“Blow the hair off a dog,” he said. And his own dog, Elvis, twisted her ears, the skin on her back shuddered.
In the Burkes’ house the aunt marked the beating of the sea, a pummeling sound that traveled up through the legs of the bed. Up the road Mrs. Buggit recognized the squealing gasps of a drowning son. Herry, rigid in his blankets, experienced immensity, became a solitary ant in a vast hall. And down in St. Johns in his white bed the old cousin trembled with pleasure at what he had conjured with wind-knots.
But Bunny went up the howling chimney, sailed against the wind and across the bay to the rock where the green house strained against the cables. She lay on stone, looked up. A shingle lifted, tore away. A course of bricks flew off the chimney like cards. Each of the taut cables shouted a different bull-roarer note, the mad bass driving into rock, the house beams and timbers vibrating. The walls chattered, shot nails onto the heaving floors. The house strained toward the sea.
A crack, a whistle as a cable snapped. Glass burst. The house slewed on grating sills. The cables shrilled.
Bunny watched, flat on her back, arms outstretched like a staked prisoner and powerless to move. The house lifted at the freed corner, fell, lifted. Glass broke. A second cable parted. Now the entire back of the house rose as if the building curtsied, then dropped. Cracking beams, scribbles of glass, inside the pots and pans and beds and bureaus skidding over the floors, a drawer of spoons and forks down the tilt, the stairs untwisting.
A burst of wind wrenched the house to the east. The last cables snapped, and in a great, looping roll the house toppled.
Shrieking. Awake. Scrambling across the floor to get away. The wind outside proving the nightmare. Quoyle lurched through the door, grasped the kicking child. He was frightened for his daughter. Who was mad with fear.
Yet in ten minutes she was calm, swallowed a cup of warm milk, listened to Quoyle’s rational explanation of wind noises that caused nightmare, told him she could go back to sleep if Warren the Second slept on the bed. When he asked cautiously what she had dreamed, she couldn’t remember.
At the Gammy Bird Quoyle ran a special issue, OUR BATTERED COAST, featuring shots of boats in the street, marooned snowplows. A thousand stories, said Billy Pretty in a worn voice. Ships lost, more than forty men and three women and one child drowned between the Grand Banks and the St. Lawrence Seaway, boats crippled and cargoes lost. Benny Fudge brought in photographs of householders digging out their buried pickups.
The weather service predicted a heat wave.
On Monday it came, a shimmering day of heat, the land streaming with melting snow and talk of global warming. A riddled iceberg scraped past the point. Quoyle in shirtsleeves, squinting his way through glare. When he could shunt thoughts of Bunny onto a siding, he felt spasms of joy. For no reason that he could think of except the long daylight, or the warmth, or because the air was so clear and sweet he felt he was just learning to breathe.
Late in the morning the newsroom door opened. There was Wavey. Who never came there. She beckoned. Whispered in his ear, her breath delicious against his cheek. The auburn braid a rope of shining hairs which he had experienced undone. Yellow paint on her knuckle, faint scent of turpentine.
“Dad says you must come by this noon. He wants to show you something.” But said she didn’t know what. Some kind of men’s business. For Archie was an expert at dividing the affairs of life into men’s business and women’s business. An empty cupboard and a full plate were the man’s business, a full cupboard and an empty plate the concern of the woman.
He was leaning on his fence when Quoyle drove up. Must have heard the station wagon start up half a mile away, for the exhaust system was shot. Quoyle knew he should have walked the distance, needed the exercise, but it was quicker to drive. He’d start walking tomorrow if the weather was good.
Archie leaned, his wooden zoo behind him, held old-fashioned binoculars. A cigarette in his mouth. Years ago the first thing he’d seen through the binoculars had been the Buggit boys out on the grainy ice, copying, jumping from one pan to another. Could see the snot running from their noses. Never a miss for an hour. Then Jesson fell short, clenched the edge of the ice, the other one tried to haul him up. Archie was out there with his boat in a few minutes, saving the boy, yanking him out of the sishy drift. At the time, thought it was lucky he had those binoculars. But later saw it for an omen. No one could stop the hand of fate. Jesson was born to be drowned.
He raised the binoculars now as Quoyle came toward him, scanned the far shore, examined Quoyle’s Point as illustration for what he had to say.
“You know, I believe your ‘ouse is gone. Take a look.” Held out the binoculars.
Quoyle standing on snow-rived rock. Moved the binoculars slowly back and forth. And again.
Archie reeked of cigarettes. His face fissured with thousands of fine lines, black curved hairs growing out of his ears and nostrils. The fingers orange. Couldn’t speak without coughing.
“No, you won’t find ‘er for she’s not there. I looked out for ‘er this morning, but she’s not where she was. Thought you might want to go along down and see if she was just tipped over or sailed away. Was some shocking ‘ard wind we ‘ad. How many years was them cables ‘olding ‘er down?”
Quoyle didn’t know. Since before the aunt’s time, what sixty-four years and many more. Since the old Quoyles dragged the house across the ice.
“She’ll take it hard if it’s gone,” he said. “After all the work.” And even though he knew his secret path was still there, felt as if he’d lost the place where the whiskey jacks flitted through the tunnels among the spruce branches, the place where he jumped down onto the beach. As if he’d lost silence. Now there was only town. The Quoyles on the shift again.
Thanked Archie and shook his hand.
“Good thing I had the binoculars.” Archie drew on his cigarette, wondered what shrouded meaning might be in this.
Beety said yes, Dennis was cutting wood for his buddy Carl who still couldn’t lift more than a fork, had to wear a collarlike thing around his neck. Yes he had the snowmobile. Though the snow was spotty. Down the highway by the blue marker; Quoyle’d see the truck parked on the side of the road. Not far from where they’d been cutting after Christmas. There was a wood path going in. He’d find it. Sure he would.
Dennis in a fan of raw stumps and Quoyle had to shout above the chain saw’s racketing idle. He said his house was missing. And they were up the road for the track through slumping drifts, past the Capsize Cove turnoff. Gravel showing through. Past the glove factory. Whiskey jacks there, anyway. The smell of resin and exhaust. Trickle of melt water.
The great rock stood naked. Bolts fast in the stone, a loop of cable curled like a hawser. And nothing else. For the house of the Quoyles was gone, lifted by the wind, tumbled down the rock and into the sea in a wake of glass and snow crystals.
“All our work and money and it’s just away like that? To stand forty years empty, and then go in the flicker of an eyelid! Just when we had it fixed up.” The aunt in her shop, sniveling into a tissue. A silence. “What about the outhouse?”
He could hardly believe what he heard. The house gone and she asked about the crapper.
“I didn’t notice it, Aunt. But I didn’t make a special effort to look, either. The dock is still there. We could build a little camp out there, use it on fine weekends and in the summer, you know. I’ve been thinking we could buy the Burkes’ house. It’s a nice house and it’s convenient. It’s big enough. Nine rooms, Aunt.”