Out through the narrows and Billy set a seaward course. Quoyle had forgotten his cap again and his hair whipped. The skiff cut into the swell. He felt that nameless pleasure that comes only with a fine day on the water.
“Ar,” said Billy above the motor and the sound of water rushing off the hull, “speaking of named rocks, we got ‘em all along, boy, thousands and thousands of miles with wash balls and sunkers and known rocks every foot of the way. Newfoundland itself is a great rock in the sea, and the islands stribbled around it are rocks. Famous rocks like the Chain Rock and the Pancake up in St. John’s, both of them above water and steep-to, and there’s old terrors that they’ve blowed up-the Merlin and the Ruby Rock that was in St. John’s narrows. A hundred years ago and more they blew them up. Up along the north shore there’s Long Harry. And mad rocks with the seaweed streeling.
“I mind to Cape Bonavista there’s Old Harry Rock under two fathoms and he stretches out three mile into the sea and at the far end is a cruel little rise they call Young Harry. In North Broad Cove they’ve Shag Rock and Hell’s Rock. The shag, y’know is the cormorant, the black goose, a stinking black thing that the old people used to say built its nest with dead fish. That’s what they called you if you come from Grand Banks. If you come from Fortune you were a gaily, a scarecrow. Down on the Burin Peninsula.” Billy Pretty tossed his head up and sang in a creaky but lilting tenor:
Fortune gaily-baggers and Grand Bank shags
All stuffed into paper bags.
When them bags begin to bust
The Grand Bank shags begin to cuss.
“You heard that one? Now, to rocks again, Salvage Harbor has a big broad one they call the Baker’s Loaf and on along you’ll find the Cook-room Rock. Funk Islands is snaggy water, reefs and shoals and sunkers. The Cleopatra and Snap Rock. The Fogo Islands, dangerous waters for rocks where many a ship has wrecked. Born and brought up there to find your way through. And sticking out of the water is the jigger, Old Gappy, Ireland Rock, the Barrack Rock, the Inspector who wants to inspect your bottom.
“Look there, you can see it now, Gaze Island. Been about three years since I come out here. Where I was born and brought up and lived-when I was ashore-until I was forty years old. I shipped out and worked the freighters when I was young for quite a few years. Then I was in two wrecks and thought if there was going to be another, I wanted it to be in home water. There’s many of my relatives down under this water, so it’s homey, in a way. I come back and fished the shore. Jack Buggit was part of my crowd, even though he come from Flour Cove. His mother was my mother’s cousin. You wouldn’t know it to look at us, but we’re the same age. Both seventy-three. But Jack hardened and I shriveled. The government moved us off Gaze in ‘sixty. But you’ll see how some of them houses is standing just as straight and firm after thirty-odd years empty. Yes, they looks solid enough.”
“Like our house down on the Point,” said Quoyle. “It was in good shape, endured forty years empty.”
“It endured more than that,” said Billy.
Gaze Island reared from the water as sheer cliff. Half a mile from the formidable island rocks broke the surface, awash with foam.
“That’s the Home Rock. We takes our bearing off it.” He changed course toward the southern tip of the island.
Billy worked through an invisible maze of shoals and sunkers. The boat pointed at a red stone wall, waves smashing at its foot. Quoyle’s dry mouth. They were almost in the foam. Twenty feet from the face of the cliff he still could not see the entrance. Billy headed the boat at a shadow. The sound of the engine multiplied, beat and shouted at them, echoed off the walls that rose above onyx water.
They were in a narrow tickle. Quoyle could reach out and almost touch the rock. The cliff wall opened gradually, the tickle widened, bent left, and came out into a bay enclosed by a hoop of land. Five or six buildings, a white house, a church with a crooked steeple, a slide of clapboard, old stages and tilts. Quoyle had never imagined such a secret and ruined place. Desolate, and the slyness of the hidden tickle gave the sense of a lair.
“Strange place,” said Quoyle.
“Gaze Island. They used to say, over in Killick-Claw, that Gaze Islanders were known for two things-they were all fish dogs, knew how to find fish, and they knew more about volcanoes than anybody in Newfoundland.”
Billy brought his boat up to the beach, cut the engine and raised it. Silence except for the drip of water from the propeller, and the skreel of gulls. Billy hawked and spat, pointed down the land curve to a building set away from the shore.
“There’s our old place.”
Once painted red, greyed it to a dull pink by salt weather. A section of broken fence. Billy seized his bag and jumped out of the boat, bootheels made semicircles in the sand. Secured the line to a pipe hammered into the rock. Quoyle clambered after him. The silence. Only the sound of their boots gritting and the sea murmur.
“There was five families lived here when my dad was a boy, the Prettys, the Pools, the Sops, the Pilleys, the Cusletts. Every family was married with every other family. Boy, they was kind, good people, and the likes of them are gone now. Now it’s every man for himself. And woman, too.”
He tried to lift a fallen section of fence from the weeds, but it broke in his hands and he only cleared away the tangle from the upright section, braced it with rocks.
They walked up to the high gaze that gave the island its name, a knoll on the edge of the cliff with a knot of spruce in one corner, all hemmed around with a low wall of stones. Quoyle, turning, could look down to the cup of harbor, could turn again, look at the open sea, at distant ships heading for Europe or Montreal. Liquid turquoise below. To the north two starched sheet icebergs. There, the smoke of Killick-Claw. Far to the east, almost invisible, a dark band like rolled gauze.
“They could see a ship far out in any direction from here. They’d put the cows up here in the summer. Never a cow in Newfoundland had a better view.”
They walked over the moss and heather to a cemetery. A fence of blunt pickets enclosed crosses and wooden markers, many fallen on the ground, their letters faded by cold light. Billy Pretty knelt in the corner, tugged at wild grass. The top of the wooden marker was cut in three arcs to resemble a stone, the paint still legible:
W. Pretty
born 1897 died 1934
Through the great storms of life he did his best,
God grant him eternal rest.
“That’s me poor father,” said Billy Pretty. “Fifteen was I when he died.” He scraped away, pulling weeds from a coffin-shaped frame that enclosed the grave. It was painted with a design of black and white diamonds, still sharp.
“Painted this up the last time I was over,” said Billy, opening his bag and taking out tins of paint, two brushes, “and I’ll do it again now.”
Quoyle thought of his own father, wondered if the aunt still had his ashes. There had been no ceremony. Should they put up a marker? A faint sense of loss rose in him.
Suddenly he could see his father, see the trail of ground cherry husks leading from the garden around the edge of the lawn where he walked while he ate them. The man had a passion for fruit. Quoyle remembered purple-brown seckle pears the size and shape of figs, his father taking the meat off with pecking bites, the smell of fruit in their house, litter of cores and peels in the ashtrays, the grape cluster skeletons, peach stones like hens’ brains on the windowsill, the glove of banana peel on the car dashboard. In the sawdust on the basement workbench galaxies of seeds and pits, cherry stones, long white date pits like spaceships. Strawberries in the refrigerator, and in June the car parked on a country road and the father on his knees picking wild strawberries in the weeds. The hollowed grapefruit skullcaps, cracked globes of tangerine peel.