“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.
24 Berry Picking
“The difference between the CLOVE HITCH and TWO
HALF HITCHES is exceedingly vague in the minds of many, the reason
being that the two have the same knot form; but one is tied
around another object, the other around its own standing part.”
THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS
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.