Annabel (10 page)

“Dad, the creek has only got, like, eight inches of water in it.”

“What I’m saying is, Wayne, you’ve got to study what’s below that eight inches of water. Is it mud? Is it stone? Is it sand? Is it going to be gouged out by the current? You’ve got to know what you’re building on. If you do that, if you study it real good, mind, you can have that wood, son. I’ll help you get started. We can start on it this afternoon if you want.”

Wayne wanted the wood but he was not sure he wanted his father to help him make a bridge over the creek. “Will we finish cleaning up the cabbages?”

“That’s what your mother calls them. Cabbages. Instead of cabbage. That’s one way you can tell she wasn’t born in Labrador.”

Wayne knew his father was right. Anyone from Labrador called vegetables by their single name. Cabbage. Turnip. Carrot. No matter how many individual specimens, you spoke of them as one entity. He realized Treadway thought about people in the same way. Men, to him, were all one man.

The outer cabbage leaves insulated the inner parts, which Wayne’s mother rationed until mid-June, two weeks away, when there would be fresh turnip greens and dandelion. The cabbages hung hard and cold and knocked Wayne’s head when his mother sent him to get berries out of the barrels, and that hurt. You had to smack the berries with the cup, then they rolled apart, clicking like cold marbles. The shed was dark. You felt your way to the produce. The food transformed once Jacinta boiled it in the kitchen: its colours and flavours burst alive as if the wood fire were the heat of the sun, which Treadway said it was, indirectly. A lot of Labrador was like that. Dull and frozen and in the dark one minute; bursting with sour and sweet and red and green when you did something with it. Labrador was a place where the human touch meant everything.

“What you really want over that creek,” Treadway said in the kitchen, “is a simple cantilever.” He tore the top flap off the cornflakes box and raised his pencil stub.

“Dad, it doesn’t have to be anything complicated.”

“That way you won’t have to deal with the creek bottom. See?” He showed Wayne a diagram. “You anchor each end to a couple of bases on the riverbank and they meet in the middle.”

“But there’s a crack in the middle. It’ll fall down.”

“It won’t. The end pieces are going to anchor it. I have some cement and some rebar and some old bolts from Graham Montague’s wharf. What we need to do is each get a shovel and start digging foundations for the posts.”

“Dad, I don’t want to get a shovel. I have math homework.”

“What kind of math homework?”

“Measuring triangles. We have to find out the lengths of the missing pieces.”

“Perfect. Get your math homework out and we’ll incorporate it into our construction project.”

“Dad.”

“Come on, it’ll be fun.”

It was a Saturday and on Saturdays Jacinta made bread, so they were all in the kitchen most of the day. The radio was on. There was rain against the windows and some steam, and the family felt happy. By the time Jacinta had kneaded six loaves and set them to rise twice, the table was covered in drawings. Treadway was concentrating on the bridge as if it was his own, and Wayne liked making fair copies of the diagrams with a six-inch metal ruler and a carpenter’s pencil Treadway had sharpened with a razor. He liked the flat, chunky width of the pencil.

“Can I keep this pencil, Dad?”

“Yes, son, you can have it.”

In the morning Treadway took him to the creek to haul up the old logs and dig holes and build forms for the posts. He showed Wayne how to use a pickaxe and how to mix cement. Wayne liked the sound cement made when you had it wet, when you mixed it with the shovel: a sluicing, slicing sound that meant you were making something big. His father showed him how to mix stones into the cement, and how to place the rebar inside the forms. It took three weekends of this before they had four support posts ready.

“When is it going to be done, Dad? School is over. Me and Wally want to use the bridge and all we’ve got done is the posts.”

“You and Wally Michelin?”

“Yes. We really want to use the bridge.”

“I thought you were going to play on the bridge with some boys, Wayne. Brent Shiwack and some of the other lads.”

“No! I want to go on it with Wally.”

“I was thinking we should construct the bridge so you can remove a section if you don’t want the other team to be able to cross it. That is an old, old tactic used in wartime for millennia.”

“Dad. I want to be on the bridge with Wally Michelin. We’re not going to have wars. And all we’ve got done is the posts. It’s taking way too long.”

“Your posts are everything, Wayne. The foundations of anything are the thing itself. Now we’ve got them done, the rest is easy. We fit the boards, we clamp them, and we have it done. If there was a heavy load passing over we would jack the two sections apart and compress them. I mean a really heavy load, like a train.”

Treadway had always constructed things more solidly than necessary. His sled was heavier than the sled of any other trapper in the harbour, which made it harder to haul, but it would never come apart. Wayne could see that this bridge was like Treadway’s other projects. It was sturdy and built to last, like Treadway himself. The bridge was four feet wide and ten feet across, and Wayne had to admit he could do just about anything to that bridge and it would not collapse.

“But what am I going to do for sides?”

“You have to design them. Get your pencil out. You can put any kind of sides you want on that. Here, we’ll put three posts along each side and you can attach whatever you want to those posts. You can use wood or wire or rope or whatever you want.”

“I want it covered. I want it so me and Wally can see out but no one can see in. I’m going to ask Mom for some curtains.”

“Curtains?”

“Yeah, Mom has stuff she was going to give me.”

“Drapes?” Treadway asked Jacinta when Wayne had gone to bed. “China? A carpet?”

“It’s just old material I never got around to using.” The brocade had lain on a shelf since before Wayne’s birth. Its thread glowed on a matte background. “Wayne thought it looked royal and old-fashioned.”

“We never had anything like that in our forts. We used ours for storing things we didn’t want our mothers to see.”

“Would you rather he had beer and ammunition?”

Treadway took his socks off. He was always peeling his socks off and leaving them inside out on the floor. “We didn’t have cake. We didn’t have cups with flowers on them.”

“It’s only a few cracked mugs.”

Treadway held a judgement in his body. He moved his body with unnecessary precision, his face rigid with purpose. He became unreachable but his body spoke, and Jacinta hated this. She wanted words to come out of his mouth but they came out of his bones. His bones said, You may be lenient or blind, but I am neither.

Wally Michelin and Wayne created a temporary cover for the bridge out of rope and blankets and a waterproof tarp. The bridge was not the same as the snow forts Wayne had made. Snow forts were all about construction. At no time were they complete. Once you had carved a mound and fitted it with windows and an entrance, you connected it, by tunnel, to a new mound; an endless, interconnected complex of frozen interiors infused with quiet blue light. You were underneath the snow, whereas on the bridge you were suspended over the water of the creek. Wally brought her music and practised singing her scales, while Wayne brought paper and drew designs for other kinds of walls and latticework and coverings for the bridge itself. He brought Thomasina’s postcards in their Peek Freans shortbread tin and studied the bridges of London, Edinburgh, Paris, and Florence. The bridges had the same symmetry he loved in synchronized swimming. Wayne looked at their arches and interlacings and copied them on paper.

Wally Michelin had a little radio and she listened to music on it continually, then sang what she had just heard. “It’s a way of training your memory. You listen to something just one time, then you copy it. You have to remember every note.”

“But how do you know you got it right?”

“It’s like hunting for new kinds of wild mushrooms. My dad says you have to peel your senses. You don’t let anything get in the way or you’ll die.”

“But you won’t die if you don’t get the music right.”

“But I am going to get it right.”

“But if you didn’t you wouldn’t die.”

“If you were on a concert stage and you sang the wrong note, it would be dying. I’m going to do my dying right now, before anyone can hear it except us.”

Wally stole her brother Tyrone’s xylophone and brought it onto the bridge. “Play six notes. Then I’m going to sing them, and you tell me if I sang them right. Then we’ll do twelve notes, and then sixteen.”

“I don’t know myself which are the right ones. By the time you start singing them I forget what they were.”

“I’ll bring my mother’s tape recorder and play them into the tape, then we’ll have a record.”

Wayne told his father he wanted to make the top of his bridge like the Ponte Vecchio. “I like the way things are going on in it all the time. People aren’t just going across it. They have shops full of gold. They stay on it and they play music.”

“All you need to do to make arches, son, is join and brace those posts. Then you cover them with Masonite, or some of that corrugated fibreglass I’ve got left over from the greenhouse. Put that on the roof and the light will still shine in. Come on.” He found two hammers and a box of screws and showed Wayne how to use a drill and set the screws straight. He made a big compass out of string and an old broom and got Wayne to draw his arches on the Masonite, then he showed him how to cut with a jigsaw.

“It looks just right, Dad. It looks like the bridge on Thomasina’s card.”

“It looks pretty good, son. Not what I’d put on top of that base if I were doing it, but it’s what you wanted.”

“It is, Dad, it’s great. Can we borrow your big extension cord?”

“Why do you want that?”

“To put lights up.”

Wayne strung Christmas lights along the arches. He read reclining on boughs and cushions while Wally Michelin did her voice exercises and wrote in her diary. They ate lettuce sandwiches with cans of Sprite. Every time Wally learned a new bar of Fauré’s “Cantique de Jean Racine” she underlined it in green ballpoint. Wayne was amazed at how slowly but certainly the green lines grew. Wally’s diary was green; she had ordered it from Avon and it had a tiny key. When she wrote in it under the lights or sang as Wayne drew his designs, the bridge took on the enchantment of an airborne caravan, something out of a dream.

Treadway watched and did not like the look of the whole thing.

“We never sang in our forts. We didn’t read,” he told Jacinta.

“You read John Donne in your hunting cabin. You read Poe and Stevenson.” All the trappers read by a flame for a chapter, a poem, two at the most, before they dropped, dead tired. “You read Pascal’s
Pensées
.”

Treadway went to bed at nine thirty. But Wally Michelin’s singing kept him awake. He endured this until he looked at the clock and saw it was nearly midnight. He got himself a glass of water. The window was open and he stood listening, then he rinsed his glass and went in the living room, where Jacinta was gathering the front of a rabbit-nose slipper with her long needle.

Jacinta had been listening too. “She’s a good singer.”

“Why do we let him stay up all hours of the night with that girl?”

A rabbit-nose was harder to sew than the moccasins Jacinta had learned to make when she first came to Labrador. A rabbit-nose has a series of tiny gathers, and it is hard to get the tension of both slippers identical. Jacinta would have stayed up until three in the morning if Treadway had not minded. He always woke when she came to bed, and couldn’t get back to sleep.

“But it’s summer,” Jacinta said.

“I know what season it is.” Treadway grimly considered the carpet. He knew it was summer. He had not at any age wished to stay up past midnight talking to a girl. If his wife could not see there was something wrong with it, he saw no point in explaining.

Jacinta had challenged him in the past and had lost. The Florentine bridge over the creek struck her as lovely, and she wished she could go lie down on it with the children.

“If that was happening next door,” Treadway said, “I’d wonder what kind of parents would let a boy and a girl spend half the night alone outside together.”

“They’re in grade six.”

“They’re done grade six. I’m surprised Ann and Gerald Michelin let her stay out. If I was her father I’d be over here by nine and I would take my daughter home.”

“Wayne?” The moon had come out and Wally Michelin lay on the bridge floor watching it through one of the spandrels.

“What?”

“Remember what Mr. Ollerhead said about the moon?”

“I remember his shirt.” Mr. Ollerhead had worn a shirt of pink and silver stripes. He had brought his guitar to school.

“He said if you look at the moon long enough, you’ll find out something.”

“Like what?”

“He never said.”

Mr. Ollerhead had broken the hearts of girls in his class, Wayne knew. He didn’t mean to break them, and he didn’t know he had broken them, but he couldn’t help it.