The Shipping News

The trailer shook on its cinder-block foundation. All at once the room was so packed that bottles had to be passed from hand to hand overhead.

Tert Card was beside him. “There’s something I want to tell you,” he shouted, raised a squat tumbler with a nicked rim to Quoyle. But before he spoke, disappeared.

Quoyle began to enjoy himself in a savage, lost way, the knots of fatherhood loosened for the night, thoughts of Petal and Wavey quenched. He had only been to two or three parties in his adult life, and never to one where all the guests were men. Ordinary parties, he thought, were subtle games of sexual and social badminton; this was something very different. There was a mood of rough excitement that had more in common, he thought, with a parking-lot fight behind a waterfront bar than a jolly good-bye to Nutbeem. A rank smell of tobacco, rum and dirty hair. Tert Card’s touring cap rose and fell in front of him again as though he were doing knee bends. He mopped at his eyebrows with his forearm.

“Everybody asks me about the hairy devil,” screamed Tert Card. “But I’ll tell you.”

Quoyle could barely catch the words of the interminable monologue. “When my father was young up in Labrador… Used to call him Skit Card because he was left-handed. Said there was a feeling like he was near a HOLE under the snow. Walk careful or… slip straight down SPINNING… He walked careful… spooky. One day he gets his buddy Alphonse… They get to the camp… Alphonse says… ‘NO GOOD, I’m going back.’ Father persuades him… ‘STAY until daybreak’… laid down. In the morning Alphonse was GONE. His tracks… straight ahead. Then nothing… tracks disappeared, snow untouched.”

A man with a meaty face the size and shape of a sixteen-pound ham squeezed in front of Quoyle. Although he shouted his voice was distant.

“Hello, Quoyle. Adonis Collard. Write the food column. Wanted to say hello. Don’t get up to Killick-Claw much. Down in Misky Bay, you know. For the restaurants.” The crowd surged and Quoyle was carried near the beer tub. Nutbeem’s sound system was sending out tremendously low snoring and sawing sounds. Then, Tert Card again, a ham slice protruding from his mouth.

“Father got a POLE. Poked around where tracks ended. All of a sudden a sound like a CORK being pulled… a deep blue well going down… polished steel CYLINDER. He throws in the stick. Whistled like a sled ru

Someone pushed between them and Quoyle tried to work toward the front door, working his elbows like oars. But Card was in front of him again.

“All of a sudden something BEHIND him. A HAIRY DEVIL jumped down the hole like a HOCKEY puck… RED EYES. Says to me father… ‘BE BACK for you… after I washes me POTS AND PANS.’ Father… ran forty miles.”

“My wife,” bawled Quoyle, “is dead.”

“I know that,” said Tert Card. “That’s not news.”

By ten, Quoyle was drunk. The crowd was enormous, crushed together so densely that Nutbeem could not force his way down the hall or to the door and urinated on the remaining potato chips in the blue barrel, setting a popular example. The deafening music urged madness. In the yard two fights, and the empurpled Diddy Shovel threw Nutbeem’s bicycle into the bay. The strong man looked around, called for a beam on which to hoist himself by his little finger. De

An emaciated black-haired man, a foot taller than the local men who ran to large jaws, no necks, sandy hair and barrel chests, got up on the steps. He raised an axe he’d picked up near Nutbeem’s woodpile.

“Ar!” he shouted. “Wants to take ‘is leave, do ‘e? Us’ll ‘ave ‘im ‘ere. Come along, b’ys, axe ‘is bo’t. Got yet chain saw Neddie?”

Nutbeem screamed “No! No! Don’t fucking touch her! Fucking leave her alone!”

With a roar a dozen rushed to follow the black-haired man. Quoyle didn’t understand what was happening, saw that he had been left behind. The party had gone somewhere else without him. Just like always. Quoyle left out. Not a damn thing had changed. In a huff of rejection he reeled away down the road toward-what? Something.

“Quoyle, you fucking bitch get back here and help me save her!” But Nutbeem’s howl was lost in the cacophony.

The party charged to the dock where the Borogove was tied up. Some had gotten chain saws from the back of their pickups, others carried sticks and rocks. The black-haired man was in the lead bellowing “We loves old fuckin’ Nutbeem!”

The homely little boat lay at the dock, repaired and ready, provisioned, freshwater tanks filled, new line, the few bits of brightwork polished. Nutbeem staggered along the road crying and laughing as the wild men swarmed over his boat. The black-haired man lifted his axe and brought it down on the deck with all his strength. A chain saw bit into the mast. Tremendous pummeling and wrenching noises, splashes as pieces of the Borogove went into the water. The black-haired man got below deck with his axe and in a few minutes chopped through the bottom.

“Every man for hisself,” he shouted, rushed forward and jumped onto the pier. In ten minutes Nutbeem’s boat was underwater, nothing showing but the roof of the cabin, like a waterlogged raft.

Quoyle did not remember leaving the maelstrom. One moment he was there, the next, on his hands and knees in the ditch on the far side of the bridge. The air was like water in his flaming mouth. Or had he fallen in the water, and was now steaming rudderless in the night? He got up, staggered, looked back at the trailer. The windows glowed in a line of tilted light like a sinking passenger ship. Ships could hear Nutbeem’s speakers five miles out at sea, he thought. The howling of the mob.

He started to walk, to lurch along the road into a greater silence. The hell with Nutbeem. He had his own affairs. Past the houses and up the steep streets of Killick-Claw. His head cleared a little as he walked. He did not know where he was going, but climbed up and on. The hill over the town. The same route he took to work every day. He could see the harbor lights below, a large ship coming slowly down the bay. The lighthouse on the point swept its beam over the sea. Quoyle walked on. He felt he could walk to Australia. Down the long hill now, past the dark Gammy Bird office. Cold television light in the Buggits’ house; Mrs. alone with her snowdrifts of doilies. Looked across the bay where Quoyle’s Point was lost in caliginous night. The moon cleared the landmass, cast a sparkling bar on the water.

He was outside her kitchen window. A wry, reedy music within. He knelt at the window. The hard illumination of the neon circle from the ceiling. A clattering. He looked in at Wavey on a kitchen chair, her legs wide, the skirt a hammock for the red accordion on her lap. Her foot rising and falling, slapping the time in a rhythm that was sad in its measured steadiness. And on the empty linoleum stage in front of the stove Herry, dancing and hopping a jig, the pie-face split with a grin of intense concentration.

Quoyle crawled out to the road. The moon’s reflection bored into the flat water like a hole into the sea, like the ice well where Tert Card’s father’s hairy devil washed his pots and pans. The painted wooden dogs in Wavey’s father’s yard watched, their bottle, cap collars catching the light as though in convulsive swallowing. He started back toward Killick-Claw, toward the i