The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie Read online

  What if everyone has a piece of the truth, he wondered, once he had continued on his way, that we are all afraid to share?

  His pondering was interrupted, however, by the welcome sight of his truck returned. He set the bag down to peer inside at the keys left on the driver’s seat. When he heard the noise, he turned in time to see the hoodlums (five or six of them) emerge from behind the house. Later, he would ponder the animal sound that came from his mouth, a guttural scream perfectly calibrated to be mocked, but the boys screamed too, squealing in their boyish tenor as they escaped down the long drive.

  He walked to the backyard to see what they had done; reassured to perceive no damage, though he did discover footprints in the dirt all around Aurora. It was upsetting to think of them so near her.

  “Won’t be long now. Soon you’ll be free,” he whispered, not knowing it was a lie, as he brushed his fingers across her hull.

  29

  Quark realized he should have allowed the cake to cool when the frosting melted into a drippy, anemic glaze, but didn’t let that minor issue discourage him. He considered and rejected several ideas about how to improve the appearance, from a sprinkle of shredded carrot to trashing the thing and starting over. Judging by what he’d sampled of the batter, the final product would be delicious, even if it did look vaguely like a giant bird dropping. It wasn’t perfect, but it had to be enough. After all, he was in the midst of preparations for Thayer’s burial at sea and ship launch. Had it been anyone else, anyone at all, Quark would not have bothered. But Mrs. Winter had been exceedingly kind to him, and Coral had tried to be as well.

  He needed to get the cake out of the house before it was ruined; a lesson learned recently when he’d set aside a peanut butter and radish sandwich one afternoon while playing his flute, peering out the window as if he really believed the old song might conjure his mother. Finally tired of the repeated melody (and the despair of hope) he turned to his sandwich, appalled to find it buried beneath black writhing wings, set upon like a corpse.

  He carried the cake, perched on the best plate (only one crack, near the rim) to his truck. Keeping a watchful eye on the culinary passenger, and his foot light on the gas, he drove without incident all the way to Wintercairn beneath a darkening sky, as if all of Bellfairie was draped in funeral cloth. Finding no spaces available in front of the house, he regrettably had to park near the cemetery. He gave himself a good talking-to about proceeding with focus. Certainly he could carry a cake further than anticipated without fear of ghosts or a spill.

  Quark took careful, measured steps, the plate grasped tightly in both hands, his hat at a jaunty tilt. Yet, when he finally arrived at the stairs to Wintercairn, he paused. How horrible to think she would never again be waiting on the other side of the door! By the time he made it up the steps without incident (the trickiest maneuver of all) Quark was so sad about his reason for being there he considered abandoning the cake on the stoop where someone would surely find it and bring it into the house. Who knows what he might have done had not the front door opened just then, and a couple he had never seen before stepped out?

  “Here, let me hold the door for you, hun,” the woman said.

  He wanted to object but, worried any negative response might incite the uncontrollable head shaking that would surely prove disastrous, he mumbled thank you and stepped inside. Expecting to face a roomful of mourners, he was surprised to find himself alone in the parlor.

  The thing Quark was beginning to understand, at that rather late point in life, was how every death felt like a drowning; as if he could reach through the present to rescue what sank just beneath the surface, if only he knew how. There she was looking up at him beneath her hat with birds trembling on the brim, there she was walking down the hallway, and there she was asleep in the chair beside the dying fire.

  “Quark.”

  He hadn’t noticed Coral enter the room, but there she was, her usually neat hair a hive around her pale face, her lips parted with the gasp of his name.

  “I brought you a cake.”

  “How could you?”

  “It wasn’t difficult. I just followed the directions on the box.” She glanced over her shoulder. Quark heard voices coming from the back of the house. Afraid she would insist he join the others, he tried to settle the dispute before it started. “I can’t stay.”

  “No. Go.”

  “Here.” He extended the plate. “It’s a carrot cake.”

  She took it as though under confused enchantment.

  He understood. He remembered the period after Thayer’s death as infused with absurdity. “I am very sorry. I…” Quark lost track of what he was saying. Coral’s eyes slit, her lips so firm, he was reminded of a cloth doll he’d seen at the Emporium, its mouth sewn shut with black cross stitches.

  “I can’t believe you had the gall to do this.”

  He shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. In all the excitement he’d forgotten to put on his new socks, and the sand felt gritty against his skin.

  “Yes, well,” he said, confused.

  “Do you have no shame?”

  “Well, I—”

  “She trusted you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You need to leave.”

  She sounded so bossy Quark didn’t even consider disobeying. He turned quickly, plummeting towards the doorknob, just grasping it when he heard a man’s voice.

  “What’s he doing here? Are you all right? Should I get the sheriff?”

  Quark stumbled outside—distressed when he didn’t immediately see his truck before remembering he’d parked further down the road—running in his awkward manner, as if chased by a mob, though no one followed. When he finally sat behind the steering wheel, his breathing labored, he squinted through the dirty windshield at the serene graveyard, leaning forward at an uncomfortable angle to look up at the sky, already graced with an early star. What was it Mrs. Winter said? “No one even knows if a Quark exists.”

  Did he? Had Mrs. Winter made it snow in his classroom? Or had he imagined that? Were there ever, really, bird folk? Was he one of them, or born for the sea he despised? Had he been raised by a man who loved him as much as hated him? Had he ever really lived? Or was he a figment? Did he leave a trail of good and bad in his wake? Or nothing at all?

  It was too much to figure out after the mystifying exchange with Coral. She had gone a little nuts, he decided as he turned the key in the ignition. But hadn’t he once awoken in Mrs. Neller’s garden? Hadn’t he been in a fugue the whole time others had come in and out of his house completing the work on Aurora? Hadn’t he thought they were intruders when actually they had been friends? Who knows what terrible thing he said, or did, in his own grief! Maybe he could forgive Coral the way everyone had forgiven him. He drove slowly, as if the cake still rested beside him. Would she eat it, or shove it to the back of the refrigerator until it turned stale and moldy? He hoped she would give it a try. The cream cheese frosting was a mess but the batter was flavored with pineapple, pecans and cinnamon. He worried about its uncertain fate.

  Back at the house, he flicked on the lights, which set the room abuzz. He hoped it meant he merely needed to change a bulb, but flies came out, darting at him with the rumored intensity of sharks. He had a plastic cup and sympathy card set aside for times like this. Cup in one hand, card in the other, he scanned the room until settling on a fly that rested on the plank table. He slammed the cup over the little creature then slid the card beneath the cup’s rim and hard surface, carefully executed so as not to sever leg or wing as sometimes happened, much to his horror. Once that was done, Quark carried card and cup outside where he released the fly, capturing and freeing several more before it occurred to him to wonder if he was making everything worse by sending them into the cold night. What trouble were they, really?

  Perhaps, he thought, if he donned his hat, the buzzing would not be so bothersome. But where was it? He had no memory of taking it off, though clearly he must have for it wasn’t on his
head. He looked behind the chair and under the couch. He opened the cupboards to search even as he chastised himself for being ridiculous, and then proved the self-recrimination true by going upstairs to the little bedroom as if the hat might have flown there. Finally, he looked outside, scouring the yard and long drive for any hat-shaped blob in the dark. He stood for quite awhile, unable to process this loss amongst all the rest until it occurred to him that it must have fallen off when he ran from Wintercairn.

  He drove back the same way he came, cruising up and down the road several times before accepting the tragic truth. He reserved a fragment of hope that he would see the beloved stovepipe hat on his drive back but, instead, glancing in the rearview mirror, saw only Phoebe. Not her, of course, her spirit scowling at his receding truck and only for a moment before she was gone, absorbed by the dark.

  He thought he heard a noise—something out of order in the natural world—as he slogged across the muddy drive to the front door. Another time he might have made an investigation of the property, but he was exhausted by that day’s turmoil. After all, Mrs. Winter had died, he’d made a mess of things with Yarly, discovered the gold heart belonged to Phoebe, given a cake to Coral that was so ugly she was insulted, and lost his hat. His dear, dear hat! Quark sank into the old chair, cradling his head to muffle the first beats of pain, the flies buzzing around his head like a dark halo as though he’d gone through some kind of transfiguration; either lit from within like a saint or infected with decay. They meant no harm, he knew, but even for all the lives he’d saved they could never be other than what they were, just as he could never be some other man, some acceptable creature.

  30

  Awoken by a flash he thought was a falling star, Quark sat up slowly, disoriented to find himself watching flakes drift past the window. Was it snowing? The room flickered with luminescence, and there was a sound—a vague hiss and crack—like breaking ice. Once, the Old Man made Quark walk barefoot in the snow; the crackling reminded him of that starlit pain. He tiptoed to the kitchen. Like a somnambulist half in the woken world and half in slumber, he opened the back door with an expectation of wonder.

  He told himself she was not on fire even as he knew she was then spun into the kitchen to pick up the phone, but it was dead. Idiot, he thought, as he crouched to the floor, pulling out pots and pans to plug in the cord, hitting his head on the shelf when he moved to stand but, still, no dial tone. He set the lobster pot in the sink and, as he watched the water’s unhurried flow, felt a sear in his chest as if he had caught a spark, patting his shirt provided assurance he had not. Scolding himself not to be distracted by his own pain, he opened the door wide, hoping he had made false assumptions from fragments but there she was, her skeletal core revealed by the flames that consumed her.

  The yard, filled with shadows and winged light, might have been beautiful had not the effect been created by something so terrible, and he might have remained transfixed, had he not heard the voice, exhorting him to act.

  “Hello? Who’s there?” he asked, trying to sound like the menace people sometimes believed he was, though he could not control the tremor in his voice.

  Struggling to find purchase on the pot’s wet rim, he stumbled then righted himself with hardly a spill. When he got so close he couldn’t tolerate more heat, he heaved the water towards the flames, but might as well have tried squelching it with his tears.

  He picked up the phone again. Still no dial tone. What was wrong with him that he had even hoped? He wanted to shake his head at his foolish heart, but clenched his jaw against the risk. Once more, he rushed out with the pot full of water, though it was obviously futile. He turned his face upward—like a man who believed in God—and watched smoke lick the stars from the sky. When he lowered his gaze, he saw the Old Man standing in the flames. A trick of light? A shadow? A figment of guilt? He imagined he heard a siren even as reason scolded no one was coming to help.

  But he was wrong. The fire engine and sheriff’s car screamed, their red lights spinning a bloody kaleidoscope over the yard, the house, the sparkling shards on the side of the long drive, and him.

  He tried to watch from the shelter of the kitchen but someone—her face obscured by a helmet—insisted he wait outside where, she said, he would be safe. They turned one hose on the back of the house, and another on what was left of Aurora, working in a flurry, able to understand each other with an economical use of language and gesture Quark found impossible to decipher. Watching them behave as if the ship could be saved (clearly she was lost) he shook his head at the persistence of hope.

  When that was done, he blinked to an awareness of the grand flame diminished into a series of small ones, each answered by an overwhelming force of water. It didn’t seem long before they were coiling hoses, and picking up tools, their movements languid.

  “Wouldn’t of come if it wann’t for Thayer,” one of them said.

  “Saved the house, I guess.”

  “Might a been better to let it burn.”

  “What? That’s no way to talk.”

  “You know what folks are saying. Might of been better to let it burn. With him in it too.”

  “Don’t. You sound like the devil. Leave it to Healy.”

  “I would like to express my appreciation,” Quark began, but it was as if he hadn’t spoken. Was this what it felt like to be a ghost? Was it possible he had died in the fire? Maybe it wouldn’t be so terrible to watch the world without any expectation of being tended by it.

  “What about it? Is it safe?” one of the fireman asked another who shrugged and said something low, then laughed, a shocking sound within the burnt stillness.

  The seared house reminded Quark of the time he’d covered an entire page with bright colored crayon he was instructed to blight with black before using a pin to scratch a little rainbow dwelling out of the dark. He thought he didn’t care about the place he grew up in, but seeing it in such a state made him realize he had. Hoping to be reassured by the side that had not been exposed to flames, he walked to the front yard where he found Healy standing as if guarding the place.

  “You wanna tell me what happened?”

  Quark shrugged, a particularly complicated gesture he never learned to properly execute.

  “You all right?”

  He had to concentrate and stand very still in order not to shake his head.

  “Chief says it’s arson. You know anything about that?”

  A fireman, walking past, brushed into Quark’s shoulder, continuing on without apology. He knew he shouldn’t judge, they had just saved the house, but Quark found the behavior upsetting. Did no one care about his grief?

  “What did you say?”

  “Looks like arson.”

  Quark nodded. Well, of course. “Those boys.”

  Healy leaned back slightly.

  “They have been following me and taunting me. They were here. I saw them.”

  “When was that?”

  “The night of the storm. When Coral arrived she scared them off.”

  “That was days ago, Quark.”

  “They came back. Obviously. I heard them. I should have made an inspection but I had a bad day.”

  “What did you hear? Exactly?”

  “A noise.”

  “Did you say, ‘a noise’?”

  “Yes. An unnatural noise.”

  “Okay. So you heard an unnatural noise. Could you be more specific?”

  “It wasn’t the wind, or anything like that. It was them.” He watched a lone seagull dive from the sky to peck at the ground near his feet. “I know they are young, but they did a lot of damage.”

  “Who?”

  “The boys.”

  “We’re back to them, are we?”

  He didn’t know what to say.

  “I gotta tell you. Things aren’t looking good.”

  The gull stopped searching for grubs to watch Quark with a cold gaze.

  “I think you know what I’m saying.”

  He had
a whole box of eyes made of glass in his office. Sometimes he rolled them in the palm of his hand, enjoying the way they caught the light.

  “There’s only so far you can take this. It’s just a matter of time. Things might go easier for you if you confess.”

  “Confess?”

  “Tell me what you did.”

  “What I did?”

  “That’s right.”

  He kept forgetting nothing made sense. There were brief moments of clarity but, just as insight flamed, it flickered out.

  “I…”

  “Yeah?”

  “I did nothing at all.”

  Healy lowered his gaze, scratched his brow. “Don’t try to leave town. It’ll just make things worse.”

  He nodded. It wasn’t meant as an indication of agreeing to the order, but as acknowledgment of having heard it. The sheriff and firemen drove away, their sirens mute, the red lights as immobile as clots. He was still standing there when the hearse came slowly up the long drive.

  *

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry, Quark. This has never happened before.”

  “But, how?”

  “I wish I could give you a good explanation. I don’t have one. It was a terrible mistake. My new assistant. Former. Assistant. She…well, she fucked up, is the only way to say it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I am so sorry.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Maybe I should of waited. I felt I should tell you as soon as I found out, but maybe I should of waited.”

  “You say you’re sorry?”

  “I know it’s not enough.”

  Quark considered that for a moment.

  “We’re not going to charge you, of course. For any of it. The storage, or the urn, or…. Obviously.”

  “Well.”

  “It’s the least I can do. Also, if you don’t like this one, we have others. You can choose whatever you want. No limit. This is one of the nicest. Just so you know.”