Shipping News_A Novel Read online

  “I was going to go this afternoon,” said Quoyle. “But can do it now. Where’s the harbormaster’s office?”

  “Next to Pubby’s Marine Supply on the public wharf. Upstairs.”

  Quoyle got up, put on his jacket. At least it wasn’t a wreck, all glass and dripping fluids, and the ambulance guys fumbling inside smashed mouths.

  9 The Mooring Hitch

  “The merit of the hitch is that, when snugly applied, it will not

  slip down the post. Anyone who has found himself at full tide,

  after a hard day’s fishing, with his painter fast to a stake

  four or five feet below high-water mark, will be inspired to

  learn this knot.”

  THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

  HE DODGED through the rattle of lift trucks and winches on Wharf Road. Boats varnished with rain. Down along he saw the black coastal ferry with its red rails taking on cars, and the Labrador hospital ship. At the government dock orange flank of the Search and Rescue cutter. A dragger coming in to the fish plant.

  Wharf Road was paved with worn, blue stone carried as ballast from some distant place. A marine stink of oil, fish and dirty water. Beyond the dives and bars a few provisioners. In one window he noticed an immense pyramid of packaged dates of the kind Nutbeem liked-Desert Jujubes-red camels, shooting stars on the label.

  The harbormaster’s office was at the top of a gritty wooden stair.

  ¯

  Diddy Shovel, the harbormaster, watched Quoyle’s yellow slicker emerge from the station wagon, watched him drop his notepad on the wet cobbles. Sized him up as strong and clumsy. Shovel had been renowned once for his great physical strength. When he was twenty he started a curious brotherhood called “The Finger Club.” The seven members were all men who could suspend themselves from a beam in Eddy Blunt’s cellar by a single little finger. Powerful men in those days. As he grew older, he complemented, then replaced, his physical strength with a stentorian voice. Was now the only living member of the Finger Club. His thoughts often stopped at that point.

  In a minute Quoyle opened the door, looked through the windows twelve feet high, a glass wall into the drizzled slant of harbor, the public docks and piers in the foreground, and beyond, the sullen bay rubbed with thumbs of fog.

  A squeaking sound. Wooden swivel chair spun and the terrible face of the harbormaster aimed at Quoyle.

  “You ought to see it in a storm, the great clouds rolling off the shoulders of the mountains. Or the sunset like a flock of birds on fire. ‘Tis the most outrageous set of windows in Newfoundland.” A voice as deep as a shout in a cave.

  “I believe that,” said Quoyle. Dripping on the floor. Found the coat hook in the corner.

  Diddy Shovel’s skin was like asphalt, fissured and cracked, thickened by a lifetime of weather, the scurf of age. Stubble worked through the craquelured surface. His eyelids collapsed in protective folds at the outer corners. Bristled eyebrows; enlarged pores gave the nose a sandy appearance. Jacket split at the shoulder seams.

  “I’m Quoyle. New at the Gammy Bird. Come to get the shipping news. I’d appreciate suggestions. About the shipping news. Or anything else.”

  Harbormaster cleared his throat. Man Imitates Alligator, thought Quoyle. Got up and limped behind the counter. The cool high light from the windows fell on a painting the size of a bed sheet. A ship roared down a wave, and in the trough of the wave, broadside, a smaller boat, already lost. Men ran along the decks, their mouths open in shrieks.

  The harbormaster pulled up a loose-leaf notebook, riffled the pages with his thumb, then handed the book to Quoyle. ARRIVALS on the cover; a sense of money gain and loss, cargoes, distance traveled, the smell of the tropics.

  Followed Quoyle’s gaze.

  “Fine picture! That’s the Queen Mary running down her escort, the Curacoa. Back in 1942. Twenty miles off the Irish coast in clear sunlight and crystal visibility. The Queen, eighty-one thousand ton, converted from passenger liner to troopship, and the cruiser a mere forty-five hundred. Cut her in half like a boiled carrot.”

  Quoyle wrote until his hand cramped and he discovered he had taken down the names of ships that had called weeks ago.

  “How can I tell if ships are still here?”

  The harbormaster pulled up another book. Plywood cover, the word DEPARTURES burned in wavering letters.

  “Ha-ha,” said Quoyle. “I’d think they’d get you a computer. These logbooks look like a lot of work.”

  The harbormaster pointed to an alcove behind the counter. Computer screen like boiling milk. The harbormaster punched keys, the names of ships leaped in royal blue letters, their tonnages, owners, country of registration, cargoes, arrival and departure dates, last port of call, next port of call, days out from home port, crew number, captain’s name, birthdate and social insurance number. The harbormaster tapped again and a printer hummed, the paper rolled out into a plastic bin. He tore off pages, handed them to Quoyle. The shipping news.

  Cracking grin that showed false teeth to the roots. “Now you’ll remember that we do it two ways,” he said. “So when the storm roars and the power’s out you’ll look in the old books and it’ll all be there. Have a cup of tea. Nothing like it on a wet day.”

  “I will,” said Quoyle. Sat on the edge of a chair. Runnels of water coursed down the window glass.

  “Get down,” said the harbormaster, pushing a cat out of a chair. “It’s a good range of vessels we get here now. Bold water in Omaloor Bay almost to the shoreline. The government put seventeen million dollars into upgrading this harbor two years ago. Reconstructed dock, new container terminal. Sixteen cruise ships pegged to come in this year. They don’t stay more than a day or so, but, my boy, when they sets foot on the dock they commence to hurl the money around.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Depends what you mean by ‘this.’ I went to sea when I was thirteen years old-deckhand on my uncle Donnal’s sixty-ton sailing schooner, working up and down the coast. Where I built up me strength. Oh he fed me royal. And worked me hard. Then I fished for a while on a dory-schooner out on the Belle Isle banks the old way. I worked on a coastal ferry. I was in the Merchant Navy. In World War Two, lieutenant in the Canadian Navy. After the war I joined the Coast Guard. In 1963 I moved into this office as Killick-Claw harbormaster. Thirty years. Next year I’ll retire. Seventy years young and they’re forcing me out. Intend to learn how to play the banjo. If I can keep from bursting the strings. Sometimes I don’t know me own strength. What about you?” Flexed his fingers, making the joints pop like knotwood in a fire. Showed a little finger like a parsnip.

  “Me. I’m just working at the paper.”

  “You look like you come from here but don’t sound it.”

  “My people came from Quoyle’s Point but I was brought up in the States. So I’m an outsider. More or less.” Quoyle’s hand crept up over his chin.

  The harbormaster looked at him. Squinted.

  “Yes,” said Diddy Shovel. “I guess you got a story there, m’boy. How did it all come about that you was raised so far from home? That you come back?” Even now he could perform feats that would make them stare.

  Quoyle rattled his teacup on the saucer. “I was-. Ah, it’s complicated.” And his voice fell away. He jabbed at the pad with his pen. Change the subject.

  “That ship there,” he said, pointing. “What is it?”

  The harbormaster found a pair of binoculars under the chair and looked out into the bay.

  “The Polar Grinder? Oh yes. She’s been tried and tested. Calls here regular to take on fish and sea urchin roe for the Japanese gourmet trade. A refrigerator ship, built in Copenhagen for Northern Delicacies around 1970, 1971. You ever see the way they put the sea urchin roe up at the fish plant?”

  “No,” Quoyle thinking of the green pincushions in tidal pools.

  “Beautiful! Beautiful. Fancy wooden trays. The Japs think they’re quite the gourmet delicacy, pay a hundred do
llars for a tray of them. They lay them out all in fancy patterns, like a quilt. Umi, Call it umi. Eat them raw. Get them at sushi bars in Montreal. I had them. I tried it all. Buffalo. Chocolate-covered ants. And raw sea urchin roe. Got a cast-iron stomach, I have.”

  Quoyle sucked at his tea, a little revolted.

  “Here. Take the glasses and look. She’s got the bulbous forefoot that was coming in when she was built. There’s a sister ship, the Arctic Incisor. Refrigerator ship, four holds, insulated compartments. Chart and wheelhouse amidships, all the latest electronic navigational aids. Highly automated for her day. Since her misadventures in the storm she’s been refitted with new navigational gear, new electronic temperature gauges that you can read on the bridge, all the rest of it.

  “When she was built, you know, the fashion was for Scandinavian furniture-that’s where all the teak went. That song, ‘Norwegian Wood,’ remember that?” Sang a few lines in a roaring basso. “That Polar Grinder is fitted out with oiled teak furniture. There’s a sauna instead of a swimming pool. A lot more useful in these waters, eh? Murals on the walls showing the ski races, reindeer, northern lights and such. You heard about her, I suppose.”

  “No. She known for something?”

  “That’s the ship that drove a wedge between father and son, between Jack and his youngest son, Dennis.”

  “Dennis,” said Quoyle. “Dennis is doing some work on our old house. On Quoyle’s Point.”

  “I might have been in that house,” said Diddy Shovel in a neutral voice, “when I was a boy. Long, long, long ago. Dennis, now, he is a fine carpenter. Better carpenter than fisherman. And that was a relief to Jack-with all that’s happened to the Buggits on the sea. Jack has a morbid fear of it for all he spends as much time as he can on the water. He didn’t want his boys to be fishermen. So of course both of them was crazy for it. Jack tells them it’s a hard, hard life with nothing to show at the end but broken health and poverty. And a damned good chance of drowning all alone in the freezing boil. Which is what happened to his oldest boy, Jesson. Iced up out on the Baggy Banks with a full load of fish and capsized when the weather went bad. It was forecast a moderate gale but came up storm force all of a sudden. Terrible silver thaw here on shore-the more beautiful they are the more dangerous. More tea.” He poured a black cup for Quoyle. Whose tongue was as rough as a cat’s.

  “So! Dennis apprentices to a well-known carpenter in St. John’s, Brian Corkery, his name was, if I remember right, learns the trade from frame to finish. Then what does he do? First job, mind you. He signs on the Polar Grinder as ship’s carpenter! She was back and forth from the Maritimes to Europe, twice to Japan, down the seaboard to New York. Dennis is just as crazy about boats and the sea as Jack is and Jesson was. He’d rather fish than anything. But Jack won’t hear of it.

  “The way Jack carried on. Shocking. Thought if Dennis was a carpenter he’d be safe ashore. He was afraid, you see, afraid for him. And what we fear we often rage against. And Jack was right. See, he knows the sea has its mark on all Buggits.

  “In due course we had one of our winter storms. As the bad luck would have it the Polar Grinder was caught out. About two hundred miles southeast of St. John’s. February storm, savage as they come. Cold, forty-foot seas, hurricane-force wind roaring at fifty knots. Have you been at sea in a storm, Mr. Quoyle?”

  “No,” said Quoyle. “And don’t want to be.”

  “It never leaves you. You never hear the wind after that without you remember that banshee moan, remember the watery mountains, crests torn into foam, the poor ship groaning. Bad enough at any time, but this was the deep of winter and the cold was terrible, the ice formed on rail and rigging until vessels was carrying thousands of pounds of ice. The snow drove so hard it was just a roar of white outside these windows. Couldn’t see the street below. The sides of the houses to the northwest was plastered a foot thick with snow as hard as steel.”

  Quoyle’s teacup cooled in his hands. Listening. The old man hunched his shoulders, words hissed through his teeth. The past bubbled out of his black mouth.

  “Ships tried for safe harbors, distress signals all over the North Atlantic from the Maritimes to Europe. Chemical tanker lost its bridge and the captain went with it. A cargo ship loaded with iron ore went down and all the crew with it. A Bulgarian stern trawler broke in half, all hands lost. Ships in harbor dragged their anchors and slammed into each other. A bad storm. There was no safe place. The Polar Grinder had a time of it. The seas not fit to look at. The captain kept just enough speed to maintain steerage way and keep her heading off wind, hoping to ride it out. Oh, you get Dennis to tell you about it sometime. Make your blood seize up, the punishment that ship took. Smashed the wheelhouse windows. Immense seas. All anybody could think of all night long-could she make it until morning? They got through that terrible night. The only difference daylight brought was that they could see the monstrous waves coming down on them, see the fury of the raging sea.

  “A little after daybreak there was a sea, a great towering wall that seemed made out of half the Atlantic, then a tremendous detonation. Dennis said he thought the ship had smashed into an iceberg or something exploded on board. Said he was deaf for a while afterward. But it was the sea she took. The Polar Grinder’s steel hull cracked amidships under the weight of that wave, a crack almost an inch wide running from starboard to port.

  “Well, there they were, rushing back and forth, mixing concrete and trying to plug up the crack with it, shoring timbers, anything to stop the water, it poured in, filling the hold. They were sloshing around in water up to their waists.”

  Sucked in a mouthful of tea.

  “The heavy seas and the tons of water pouring in knocked the ship down. She seemed she was about to go and the captain gave the ‘abandon ship.’ If you can imagine those small lifeboats in those seas! They lost twenty-seven men. And two peculiar things happened in the end. First, the Polar Grinder-as you see-didn’t go down. Wallowed along on her side. When he see she was still afloat the captain turned back and reboarded her, and the next day they got a salvage tug out that fastened a tow and finally brought her in.

  “And Dennis?”

  But the telephone rang and the old man creaked away into his chart room, his voice booming over another wire. Came to the doorway.

  “Well, I must cut it short. They’ve seized a Russian side-trawler inside the two-hundred-mile limit fishing without a license and using a trawl with undersize mesh. Second time they’ve caught the same ship and captain. The Coast Guard’s escorting him in. I’ve got a bit of paperwork. Come again next week and we’ll have a drop of tea.”

  ¯

  Quoyle walked along the wharf, craning to get another look at the Polar Grinder, but it was lost in the rain. A man in a pea jacket and plastic sandals gazed at the rubber boots in Cuddy’s Marine Supply window. Wet, red toes. Said something as Quoyle went past. The liquor store, the marine hardware shop. A longliner drifted toward the fish plant, a figure in yellow oilskins leaning on the rail staring into dimpled water the color of motor oil.

  At the end of the wharf, packing crates, a smell of garbage. A small boat was hauled up beside the crates, propped against it a crayoned board: For Sale. Quoyle looked at the boat. Rain sluiced over the upturned bottom, pattered on the stones.

  “You can have it for a hundred.” A man leaning in a door-frame, hands draining into his pockets. “Me boy built it but he’s gone, now. Won five hundred dollars on the lottery. Took off for the mainland. Where they lives ‘mong the snakes.” He sniggered. “Seek his bloody fuckin’ fortune.”

  “Well, I was just looking at it.” But a hundred dollars didn’t seem like very much for a boat. It looked all right. Looked sturdy enough. Painted white and grey. Practically new. Must be something wrong with it. Quoyle thumped the side with his knuckles.

  “Tell yer what,” said the man. “Give me fifty, she’s yours.”

  “Does it leak?” said Quoyle.

  “Nah! Don’t leak. S
ound as a sea-ox. Just me boy built it but he’s gone now. Good riddance to him, see? I wants to get it out of me sight. I was gonna burn it up,” he said shrewdly, taking Quoyle’s measure. “So’s not to be troubled by the sight of it. Reminding me of me boy.”

  “No, no, don’t burn it,” said Quoyle. “Can’t go wrong for fifty bucks, can I!” He found a fifty and got a scrawled bill of sale on the back of an envelope. The man’s jacket, he saw, was made of some nubby material, ripped, with stains down the side.

  “You got a trailer?” The man gestured at the boat, making circles in the air to indicate a rolling motion.

  “No. How’ll I get it home without one?”

  “You’n rent one down at Cuddy’s if yer don’t mind paying his bloody prices. Or we’s’ll lash it into the bed of yer truck.”

  “I don’t have a truck,” said Quoyle. “I’ve got a station wagon.” He never had the right things.

  “Why that’s almost as good, long as you doesn’t drive too speedy. She’ll hang down y’know, in the front and the back some.”

  “What kind of boat do you call it, anyway?”

  “Ah, it’s just a speedboat. Get a motor on her and won’t you have fun dartin’ along the shore!” The man’s manner was lively and enthusiastic now. “Soon’s this scuddy weather goes off.”

  In the end Quoyle rented a trailer and he and the man and half a dozen others who splashed up laughing and hitting the man’s shoulder in a way Quoyle ignored, shifted the boat onto the trailer. He headed back to the Gammy Bird. Hell, fifty dollars barely bought supper for four. The rain ran across the road in waving sheets. The boat wagged.

  Saw her. The tall woman in the green slicker. Marching along the edge of the road as usual, her hood pushed back. A calm, almost handsome face, ruddy hair in braids wound around her head in an old-fashioned cornet. Her hair was wet. She was alone. Looked right at him. They waved simultaneously and Quoyle guessed she must have legs like a marathon runner.