Annabel (11 page)

“Do you like Mr. Ollerhead?” Wayne asked.

“As a teacher?”

“No. I mean, do you like him?”

“You mean do I kiss my pillow and pretend it’s him like Gracie Watts?”

“Yeah.”

“No. When I’m singing, I’m singing for someone. I don’t know who it is yet, but it’s not Mr. Ollerhead.”

10

Alto

“R
OLAND SHIWACK,”
Treadway told Wayne, “has a boatload of shrimp that need peeling.”

Wayne was stirring Carnation into his hot chocolate. Treadway did not believe in buying canned milk, or any milk, because it was insanely expensive in Labrador, and no one used it in tea. If you needed milk, Davina Thevenet had six goats and would trade you as much milk as you wanted for fenceposts or a couple of bales of hay. Was it the can of milk Treadway was looking so grim about now? Jacinta restricted herself to buying two cans a week, out of consideration for her husband’s disapproval. When Treadway disapproved of anything, Wayne felt his own chest tense up. If it wasn’t the milk, what was it?

“Can you do it for him?”

“Peel shrimp?”

“He’ll pay eight dollars.”

“I was going to work on something else today.”

“With Wally Michelin?” It was late for his father to be in the kitchen. Had Treadway been waiting for him?

Wayne did not want to admit that Wally was teaching him the alto harmony for Fauré’s song, or that he was copying postcards from Thomasina into a Hilroy exercise book like the ones they used in kindergarten — half ruled and half unruled.

Treadway ate a piece of bread spread thick with duck jelly and stirred five cubes of sugar into his tea. His hands were black from filing his chainsaw. Nothing Treadway could have said would have matched the disparaging crush of his silence.

“I could do the shrimp,” Wayne said finally. He knew his father did not like Roland Shiwack.

“You do remember how?”

The family had eaten shrimp lots of times. You snapped the head, slit the shell with your thumbnail, unzippered it, and eased the fan off the tail. You didn’t want to lose meat. You reamed the black thread from its groove and rinsed the meat in cold water.

“There’s a lot more than what we did here,” Treadway warned. “A boatload will keep you busy for the good part of a day.”

“Okay.”

“Bring a feed bag. And bring some shells home for my compost.” Roland Shiwack did not have a garden, which was another reason Treadway held him in low esteem.

“Okay. Dad?” His father was looking under the sink for SOS pads to scour his hands. What the SOS pads did not clean, Treadway would scrape off with a knife. He did not answer his son. This was not unusual, but Wayne felt he had done some indescribable wrong. He felt ashamed and did not know why. He feared he would not peel the shrimp correctly, that Roland Shiwack, of all people, would tell Treadway that Wayne had torn off too many tails, or dropped heads in the cleaned meat, or taken eight hours to do what should have been completed in five. There were so many ways Wayne could fail. He did not have to ask his father why Roland’s own son, Brent, could not do the job. Brent had gone to army cadet camp in New Brunswick. At least Treadway did not encourage Wayne to do that.

“Yes, son?”

“If Wally comes over, tell her I’ll be back after supper and we can go on the bridge then.”

Roland Shiwack had set up a chair under the aspen in his backyard. He equipped Wayne with two barrels of cooked shrimp, one of cold brine for rinsing, a hose connected to the outside tap, and eight five-gallon buckets to put the peeled shrimp in. Wayne was glad of the aspen. The shrimp were so plentiful, with their tiny black eyes, that when he closed his own eyes he saw versions of them made of pale green light. He enjoyed peeling them for the first half-hour. There was finality in zipping off their brittle coats, and he liked the firmness of the meat, and even ate a few. Mrs. Shiwack brought him cold lemonade, which he held in a briny hand that had shards of pink armour and feelers stuck all over it. The lemonade had the sourness he liked. He did not like it too sweet. What was the point of a lemon if you couldn’t salivate and pucker? After an hour the shrimp were tiresome, and in the afternoon Wayne felt grateful for a rain squall that broke the monotony. When Mrs. Shiwack asked him if he’d like to come in and watch
The Price Is Right
until the rain stopped, he told her he didn’t mind the rain.

In the rain, Treadway walked with his chainsaw towards the bridge. He took the brocade down and folded it to lay beside Jacinta’s mending pile. He did not mean to destroy anything. He wanted to dismantle what he saw as a deterrent to his son’s normal development. It was no good to have an obsession that made you sedentary as a child when you should be walking, working, travelling by foot over the land, fishing, hunting, learning what the wilderness had to teach a young person. If Wayne dropped his habit of lolling around this bridge with that girl, Treadway told himself, he would enjoy the summer the way a boy should. It wasn’t even a bridge: it was not what Treadway had envisioned as he and Wayne built the base of it. The base was covered now in curtain material, flowers, papers everywhere, crayons, and trinkets. Wayne and Wally had brought out gilt chain and tassels, so every part of the bridge inside was decorated like some sort of carnival tent. Treadway hated it. You could not see its structure; the plain bones of the thing were gone. Fraped up, Treadway called that. The way some women dressed when they went to a garden party, with bits of draped extra material hanging everywhere so you could hardly recognize who you were talking to.

Treadway pulled off the coverings and decorations. Some were tied with knots he had to cut. Why couldn’t the boy tie sensible knots instead of getting twine and ribbon of all kinds snarled in such inefficient tangles? Why had he not used the knots Treadway had taught him? When this has blown over, Treadway decided, I’m going to reteach him real knots and get him out of the habit of generating such a fraped-up, convoluted, disorganized mess.

He picked up the Hilroy exercise book and looked at Wayne’s sketches. There was a picture of the Pont d’Avignon, and beside it a diagram of two intersecting circles with one smaller circle high in the middle. On other pages were more designs linked to sketches of other bridges. Wayne had been copying the geometry of arches from the great bridge builders of the world. The rain kept up. Treadway sat on Wayne’s bridge with the sketchbook and wondered if he had done the wrong thing. But he had already taken down the corrugated fibreglass ceiling. Other papers were getting wet. Where was the lid for that tin with Thomasina Baikie’s postcards in it? There was Wally Michelin’s green diary, its key tied to the lock with red thread. What was in that? Treadway sat with it. He had no intention of opening it but the impulse came over him. Before his sense of honour intervened he had leafed open a dozen pages. A gust of wind blew papers into the river. Treadway tried to gather everything. He shoved the diary into a box and got to work with his chainsaw in the rain. He had begun the job of dismantling this thing now. If he were making a mistake, he would make up for it in some other way. He would go down to Nansen Melville’s place right after he took down the last two-by-four and get that dog for Wayne. The pups would be six weeks old next Tuesday, Nansen had said. Time enough for them to be taken from their mother.

From the two-by-fours Treadway carefully removed each screw. He saved them in a jar and stacked the wood near the shed so he and Wayne could make something else later. It would make a nice big doghouse, for a start. When he had stacked the wood, he gathered the box of papers and other rubble and brought it into the house. There were twenty yards of good string there, ruined. He threw it in the woodstove along with papers the rain had torn. He went out to bring in the curtain material he had laid on the step beside teacups whose glaze had cracked.

Jacinta came to the gate. Onions hung from her hand. Why had she bought onions, he wondered, when their own were nearly ready in the garden? Why was everyone so inefficient?

“What are you doing?” Jacinta put the onions on the ground and lifted her brocade. It was plain what he was doing, so Treadway did not answer. He watched her pick up the cups and wrap them in the brocade. He went back in the kitchen, thinking she would follow him, but she did not come in. He went out to the step but she was not in the garden, and the bag of onions lay on the ground.

Anytime Treadway had done anything against her wishes, Jacinta had told him how she felt. She had respected him but had told him her position. There was no end to the useful things Wayne could make out of the screws and two-by-fours salvaged from that bridge, Treadway told himself. He would go down to Nansen Melville’s right now and pay Nansen for that thoroughbred pup. A hunting dog, not a pet.

“You have a fine husband, if you compare him to all the dishonest men in the world,” Eliza Goudie said. “There’s a lot to be said for a modest, honest man.” This was a new point of view for Eliza. She had finally allowed her doctor to prescribe her an antidepressant medication, and had become a different person.

“You were hardly depressed before,” Jacinta said. “You were euphoric a lot of the time.”

“That was my problem. I was so euphoric I couldn’t sit still. Now I’m much more balanced.”

Jacinta’s friendships in Croydon Harbour were coloured by the fact that she had come from St. John’s, though she had been here ten years. They were also coloured by her nature, which, like Treadway’s, was reclusive. It was unusual for her to come down the hill, as she had now done, knock on Eliza’s door, and tell her friend she was ready to leave her husband. She could not say the real reason was that Treadway refused to let Wayne act like a girl. Nobody understood except Thomasina, and Thomasina was in London. Her last postcard said she loved London and did not want to leave it. There was enough theatre that you could go to a different play every night of the year and not see the same thing twice. Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie, and young writers no one outside London knew yet. Thomasina loved all of it, and she was staying in a hostel so she could stay longer and see all the plays she wanted.

So Jacinta fled to Eliza Goudie. Of all Jacinta’s Labrador friends, Eliza was the one who confessed the most. She had told Jacinta everything about Edward, her own husband, and had explained her affair with Tony Ollerhead, the geography teacher, in vivid detail. Things Jacinta had not wanted to know, she now knew, such as the colour of Tony Ollerhead’s underpants — warm chocolate brown — and the fact that they fitted his body tightly, unlike Edward’s plaid boxers. Mr. Ollerhead wore Old Spice, and had a fine trail of silky hair leading from his navel to his pubic bone; hair that turned gold in candlelight. Jacinta had heard all about this while she was trying to seal two dozen jars of partridgeberry jam.

“If I remember correctly,” Jacinta said after she had left Treadway and the bag of onions, “you weren’t too fussy about honest husbands a month ago. You could have taken honest husbands to the edge of Shag Rock and pushed them off.”

At this point Eliza would have come to her senses, Jacinta thought, had she not been drugged. They would have laughed until tears came, and that was what friends were for. Jacinta had not indulged as much as her other friends had in talking about the folly of husbands, but she had done it at times when the pressure became great. She had not expected Eliza to defend Treadway. But then, she had not confessed her whole story.

“He doesn’t even try to understand beauty.”

“Since when did you expect him to?”

“I can create my own romance. But Wayne is only a child. How could Treadway stamp out such a sweet thing?” She had told Eliza the bridge was gone, but it didn’t seem such a big deal, somehow, when she told it. It did not seem like what it was to her: a kind of annihilation by Treadway of some part of his own child’s soul.

“Treadway is a woodsman and a trapper,” Eliza said. “He is a good provider. He has never let you down, and he never will. You could go off on your own for ten years and come home and Treadway Blake would take you back. No matter what, you can always rely on him.”

“I don’t think he’d take me back. I think he’d find another woman after three months. I think I’m completely replaceable.”

“You’re not. And I’ll tell you why. Treadway Blake is an intelligent man, and he knows a fantastic woman when he sees one, and he adores you.”

“If I adored someone I would tell them, in plain English.”

“Well he’s not going to, because that’s not his strength, and you should be used to that by now. Go to the doctor and get some Valium. It has changed my whole life. I love my husband. I’ve finally seen him from a proper perspective.”

“You mean you no longer feel like throwing up every time he walks in the house?”

“No. As a matter of fact, our sex life is phenomenal. I sent away for three garter belts for myself and two black jockstraps for Edward out of this catalogue I got from Montreal. You should go through it. I leap into bed with my husband. Leap, I’m telling you. I don’t know how he put up with me before. It’s all part of his basic goodness. And your husband is basically good too. I wish you could see it, for your sake. Go to your doctor and get the Valium. I promise you, you won’t regret it. I leap into the bed.”

Jacinta, despite her wishes, envisioned Eliza leaping into bed, highly elevated and in a kind of supernatural slow motion, in her garter belt, and Edward waiting for her clad only in his garment from Montreal. It was not a pretty sight, and Jacinta wished, not for the first time, that she were more honest with her friends. She wished she could tell Eliza to stop taking the drug that skewed the truth for the sake of convenience. She wished she had told all her friends, the day Wayne was born, that he had been born a hermaphrodite. She wished she had not locked the secret inside her, where it clamoured to get out. Treadway would have just had to deal with it. The beautiful bridge would still be up, with her child on it, singing and drawing with his best friend, a girl. Her child would not have to come home this evening to find the bridge had disappeared.