How he knew where to go is beyond logic. Dennis and one other. Both of Dennis’s arms were broken and the other fellow was unconscious. How did he get them both in the skiff? Jack never said a word, according to what I heard, until they got to Owl Bawl. Then he said, ‘If you ever set foot in a boat again I’ll drown you myself.’ Of course, soon as the casts were off his arms, Dennis went out squid jigging with his wife. And Jack shook his fist at him and they don’t speak.”
“How long ago?” asked Quoyle, sending the foam in his glass around in a circle until a vortex formed.
“Oh donkey’s years. Long ago. Before I came here.”
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Miles up the coast the aunt looked at wind-stripped shore. As good a place as any. She parked at the top of the dunes and gazed down the shore. Tide coming in. The sun hung on the rim of the sea. Its flattened rays gilded the wet stones. Combers seethed under a strip of corn-yellow sky.
The waves came on and on, crests streaked tangerine, breaking, receding with the knock of rolling cobbles. She opened the back of Quoyle’s station wagon and lifted out the dead dog.
Down past the wrackline, onto hard sand. The fringe of bladder wrack and knot wrack stretched, relaxed, flowed in again on nervous water. The aunt laid Warren on the stones. An incoming wave drenched the sheet.
“You were a good girl, Warren,” said the aunt. “A smart girl, no trouble at all. I was sorry they had to pull your teeth but it was that or you know what. Ha-ha. You got a few good bites in, didn’t you? Many good years although denied bones. Sorry I can’t bury you, but we are in a difficult situation here. Too bad you couldn’t wait until we moved out to the house. And too bad Irene never knew you. Would have liked you, I’m pretty sure.” Thought, Irene Warren. How I miss you. Always will.
She snorted into her handkerchief, waited in the gathering darkness, moving back a few steps at a time as the tide advanced, until Warren floated free, moved west along the shore, edging out and out, riding some unseen tidal rip. The sea looked as though it would sound if struck. Warren gliding away. Sailed out of sight, into the setting sun.
Just like in the old westerns.
And down the bay Quoyle heard Nutbeem’s everlasting story, Tert Card’s twilight gathered in his glass of Demerara.
11 A Breastpin of Human Hair
In the nineteenth century jewelers made keepsake ornaments
from the hair of the dead, knotting long single hairs into
arabesqued roses, initials, singing birds, butterflies.
THE AUNT set out for the house on Friday morning. She was driving her new truck, a navy blue pickup with a silver cap, the extra-passenger cab, a CD player and chrome running boards.
“We need it. Got to have a truck here. Got to get back and forth to my shop. You got a boat, I got a truck. They’ve got the road fixed and the dock in. Upstairs rooms done. There’s an outhouse. For now. Water’s connected to the kitchen. Some of that new black plastic waterline. Later on we can put in a bathroom. He’s working on the roof this week. If the weather holds. But it’s good enough. We might as well get out there. Out of this awful motel. I’ll pick up groceries and kerosene lamps. You come out with the girls-and your boat-tomorrow morning.”
Her gestures and expressions swift, hands clenching suddenly as though on the reins of a fiery horse. Wild to get there.
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The aunt was alone in the house. Her footsteps clapping through the rooms, the ring of bowl and spoon on the table. Her house now. Water boiled magnificently in the teakettle. Upstairs. Yet climbing the stairs, entering that room, was as if she ventured into a rough landscape pocked with sinks and karst holes, abysses invisible until she pitched headlong.
The box holding the brother’s ashes was on the floor in the corner.
“All right,” she said, and seized it. Carried it down and through and out. A bright day. The sea glazed, ornamented with gulls. Her shadow streamed away from her. She went into the new outhouse and tipped the ashes down the hole. Hoisted her skirts and sat down. The urine splattered. The thought that she, that his own son and grandchildren, would daily void their bodily wastes on his remains a thing that only she would know.
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On Saturday morning Quoyle and his daughters came along, suitcases humped in the backseat, the speedboat swaying behind on the rented trailer. He steered over the smoothed road. Starting where the road ended in the parking lot of the glove factory, the bulldozer had scraped a lane through the tuckamore to the house. New gravel crunched under the tires. Clouds, tined and serrated, and ocean the color of juice. The sun broke the clouds like a trout on the line.
“A ladder house,” said Sunshine, seeing the scaffolding.
“Dad, I thought it was going to be a new house,” said Bunny. “That Dennis was making it new. But it’s the same one. It’s ugly, Dad. I hate green houses.” She glared at him. Had he tricked her?
“Dennis fixed up the inside. We can paint the house another color later on. First we have to fix up the holes and weak spots.”
“Red, Dad. Let’s paint it red.”
“Well, the aunt has the say. It’s mostly her house, you know. She might not be crazy about red.”
“Let’s paint her red, too,” said Bunny. Laughed like a hyena.
Quoyle pulled in beside the aunt’s truck. He’d wrestle with the trailer and the boat on Sunday. Dennis Buggit on the roof, tossing shingles into the wind. The aunt opened the door and cried “Ta-TA!”
Smooth walls and ceilings, the joint compound still showing trowel marks, the fresh window sills, price stickers on the smudgy window glass. A smell of wood. Mattresses leaned against a wall. The girls’ room. Bunny piled wood shavings on her head.
“Hey, Dad, look at my curly hair, Daddy, look at my curly hair. Dad! I got curly hair.” Shrill and close to tears. Quoyle picked at melted cheese on her shirt.
In the kitchen the aunt ran water into a sink, turned on the gas stove to show.
“I’ve made a nice pot of stewed cod,” she said. “Dennis brought a loaf of Beety’s homemade bread. I got bowls and spoons before I came over, butter and some staples. Perishables in that ice cooler. You’ll have to bring ice over. I don’t know when we can get a gas refrigerator in here. Nephew, you’ll have to manage with the air mattress and sleeping bag in your room for a while. But the girls’ve got bed frames and box springs.”
Quoyle and Bunny put a table together of planks and sawhorses.