We’ll go along with that. But he’s got an idea on the car wreck feature. You know there are weeks when we don’t have any good wrecks and have to go into the files. Well, Jack wants to include boat wrecks. He says at the fisherman’s meeting they said there was more than three hundred dangerous boat accidents and vessel losses last year. Quoyle, he wants you to write up boat wrecks and get some photos, same as you do the car wrecks. There’s enough so we’ll always have a fresh disaster.”
“There’s no doubt about that,” said Quoyle, looking at Tert Card.
26 Deadman
“Deadman-An ‘Irish pennant,’ a loose end
hanging about the sails or rigging.”
THE MARINERS DICTIONARY
THE END of September, tide going out, moon in its last quarter. The first time Quoyle had been alone at the green house. The aunt was in St. John’s for the weekend buying buttons and muslin. Bunny and Sunshine had howled to stay with Dennis and Beety for Marty’s birthday.
“She’s my best friend, Dad. I wish she was my sister,” Bunny said passionately. “Please please please let us stay.” And in the Flying Squid Gift amp; Lunchstop she chose a ring made from pearly shell for Marty’s present, a sheet of spotted tissue for wrapping.
Quoyle came across the bay in his scorned boat on Friday afternoon with a bag of groceries, two six-packs of beer. All of his notes and the typewriter. A stack of books on nineteenth-century shipping regulations and abuses. In the kitchen, stooped to put the beer in the ice cooler under the sink, then thought of ice. He’d meant to get some, but the empty cooler was still empty, still in the boat. It didn’t matter. In the evening he drank the beer as it was, scribbled by the light of the gas lamp.
On Saturday Quoyle stumped around the underfurnished rooms; dusty air seemed to wrinkle as he moved through it. He split wood until lunch; beer, two cans of sardines and a can of lima beans. In the afternoon he worked at the kitchen table, started on the first draft, banging the keys, swearing when his fingers jammed between them, writing about Samuel Plimsoll and his line.
“FOR GOD’S SAKE, HELP ME”
Everybody has seen the Plimsoll lines or loading marks on vessels. They mark the safe load each ship can carry.
These loading marks came about because of a single concerned individual, Samuel Plimsoll, elected MP from Derby in 1868. Plimsoll fought for the safety of seamen in a time when unscrupulous shipowners deliberately sent overloaded old ships to sea. Plimsoll’s little book,Our Seamen , described bad vessels so heavily laden with coal or iron their decks were awash. The owners knew the ships would sink. They knew the crews would drown. They did it for the insurance.
Overloading was the major cause of thousands of wrecks each year. Plimsoll begged for a painted load line on all ships, begged that no ship be allowed, under any circumstances, to leave port unless the line was distinctly visible.
He wrote directly to his readers. “Do you doubt these statements? Then, for God’s sake-oh, for God’s sake, help me to get a Royal Commission to inquire into their truth!” Powerful shipping interests fought him every inch of the way.
When he stopped the evening was closing in again. Cooked two pounds of shrimp in olive oil and garlic, sucked the meat from the shells. Went down to the dock in the twilight with the last beer, endured the mosquitoes, watching the lights of Killick-Claw come on. The lighthouses on the points stuttering.
The Old Hag came in the night, saddled and bridled Quoyle. He dreamed again he was on the nightmare highway. A tiny figure under a trestle stretched imploring arms. Petal, torn and bloody. Yet so great was his speed he was carried past. The brakes did not work when he tramped them. He woke for a few minutes, straining his right foot on the dream brake, his neck wet with anxious sweat. The wind moaned through the house cables, a sound that invoked a sense of hopeless abandonment. But he pulled the sleeping bag corner over his upper ear and slept again. Getting used to nightmares.
By Sunday noon the Plimsoll piece was in shape and he needed a walk. Had never been out to the end of the point. As he pulled the door to behind him a length of knotted twine fell from the latch. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. Then down along the shore and toward the extremity of land.
Climbed over rocks as big as houses, dropping down their sides into damp rooms with seaweed floors. The stones clenched lost nets, beaten into hairy frazzles of mussel shells and seaweed. Gulls flew up from tidal pools. The rock was littered with empty crab shells still wet with rust-colored body fluids. The shoreline narrowed to cliff. He could go no further that way.
So, backtracked, climbed up to the heather that covered the slope like shriveled wigs. Deep-gullied stone. Followed caribou paths up onto the tongue of granite that thrust into the sea. To his right the blue circle of Omaloor Bay, on the left the rough shore that reeled miles away to Misky Bay. Ahead of him the open Atlantic.
His boots rang on the naked stone. Stumbled on juniper roots embedded in fissures, saw veins of quartz like congealed lightning. The slope was riddled with gullies and rises, ledges and plateaus. Far ahead he saw a stone cairn; wondered who had made it.
It took half an hour to reach this tower, and he walked around it. Thrice the height of a man, the stones encrusted with lichens. Built a long time ago. Perhaps by the ancient Beothuks, extinct now, slain for sport by bored whalers and cod killers. Perhaps a marker for Basque fishermen or wrecker Quoyles luring vessels onto the rocks with false lights. The booming thunge of sea drew him on.
At last the end of the world, a wild place that seemed poised on the lip of the abyss. No human sign, nothing, no ship, no plane, no animal, no bird, no bobbing trap marker nor buoy. As though he stood alone on the planet. The immensity of sky roared at him and instinctively he raised his hands to keep it off. Translucent thirty-foot combers the color of bottles crashed onto stone, coursed bubbles into a churning lake of milk shot with cream. Even hundreds of feet above the sea the salt mist stung his eyes and beaded his face and jacket with fine droplets. Waves struck with the hollowed basso peculiar to ovens and mouseholes.
He began to work down the slant of rock. Wet and slippery. He went cautiously, excited by the violence, wondering what it would be like in a storm.