Five or six buildings, a white house, a church with a crooked steeple, a slide of clapboard, old stages and tilts. Quoyle had never imagined such a secret and ruined place. Desolate, and the slyness of the hidden tickle gave the sense of a lair.
“Strange place,” said Quoyle.
“Gaze Island. They used to say, over in Killick-Claw, that Gaze Islanders were known for two things-they were all fish dogs, knew how to find fish, and they knew more about volcanoes than anybody in Newfoundland.”
Billy brought his boat up to the beach, cut the engine and raised it. Silence except for the drip of water from the propeller, and the skreel of gulls. Billy hawked and spat, pointed down the land curve to a building set away from the shore.
“There’s our old place.”
Once painted red, greyed it to a dull pink by salt weather. A section of broken fence. Billy seized his bag and jumped out of the boat, bootheels made semicircles in the sand. Secured the line to a pipe hammered into the rock. Quoyle clambered after him. The silence. Only the sound of their boots gritting and the sea murmur.
“There was five families lived here when my dad was a boy, the Prettys, the Pools, the Sops, the Pilleys, the Cusletts. Every family was married with every other family. Boy, they was kind, good people, and the likes of them are gone now. Now it’s every man for himself. And woman, too.”
He tried to lift a fallen section of fence from the weeds, but it broke in his hands and he only cleared away the tangle from the upright section, braced it with rocks.
They walked up to the high gaze that gave the island its name, a knoll on the edge of the cliff with a knot of spruce in one corner, all hemmed around with a low wall of stones. Quoyle, turning, could look down to the cup of harbor, could turn again, look at the open sea, at distant ships heading for Europe or Montreal. Liquid turquoise below. To the north two starched sheet icebergs. There, the smoke of Killick-Claw. Far to the east, almost invisible, a dark band like rolled gauze.
“They could see a ship far out in any direction from here. They’d put the cows up here in the summer. Never a cow in Newfoundland had a better view.”
They walked over the moss and heather to a cemetery. A fence of blunt pickets enclosed crosses and wooden markers, many fallen on the ground, their letters faded by cold light. Billy Pretty knelt in the corner, tugged at wild grass. The top of the wooden marker was cut in three arcs to resemble a stone, the paint still legible:
W. Pretty
born 1897 died 1934
Through the great storms of life he did his best,
God grant him eternal rest.
“That’s me poor father,” said Billy Pretty. “Fifteen was I when he died.” He scraped away, pulling weeds from a coffin-shaped frame that enclosed the grave. It was painted with a design of black and white diamonds, still sharp.
“Painted this up the last time I was over,” said Billy, opening his bag and taking out tins of paint, two brushes, “and I’ll do it again now.”
Quoyle thought of his own father, wondered if the aunt still had his ashes. There had been no ceremony. Should they put up a marker? A faint sense of loss rose in him.
Suddenly he could see his father, see the trail of ground cherry husks leading from the garden around the edge of the lawn where he walked while he ate them. The man had a passion for fruit. Quoyle remembered purple-brown seckle pears the size and shape of figs, his father taking the meat off with pecking bites, the smell of fruit in their house, litter of cores and peels in the ashtrays, the grape cluster skeletons, peach stones like hens’ brains on the windowsill, the glove of banana peel on the car dashboard. In the sawdust on the basement workbench galaxies of seeds and pits, cherry stones, long white date pits like spaceships. Strawberries in the refrigerator, and in June the car parked on a country road and the father on his knees picking wild strawberries in the weeds. The hollowed grapefruit skullcaps, cracked globes of tangerine peel.
Other fathers took their sons on fishing and camping trips, but Quoyle and his brother had blueberry expeditions. They whined with rage as the father disappeared into the bushes, leaving them in the sour heat holding plastic containers. One time the brother, face swollen with crying and insect bites, picked only fifteen or twenty berries. The father approached them, arms straining with the weight of two brimming pails. Then the brother began to cry, pointed at Quoyle. Said Quoyle had taken his berries. Liar. Quoyle had picked half a quart, the bottom of his pail decently covered. Got a whipping with a branch torn from a blueberry bush, with the first stroke berries raining. On the way home he stared into the berry pails watching green worms, stink bugs, ants, aphids, limping spiders come creeping up chimneys to the surface of the fruit where they beat the air and wondered. Backs of his thighs on fire.
The man spent hours in the garden. How many times, thought Quoyle, had his father leaned on his hoe and gazed down the rows of string beans, saying “Some sweet land we got here, boy.” He’d thought it was the immigrant’s patriotic sentiment, but now balanced it against the scoured childhood on a salt-washed rock. His father had been enchanted with deep soil. Should have been a farmer. Guessing at the dead man too late.
Billy Pretty might have heard him thinking.
“By rights,” he said, “my dad should have been a farmer. He was a Home boy on his way to Ontario to be hired out to a farmer.”
“Home boy?” It meant nothing to Quoyle.
“From a Home. Part orphanage, part a place where they put children if the parents couldn’t keep them, or if they were running wild on the streets. England and Scotland just swept them up by the thousand and shipped them over to Canada. My father was the son of a printer in London, but it was a big family and the father died when he was only eleven. It was because he was a printer’s son that he could read and write very well. His name was not Pretty then. He was born William Ankle. His mother had all the others, you see, so she put him in a Home. There used to be Homes all over the UK. Maybe there still are. The Barnardo Homes, the Sears Home, the National Children’s Homes, the Fegan Home, the Church of England Bureau, the Quarrier Homes and more and more. He was in the Sears Home. They showed him pictures of boys picking big red apples in a sunny orchard, said that was Canada, wouldn’t he like to go? He used to tell us how juicy those apples looked. Yes, he said.
“So, a few days later he was on this ship, theAramania , on his way to Canada.