The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie Page 6

  “What is your intention with that ship?”

  Quark knew, from experience, that it was best to walk away from the kind of dead calm his question raised, but he was a grown man, not a terrorized child.

  Thayer leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Did I ever tell you what happened out there?”

  “Out where?”

  “I built her—”

  Quark sighed.

  “With my own hands I built the coffin I thought was my dream. It took me four years. Too long, you know. She was infected by the seasons, but when she was done everyone wanted to be a part of the voyage. Think of that, why don’t you? I had to turn away crew. Those boys survived to become men with children and grandchildren. Why do you look at me like I’m a terror? What do you believe in anyway?”

  “I—”

  “Nothing. That’s what. You believe in nothing.”

  “That is incorrect I—”

  “We launched her with blood. We did it right and everyone cheered.”

  “Can we—”

  “She broke apart.”

  “It wasn’t—”

  “One storm was all it took. She broke like a bitch. Eight of us when she went down. Eight. Only I survived. I went down with her. Popped up again like a god damn cork. That is my curse. I was young. I didn’t know how to die.” He squinted at Quark. “Why’d you stay away so long?”

  “You know why.”

  “You still mad about damn trees?”

  Quark looked at his hands and found them, in his inebriated state, shockingly large. It’s amazing, he thought, that I can do such delicate work with such monstrous hands.

  “You and your hysterics over trees! Did I tell you about their screams?”

  “What? Trees don’t scream.”

  “Try to follow along, boy, all right? We’re talking about the wreck. I meant to die with them, but I went adrift. You know life is a curse, don’t you? I taught you that, right? Their way was death. After a while one man’s cries start to sound like another’s until they sound inhuman. Like birds. Like your name, squawking gulls.”

  Quark had sat through recitations of the story so often that when he heard a seagull’s call the first thing he thought was that someone was dying.

  “Why do you have to talk about this now? It was a long time ago. There was nothing—”

  “I swam in the dark until I was half-dead then I climbed aboard a horse. I smelled oranges and thought death was sweet. Why did you stay away?”

  Quark rubbed his fingers across the gouge marks on the table. He had learned to whittle there, starting with wood before graduating to bone.

  “What is your intention with that ship?” he asked again.

  The Old Man’s eyes narrowed, his expression sneering and cruel. “What is your intention?” He mimicked Quark’s plaintive tone. “What do you think? I’m going back to sea, boy. And you’re coming with me.”

  Quark turned to look out the big picture window at the bright blue sky cut by a lone gull. A moment later he heard its mournful cry.

  10

  Returning to his childhood home reacquainted Quark with the boy he’d been, awkward where it seemed he should have been most comfortable, lonely amongst those who knew him best. What was it Mrs. Winter said about his family? Isolatoes? Yes, he was an Isolato, and that was all right.

  What was this then? This restless feeling that kept him awake, staring at the ceiling slanted close over his bed? He wanted to push it away. Every time he drifted towards sleep he awoke with a start, his breathing labored. How had he slept beneath it all those years, like a boy in a casket propped open for viewing? What a thought! What a morbid idea! Yet, what was he to make of the great unmooring? His father was not his father. His mother was gone. She had always been gone. But, no, Quark had been eight years old before she left. Where was she? Somewhere in his mind. But how to find her?

  He felt a tug at the corner of his thoughts, a sensation similar to that of a remembered taste, and found there, not his mother but Cheryl, his childhood pet, peering around a dark corner. She almost made him smile, though that was quickly interrupted by Thayer’s incredulity. “Cheryl?” he’d barked. “Where’d ya get a name like that?”

  Quark sighed. What was the use? Why was he even trying? He rolled over, carefully planting his feet on the old braided rug, his shoulders hunched, a habit established long ago, when he went through his growth spurt and could no longer sit straight up in bed or stand tall in his own room without hitting his head.

  There was a single small round window at the other end of the narrow space, his old bedside table beneath it. He wondered what had become of the desk that used to be positioned there, though it had never been anything special. When he was young he had liked to pretend his room was a captain’s quarters, the window, a porthole, which dispensed a milky light he initially mistook for dawn.

  Stepping off the rug, Quark recoiled against the cold floor. Why, summer is almost over, he thought, walking through the glow to peer out the window at the vessel below, mysterious as a ghost ship and—like all skeletons—strangely beautiful.

  He leaned closer to the porthole to be sure. Yes, the Old Man was balanced against the moon, hammering. Thayer had been drunk when Quark went to bed, and had to be drunk still. It wasn’t safe for him to perch there, the hammered hand raised.

  He could fall, and this would all be over.

  Careful to keep his head bowed, Quark walked across the room and down the creaking stairs where the moon cast a bluish sheen over the half-empty bottle and two shot glasses. He paused for a moment to appreciate the beguiling effect before proceeding through the kitchen, out the back door, into the stony yard.

  “You are going to catch cold,” he hollered. “You could get pneumonia.”

  Thayer stopped mid-swing. Illumined by the moon, he was made incandescent, his hair—like the wild fright of a cartoon character—almost ghostly. “You worried I’m going to die?” he bellowed.

  “Come in. The neighbors—”

  “The neighbors? What’s got into you? Everyone’s worried about my head and you’re talking about neighbors? What neighbors? We don’t got neighbors and never did.”

  “Sound carries. That’s what I’m saying.”

  Thayer responded by resuming his work. Quark kicked an acorn with his bare foot. He watched until he was sure that, in spite of reasonable expectations, the Old Man was stable—at least physically—before going back inside where he found socks, shoes, a sweater draped across the couch; surprised to discover that beneath the anger, resentment, disappointment and sheer bafflement there remained this desire to be needed.

  Other than an occasional grunt of direction they didn’t speak as they worked. It was crazy. Symptomatic, even. But, after a while, Quark had to admit he enjoyed the deep silence punctuated by rhythmic sound, the distant whisper of waves, the feel of moon glow on his skin. When Thayer pointed east and said, “She’s bleeding. Time to go in now,” Quark was sorry to see the pink slit of morning. Together they walked back to the house where it felt good to fall into his boyhood bed, to sleep deeply, untroubled by dreams or unanswered questions, his body aching. When, hours later, he was briefly awoken by the cry of a seagull, Quark wondered why he had never noticed before how much it sounded like his name—as if someone might want him—or how soothing it was to hear the distant bells tolling from the wreck.

  11

  Judging by the pool of light spilled through the small window, Quark guessed he slept late, which made sense after spending much of the night on that ship. No, that couldn’t be right. He shook his head against the persistence of dreams, the way they sometimes stuck like cobwebs. The dull ache in his temple, however, provided dismal proof that the previous evening’s drinking actually transpired, which gave rise to the conclusion that building a ship in the backyard might have occurred as well.

  Alas, such heightened awareness did not prevent Quark from butting his head on the low ceiling. He lay back down until moved t
o the deed again (without the damage) by the overwhelming heat he recalled as a force of expulsion during his childhood, driven out to play his solitary games in the shade beneath the oaks. The little attic room (for that’s what it was, wasn’t it, just an attic) had been a sauna in summer, and so cold in winter he sometimes wore mittens to bed, the window often glazed with ice, though he almost smiled to recall the shiver of anticipation he used to feel, that delightful sensation in his toes all the way up his legs through the length of his spine to the top of his head, when he heard the jingle of bells that signified the horned beast’s arrival on Christmas eve.

  Had he always gone down the stairs to use the bathroom tucked in the corner there? He must have, of course, both then and since his return, though he only had the vaguest memory of doing so, signifying he had been—until that point—somewhat of a sleepwalker. Hunched beneath the dangling light bulb as he pissed into the rust-stained toilet, Quark considered his options. He had to choose whether to stay or go. It shouldn’t have been a difficult decision. He owed nothing to the foolish ship building project, or its captain.

  Rejecting the bar of grease-splotched soap, he opened the mirrored medicine cabinet, hoping to find a package of Dial or Irish Spring. The old names came to him with a vague pleasant olfactory accompaniment cut short when confronted by the feminine evidence. A small glass bottle (nearly empty, labeled Rain) an opened box of tampons, a comb he lifted for inspection—as though it were some strange tribal artifact—long dark hair wrapped in the tines, a few strands (apparently preserved for decades) loosened by his investigation. He tried to tuck them back and, after one quick tap to ascertain the comb was securely positioned, closed the cabinet. Resigned to using the unappealing bar of soap perched on the basin, Quark rubbed his palms until they were covered in a hive of bubbles.

  The towel hanging by the sink was also grease-streaked. He dried his hands on the pants he slept in, causing the clumsy sensation of swatting himself as he surveyed the dismal bathroom he’d been too distracted to assess earlier, clearly in need of major cleaning, a matter he decided to consider more thoroughly after his morning coffee, stepping out of the cramped, gloomy space into the room filled with light.

  The picture window framed a bright morning, a blue sky above the long broken glass drive that sparkled towards the horizon. He might have appreciated the view had not the truck, with its deflated tire, reminded him of his entrapment. Why was it that whenever he left Bellfairie, swearing never to return, he always did? Why was it that, once arrived, he found it so difficult to depart? He knew locals would say it was the curse of a town built from the wrecked ship, the curse of the bells, the curse of a vengeful sea, the curse of the moon, the curse—apparently—of his family, which he did not believe in; though recalling Mrs. Winter’s casual reference to it sent a shiver down his spine.

  He padded across the wood floor, surprised to discover no sign of the Old Man’s morning ritual. No pans on the stove or in the sink, no mug ringed with coffee, no evidence at all that Thayer had awoken. Odd, he had always been an early riser.

  It was then Quark felt the first ping, a small alarm, like that of a bicycle bell (the kind he had as a child) swaddled against his heart. He opened the back door, hoping to find Thayer with his ridiculous enterprise but, while the ridiculous enterprise remained (and didn’t it look, in all its peculiarity, magnificent, rising from the yard?) the Old Man was not there.

  “Dad?” Quark choked out the word, startled by its arrival, so tremulous it seemed to come from the boy he’d been. “Dad?” he said again, louder, walking slowly across the kitchen floor, past the plank table where the glasses and rum bottle formed a tableau.

  Old people sleep late, he reasoned, eyeing the closed bedroom door, turning the glass knob with the careful execution of a thief. Sure enough, Thayer was lying in bed, glowing in the gold light diffused through drawn curtains.

  As he backed out, Quark wondered if he should make coffee for two or just himself. The Old Man looked so harmless, vulnerable even. What an imperfect father he had been—or grandfather—at any rate all the parent Quark had ever known.

  He turned so suddenly he tripped over his own feet, stumbling into the room making a ruckus to wake the dead, though it didn’t work. Thayer’s chest remained unmoved, like an old boat set on blocks for winter.

  *

  Once, Quark taxidermied a little dog for a woman who had begged him to give her that solace. His resistance had not been motivated by moral compunction but practical considerations, apparently what seemed consoling in those first hours of grief became unbearable, and people rarely returned for their pets. He didn’t fully understand it, but could not dispute the evidence of two hamsters, a gray cat, a miniature horse, and the parrot that occupied various perches of his office. He tried to develop some affection for them beyond vocational, but never did.

  Mocha, however (a white-haired thing, much like a terrier but for the beagle ears) remained curled on its scotch-plaid bed at the front of the shop and, while the grief-stricken owner never did take the little dog home, she stopped by to visit— frequently at first, and then every six months or so—sitting on a straight back chair, her feet firmly planted on the ground beside her beloved. Sometimes she brought a book, sometimes her knitting. At first she made Quark uncomfortable, self-conscious and awkward in his own space, but eventually he forgot her presence as if she were just another glass-eyed creature, startling him when she leaned over to pat the little head at the end of the visit. Several times, in his solitary hours, Quark found himself talking to Mocha, and once even caught himself pondering cheerful bags of dog food in the supermarket like a regular pet owner.

  It was only that morning, as he sat in the Old Man’s chair, staring out the window, coffee mug in hand, that Quark realized how long it had been since the bereaved woman had visited. Had she died? Had she gotten another pet? Or had the quality of her grief changed? He peered over the mug’s rim at the blue day, hoping to find something in the landscape that would tell him how to proceed. He couldn’t put it off much longer. Just one cup of coffee, he bargained. He needed a plan before all the excitement began. Remembering the funerals of his youth with their confluence of sorrow and celebration, he had no doubt it would be exciting; the fish pie and Hummingbird cake, the mourners’ faces imbued with light as though grief conferred halos.

  Eventually he set the mug on the plank table between the shot glasses, and proceeded to the kitchen. The old lobster pot hung from the hook he had fashioned, as a boy, from whalebone. The dish soap scent was pleasant, neither fruity nor flowery. He shook his head when he realized he needn’t adjust the water’s temperature for a dead man, and continued to shake it as he admonished himself that he, at least—still alive—was worthy of such caution, and never again need suffer burned flesh. By the time the head shaking was finished, the pot was overflowing into the sink. Quark turned the faucet off then searched through several drawers of jumbled flatware, balls of string and old tools before he found several neatly folded—though tattered and stained—dish cloths.

  He returned to the Old Man’s room, struck by the change in atmosphere. As if the sun were in sympathy with the circumstance, grey shadows had replaced the earlier gold. Quark set the pot on the floor beside the bed, and opened the curtains. Who knows how long he stood staring at the ship? Time took a strange course that day. He finally turned from the window to attend the corpse, pulling the blankets back and releasing a sour odor. He dipped a cloth into the soapy water to begin the task of washing the gnarled feet, working up the bowed legs to the scrotum—that small purple sac upon which the placid penis rested like the pistil of a denuded flower—to the barreled gut and tattooed chest. He leaned over to pick up the distant hand, so much smaller than he remembered, washing between the fingers and up the arm to the wiry neck, the water cool. When he picked up the left hand, Quark pondered how it would never again make a fist, hold a hammer, build a ship, swim through danger or cradle a mug of bitter coffee offered w
ith forgiveness.

  He gently rubbed the cloth over the tattoo heart wrapped in thorns which, as a boy, had been frightening to consider. How odd, that only death provided the intimacy he’d yearned for all his life. When there was nothing left to do, but confront the face, Quark gasped at the blue eyes, locked open, as though stunned.

  “Were you frightened?” he heard himself whisper, bewildered by the possibility, remembering the seagull’s cry that had awoken him, how it sounded so much like someone calling his name. Shocked by the depth of his inadequacies, Quark wept into his hands, getting soap in his eyes. When he ran to the bathroom to cup cold water over them, his vision was so obscured he thought he saw Thayer standing in the dark corner, glowering at the incompetence.

  *

  Quark closed the eyelids, but they popped right open again. After this happened several times, he went upstairs to his old room to search though his pockets for coins and, while there, get dressed, remembering to stay ducked low so as not to hit his head on the ceiling. For that brief period of time, sheltered in his boyhood space, the day seemed ordinary. It felt surreal to return downstairs to the Old Man’s chair still facing the window, as if he’d only just risen from it when, in truth, he remained lying on the bed, his eyes open wide as if, he too, was surprised by that morning’s events.

  After some consideration, Quark rejected the idea of trimming the beard. He had never seen it any other way than wild. He chose clothes from the simple wardrobe. Trousers with knotted rope for a belt, the button-down shirt, tucked. No tie or pocket kerchief. No nonsense. What to do about shoes and socks? Overwhelmed by the absurdity of dressing a corpse, Quark nearly suffered an existential crisis over the issue, wavering so thoroughly he began to feel seasick.

  The Old Man owned two pairs of socks, each with holes in them which, for some reason, brought tears to Quark’s eyes, though he didn’t indulge. He would grieve later. There was too much to take care of for him to fall apart. The last thing he did, before going into the kitchen to make the necessary calls, was lightly press his fingers on each lid, drawing them down like a magician casting a spell, placing the quarters there, adjusting the coins so George Washington faced the ship but, when he returned, discovered the coins fallen to the pillow, clods of dirt around the bed.