The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie Page 13

  “I do not.”

  “We were sitting on the porch. Do you remember how we used to do that?”

  Quark had pleasant memories of evenings spent at Yarly’s cabin on the shore. As an adult he understood what the boy had not. How the two men were joined in a confederacy of grief after Yarly’s wife—speeding, they said—plummeted into the cove, killing both her and their baby girl. The two men would sit in the porch rockers, saying little, while Quark built sand castles and pebble graveyards, sometimes falling asleep on the stairs like an old dog.

  “Well, you know how he would get with his sorrows. He was talking about you the way he did.”

  “He did? He was?”

  “He said it was a good name for you, though he didn’t like it at first.”

  Well, that makes two of us, Quark thought. How often he’d imagined being called something ordinary like Todd, or Chad, or Lincoln.

  “He said, now listen to this, he said, it was the perfect name because you turned out to be like a strange star, not the movie ones, you know, but the ones in the sky.”

  Quark thought there must be more, but Yarly looked up expectantly, a beatific smile on his worn face.

  “Yes, well.”

  “Oh, now, I didn’t mean to upset you. I heard you’re taking it hard. Listen, son. Don’t let it drown you. You know what they say?”

  Quark nodded. “With grief,” he sighed. For the first time wondering if everyone was right. Had he been so overcome that he didn’t even know it? Was it possible that others knew his own heart better than he did? “I have made plans for his funeral. You are invited.”

  “Oh?”

  “Saturday night before the launch. Maude is going to take the ship out. Burial at sea. It’s what he wanted.”

  “He always did say he wanted to go back to the sea so he—”

  “Could turn into a shark.”

  “What? Ha! See, you do take after him, don’t ya, with that humor? So he could turn into a shark! Ha!”

  “You are invited. To the funeral. Saturday night. We’re having fish and coleslaw. The launch is Sunday. You are invited to both.”

  “Well, I appreciate it, I really do, but I ain’t gone to a funeral since…. I just came from Whitman’s. You remember Seamus Whitman? Wayne’s father? He’s building that girl’s coffin.”

  “Phoebe?”

  “Yah, that’s right. Hell’s bells, son. Getting forgetful in my old age. I don’t mean to be disrespectful. I understand you knew her and all.”

  “I didn’t really. I—”

  “Saw you stop and give her a ride that evening in the rain.”

  “I didn’t. I stopped but—”

  “Nothing to be ashamed of, son. That was real decent of you. Well, we do what we can, don’t we? To ease the mortal coil?”

  Unsure how to respond, Quark nodded.

  “Tell you what, why don’t you come for a visit? We can say our goodbyes in private. Would you like that? Would that work? Remember how we used to do? Remember those castles you used to make with little stone forests around them?”

  Quark felt suddenly seasick as he peered at the face smiling up at him. He said he was glad they ran into each other, and maybe he was. His gratitude wasn’t completely fraudulent, only complicated. “Thank you.” He tipped his hat at Yarly and, after a moment’s pause to recall the way, headed towards Whitmans.

  Unfortunately, the most direct route was blocked by police tape. An assortment of the curious—some Quark recognized and some he didn’t—stood near the cairn, watching the rolling waves, as though her spirit might rise from the sea to tell the tale of the last moments of her life. A few children, oblivious to the gravity of the location, searched gleefully through shells for beach glass Quark remembered from his childhood. One little girl ran to add her find to the stack.

  “Look, Mummy,” she said. “A mermaid’s tear for the dead girl!”

  Quark took the detour, finally making his awkward ascent up the side of a hill he recalled as the mountain he and Wayne climbed all those years ago during that period when they were friends and conquerors. At the summit he scratched his dirty palms, still burning from when he’d slammed them on the counter, an embarrassing display he did not like to remember.

  The crooked house, alone on the bluff, had the best view in all of Bellfairie. He had found it frightening when he was young and thought the jagged rocks below looked like the unkempt teeth of a monster. The sea that day was calm, the sky clear. Standing at a safe distance from the edge, Quark felt like he was looking at the end of the world. It didn’t seem so difficult to understand how people once believed they would fall off the horizon though, obviously, he knew that was impossible.

  The ghost ship appeared out of nowhere, the water untroubled by the vessel’s course. So near, he could see the sun through its ribs, the skeleton figurehead, and the shades of men on board raising their arms even as they disappeared, leaving only the echo of their cries until that, too, was gone.

  Quark remained rooted for a while; to be sure what was true. It would be a terrible thing to abandon men on the rocks simply because his mind could not contain their suffering but, no, it was the suffering that was imagined. The sea was clear, the sky too, and the only sound was the waves, the distant squawk of seagulls, and a motorized screech of some kind of power tool emanating from the workshop he was headed towards when Mrs. Whitman rounded the side of the house with a basket of laundry. She greeted him by saying his name with a gasp of exclamation. He felt bad he hadn’t visited sooner. He had not realized she felt so warmly towards him.

  “I heard you’d come back,” she said.

  Deeply aware of the awkwardness of condolence, Quark tipped his hat and bowed. He had no idea what inspired the archaic gesture but, once committed, there was nothing left to do but unbend himself and say how very sorry he was to learn of Wayne’s decapitation.

  She looked so shocked he worried she’d forgotten the tragic event of her own son’s death and wondered how to proceed as she turned to walk up the steps, the basket against her hip, not even bothering to look back when she asked if he was coming.

  The foyer was cloyingly dark. Quark blinked away the shadows until he could safely make his way to the kitchen, painted picket fence white, the mullioned windows, wavy with old glass, curtained in lace. It smelled damp; cut by a sharply sweet perfume he guessed was detergent. A washing machine and dryer fit snugly into the small mud room, the basket of laundry set on top.

  “Couldn’t keep going into the basement. My knees wouldn’t take it. Seamus and some of the men brung ‘em up here. I don’t mind the door being blocked. You know what they say about trouble coming through the back door, right?”

  Quark, who had no idea what they said about most things, studied her face for clues while she peered at him as if on a similar excavation. Pretending not to mind the uncomfortable atmosphere, he pulled out a chair to sit at the table, momentarily distracted by gouge marks in the wood. Did everyone have a life of slipped knives and secret cuts?

  “Seamus will be along any minute,” Mrs. Whitman said, setting a cup and saucer before him. “Maybe you should just tell me why you’re here?”

  He explained how he’d come to ask Mr. Whitman to build a ditty box. “Not a coffin,” he hastened to clarify. “Just a little box, you know. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “Is that right?”

  He didn’t understand why she was frowning or why she crossed her arms over her chest, the kettle untouched, all the burners cold. He explained his plans for the ship launch and Thayer’s burial, backing into Saturday’s feast in order to make clear it was not a party, but a funeral. “You’re invited, of course.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He stared at the table.

  “I don’t think you should expect any more from Seamus. He was at your place for almost a month, you know, finishing Thayer’s folly. That’s all right. Lots of folks helped us after what happened to Wayne. That’s just what we do ‘
round here. But now there’s this dead girl and you know, maybe it’s time you start thinking about what you can do for yourself.”

  “It’s not what I do best,” Quark said.

  “What’s that?”

  “My specialty is bones.” What had he been thinking, anyway? She was right. Everyone had already done so much while he had been wandering about like a fool falling asleep all over town. When he stood to leave she startled back, so quickly she fairly jumped, which he found surprising; up to that point he had taken her for someone whose girth made all movement languid.

  “Seamus will be here any second.”

  “Could you thank him for me? I should have done so sooner. For all he did for Aurora?”

  “Aurora?”

  “The ship. That’s her name. I’d appreciate it if you could tell him how grateful I am. For everything. I’m afraid I’ve been, well, you know what they say.”

  “Naming a ship that ends in a vowel is unlucky. Don’t you remember?”

  “I don’t remember much.”

  “Nothing to be done for it now.”

  “I might change it to something else. Catfish, maybe.”

  “Nope. Can’t change a ship’s name once it’s decided. Doesn’t work like that. Don’t you remember anything?”

  Quark considered confiding his concern about the great gaps in his memory but quickly rejected the idea. He tipped his hat—embarrassed that he’d neglected to take it off—thanked her, then walked down the dark hallway and out the front door.

  Standing on the top step, trying to decide what to do next, he heard a noise he thought might be the drawing of the lock. Bellfairie had changed more than he’d realized if folks had begun locking their doors.

  Hunched against the wind, he continued on his way, stopping to inspect a glint of gold in his path; a tiny heart, the sort that would hang on a chain. He considered bringing it to Mrs. Whitman. Perhaps it was something she’d been looking for, precious for sentimental reasons (because it certainly wasn’t an expensive piece) he pocketed it instead, feeling bold and guilty, a confluence of emotion he found disturbing. He did not alleviate his burden by returning the heart to its resting place, however. He wanted the cheap thing. It was pretty and he wanted it.

  22

  Quark could fashion a lovely container from a femur but where would he get one without a lot of trouble? Besides, it seemed a fitting tribute to make a ditty box from ship remnants. He collected a small pile in the backyard then sat on the cold ground to work, soon remembering the comfort he’d taken, all those years ago, in carving, when his knife had helped him discover a brand of mastery different from brute power. How mystifying to learn that the enigma he’d always thought his terrible father was actually his generous grandfather, a man who’d sacrificed the last decades of life to raise an orphaned child. Quark could not dismiss that fact, or the memories that arose from the wood shavings as though released by the blade. The Christmas lobsters, purchased at the market every December twenty-fourth (even the year of the big storm when Thayer snow-shoed into town and returned with ice chips in his beard and eyebrows) the time a teacher began calling Quark “Frank,” and Thayer roared into the classroom (both embarrassing and thrilling) to tell the woman “his” boy’s name. “Like in the sky” he’d said which, at the time, had made no sense. To think, such a force reduced to a whiff of tobacco, suspicious puddles, weeping figments, clouds of flies.

  And a ship! Quark admonished himself not to forget that accomplishment, even if created from his loss.

  “I know they meant nothing to you,” he’d said when he visited and found the trees gone. “But they were my friends.”

  “Your friends? Your friends!” the Old Man mocked. “Listen to you. A grown man who thinks trees are his friends!”

  Nothing had prepared Quark for the cavern that opened within, as though his ribs were torn apart to reveal a labyrinth of loss: the tyrant who raised him, who fed him, who defended him, who left both the magnificent legacy of a ship and the hideous waste of their alliance.

  Yet, when his fascination turned from wood to vertebrae, which even as a child Quark suspected was weird, didn’t Thayer come from town with that corpse?

  “Come here, son. This is what I’ve been trying to tell you. Never mind that nonsense. You are not of the air, but the sea. Don’t listen to that witch. Birds are not your kin. Your people are sailors and shipmen. Your great-great-grandfather was a whaler. Long nights on the sea with nothing to do but carve bones and teeth. See this? Right here? This wing is filled with song. Gonna carve ‘er up for ya, son. Come on, now, don’t be a pansy. I want you to watch me cut her up. Learn how it’s done.”

  Later, the Old Man made albatross stew he served with a prune sauce Quark pretended to enjoy. Afterwards, he made it all the way to the end of the drive, but only part way down the road before throwing up. Yet, when he finished the flute, carved from Albatross bone, hadn’t the Old Man held it tenderly and called it a fine piece of scrimshaw, and Quark a fine Scrimshander?

  What had become of that odd instrument? Had it truly possessed the right geometry for music? Quark remembered playing it, but maybe that was just fancy, the same state that caused him to believe Mrs. Winter had made it snow in his classroom, or that once he had a magic wand so powerful it made people disappear.

  He paused to brush away the wood shavings and a sliver burrowed beneath his skin causing a sharp point of pain, its tiny edge, like a fibrous eyelash, protruding just enough to be drawn out. Finished with the delicate excavation he raised his face to find an old seagull, landed nearby, watching as if it knew Quark’s worst impulse.

  It was a terrible thing the way she had died too young, and too soon. He wished he could change it back, return to that watercolor night and the girl walking in the rain. “Get in,” he would say, and she would open the door, and be saved, and her child, and the generations to follow. But what was the use of pretending?

  He returned to the task, fitting the box in the old way, without nails, a puzzle of sorts. One section was off kilter. He shaved the edge and tried again. Just as it fit, he thought of the bedside table in his old room. Is the mind a ditty box all its own, he wondered, filled with an assortment of scraps tucked in the dark until some strange force opens it to retrieve forgotten things?

  After storing the tools (he would never forget the Old Man’s temper incited by a hammer left in the rain) Quark brought the box into the house and set it on the plank table, cautioning himself against optimism as he walked up the stairs to the little crooked room. Pretending it didn’t matter, he sauntered across the creaking floor to pull and jiggle the stubborn drawer until it released its hold, revealing a stack of paper he had used for folding into birds, a pencil with broken lead, and the slender flute made of bone.

  Like sighting a firefly, a monarch, a shooting star, or a moment from my own childhood, he thought. He sat on the side of the bed, eyeing the instrument as though it might flicker and disappear, surprised at how small it was.

  Upon close inspection, it appeared clumsily executed, but when he brought it to his lips he found—after some effort and adjustment—he was able to produce an unpleasant noise through which he persisted until it became a melody created a long time ago, a gift from the boy he’d been to the man he became.

  He played the tune over and over again, in spite of Thayer’s complaints, thundering at “that ghastly sound,” which incited a few terrifying squawks. With furrowed brow and trembling fingers, Quark vanquished the ghost only to have it replaced by another. She came into the room and said, “Will you come with me to walk the bluffs?”

  Startled, he squinted into the shadows. “Will you come with me to walk the bluffs?” she asked again, and for a moment he was a boy who loved that voice, who happily abandoned everything to run to her.

  What kind of person am I, Quark wondered as he returned the instrument to the drawer. What kind of person forgets his own mother? He curled in the fetal position on his old bed, closed his eye
s and listened to the dark, daring to hope someone would tell him he was not unforgivable.

  Did he sleep? He didn’t think so but then again, he must have. It must have been a nightmare, the Old Man sitting by the side of the bed, a phantom of dejection. Quark feared the revealed face, as it turned, would be something horrible—a monster of decay—but it was only Thayer.

  “Your wait is almost over,” Quark said, surprised to hear the scratched sorrow of his voice. “I found someone to take you out to sea. You remember Maude? She owns the funeral home? She’s very well suited for the position.”

  The Old Man shook his head.

  “It won’t be long,” Quark whispered. “Just what you want. Burial at sea,” and his focus broadened to a room filled with the dead. He wondered if the confused looking young man with binoculars draped around his neck was his father, the woman beside him, who did look vaguely familiar, his mother. Wayne was there, his head, thankfully, still attached, and Cheryl, her yellow tail erect as she ran across the covers. Quark’s happiness at finding his lost pet was quickly dissipated by the girl, her cape blowing in a phantom wind, dark hair lashing her face into a mask of blood red lips, gone before he could ask why she’d said no. The animals arrived on stealthy paws, bounding over his bed, landing without a sound, and scurrying across the coverlet yet leaving no imprint: squirrels, and gophers, and mice, and rabbits. The albatross swooped down from the ceiling, its wings cutting the air with the ghostly music of its bones. When the seagulls arrived, they filled the room with flap of wings and sharp beaks, squawking his name, and accusing him of murder.

  Overcome, all Quark could do was cry, not the rare somber silent tears of a grown man, but the humiliating chirps of a wren, his hands cupped over his eyes. When at last he looked up, all that was left were flies settled in their various locations, crawling up the windowpane, resting on the pillow, perched on the bedpost. He escaped the room, briefly considering another night on the ship, he chose the couch instead.