“That’s why you must go right back to ‘em. Now you been christened. Winter is the finest time to build a boat. Alvin build you something and come ice-out I’ll show you the tricks. Since you’ve been brought up away from the boats and are a danger to yourself.”
Quoyle knew he should feel grateful. But felt stupid. “That’s kind of you, Billy. I know I ought to do it.”
“You just go out there to Alvin’s place. You know where his shop is? Get Wavey to show you. Alvin’s her uncle. Her poor dead mother’s oldest brother.”
“Alvin Yark is Wavey’s uncle?” He seemed to be treading a spiral, circling in tighter and tighter.
“Oh yes.”
While his hand was on the phone Quoyle dialed Diddy Shovel. What was the fire, was there a story in it? Bunny slouched into the kitchen with her sweater on backwards. Quoyle tried to pantomime a command to reverse the sweater, aroused the Beethoven scowl.
“Young man,” the great voice boomed, “while you’re fiddling around the Rome bums. Cargo ship, Rome, six-hundred-foot vessel, Panamanian registered, carrying a load of zinc and lead powder is, let’s see, about twenty miles out and on fire at thirteen hundred hours. Two casualties. The captain and an unidentified. Rest of the crew taken off by helicopter. Twenty-one chaps from Myanmar. Do you know where Myanmar is?”
“No.”
“Right where Burma used to be. Helicopter took most of the crew to Misky Bay Hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation. Ship is in tow, destination Killick-Claw. More than that I do not know.”
“Do you know how I can get out to her?”
“Why bother? Wait until they bring her in. Shouldn’t be too long.”
Yet by three-thirty the ship still had not entered the narrows. Quoyle called Diddy Shovel again.
“Should be here by five. Understand they’ve had some trouble. Towing cable parted and they had to rig another.”
Wavey came down the steps pulling at the sleeves of her homemade coat, the color of slushy snow. She got in, glanced at him. A slight smile. Looked away.
Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.
“I’ve got to go down to the harbor. So we can pick up the kids and I’ll bring you and young Herold straight back. I can drop Bunny off at Beety’s for an hour or take her with me. They’re towing in a ship that had a fire. Two men dead, including the captain. The others in the hospital. Diddy Shovel says.”
“I tremble to hear it.” And did, in fact, shudder.
The school came in sight. Bunny stood at the bottom of the steps holding a sheet of paper. Quoyle dreaded the things she brought from school, that she showed him with her lip stuck out: bits of pasta glued on construction paper to form a face, pipe cleaners twisted into flowers, crayoned houses with quadrate windows, brown trees with broccoli heads never seen in Newfoundland. School iconography, he thought.
“That’s how Miss Grandy says to do it.”
“But Bunny, did you ever see a brown tree?”
“Marty makes her trees brown. And I’m gonna.”
Quoyle to Wavey. “Billy says I must get a boat built over the winter. He says I should go to Alvin Yark.”
A nod at hearing her uncle’s name.
“He’s a good boat builder,” she said in her low voice. “He’d make you a good one.”
“I thought I would go over on Saturday,” said Quoyle. “And ask. Take the girls. Will you and Herry come with us? Is that a good day?”
“The best,” she said. “And I’ve got things I’ve been wanting to bring to Aunt Evvie. We’ll have supper with them. Aunt Evvie’s some cook.”
Then Quoyle and Bunny were off to the harbor, but the Rome had been towed to St. John’s by company orders.
“Usually they tell me,” said Diddy Shovel. “A few years back I’d have twisted ‘em like a watch spring, but why bother now?”
On Saturday the fog was as dense as cotton waste, carried a coldness that ate into the bones. The children like a row of hens in the backseat. Wavey a little dressed up, black shoes glittering on the floor mat. Quoyle’s eyes burned trying to penetrate the mist. Corduroy trousers painfully tight. He made a thousandth vow to lose weight. Houses at the side of the road were lost, the sea invisible. An hour to go ten miles to the Nunny Bag Cove turnoff. Cars creeping the other way, fog lights as dull as dirty saucers.
Nunny Bag Cove was a loop of road crammed with new ranch houses. They could scarcely see them in the mist.
“They had a fire about six years ago,” said Wavey. “The town burned down. Everybody built a new house with the insurance. There was some families didn’t have insurance, five or six I guess, the others shared along with them so it all came out to a new house for everybody. Uncle Al and Auntie Evvie didn’t need such a big house as the old one, so they chipped in.”
“Wait,” said Quoyle. “They built a smaller house than their insurance claim paid for?”
“Umm,” said Wavey. “He had separate insurance on his boat house. Had it insured for the amount as if there was a new long-liner just finished in it.”
“That’s enterprising,” said Quoyle.
“Well, you know, there might have been! Better to guess yes than no. How many have that happened to, and the insurance was only for the building?”
Mrs. Yark, thin arms and legs like iron bars, got them all around the kitchen table, poured the children milk-tea in tiny cups painted with animals, gilt rims. Sunshine had a Gloucester Old Spot pig, Herry a Silver Spangle rooster and hen. A curly homed Dorset sheep for Bunny. The table still damp with recent wiping.
“Chuck, chuck, chuck,” said Herry, finger on the rooster.
“They was old when I was little,” said Wavey.
“Be surprised, m’dear, ‘ow old they is. My grandmother ‘ad them. That’s a long time ago. They come over from England. Once was twelve of them, but all that’s left is the four. The ‘orses and cows are broke, though there’s a number of the saucers. Used to lave some little glassen plates, but they’s broke, too.” Mrs. Yark’s ginger cookies were flying doves with raisin eyes.
Bunny found all the interesting things in the kitchen, a folding bootjack, a tin jelly mold like a castle with pointed towers, a flowered mustache cup with a ceramic bridge at the rim to protect a gentleman’s mustache from sopping.
“You’re lucky you saved these things from the fire,” said Quoyle. Eating more cookies.
“Ah, well,” Mrs. Yark breathed, and Quoyle saw he’d made a mistake.
Quoyle left the women’s territory, followed Alvin Yark out to the shop. Yark was a small man with a paper face, ears the size of half-dollars, eyes like willow leaves. He spoke from lips no more than a crack between the nose and chin.
“So you wants a boat. A motorboat?”
“Just a small boat, yes. I want something to get around the bay-not too big. Something I can handle by myself. I’m not very good at it.”
A cap slewed sideways on his knotty head. He wore a pair of coveralls bisected by a zipper with double tabs, one dangling at his crotch, the other at his breastbone. Under the coveralls he wore a plaid shirt, and over everything a cardigan with more zippers.
“Outboard rodney, I suppose ‘ud do you. Fifteen, sixteen foot. Put a little seven-‘orsepower motor on ‘er. Something like that,” he said pointing at a sturdy boat with good lines resting on a pair of sawhorses.
“Yes,” said Quoyle. Knew enough to recognize he was looking at something good.
“Learn yer young ones to row innit when they gits a little stouter.”
They went into the dull gloom of the shop.
“Ah,” said Yark. “I ‘as a one or two to finish up, y’know,” pointing to wooden skeletons and half-planked sides. “Says I might ‘elp Nige Feam wid ‘is long-liner this winter. But if I gets out in the woods, you know, and finds the timber, it’ll go along. Something by spring, see, by the time the ice goes. If I goes in the woods and finds the right sticks you know, spruce, var. See, you must find good uns, your stem, you wants to bring it down with a bit of a ‘ollow to it, stempost and your knee, and deadwoods a course, and breast’ook. You has to get the right ones. Your timbers, you know. There’s some around ’ere steams ’em. I wouldn’t set down in a steam timber boat. Weak.”