The Shipping News by Annie Proulx Page A

wind. Ochre brilliance suffused the tattered fog, disclosed the bay, smothered it.
    â€œAh!” shouted the aunt pointing into the stirring mist. “I saw the house. The old windows. Double chimneys. As it always was. Over there! I’m telling you I saw it!”
    Quoyle stared. Saw fog stirring.
    â€œRight over there. The cove and then the house.” The aunt strode away.
    Bunny got out of the car, still in her sleeping bag, shuffling along over the asphalt. “Is this it?” she said, staring at the concrete wall. “It’s awful. There’s no windows. Where’s my room going tobe? Can I have a soda, too? Dad, there’s smoke coming out of the can and coming out of your mouth, too. How do you do that, Daddy?”

    Half an hour later they struggled together toward the house, the aunt with Sunshine on her shoulders, Quoyle with Bunny, the dog limping behind. The wind got under the fog, drove it up. Glimpses of the ruffled bay. The aunt pointing, arm like that of the shooting gallery figure with the cigar in its metal hand. In the bay they saw a scallop dragger halfway to the narrows, a wake like the hem of a slip showing behind it.
    Bunny sat on Quoyle’s shoulders, hands clutched under his chin as he stumped through the tuckamore. The house was the green of grass stain, tilted in fog. She endured her father’s hands on her knees, the smell of his same old hair, his rumbles that she weighed a ton, that she choked him. The house rocked with his strides through a pitching ocean of dwarf birch. That color of green made her sick.
    â€œBe good now,” he said, loosing her fingers. Six years separated her from him, and every day was widening water between her outward-bound boat and the shore that was her father. “Almost there, almost there,” Quoyle panted, pitying horses.
    He set her on the ground. She ran with Sunshine up and down the curve of rock. The house threw their voices back at them, hollow and unfamiliar.
    The gaunt building stood on rock. The distinctive feature was a window flanked by two smaller ones, as an adult might stand with protective arms around children’s shoulders. Fan lights over the door. Quoyle noticed half the panes were gone. Paint flaked from wood. Holes in the roof. The bay rolled and rolled.
    â€œMiracle it’s standing. That roofline is as straight as a ruler,” the aunt said. Trembling.
    â€œLet’s see how it is inside,” said Quoyle. “For all we know the floors have fallen into the cellar.”
    The aunt laughed. “Not likely,” she shouted joyfully. “There isn’t any cellar.” The house was lashed with cable to iron rings setin the rock. Streaks of rust, notched footholds in the stone like steps, crevices deep enough to hide a child. The cables bristled with broken wires.
    â€œTop of the rock not quite level,” the aunt said, her sentences flying out like ribbons on a pole. “Before my time, but they said it rocked in storms like a big rocking chair, back and forth. Made the women sick, afraid, so they lashed it down and it doesn’t move an inch but the wind singing through those cables makes a noise you don’t forget. Oh, do I remember it in the winter storms. Like a moaning.” For the house was garlanded with wind. “That’s one reason I was glad when we moved over to Capsize Cove. There was a store at Capsize and that was a big thing. But then we shifted down the coast to Catspaw, and a year later we were off to the States.” Told herself to calm down.
    Rusted twenty-penny nails; planks over the ground-floor windows. Quoyle hooked his fingers under the window planks and heaved. Like pulling on the edge of the world.
    â€œThere’s a hammer in the car,” he said. “Under the seat. Maybe a pry bar. I’ll go back and get them. And the food. We can make a picnic breakfast.”
    The aunt was remembering a hundred things. “I was born