Although my training is in marine traffic control and upholstery I am willing to learn…
“You know, all of us girls was good at the needlework. Liz, of course, making the mats, she was a well-known mat maker. Our mam kept sheep for the wool. I can see her now after supper spinning the wool or knitting. Always knitted after dinner. I can see her now, setting there working a pair of thumbies with her wooden skivers clacking away. Said the wool handled easier at night, was lax because the sheep was lying down, see. Taking their sleep. That old spinning wheel come down to me. Worth a fortune. I used to have it out on the lawn. Des painted it up red and yellow, it was a fine ornament. But we’d have to take it in at night, afraid a tourist would steal it. They do that, you know. They’ll take a spinning wheel right out of your yard. I know a woman it happened to. Mrs. Trevor Higgend, goes to my church. What do you think about the nephew, Dawn? You ate supper at their house. Finding a thing like that. You wouldn’t want a man who finds what he found, would you? Nothing good ever happened with a Quoyle.”
“Never.” The keys rattled. The last one for this week. There could be replies in her mailbox right now.
I wish to inquire about the position of architectural draughts-person. Although my training is in marine traffic control I am willing to relocate and retrain for a career in architectural draughting…
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Quoyle and Wavey side by side, feeling sympathy for each other, Herry breathing down their necks. The car moaned up the hill through the rain, away from the school. They came over the crest. On Quoyle’s side the ocean, bruise grey under the strained wet light.
Gushing through yellow rain. A row of mailboxes, some fashioned as houses with painted windows. Four ducks swayed along the muddy ruts. Quoyle slowed to a crawl behind them until they dodged into the ditch. Past theGammy Birdoffice, past Buggits’ house and on. The square houses painted in marvelous stripes, brave against the rock.
Wavey’s little house was mint green on the ground floor, then a red sash. The boy’s scarlet pajamas on the clothesline, bright as chile peppers. A pile of tapered logs, sawbuck in a litter of chips and bark, split junks of wood ready to be stacked.
Two fishermen beside the road, lean and hard as rifles, mending net in the rain, the wet beading their sweaters. Sharp Irish noses, long Irish necks and hair crimped under billed caps. One looked up, his glance sprang from Wavey to Quoyle, searching his face, knowing him. Netting needle in his hand.
“Uncle Kenny there,” said Wavey to the boy in her low, plangent voice.
“Dawk,” cried the child.
There was a new dog in Archie Sparks’s yard, a blue poodle among the plywood swans.
“Dawk.”
“Yes, a new dog,” said Wavey. A wooden dog with a rope tail and a tin-can necklace. Mounted on a stick. Eye like a boil.
In the rearview mirror he saw Wavey’s brother coming along the road toward them. The other man watched from a distance, held the net, his hands stilled.
Wavey pulled Herry out of the car. He put his face up to the mist, closed his eyes, feeling the droplets touch him like the ends of cold fine hairs. She pulled him toward the door.
Quoyle held out his hand to the advancing man as he might to an unknown dog stalking toward him.
“Quoyle,” he said, and the name sounded like an evasion. The fisherman clamped his hand briefly.
Face like Wavey’s lean face, but rougher. A young man smelling of fish and rain. The scrawn of muscle built to last into the ninth decade.
“Giving Wavey a ride home, then?”
“Yes.” His soft hand embarrassed him. A curtain moved in the window of the house behind the rioting wooden zoo.
“There’s Dad, then, peeping,” said Ken. “You’ll come in and have a cup of tea.”
“No. No,” said Quoyle. “Got to get back to work. Gave Wavey a ride.”
“Walking keeps you smart. You’re the one found the suitcase with the head in it. Would of turned me stomach. You’re on the point across,” jerked his chin. “Dad sees you over there through his glass on fine days. Got a new roof on the old house?”
Quoyle nodded, got back in his car. But his colorless eyes were warm.
“Going back? I’ll take a ride as far as me net,” said Ken, striding around the nose of the car and thumping into Wavey’s seat.
Quoyle backed and turned. Wavey was gone, disappeared into her house.
“You come along any time and see her,” said Ken. “It’s too bad about the boy, but he’s a good little bugger, poor little hangashore.”
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“Dear Sirs,” wrote Dawn. “I would like to apply…”
23 Maleficium
“The mysterious power that is supposed to reside in
knots… can be injurious as well as beneficial. “
QUIPUS AND WITCHES’ KNOTS
QUOYLE painted. But no matter what they did to the house, he thought, it kept its gaunt look, never altered from that first looming vision behind the scrim of fog. How had it looked, new and raw on Gaze Island, or sliding over the cracking ice? The idea fixed in him that the journey had twisted the house out of true, wrenched the timbers into a rare geometry. And he was still shuddering over the white-haired man’s stiff eye which had sent its dull glare at him.
The aunt’s interest in fixing up slowed, veered to something private in her own room where she lay on the bed staring at the ceiling for as long as an hour. Or got up with a yawn, a short laugh, said, Well, let’s see now. Coming back from wherever she’d been.
Weekends came to this: the aunt in her room or stirring something or out for a walk. Quoyle hacking his path to the sea, the children squatting in the moss to watch insects toil up stems. Or he split wood against future cold. Thought of Partridge, fired up to cook new dishes and let the children dabble their fingers in mixes and slops, and sometimes let Bunny use the paring knife. While he hovered.
In late August a bowl of cleaned squid stood on the kitchen shelf. Quoyle’s intention: calamari linguine when he was done with the painting. Because he owed Partridge a letter. The aunt declared a salad despite fainting lettuce and pale hothouse tomatoes.
“We could have put in a little garden,” she said. “Raised our own salads at least. The stuff at the markets is not fit to eat. Celery brown with rot, lettuce looks like it’s been boiled.”
“Wavey,” said Quoyle, “Wavey says Alexanders is better than spinach. You can pick it all along the shore here.”
“Never heard of it,” said the aunt. “I’m not one for wild plants.”
“It’s like wild sea parsley,” said Quoyle. “I might put some in the calamari sauce.”
“Yes,” said the aunt.