The Shipping News

24 Berry Picking

SEPTEMBER, month of shortening days and chilling waters. Quoyle took Bunny to the first day of school. New shoes, a plaid skirt and white blouse. Her hands clammy. Afraid, but refused his company and went through the pushing rowdies by herself. Quoyle watched her stand alone, her head barely moving as she looked for her friend, Marty Buggit.

At three o’clock he was waiting outside.

“How did it go?” Expected to hear what he had felt thirty years before-shunned, miserable.

“It was fun. Look.” She showed a piece of paper with large imperfect letters:

BUN

Y

“You wrote your name,” said Quoyle, relieved. Baffled that she was so different than he.

“Yes.” As though she’d always done so. “And the teacher says bring a box of tissues tomorrow because the school can’t afford any.”

Blunt fogbows in the morning trip around the bay. Humps of color followed squalls, Billy Pretty babbled of lunar halos. Storms blew in and out. Sudden sleet changed to glowing violet rods, collapsed in rain. Two, three days of heat as though blown from a desert. Fibres of light crawling down the bay like luminous eels.

On the headlands and in the bogs berries ripened in billions, wild currants, gooseberries, ground hurts, cranberries, marshberries, partridgeberries, squashberries, late wild strawberries, crawberries, cloudy bakeapples stiff above maroon leaves.

“Let’s go berrying this weekend,” said the aunt. “Just over a ways was well-known berrying grounds when I was young. We’ll make jam, after. Berrying is pleasure to all. Maybe you’ll want to bring Wavey Prowse?”

“That’s an idea,” said Quoyle.

She said she would be glad-as if he’d invited her to a party.

“Ken will bring me across-wants to see your new roof.”

Ken looked less at the roof than at Quoyle and his daughters; joked with the aunt. Gave Herry a good-bye touch on the shoulder. “Well, I’m off. Business in Misky Bay, so might’s well go around the point. Shall I come along later, then?” Eyes like a thornbush, stabbing everything at once. In a hurry to get it all.

“All right,” said Wavey. “Thank you, boy.” Her berry pails had rope handles finished in useful knots.

The aunt, the little girls, Quoyle, Wavey and Herry walked overland to the berry grounds beyond the glove factory, their pails and buckets rattling, clatter of stones on the path, Sunshine saying, Carry me. The sun laid topaz wash over barrens. Ultramarine sky. The sea flickered.

Wavey in toast-colored stockings, a skirt with mended seams. Quoyle wore his plaid shirt, rather tight.

“People used to come here for miles with their berry boxes and buckets,” said the aunt over her shoulder. “They’d sell the berries, you see, in those days.”

“Still do,” Wavey said. “Agnis girl, last fall they paid ninety dollars a gallon for bakeapples. My father made a thousand dollars on his berries last year. City people want them. And there’s some still makes berry ocky if they can get the partridge berries.”

“Berry ocky! There was an awful drink,” said the aunt. “We’ll see what we get,” and looked sidewise at Wavey, taking in the rough hands and cracked shoes, Herry’s face like a saucer of skim milk. But a pretty boy, they said, with his father’s beauty only a little distorted. As though malleable features had been pressed with a firm hand.

The sea glowed, transparent with light. Wavey and Quoyle picked near each other. Her hard fingers worked through the tufted plants, the finger and thumb gathering two, seven, rolling them back into the cupped palm, then dropping them into the pail, a small sound as the berries fell. Walked on her knees. A bitter, crushed fragrance. Quoyle blew chaff away. A hundred feet away Herry and Sunshine and Bunny, rolling like dogs on the cushiony ground. The aunt roved, her white kerchief shrank to a dot. As the pickers spread out they disappeared briefly in hollows or behind rises. The sea hissed.

The aunt called to Quoyle. “Yoo-hoo. Forgot the lunch basket. Back by the glove factory. You get it, I’ll watch the children.”

“Come with me,” said Quoyle to Wavey. Urgent. She looked away at Herry.

“They’re playing. Come on. We’ll go along the shore. It will be faster walking on the stones than going through the tuckamore. We’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

“All right.”

And she was away on her strong legs, Quoyle stumbling after, running to catch up. The ocean twitched like a vast cloth spread over snakes.

Quoyle swung the basket, walked along the shore past broken bladder wrack, knot wrack, horn wrack and dead-man’s-fingers, green sausageweed and coralweed, mats of dulse and in their thou sands, crushed clumps of bristly bryozoan, long brown rips of kelp, a blackening coastal string looped by the last week’s storm. Wavey climbed and sprang along the rocks, kicked through the heaped wrack. Quoyle picking his way more slowly, beer bottles clinking in the basket.

“Look,” he said. At the mouth of the bay a double-towered iceberg.

“It’s tilting.”

Wavey stood on a rock, curled her fingers and raised her fists to her eyes as though they were binoculars. The ice mass leaned as though to admire its reflection in the waves, leaned until the southern tower was at the angle of a pencil in a writing hand, the northern tower reared over it like a lover. Soundlessly the distant towers came together, plunged under the water. A fountain of displaced water.

Quoyle below the rock. Suddenly he clasped his hands around her ankles. She felt the heat of his hands through her brown stockings, did not move. Prisoner on the rock. Looked down. Quoyle’s face was pressed against her legs. She could see white scalp through snarled reddish hair, fingers curved firm around her ankles hiding her shoes except the pointed toes, the leather perforated in an ornate curl like a Victorian mustache, his heavy wrists and beyond them the sweater cuffs, a bit of broken shell caught in the wool, dog’s hair on the sleeves. She did not move. There was a sense of a curtain, of a hand on the rope that could pull it open. Quoyle inhaled the scent of cotton stockings, a salt and seaweed female smell that made him reckless. His fingers unfurled, the hands drew back. She felt the absence. Quoyle staring hard at her. “Come down. Come down.” He held out his arms. No mistaking what he meant. Transfixed, she hardly breathed. One flicker of movement and he’d be all over her, pulling her clothes up, wrenching the brown stockings and pressing her down on the stones with the shore flies crawling on bare skin, Quoyle, entering her, ramming his great chin into the side of her neck. And afterwards some silent agreement, some sore complicity, betrayal. She burst out.

“Do you know how he died? My husband? Herold Prowse? I’ll tell you. He’s in the sea. He’s down at the bottom. I never come beside the sea without thinking-‘Herold’s there.’ Old Billy tell you about it, did he?”

She slid down the rock, safe now, protected by grief. Quoyle stood away, hands dangling, looking at her. The words gushed.

“Herold was a roustabout on the Sevenseas Hector. First decent job he ever had. Wonderful money, steady work. Everything coming fine for us. Biggest, safest oil rig in the world. Three weeks off, three weeks on. He was out on it when it went over. The telephone. Early in the morning. January 29, 1981. I was up and dressed, but lay down again because I felt so bad. I was carrying Herry. A lady’s voice come on the phone and she says, she says to me, ‘Oh Mrs. Prowse. We have to inform you that they are reporting the Sevenseas Hector went over in the storm and the men are considered missing.’ Went over in the storm, she said. At first they claimed it was because the storm was so bad.

“But there was other oil rigs out there only a dozen miles away and they stayed up. Sevenseas Ajax and Deep Blue 12. They didn’t have any trouble. Storms like that one comes along every winter. It wasn’t a century storm, comes along once every hundred years. Ninety-seven men missing, and not a single body did they ever recover. They saw some of them in a sinking lifeboat, the seas breaking over them and then they was gone.

“It come out little by little. Like a nightmare that gets worse and you can’t wake up. The government didn’t have any safety rules for these things. The design of the rig was bad. Nobody on the rig knew who was in charge. Was it the tool pusher or the master? Most of the men on board didn’t know nothing about the sea. Geologists and cementers, derrickmen, mud watchers, drillers, welders and fitters, they was after the oil, no attention to the water or weather. Didn’t even understand the weather reports that come to them. Didn’t know enough to close the deadlights when the seas worked up. The glass in the ballast room portlight was weak. The control panel shorted out if water got in it. A sea broke the portlight, come in and drenched the control panel. They wasn’t properly trained. No operation manuals. So when the panel went out and they tried to adjust the ballast by hand with some little brass rods they got it all wong, did it backwards, they sent it into a tilt. Just like that iceberg. Over it went. And the lifeboats wasn’t any good, and most of the men never made it to the boats because the public address system went out when the control panel failed. The lawyer said it was falling dominoes.

“So, not to hurt your feelings, but that’s how it is. I was thinking of it watching that iceberg go down. I think of it every single time I’m at the edge of the water, I look along the shore, half afraid, half hoping that I’ll see Herold’s drowned body in the seaweed. Though it’s years, now.”

Quoyle listened. Would he have to bring her to the prairies? And what of Petal’s essence riding under his skin like an injected vaccine against the plague of love? What was the point of touching Wavey’s dry hand?

They came up the path and onto the barrens, looked toward the pale dot that was the aunt’s kerchief, the jumping children like fleas.

Quoyle behind her. Without looking Wavey knew exactly where he was.

Warmth, deep sky, the silence except for their children’s far voices. Then, sharply, as a headache can suddenly stop, something yielded, long griefs eased. She turned. Quoyle was so close. She started to say something. Her freckled, rough skin flushed. She fell, or he pulled her down. They rolled over the massed cushions of berry plants, clinging, they rolled, hot arms and legs, berries and leaves, mouths and tears and stupid words.

But when the sea heaved below she heard it, thought of Herold’s handsome bones tangled in ghost nets. And shoved Quoyle away. Was up and running toward the aunt, the girls and poor fatherless Herry, the picnic basket bumping against her legs. If Quoyle wanted anything at all he must follow.

Wavey ran to get away, then for the sake of running, and at last because there was nothing else to do. It would look undecided to change her pace, as though she did not know what she wanted. It seemed always that she had to keep on performing pointless acts.

Quoyle lay in the heather and stared after her, watching the folds of her blue skirt erased by the gathering distance. The aunt, the children, Wavey. He pressed his groin against the barrens as if he were in union with the earth. His aroused senses imbued the far scene with enormous importance. The small figures against the vast rock with the sea beyond. All the complex wires of life were stripped out and he could see the structure of life. Nothing but rock and sea, the tiny figures of humans and animals against them for a brief time.

The sharpness of his gaze pierced the past. He saw generations like migrating birds, the bay flecked with ghost sails, the deserted settlements vigorous again, and in the abyss nets spangled with scales. Saw the Quoyles rinsed of evil by the passage of time. He imagined the aunt buried and gone, himself old, Wavey stooped with age, his daughters in faraway lives, Herry still delighted by wooden dogs and colored threads, a grizzled Herry who would sleep in a north room at the top of the house or in the little room under the stairs.

A sense of purity renewed, a sense of events in trembling balance flooded him.

Everything, everything seemed encrusted with portent.