The Shipping News

23 Maleficium

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 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 by itself, walked toward the spruce. There was no one. But saw footprints of fishing boots angling away into the tuck-moose path she thought that descended to a wild marsh of tea-colored water and leathery shrubs.

She sucked in her breath, looked for dog tracks along the edge of the road. And was not sure.

“It’s the old man,” said Quoyle. “Got to be.”

“What old man?”

“Billy Pretty says he’s ‘fork kin’ of the Quoyles. Says he’s a rough old boy. Wouldn’t leave Capsize Cove in the resettlement. Stayed on alone. Billy thinks he might have his back up a little because we’re in the house. I told you this.”

“No, you didn’t, Nephew. And who in the world might he be?”

“I remember telling you about it.”

The aunt wondered cautiously what the name was.

“I don’t know. One of the old Quoyles. I can’t remember his name. Something Irish.”

“I don’t believe it. There’s none of ‘ em left. You know, there was Quoyles didn’t have a very good name,” said the aunt. Head turned away.

“Heard that,” said Quoyle. “Heard Omaloor Bay is called after the Quoyles-like Half-Wit Pond or Six Fingers Harbor or Apricot Ear Brook named for certain other unfortunates. Billy told me how they came here from Gaze Island. Supposed to have dragged the house over the ice.”

“So they say. Half those stories are a pack of lies. I imagine the Quoyles was as decent as anybody. And I’m sure I don’t know who that fellow you’re talking about could be.”

Quoyle cleaned his hands of paint, called “Who wants to walk along the shore with me and pick Alexanders?”

Sunshine found two wild strawberries. Bunny threw bigger and bigger stones in the waves; the gouts of water ever closer until a splash doused her.

“All right, all right, let’s go back to the house. Bunny can change her britches and Sunshine can wash the Alexanders and I will sauté the garlic and onions.”

But when the sauce was nearly done, discovered there was no linguine, only a package of egg noodles shaped like bows, soft stuff that mounded under the sauce and sent the squid rings sliding to the rims of the plates.

“You’ve got to plan ahead, Nephew.”

Just before dawn again. Something woke him. The bare room rose above him, grey and cool. He listened to hear if Bunny was calling or crying but heard only silence.

A circle sped across the ceiling, disappeared. Flashlight beam.

He got up, went to the seaward window, the husks of flies cracking under his bare feet. Knelt to one side and peered into the dimming night. For a long time he saw nothing. His pupils enlarged in the dark, he saw the sky rinsing with the nacre sheen of approaching light. The sea emerged as a silver negative. Far down in the wiry tuck he saw a spark restlessly twitching, and soon it was gone from his sight.

“We ought to go down there,” Quoyle said. “Look the old man up.

“I’m sure I don’t want to go ferret out some old fourth cousin with a grudge. We’ve got along this far very well, and it would be better to leave things alone.”

Quoyle wanted to go. “We’d take the girls, they’d soften an ogre’s heart.”

Or more likely, harden it, thought the aunt.

“Come on, Aunt.” He urged.

But she was cool. “I’ve thought about it, wondering who it could be. There was a crowd of my mother’s cousins in Capsize Cove, but they were her age if not older, grown adults with children, grandchildren of their own when I was a teenager. So if it’s one of them, must be in the late eighties or nineties, probably senile as well. I’d guess the one on the road was somebody from town, maybe walking or hunting, didn’t know we were here.”

Quoyle said nothing of the flashlight. But coaxed her a little.

“Come on, we’ll take a ride down to where the road branches, and walk in. I’d like to see Capsize Cove. The deserted village. Out with Billy that day on Gaze Island-it was sad. Those empty houses, and standing there and hearing about the old Quoyles.”

“I never went out to Gaze Island and can’t say I feel like I’ve missed much. Depressing, those old places. I can’t think why the government left the houses standing. They should have burned them all.”

Quoyle thought of a thousand settlements afire in the wind, flaming shingles flying over the rocks to scale, hissing, into the sea.

In the end they did not go.