The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie Read online

  “Time for you to go now,” Quark said, glaring, slit-eyed, at the body in repose. He drew the eyes closed again, less gently this time, firmly pressing the quarters onto the lids. He might have said more, often wished he had, if not for the sound of gravel crunching beneath tires that thrust him into a sudden state of panic. It was too soon, wasn’t it? There was so much they never said to each other.

  “Quark? Quark? You in here, son?”

  At the sound of the sheriff calling from the front of the house Quark did the only thing he could think of that might settle what remained unfinished. He leaned over to press his lips against the Old Man’s forehead, a cold exchange like kissing a rock.

  “Came right away,” the sheriff said, squeezing his fingers deeply into Quark’s shoulder. “So he cut the painter, did he?”

  Disconcerted—Quark hadn’t heard the old saying in a long while—he turned just in time to see Healy startle back, eyes wide.

  Quark felt a momentarily thrill, barely able to formulate the notion that the Old Man had, in fact, risen, before realizing it was only the ship—perfectly framed by the window—that had drawn the sheriff’s attention.

  “Jesus. What is that?”

  He didn’t know what to say. He felt like he’d woken up to a different world than the one he’d fallen asleep in. The ship was an enchantment he turned away from to appraise the old enchanter, himself, laying in repose, coins beside his head, eyes opened wide, hands neatly folded across his belly, the vague suggestion of a smile at the corner of lips Quark would have sworn had been, only moments earlier, locked in a frown.

  12

  Lost travelers who came upon Bellfairie nearly always felt they discovered the proverbial jewel until, upon close inspection, it was determined to be so seriously imbued with superstition and entropy that any charm was dissipated. In the matter of embalmment, however, Bellfairie’s tradition of forgoing it entirely had persisted so long as to have become quite modern. Quark was pleased when the funeral director, Maude (heavily tattooed, pierced, and reassuring in her efficiency) told him the Old Man’s body would be refrigerated until burial. “Or a viewing. If you want a viewing, we are here to assist you.”

  But when Quark said he would call with his decision, a shadow passed across her face, and he wondered if he had fallen into a type, like those people who never returned for their embalmed pets. Was there a whole population of refrigerated corpses awaiting resolution? He couldn’t worry about it. He had enough going on in his own life without having to consider the abandoned dead. News traveled fast in Bellfairie, and the plank table, cleared of rum and its accoutrements, was laden with cakes and bread, casseroles and pies which, in spite of his grief, Quark found enticing. When his stomach growled, he tipped his hat at the funeral director in an attempt at distraction but she had already turned away to oversee the bagged corpse, on some kind of palette, being carried through the suddenly hushed assembly.

  When his stomach growled again, Quark thought how it was like an uncooperative member of a silent cabal, a notion he found so amusing he let out a small snort, which incited a few smirks, though they were not meant unkindly. Bellfairians knew better than to cry over a corpse, less they wake the hounds of hell that would tear the soul apart.

  Quark bowed his head occupying himself by trying to identify the foil-covered pie’s aroma. Was it bumbleberry, apple, cherry or peach? He did not look up, even at the disturbing sound of something (the palette? the body?) jam against the doorway, followed by Maude’s scold, “To the right, move to the right.”

  Having discovered how successfully the bowed posture served as deterrent against the uncomfortable exchanges he had suffered through most of the morning, Quark continued to stare at the wood floor, searching for the whorl he remembered from his youth that looked like a howling man, listening to the hushed voices in whispered conference. (“Should we go? Should we just leave? You know how he is. Come on, don’t crowd him.”) Even as his neck began to ache, Quark remained bowed until he was finally alone, at which point he immediately pivoted into the kitchen to find the rum, drinking right from the bottle, pleased how it warmed him as if he needed revival. When he sat at the plank table, utensils in hand, he thought he must be dreaming. Never had he seen so much food set before him, not even on holidays, which were simple affairs though, to the Old Man’s credit, he had tried; one birthday presenting Quark with a fishing pole as though it were made of gold. It became a favorite possession for Quark, who much preferred playing magician to the gruesome business of hooking fish, after he realized it made a perfect wand. The pleasant memory was accompanied by distressing ones Quark scolded himself against indulging in. Think of something happy, he thought. Every year they had a special dinner of Christmas lobster. What Quark remembered most about that feast was his fascination with the crustacean’s construction, contrasted by the vicious way the Old Man tore into the exoskeleton, breaking bone with abandon.

  Well, enough of that, Quark thought as he lifted the aluminum foil from the pie plate he’d been eyeing since its arrival. Hit with the intoxicating scent of apple and cinnamon, he decided there was no reason to investigate further. The closest he’d been to homemade pie since he’d left Bellfairie had been in diners that advertised theirs as such, and he wasn’t sure he could trust the claim. Nonetheless, he’d had some delicious slices—once, in a fit of gluttony, ordering six in a single sitting—but, as near as he could recall, this was his first verifiable homemade pie in years. He used a spoon to eat it right out of the dish, eager to scoop up the sweet liquid.

  A devoted Pescatarian, Quark was not unfamiliar with the dismay of limited dietary choices, but after a careful search he determined that the lasagna was, indeed, vegetarian and though cold, better than any he’d ever eaten. He intended to finish his feast with a brownie. Overcome by his unexpected fortune, he neglected to check for offending elements. Finding walnuts in the first bite, he spit the remnant into a paper napkin plucked from a nearby stack. It had a Christmas holly border with small red bells and snowmen. Though full, Quark preferred to end on a delicious taste. He returned to the pie, which he finished, so satisfied, he might have reasonably sat there to digest.

  Instead, bringing the bottle with him, he began wandering through the house, reminded of something—he couldn’t figure out what—until he recalled the way the Old Man used to careen drunkenly about. At that sobering thought, Quark stumbled into Thayer’s room where, beneath the lopsided cairn of stacked stones, blanket and sheets still held the shape of their last resident. Clearing the way with a swipe of hand, Quark fell across the bed, nose smashed into the pillow scented of rum, smoke and soap. The effect was comforting until it began to suffocate so he turned his face to watch the abandoned ship floating in a sea of tears.

  13

  Awoken by a gentle nudge, Quark thought for a confused moment, that Mocha was looking for a human hand to feed her. Recognizing the notion as absurd as soon as it was formulated, he shook his head against the hallucination, which was a mistake. The rum pounded his temples. He eased out of bed, even in such a compromised state enjoying the vast distance to the ceiling before, suddenly nauseous, stumbling into the small bathroom where his retching reminded him of his childhood.

  He didn’t recall seeing mouthwash earlier but hadn’t been looking for any, either. He reached for the medicine cabinet, startled by darkness where his reflection should have been, then pulled the black material off the mirror with a sigh, disappointed, as always, by his face, the terrible mask he’d worn his entire life, an inheritance he was only beginning to comprehend. What a relief to open the cabinet and escape the abomination.

  How empty it was. How clean the glass shelves stacked one over the other like vertebra. He brushed a finger across each narrow plane, searching for a strand of hair or an oily drop of perfume, anything to verify his memory of what had been there.

  “It’s like you have a hole in your head,” the Old Man taunted, more than once.

  “No one reme
mbers every moment,” Quark said in defense of the boy who took things so literally he worried for years (years!) that he really did have a hole in his head like a gunshot victim, or a freak. He’d been just a child, after all, not schooled in biology.

  Feels like I’m disappearing, he thought as he stepped out of the bathroom. He knew that the explanation for the dark cloth over the mirror was the well-intentioned preparation before a wake. Someone had obviously tended to the matter while he had been distracted. The room projected an unfamiliar antiseptic brightness which did little to dispel the gloom projected by the figurehead guarding the corner, her face draped in black lace.

  He didn’t have a hole in his head and never had. He did have a headache, though. A big one. Coffee, he thought, with a splash of rum. Isn’t that what one drank to cure hangovers?

  He searched, with increased desperation, finally locating the bottle on the floor beside the bed. Though nearly empty, he discovered that, by holding it under the tap and adding water to the dregs, he was able to produce a golden liquid too diluted to promise much medicinal value. Nonetheless, he poured it into his mug.

  With a sigh, Quark sat at the plank table, dismayed that the neglected feast already emitted a slightly sour odor. Some of it should have been refrigerated. He knew he was expected to share the offerings with everyone after the funeral but suddenly decided there wouldn’t be one. No laying out of the body, no procession of the curious coming through the house to drape cloth or gather tears in tiny bottles. He would serve no one, accommodate no one’s grief but his own. Pleased with his decision, Quark was surprised to find himself weeping again. Why? Why mourn the death of the very man whose deeds frequently incited tears at that same table? Why mourn at all? Wasn’t this the final abandonment he had always longed for?

  14

  Bellfairians have a proverb, “Grief is a ship without a captain.” This was said so many times that Quark passed through annoyance at the repetition to a state of poetic fascination. Grief. The word stuck in his throat like a small fishbone.

  What is grief, he wondered, surprised how the weight of sorrow was relieved by the buoyancy of rum. How could it be that he, raised in the despair of alcohol, would find solace there? It made no sense unless grief was something more substantial than emotional residue.

  “Like a dybbuk?” Felix (of Felix’s Emporium) asked. “Is that what you’re talking about, son?”

  “I do not understand what lesbians have to do with it.”

  “Not lesbians,” Felix snorted. “Dybbuk. You know, like a ghost inside you.”

  “A ghost inside me?”

  Felix nodded. “Happened to Yarly, after his wife’s accident, you know. You’re too young to remember but after she died he never got another car. Won’t go in one, either. That’s when he started walking everywhere. Happened to Thayer, too, is what folks say.”

  “It did? They do?”

  “Yep. Well, that’s what they say. I’m too young to remember, myself. They say he used to go up the bluff and wail like the sound of a woman in labor. She died giving birth, yah? They say he wanted to fly away, though we both know that’s nonsense, don’t we, son? And then, of course, he had some good years until, well, your mother…that one put him over the edge. They say.”

  Quark nodded; dully relieved to have learned his history from Mrs. Winter before hearing the confused version from Felix.

  “Well, what can I tell you? Grief is a ship without a captain. You’re at sea now, son.”

  Quark careened out of the Emporium, his hand fisted around the newly purchased bottle. Was it possible, he wondered, as he weaved down the fog-dark road, that he had a ghost inside him? Was his new thirst driven by the Old Man’s cravings?

  “Grief!” he shouted.

  “Frankenquark!”

  For a moment he thought it was a call from his past. Anything seemed possible in the murky world of Bellfairie, even a path through time shaped more like cochlea than spine.

  “Hey, Frankenquark!” The voice called again, followed by a rain of stones.

  Not the past at all then, but a new generation of tormenters. They stood on the other side of the road, boys who had inherited their fathers’ cruel sense of play. One, wearing a red jacket, stood out amongst the rest. Quark began to veer towards him when Henry Yarly stepped out of the dark, shouting that they should be ashamed of themselves for treating a man in mourning so cruelly.

  “Take it easy now. Hold steady there, son,” he said, taking Quark by the elbow.

  “Are you a ghost?” Quark asked and watched, in confusion, as his guide both shook his head and shrugged as if the answer was both “no” and “maybe.”

  “Steady,” Yarly said. “You’re the captain now.”

  “What?”

  “Remember? Life is a ship. You all right? Just follow the sparkling road here, to your house. Go to bed. Everything will look better in the morning or at least brighter.”

  “The captain is dead!” Quark cried, walking up the glimmering drive. He felt like he had fallen, in some topsy-turvy fashion, and was traversing the Milky Way. “The captain is dead!” he cried again, maneuvering through the populace that milled about his yard. Apparently unable to accept there would be no funeral, they came anyway, bearing casseroles and bread, inexplicably carrying hammers and wearing tool belts, greeting him with the same regard he’d seen the Old Man receive—one eye on the bottle and one looking past his shoulder—as if, in mourning, Quark had become someone whose consolation rested in the disregard of others.

  The racket they made encased the house at all hours, spurring his need for escape. He found himself waking in unusual places, once on a bench surrounded by a colony of gulls paused in the midst of grub-hunting to stare at him accusingly. Several times he awoke, his body sore, staring up at the Birdman statue’s enormous wings. One night he found himself on the hard ground, peering through foliage as if blossomed there—a parentless being—blinking at the stars, wondering which one he’d been named after, and why? He reached for the bottle and, not finding it, clambered to a wavering stand. Trying to get his bearing, he studied the Quark-shaped impression he’d left in the middle of Mrs. Neller’s rosemary patch, and leaned over—in itself, a precarious act—to lift a broken stem, but it collapsed as soon as he released it.

  Too often he was awoken by the tormenters, though they seemed to have a talent for dispersing before his eyes were fully open, their taunts ringing in his ears.

  “Frankenquark. Hey, Frankenquark,” they called in singsong voices reminiscent of their fathers. “Are you stewed, again?”

  On those rare occasions when he blinked his eyes open to discover he was in his own house, he took to excavating the closet, cupboards and drawers, searching for the Old Man’s shipbuilding book. It couldn’t have just disappeared, he thought, like a living thing. He remembered how soft the leather felt when he dared brush his finger across the cover, his investigation interrupted by Thayer who, shockingly, did not scold, but picked up the book and said, “You are too young for this. Building a ship is like building a life. You can have it when I die. Maybe then you’ll understand.”

  In brief lucid periods, Quark attempted to restore order out of the mess he’d made. Several times he swept everything into one of the plastic bins Coral had left for that purpose.

  “Take them, Quark. They’re yours to keep. Maybe it will help you get organized. I understand. Everyone does. After all, grief is a ship without a captain. We all know how close you two were.”

  Close? He wanted to disagree, but maybe they were right. After all, how much closer can two men be than that one is consumed by the other?

  Finally, the morning came when, having awoken there, he walked the bluff, hoping to find some central reason for his life, so absorbed in his thoughts of legacy and inheritance, guilt and retribution, peace and despair that he was only broken out of his reverie by a seagull’s cry, surprised to see the red jacket boy standing dangerously near to the cliff’s edge, staring at his
sneakers or studying the shore below. Not a boy, Quark clarified, a teenager, almost a man. How easy it would be to push him off the cliff.

  Turn around, Quark thought, wondering if the crashing waves and tolling bells drowned out the sound of his footsteps. The boy’s hair was cut neat around his ears and exposed the back of his freckled neck, which flinched as if sensing death’s approach.

  Death’s approach! Quark recoiled against his own dark impulse, spun around and ran awkwardly down the hill through town, which smelled sweet and yeasty with the scent of that morning’s cinnamon rolls. He was lumbering and out of breath when he arrived at the house, finally restored to its solitary state, no lingering Bellfairian to be found.

  If not for the evidence of foil-wrapped and Tupperware-encased offerings stacked on the plank table and kitchen counter, Quark might have wondered if had imagined all the visitors traipsing through his life. He liked to think he had shed any remnants of Bellfairian superstition but found himself sitting in the Old Man’s chair, staring out the window, looking for the fairies he had mistaken as hammer-wielding humans. What was the old saying? Oh, yes. “Don’t eat the food they offer, or you will be trapped forever.”

  Quark began to shake, craving the poisonous cure. He ransacked much of the house, leaving crushed seashells and sand in his wake until finally locating the rum, oddly stored inside a terra cotta flower pot beside the front door. Grasped with a trembling hand, he brought it into the kitchen. Had he really entertained the idea of pushing that boy off the bluff, he wondered even as another voice insisted he was making a mistake. When he unscrewed the cap, that other voice (a dybbuk?) asserted that Quark, in mourning, had a right to unreasonable behavior. He began to pour the liquid down the drain but watched, in horror, as that same hand—apparently in dispute with itself—raised the bottle with a severe thrust towards his mouth, then threw it into the sink.