He pulled on the grey nightshirt which was torn under the arms and clung to his wet back. Again, a bolt of joy passed through him. For no reason.
Came out of sleep to hear the phone ringing. Down to the kitchen, stumbling over a dirty shirt he had dropped. Dennis on the wire.
“Don’t like to wake you up but thought you ought to know. Mumma called a few minutes ago. He’s not back yet. Been out since four this morning. He should have been back dinnertime. It’s ten o’clock now. Something’s wrong. I called the Search and Rescue. I’m on my way to Mumma’s now. I felt like something was off all day. We’s braced for the worst.”
“Let me know as soon as you hear anything.” Quoyle shivered in the chilly kitchen. The clock said six minutes past ten. He could not hear the sea.
At midnight Dennis called again, voice hoarse and drained. As though some long struggle had ended badly.
“They found the boat. They found him. He’s drownded. They said efforts to resuscitate failed.” No heartbeat, no breath, lying on the rescue ship’s emergency room table. “Looks like he caught his foot in the slingstone line when he threw a lobster trap over. They’re bringing him and the boat in now. You call Billy? I’m taking Mumma down. She wants to be there when they bring him in.”
In the morning, breakfastless and shaky from seven cups of coffee, heart and stomach aching, Quoyle went to the wharf on his way to Wavey. There was Jack’s skiff tied up beyond the orange Search and Rescue vessel, trucks and cars and a knot of people looking at the boat of the drowned man.
Wavey fell against him like a cut sapling, tears wetting his shirt. Quoyle backed against the sink in her little kitchen. He said he would drive Herry and Bunny to school to keep balance in their day. Sunshine would stay with Wavey, who, after the brief luxury of Quoyle’s shoulder, was making school lunches. Not to trouble Beety.
A stillness. Mist the depth of a hand on the water, blurred the jumbled shore. Rock ledges like black metal straps held the sea to the land. Quoyle inhaled, cold air rushed up his nose and he was guilty because Jack was dead and here he was, still breathing.
Paper-faced Billy had every detail, had gone to the wharf the night before, had put his hand on Mrs. Buggit’s arm, touched Dennis’s shoulder and said he was sorry for their trouble. Had seen Jack brought back to the house and carried in. Helped pull Jack’s clothes off, cover him with a sheet. Observed the matching mole below his left nipple that, when balanced by the eye against the right nipple, suggested punctuation ready for an inscription to be written around the torso.
Had seen Mrs. Buggit and her sisters with the basins of water and scissors to prepare Jack for his suit, to shave and tonsure, to clip his nails. An embroidered pillow was ready to put under his head, brought from a trunk, the tissue unfolded. His Voyage Ended. Worked decades before in the north light of the window.
Quoyle and Benny Fudge leaned on their desks, watching Billy who seemed made of translucent fish bones, whose talk pelted them like handfuls of thrown pebbles.
“They found the skiff out by the Pook Rock. Jack never set a lobster trap there in his life. Can’t figure it out, what he was doing there. You know that cat he liked so well, called him Skipper. Skipper Tom. Still on the boat. The Search and Rescue comes up along, shines the searchlight and there’s Skipper Tom, prowling back and forth with his tail lashing as if he knowed Jack needed help and couldn’t work out how to give it. They could see Jack clear as day under the water. The line going overboard. He was upside down, just under the boat. The slingstone line of the lobster trap wrapped around his ankle and yanked him overboard. He couldn’t get loose. It was tangled kind of crazy. His hand was jammed in his pocket. He had to of been feeling for his knife, you know, cut himself free. But there wasn’t a knife there. Could be he dropped it or lost it somehow as he went over and didn’t realize. I don’t know if he carried it loose in his pocket, but when I was fishing my knife was in my right pocket and there was a lanyard that secured it to me belt loop. Because if you lose it when you’re upside down under the water like poor Jack, that’s all, you’re gone.” Hoarse as a raven.
Quoyle imagined Jack’s clothes rippling underwater like silk, his moonstone face and throat and hands glimmering under the sea.
“Amen,” said Benny Fudge. “There’s many a lobsterman goes that way.”
“How’s Mrs. Buggit taking it?” Thinking of the woman in the perpetual freeze of sorrow, afloat on the rise and fall of tatted billows.
“Surprising calm. She said she’s been expecting it since the first week they was married and Jack was thought lost out on the ice. Sealing. She’s been through the agony now three times over. There’s one relief that’s helping her bear up. See, they recovered the body. She can bury Jack. They’ve took him up home to lay him out. Jack will be the first Buggit in a long time to be buried in the earth. It’s a comfort for her to have the body.”
Stones crowded in close company in the Killick-Claw cemetery, for someone lost at sea did not need six feet of space.
“They’re laying him out now. The wake is tonight and the burial service tomorrow, Quoyle. You do bring Wavey to poor Jack’s house at seven tonight. Dennis told me to tell you. And asks if you’ll be a pallbearer for poor Jack.”
“Yes,” said Quoyle. “I will. And we’ll run a special edition this week dedicated to Jack. Billy, we’ll want a front-page obit. From the heart. Who better than you? Talk to everybody. I wonder if there’s any pictures of him. I’ll see if Beety knows. Benny, forget whatever you’re doing. Go down to Search and Rescue and get the details of them finding Jack. Get some shots of his skiff. Play up the cat. What’s his name? Skipper Tom.”
“What’s going to happen with the Gammy Bird?” said Benny Fudge, tossing lank black hair. “Will it be put to rest?” His big chance slipping away. Even now he played with a piece of string as if it was yarn.
“No. A paper has a life of its own, an existence beyond earthly owners. We’re going to press tomorrow as usual. Have to work like hell to make it. What time’s the wake, Billy?” Quoyle began to rip up the front page.
Billy reached for his notebook. “Seven. I don’t know if Dennis can build a coffin or if they’ll have to buy one.”
Benny Fudge slipped out the door, in his hand the new laptop computer, on his head a mail-order fedora, his face firmed up with new teeth and ambition.
Thickening mist on the water. Vaporous spirals writhed, the air thickened and filled in, that other world disappeared as if down a funnel leaving only wet rock, the smothered sea and watery air. From a distance the hoarse and muffled call of the foghorn like a bull in a spring meadow bellowing with longing.
Quoyle was exhausted, keyed up, getting ready for the wake. He squeezed into his black funeral trousers. He’d have to go back to the paper as soon as he could decently leave and finish pasting up Billy’s long piece. They had a fine picture of Jack, ten years younger but looking the same, standing beside his freshly painted skiff. Quoyle had had a big nine-by-twelve print framed for Mrs. Buggit.
Dreaded seeing Jack lying in his parlor in a froth of knotted doilies. Thought of the corpse as wet, as though they could not dry him off, the seawater running from him in streams, dripping loudly on the polished floor and Mrs. Buggit, worried, stooping to mop it up with a white cloth bunched in her hand.