“ ‘You! You Billy Pretty!’ She blasted ‘im.” The cane twirled. “Says,”-a long, long pause-”says, ‘Why don’t you wear a wristwatch like everybody else?’ “
A tremendous roar from the audience. Young men tossed their watches into the air.
“Ah, she’s something, she’s something, isn’t she?” Dennis pounding Quoyle’s back, leaning forward to touch old Mrs. Fizzard’s shoulder.
“Not a word of truth in it,” she screamed, purple with laughing. “But how she makes you think there was! Oh, she’s terrible good!”
And a few days later Quoyle gave Wavey a clear glass teapot, a silk scarf printed with a design of blueberries. He’d ordered them both through the mail from a museum shop in the States. She gave him a sweater the color of oxblood shoe polish. Had knitted it in the evenings. It was not too small. Their faces close enough for breath to mingle. Yet Quoyle was thinking of the only gift that Petal ever gave him. She had opened dozens of presents from him. A turquoise bracelet, a tropical-fish tank, a vest beaded with Elvis Presley’s visage, canary eyes and sequin lips. She opened the last box, glanced at him. Sitting with his hands dangling, watching her.
“Wait a minute,” she said and ran into the kitchen. He heard the refrigerator open. She came back with her hands behind her back.
“I didn’t have a chance to buy you anything,” she said, then held both closed hands toward him. Uncurled her fingers. In each cupped palm a brown egg. He took them. They were cold. He thought it a tender, wonderful thing to do. She had given him something, the eggs, after all, only a symbol, but they had come from her hands as a gift. To him. It didn’t matter that he’d bought them himself at the supermarket the day before. He imagined she understood him, that she had to love him to know that it was the outstretched hands, the giving, that mattered.
On Christmas day a hunch of cloud moved in. But the aunt was up from St. Johns, and they had Christmas dinner with Dennis and Beety in Mrs. Buggit’s kitchen, people in and out, the fire bursting hot and stories of old-time teak days and mummers and jannies. Jack skulked around the edges pouring hot rum punch. Some distance away they heard sporadic and celebratory shotgun fire.
Dennis’s mustache white with frost. He and Quoyle on the Saturday morning after Christmas cutting next winter’s firewood back in the spruce at the bottom of the bay. Quoyle with the chain saw, for which he had an affinity, Dennis limbing and trimming. The blue scarf knitted by Sunshine barely wrapped around Quoyle’s neck. At noon they stood over the small fire sucking hot tea.
“Beety says we ought to take a look in at old Nolan there in Capsize Cove. Seeing as we’re not that far away. Finish up a little early and run in there. Dad or somebody usually goes over early part of the winter to see if he’s got enough wood and food. A little late this year. Beety makes him a cake and some bread. I see his smoke there in the morning, but you can’t tell.”
“I didn’t even think about him,” said Quoyle. Guilty.
They went up the bay in a great curve, Dennis shouting stories of drunken snowmobilers who sank forever beneath the ice because they didn’t know the routes.
“Bloody cold,” he shouted, squinting at the notch in the shoreline. The empty houses of Capsize Cove were in sight like a charcoal drawing on rough paper. A long banking turn onto shore.
Smoke coming out of the metal pipe of the old cousin’s shack. The snowmobile’s whine throttled back to stuttered idling.
“Leave it running,” said Dennis.
Worse than Quoyle remembered. The stink was gagging. The old man too weak or befuddled to get to the outhouse. A skeleton trembled before them. The dog near the stove didn’t move. But was alive. Quoyle could not help it. He retched and staggered to the doorway. In the fenced pasture three humps under the snow. Frozen sheep.
“Uncle Nolan,” he heard Dennis say. “It’s Dennis Buggit, Jack Buggit’s boy, from across the bay. My wife’s sent you some bread.” He drew the bread out of the carrier bag. The sweet, homely perfume of bread. The skeleton was upon it, crushing the loaf into his mouth, a muffled howling coming out of the twitching crust.
Dennis came outside, spat. Cleared his throat and spat again.
“Some stinking mess. Poor old bugger’s starving. Christ in the early morning, what a mess. He’d better go into a home, don’t you think? He’s off his rocker. Burning the walls of his house, there. You see where he’s ripping the boards off? He’s your kin, so it’s up to you. What to do with him. They take him away, I’ll come back over, drown the old dog. Half dead anyway.”
“I don’t have any idea what to do about him.”
“Beety will know who to call up about this. She gives time to that Saving Grace place that helps the women. And the Teenage Mothers. Knows all them groups. Her and Wavey.”
“Beety and Wavey?” Quoyle’s face flaming with guilt. He should have looked out for the wretched old cousin the first time he saw him. Didn’t think.
“That Saving Grace, Beety and Wavey started it. Couple years ago. Councilman lived over near us beat his wife up one winter, pushed her out naked-ass in the snow. She come to Beety. Blue with cold, deaf and blood in her ears. Next day Beety calls up Wavey. Wavey knows how to set up them groups, get something started, after she got the special ed group up. Get the Province’s ear, see? Make them pay attention.”
“Some women,” said Quoyle. But thought, oh you should have seen Petal, you should have seen my lovely girl. A preposterous thought, Petal in Killick-Claw, and not funny. She would have screamed, jumped on the next plane out. Never, never to be seen again.
“My son,” said Dennis, “you don’t know the half of it,” and gunned the snowmobile out onto the wind-scoured bay.
35 The Day’s Work
“Day’s Work, consists, at least, of the dead reckoning from
noon to noon, morning and afternoon time sights for longitude,
and a meridian altitude for latitude.”
THE MARINER’S DICTIONARY
“WANT to talk to you, Quoyle.” Jack, shouting down the wire. “Pick you up tomorrer morning. So they know who you are down to Misky Bay.” Bristling cough. Hung up before Quoyle could say anything. If he’d had anything to say.
By January it had always been winter. The sky blended imperceptibly into the neutral-colored ice that covered the ocean, solid near shore, jigsaw floes fifty miles out and heaving on the swells. Snow fell every day, sometimes slow flakes, as if idling between storms. Deepened, deepened; five, eight, eleven feet deep. The roads were channels between muffling banks, metal, wood silenced. And every ten days or so, by Quoyle’s reckoning, another storm.
Jack’s truck heater blasted, yet their breaths iced the side windows. Quoyle scraped with his fingernails to look for the harp seals that began to dot the far ice now like commas and semicolons. Half listening to Jack. Thinking of seals. Wavey’s older brother, Oscar, had a pet seal. Devoted to the local scallops. Jack had things on his mind and talked like a rivet gun. The new groundfish fishing season had opened, a maze of allocations and quotas that threw him into reverse.
“Einstein couldn’t understand it. They’ve made a fucking cockadoodle mess out of it, those twits in Ottawa who don’t know a lumpfish from their own arse.” Jack at his medium range of temper.