in the old times. They may laugh at them now, but they come out true more often than not. One I will never forget, hardly a girl knows it now, because they don’t make mats any more, but when there was a new mat made, you know, the girls, the young girls would get a cat, see, and they’d put the cat on the new mat, then fold up the sides and hold it in there. There was always a cat. Newfoundlanders like their cats. Then they’d unfold it, and whoever the cat came to, why she was the next one to be married. Now that was as true as the sun rises.”

The goal was twenty-five letters a week, every week. Out of them a reply must come.

Dear Sirs: I recently saw your advertisement for a dog groomer. Although my training is in marine traffic control I am willing to relocate…

“My sister worked on a mat all winter, a pattern of roses and codfish on a blue background. Pretty. There I was, fourteen years old. There was five girls there. Liz, that was my sister, and Kate and Jen and the two Marys. They done the cat up in the mat when it was finished. And you know that cat comes straight to me and jumps in my lap. And strange to say, but I was the next one married. Liz was dead of TB before the summer. Kate never married. Mary Genge went to Boston with her folks, and the other Mary I don’t know. But I married Thomas Munn. On my fifteenth birthday. As was lost at sea in 1957. A beauty of a man. The black hair. You’d feel like a puff of heat when he’d come in a room. I wasted away with crying. I was down to eighty-seven pounds. They didn’t think I would live. But somehow I did. And married Desmond Bangs. Until he went in the air crash. Up in Labrador. I says, ‘I’ll never marry again, for I can’t stand the grief.’ Not like some as cuts their husbands’ heads off and puts ‘em in satchels.”

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 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 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 name sounded like an evasion. The fisherman clamped his hand briefly.

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…”