Annabel (12 page)

“Why does Treadway have no idea that he has no right to destroy someone else’s possession?”

But her friend was unmoved. “The property is Treadway’s. It’s on Treadway’s land, and a man’s land belongs to no one but himself.”

Jacinta thought of all the times she had listened to Eliza. No matter how outrageous Eliza’s reasoning, Jacinta had tried to understand it. Even now Jacinta did not argue about the Valium, though she felt Eliza’s new outlook was a chemically induced illusion. This is my problem, Jacinta thought. I am dishonest. I never tell the truth about anything important. And as a result, there is an ocean inside me of unexpressed truth. My face is a mask, and I have murdered my own daughter.

Roland Shiwack gave Wayne his eight dollars, and Wayne walked home feeling the bills in his pocket. He could buy supplies for the bridge: some Caramel Log bars, and Cheezies, and a couple of cans of Sprite. It would be great if he and Wally had some art supplies they could leave there instead of bringing them back and forth from home. There was a spyglass in the Eaton’s catalogue. He could save up for it and use it to watch the constellations. He could lie on his bridge and find the magpie bridge in the sky. He could save up for a new sketchbook.

There were dragonflies, ladybugs, and strange, flat bugs whose copper-coloured carapaces glittered amazingly. If you had a spyglass you could watch the secret life of the creek and take scientific notes or make accurate sketches. Yes, he would put money aside, and see what other work he could get, and buy the spyglass. If he saved his whole eight dollars and forgot about the junk food, he’d need only seven more days’ work from Roland Shiwack. And Wally could contribute too. She helped Gertie Slab with her grade four homework for three dollars an hour, and she babysat.

The great thing about walking home with eight dollars in your pocket was that you could imagine spending it, over and over, on a whole bunch of different things you might want, and it was fun to envision all of them.

By the time Wayne had walked up the hill he had spent the money, in his mind, on Caramel Logs, on the spyglass, and on things for other people. There was an Italian cheese grater his mother wanted but would not send for from the catalogue. She had a grater but it was ugly. The Italian one grated hard and soft cheeses. The top had a knob that fit snugly in your hand, and it would never rust. And there was a tool in the Hudson’s Bay store that his father looked at every time he went in. It was a long iron bar, called a pince-monseigneur, that you could use to lever just about any heavy object from one place to another. Treadway had used an ordinary crowbar to move all the boulders from the front yard except one, a piece of pink granite near his mother’s old-fashioned roses. That granite needed the pince-monseigneur, but Treadway did not want to spend thirty-five dollars on something he considered a toy.

I could surprise him, Wayne decided as he approached home. I could put it on layaway and carry it home and let Dad find it propped against the shed door.

Wayne saw the neatly stacked two-by-fours and did not realize where they had come from. He saw the jar of screws and did not recognize those either. He walked into the house, looked around, and wondered where everyone was. His father was not home, and neither was his mother, and there was no cooking, which was unusual, because at five o’clock there was always something sizzling in the cast iron pan or cooking in the boiler. So he went outside and looked around the back, and then he knew the two-by-fours were from his bridge, and he knew it had not been destroyed by an animal or by wind or by anything accidental. He ran inside and saw the string, untangled and carefully wound, hanging on a chair. He went out the back door and looked at the creek with its naked posts that he and his father had taken weeks to pour and set. The creek frilled around reeds and stones. The creek was not thinking of him. It had left him alone.

Treadway walked into the house carrying a mandarin orange box that held a golden Lab puppy on a piece of brocade from the bridge. He laid the box by the woodstove, and Wayne knew what he had done.

Wayne had never felt two such conflicting feelings in his body: devotion for the puppy, who whimpered and tried to peer over the side of the box, and an utter, bereft betrayal. Treadway looked at Wayne for a second, then at the puppy. The puppy was a safe place to look. You could look at the puppy all day and your feelings could sink into the puppy, and the puppy would not reproach you.

Wayne could not ask Treadway about the bridge, and Treadway said nothing. It was five o’clock, and Jacinta came in the door with a bag from Eliza. It contained a hot loaf. Eliza had rubbed the crust with butter until it glittered and cracked. Jacinta laid it on the table. She got butter out, and a tin of oysters, and corned beef, and some mustard, and an onion which she sliced thin, and some milk and pickled beet, and she opened the tins and sliced the corned beef, and no one mentioned the puppy.

Wayne went upstairs and looked out his window, where he could see the back corner of Wally’s house, and he guessed he would have to go down in the morning and see her. He could not believe his father had gone out and found a puppy to make up for what he had destroyed. It gave Wayne a new insight into the character of his father, one he regretted knowing with all his heart. It would have been better, he thought, if his father had just done what he wanted to do and not tried to pay for it. It was the paying, with a live puppy, that Wayne found unforgivable.

At six in the morning Wally Michelin knocked on the back door and Treadway opened it, his kipper with Keen’s mustard steaming on the table. He thought Wally looked like a strong little person on his step, her hair making her face narrower, her pale skin and thousand freckles. She was starting to grow tall and she was bony; her shoulder blades stuck out, and she marched around with her head a little bit forward like someone forever ducking raindrops. She had watched him dismantle the bridge from her bathroom window and had come for the most important thing in it.

“It’s twelve pages. The paper is yellow.”

“I don’t remember it.” Treadway was honestly mystified. He remembered his son’s Hilroy scribbler. He had saved that. It sat now on the chair visitors used. Wally’s green diary was under it and she took it, and looked around to see if her “Cantique de Jean Racine” was sticking out from under the TV guide or wedged behind the toaster.

“It was with this.” She held up her diary, which still had its key. “Did you read my diary?”

Treadway had searched for what she might have written about Wayne. He hated himself for doing it, especially when most of the parts he read were about music. They were about the northern lights; how she had sung to them and they had sung back to her; and about how she had found out the name of something that happened to her but did not happen to any of the friends she had asked, including Wayne. It was called phantom music: some people heard music replayed inside their heads, every note accurately. It could be something they had heard before, on the radio or somewhere, or it could be music no one had ever heard. It happened when Wally was tired, especially if she was in a vehicle or if something near her were moving, like the creek under the bridge.

The phantom music had first happened to her on the school bus trip to Pinhorn Wilderness Camp, on their way home, after the bus had stopped at Mary Brown’s Fried Chicken in Goose Bay and continued on the road to Croydon Harbour. Sometimes she could catch a tiny fragment and pull it until the rest unrolled in her mind, but usually she had no control over the phantom music. She loved it and wished she could hear it always. Treadway had read all of this.

Any parent can scan any piece of writing, even writing done in an unfamiliar hand, and quickly discern the name of his own child, and Treadway had done this. Wayne had brought hot chocolate to the tree. Wayne had sung melody for Wally so she could try out harmonies. Wayne read while she practised writing treble clefs, half notes, whole notes, eighth and sixteenth notes, flats, naturals, rests, and accidentals. Wayne was copying triangles from Thomasina’s postcard of Andrea Palladio’s bridge over the Cismone. None of this was what a normal Labrador son would do, but none of it frightened Treadway until the part of Wally’s diary that detailed Wayne’s recurring dream.

“Wayne dreamed he was a girl again last night,” Wally had written beneath a list of supplies. String. Oreos. A shoebox. Scissors. The foot out of an old pair of pantyhose. A cup of cold bacon fat with sunflower seeds in it. “If you saw my diary, you saw my music,” Wally said.

“There might have been some pieces of wet paper. I didn’t think they looked like music.”

“Can I see them?”

“I threw them out.”

“I need to look in your garbage.”

“They’re burnt.” Treadway never threw paper in the garbage. He threw it in the stove. He did not like filling garbage bags with anything you could burn.

He felt sorry about the music, but he did not say so.

11

Old Love

J
ACINTA AND TREADWAY WERE POLITE
with each other during the shortening days after Treadway took down Wayne’s bridge. Jacinta made the bed the way Treadway liked it; Treadway wanted no air to touch his feet, and Jacinta could not sleep unless her feet breathed through an opening in the blankets. She no longer woke him when he snored, and he picked up and washed teacups she left in the grass. The politeness was unbearable. They avoided touching each other, careful as strangers on a train. But there was one thing they had always done, and they did not stop doing it now, because to stop would have been to acknowledge their marriage had broken, and they were not able to acknowledge this. The thing was that when each took a bath, at the end of the bath the other took the sponge that hung on the shower head, soaped it with a cake of Ivory, and lathered the other person’s shoulders and back. They had never thought of this as an expression of love. It was something they had started early in their days together, and now it continued. They had always done it without speaking. The silence was nothing new.

A family can go on for years without the love that once bound it together, like a lovely old wall that stays standing long after rain has crumbled the mortar. Where was Jacinta going to go? Back to St. John’s? She berated herself for not having the courage. It is amazing how small things keep you anchored in a place — the cake of soap on its little mat with rubber suckers, the moulded plastic shower stall. The bathroom cabinet with Aspirins in it, and blue razors, and Tiger Balm. The plastic runner to stop dirty tracks on the cream-coloured hall carpet. The television with its rabbit ears and its reruns of
Bewitched
and
Get Smart
that give you something predictable at four thirty every weekday. None of these things were what Jacinta loved, or even liked, but she could count on them, and she could not count on what might happen if she left Treadway and went back to St. John’s, especially if she took Wayne with her. The thing that had prevented her from running out of Goose Bay Hospital when Wayne had gone for his baby surgery existed in her now, larger and stronger than it had been then. Material things were important. Her slippers. Her sewing basket with sinew in it and needles with the right-sized eye for sewing leather. The cribbage board and the deck of cards that had a toreador swirling his glorious cloak in the bullfighting ring. Any of these things, Jacinta knew, she could find for less than two dollars apiece in St. John’s, or in any other place in North America to which she might escape.

But was there a place where she could live with truth instead of lies?
Truth or Consequences
was another TV show. She could relate to that title. You told the truth or you lived with consequences like these. If you held back truth you couldn’t win. You swallowed truth and it went sour in your belly and poisoned you slowly.

There was a pale green pill Wayne cut in half with the small, heavy knife his mother used to peel potatoes. There were two white capsules full of powder, which he knew was also white since he had broken one to find out. Finally there were two tiny, flat yellow pills that his mother, when he had asked, had told him were to prevent dizziness.

“Am I a diabetic?” Kevin Slab was diabetic, and he had pills, but his were orange.

“No.”

“Do I have leukemia?” In grade four Joey Penashue had got leukemia and lost his hair.

“No.”

“Do I have a brain tumour?” Last year Stevie White, who had sat two seats in front of Wayne, developed a brain tumour and died.

“No.” Jacinta sounded more impatient than she wanted to.

“Which ones can I stop taking when I start taking the new ones in grade seven?”

They had been through this before. He liked to get it straight, Jacinta believed, as this was the only aspect of the pills about which he was certain.

“You can stop taking the white ones. But then you will take four yellow ones instead of two, and you might have to have a needle.”

“But we won’t know if I need a needle until Dr. Toumishey examines me.”

“It might not be Dr. Toumishey. It might be a doctor you haven’t met.”

“Will it be Dr. Hedgehog?”

The specialist was always changing. Once it had been a Dr. Edgecombe, who had wanted to examine Wayne’s throat using an extra-wide tongue depressor that looked as if it were made of sandpaper. Wayne wouldn’t open his mouth, and Dr. Edgecombe had told Jacinta to pin his arms and pinch his nose so he couldn’t breathe. “He’ll open up then,” Dr. Edgecombe had said. Wayne had been six.

“No. Dr. Edgecombe has gone back to St. John’s.”

“Maybe this time I won’t need a needle.”

“I wish you could just wait and see.”

“If you had to take a needle you’d like to know about it first.”

“That’s true.”

“Will I have to take another needle after the first one?”

“You might.”

“If I knew how many then I would know when it was over.”

“I know. We would know where we stood.”

“Me. Not we.” This was new. Now that Wayne was twelve he demanded accuracy, and justice.

“You’re right. You. You would know where you stood.”

“What if I have to have four needles?”

“You might. You might need more than four. But you might not have to have any. We won’t know until the doctor examines you.”

“Remember that time we went, Mom? Remember the sign on the glass?” A card posted on the receptionist’s cage had said,
PLEASE TELL US IF YOU LEAVE WITHOUT BEING SEEN
. Wayne had looked at it for a long time. He had been eight. He had looked carefully at all the people in the waiting room, then he had said, “Mommy, do invisible people come in here?”

“Yes,” Jacinta had said. “There has been a parade of them since we came in.”

“How do you know?”

“Can’t you see their wet footprints all over the floor? And they have measles.”

“How do you know that?”

“I read it in the paper. An epidemic of measles is affecting the invisible community of Goose Bay and the Labrador Straits.”

Wayne had giggled. “Mommy, what does the sign really mean?” he had asked, and she had told him.

“But you were right to wonder,” Jacinta had said. “It is grammatically confusing.” That day the specialist had prescribed the first yellow pills.

“Is what I have,” Wayne said now, “called something?” He did not like to have an ailment for which there was no word. He had never heard of anyone in his class having a nameless medical condition. Even the things that killed you had a name. He had not gone to Stevie White’s funeral, but his class had had that day off school, and Mr. White had taken his car through the Techni-Tone Car Wash in Goose Bay, and Stevie’s sisters and aunts had decorated it with six hundred Kleenex carnations, and Stevie’s coffin had been shiny black with white and pink satin inside and a picture of the Last Supper.

“If I had a brain tumour, would you tell me?”

Jacinta knew this was the last of his questions. It was always the last one, and she always answered it the same way. “You don’t have a brain tumour. I promise you that.”

“Mom?”

“What?”

“My feet are peeling.”

“Stop worrying about everything.”

“In bed. I felt them. The skin was peeling off. I pulled an edge and it came off in sheets.”

“Wait a couple of days and if it doesn’t get any better you can remind me about it.”

“Mom. That’s what you always say about everything.”

“You might already know this.” Treadway’s voice was half lost under the noise of his chainsaw. He was limbing the last log.

“What?” Wayne supposed his father wanted to tell him how to tie the rope that kept the logs on the sled. His father had ways of doing knots that had to be obeyed according to the task. The acrid gasoline fumes got up Wayne’s nose. He liked that. He liked the wood-sap smell, the physical lifting, the noise. His father was happy when Wayne helped him hoist wood. Wood hauling began on cold mornings when the first frost entered the ground, just before school started in the fall. You got to make a fire and boil tea and eat Vienna sausages out of the can with homemade bread and margarine.

“The facts of life,” Treadway hollered.

“It’s okay, Dad.”

“What?”

“It’s okay.”

Treadway shut off the engine. He was not glad of the silence. Their shouts hung over the caribou moss, in the spaces between spruce. “Get those blasty boughs and make a base.”

The circle of rocks was the one they had used last fall. All Treadway had to do was move two that had fallen out of the circle. They had brought birch rinds and back issues of the
Labradorian
, and Treadway handed Wayne his lighter. “You probably hear the facts of life in school. But a father likes to tell them straight. To make sure his son doesn’t get the wrong end of the stick.”

“Dad, it’s okay. You don’t have to go into it. Honest.” This was not entirely true. Wayne had pieced together certain things, but there were gaps in the process as he understood it.

Treadway lit the sticks. They inhaled the sugary smoke. They were sweaty from hauling wood and they peeled their coveralls down and sat on cushions of frozen caribou moss in their undershirts. Crumbled lichen and needles and sap lay on their collarbones and shoulders.

“I’ll just get it over with,” Treadway said, “and I will have dispatched that part of my duty. Your mother reminded me.”

“Dad.”

“And she’s right. So you probably notice sometimes now, when you wake up, you might have, you know, wetness in the bed.”

“What?”

“You might have thought you wet the bed. You might be worried about it.”

“Dad. I don’t wet the bed.”

“It happens to all boys.”

“It doesn’t happen to me.”

“So it’s just ejaculation and you shouldn’t worry about it. The next thing is you probably noticed you get an erection sometimes.”

“Dad.”

“That’s what they call a hard-on.”

“Dad!”

“But the real name is an erection, and it’s nothing to be embarrassed about. No one can tell.”

“Dad, stop it.”

“You might think they can but they can’t. It can happen any time, not just when you’re thinking about a girl.”

“Okay, Dad. I get it.” Wayne stared at berries that had rolled under the caribou moss. He heard the hiss of torn tin and a broken vacuum seal as his father pulled the ringtop on the Vienna sausage can. He smelled the meat and the brine. He’d had an erection only once. He had not been thinking about a girl. His father handed him the can and he ate three sausages with his fingers while his father buttered some bread. There had been other feelings, deeper and more hungry than an erection.

“You must have noticed changes in your body.”

“My feet are peeling,” Wayne said, “and I get a stomach ache.”

“Your feet?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you mean?”

“The skin comes off.”

“Take your boots off.”

Wayne took his boots off and sank his bare feet in the caribou moss. “The bottoms.”

Treadway picked up his son’s foot. “Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“Did you ask your mother about it?”

“She told me to tell her if it doesn’t go away. She always says that.”

“Maybe she knows. I never heard of it. But I have to finish telling you this.” Treadway sighed. He did not like being sidetracked.

“Dad, it’s okay.”

“I know you think you know everything about the facts of life. And maybe you do. And if you do, it won’t hurt you to hear them again. But maybe there’s one or two facts you have wrong, and if there are, I’m going to tell you the right ones. That’s all. There’s no big deal. But you have to know the real story. And then I won’t mention it any more. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“So when you get married, you sleep in the same bed with a woman. Women have a vagina. When a man and a wife are in bed together, the penis fits into the vagina. It might not seem like that could happen, but it can. It fits in there. And that’s when the seed of the man, inside the penis, comes out and goes into the woman’s body. And that’s how the embryo of a baby is formed, and of course the baby grows in her belly, and then nine months later, it is born.”

Wayne had not known this. He didn’t know what he had known. Brent Shiwack had saved his hot dog wiener from lunch one day, and had wiggled it through the fly of his jeans at Gracie Slab while everyone was drawing isosceles triangles, and had panted with his tongue out. Davina White up in grade nine had gotten pregnant, and some people said she was a slut but others said no, it happens to the ones who aren’t sluts. Davina White came to the schoolyard with her baby in a stroller at lunchtime to eat bags of chips and drink Pepsi with her friends, and when lunch was over she walked with her baby back down the hill, and Wayne felt sorry for her. Some people said Davina shouldn’t be allowed to come to the schoolyard because her baby might make other girls want to have a baby too.