Annabel (13 page)

Treadway had dispatched his duty but he felt extremely awkward and wished he had waited, as his own father had done, until he and his son happened upon the mating of caribou in the herd. It had been beautiful, in slow motion, snowflakes falling on the creatures, and Treadway had instantly understood nearly everything there was to know about male and female intimacy, the mechanics of it. His father had not had to talk about marriage beds or body parts. He had not had to use the word
embryo
, or any other clinical word. But Jacinta had wanted him to bring up the subject. He felt he had not done the job decently. He had made it seem unnatural. And he had not been able to stop looking at his son’s body and seeing things he did not want to admit. His son looked like a girl. He talked like a girl, his hair was like a girl’s, and so were his throat and chest. When they had peeled down the tops of their overalls, Treadway had seen that his son had breast buds, small and tender through his undershirt, and it had shocked him. He wondered if Wayne had noticed them himself, or if any of the boys at school had teased him about it. The buds were very small, but they were present. What if they grew larger? What was wrong with the doctors?

He carefully folded the bread bag they had used and tucked it into the empty Vienna sausage can with the used teabags, and he wrapped it all in leftover birch rind and put the package in his knapsack. Wayne got on the back of the Ski-Doo behind him and hung on to the passenger handle for dear life, because there were a lot of bumps and it often felt like if he didn’t hang on using all his muscle power, a bump would fling him onto the trail and his father might not notice until he got home. That’s how loud the engine was, and how relentless its momentum, on the woods trail. They had a good load of wood, enough to heat the house for two weeks. Half a dozen more loads like this and they would be done, and Treadway could go on his trapline.

Some boys went with their fathers. They just left school to go on the trapline, and no one said anything. Wayne dreaded the day when Treadway would suggest he do this. Wayne was looking forward to school. Thomasina Baikie was coming back. She had sent her last postcard from Wales. On the front was Thomas Telford’s iron bridge over the Menai Strait.

“It broke a world record,” Thomasina wrote, “for the longest suspension bridge in the world. I love it here so much, Wayne, that I’m finishing my last two classes at Harlow. In September I’ll be coming back to Croydon Harbour to teach. I’ll be teaching grades seven, eight and nine.” Wayne was going into grade seven. He was excited about having Thomasina for a teacher. He loved new pencils and rulers and exercise books, and he liked being at home in the nights, in his room, studying and sketching and listening to music.

But his father could go miles without rest or food, and Treadway did not mind what Wayne saw as monotony: miles upon miles of spruce woods, a heavy packsack, and your footprints sinking through a hard crust of snow, and the death of the beautiful animals.

In bed Wayne thought about what his father had said. He imagined a man and a woman in their pyjamas, lying side by side in their marriage bed. The man fell asleep. So did the woman. While they were asleep, the man’s penis somehow reached out of his pyjama pants. It found its way, something like Brent Shiwack’s wiener, over towards the woman. She must have been wearing a short nightdress, not a long one like his mother’s, or loose pyjama pants. Anyway, somehow the penis, which must have had a sense of direction and an ability to explore on its own, got through the woman’s clothes and nosed its way into her vagina. This amazed Wayne. He had not known that such a thing happened, but he did feel there was something powerful and slightly sinister about penises, so he believed his father. The funny thing was that even though this whole story — the facts of life according to Treadway — depended on involuntary activities of body parts unbeknownst to their sleeping owners, the knowledge of it excited the low, aching hunger in Wayne’s belly. He lay in bed and touched his own penis. It did not respond, but the place behind it, underneath it, buried in his body between his legs, did respond. If he touched the skin underneath his testicle and rubbed it, it made the hunger clamour and grow wild. He pressed and pushed a little, and he thought of penises going into vaginas while he did so, and in a couple of minutes the hunger between his legs opened its mouth and devoured a shuddering, delicious and joyful series of electric jolts that delighted his whole body.

Treadway went to bed early and dreamed of a baby fox caught in his trap. He wanted to save the fox because it was too young for its skin to be of any value, and it had soft paws and looked at him with pleading eyes.

While Treadway slept, Jacinta cleaned the surfaces in the house. Treadway had not told her about his father-and-son talk but she knew he had done it as she asked, because he always did what she asked if she asked him in a particular way. A way that said she was counting on him to provide a basic husbandly service she could not do herself. She knew he had carried out the father-and-son talk, and she could tell he was disturbed about it in some profound way he did not want to talk about. Whenever Treadway was emotionally tired, he went to bed even earlier than usual, using sleep like a kind of temporary, convenient death.

Jacinta swept the floors and wiped the counters, then got a bucket of red-hot water with Pine-Sol in it and a mop, and scoured the kitchen floor and hallway. She dumped the water down the toilet and filled the bucket again, then put rubber gloves on and took a rag and a scrubbing brush and got down on her knees on an old flat cushion and washed every speck of dirt out of the corners and off the baseboards, then she washed the stairs by hand, and polished the toaster and the fridge, and washed the fingerprints off the walls near all the light switches and off the doors near the doorknobs and off the telephone. She went outside and then came in again to smell with a fresh nose how clean the house smelled, and then she got in bed beside sleeping Treadway and thought how good it would be when he went on his trapline, how there would be fewer footprints to clean.

Part Three

12

General Electric

W
HEN THOMASINA RETURNED TO
Croydon Harbour, she rented a room in the Guest House, the big white house built by Moravian missionaries and bought by Sir Wilfred Grenfell’s society to rent to new teachers and doctors. Thomasina did not intend to build again. She was past building, or sending down roots, or planning into the deep future. Approaching fifty, she knew there is a deep future in one’s life for only so long, then there is no deep future. There is a cliff, you drop off it, and your life comes to an end, and hopefully it has been a life in which you touched other lives with some sort of constructive tenderness.

Wayne’s grade seven classmates were not sure what to make of their new teacher. Some of their parents had a few things to say about Thomasina Baikie around the dinner table. How she had gone off gallivanting, after her husband, Graham Montague, had drowned with their little red-haired daughter. She did not look now the way she had looked before. Her hair had turned salt-and-pepper and she had cut it, and she wore wire glasses and jeans. You got the feeling something radical could happen with her around.

“What is she doing living in that place?” Brent Shiwack said at recess time. “My dad says she must be nuts to pay rent there. It’s only for visitors.”

In class Thomasina did not speak to her students as if they were children, and she did not single Wayne out.

“When you were all babies,” she said, “my husband died.”

Wayne knew this. He remembered the photograph of Graham Montague that had sat on her sideboard.

“I wanted to see the world, and he said that was all right with him, just wait a year. But it never happened. And then he died.”

The class did not know what to make of this.

“You don’t say died,” Donna Palliser whispered. “You say passed away.” There was an uncomfortable feeling in the room. Those who did not smirk tried to look respectful. A man had died.

“So now I can go wherever I want.” Thomasina handed them each a blue stone on a piece of elastic. Each stone bore a painted eye that looked out with severity. Wayne felt wary of the eye. The girls tied theirs onto their wrists and the boys laid them on their desks. The eyes had come from Greece. Thomasina showed them a clay lantern that was nothing but a bowl that fit in your hand, and you filled it with olive oil and lit a piece of wick that floated in the oil, and that was how you had light. Using the projector with clacking, whirring sprockets whose sound Wayne loved, she showed them a Greek dance in which everyone did steps that looked easy but were not.

“Why do we have to watch this, Miss?” Brent Shiwack said. “It’s queer.”

Wayne saw the dance as an elaborate knot but would not say so out loud. It was like the knots his father made in traps and bowlines. Wayne saw it as an interesting mathematical pattern, and wished he could trace its lines with his body.

“How come you don’t live in a normal house, Miss?” Brent Shiwack asked. “How come you live in the Guest House?”

“I used to live here in a normal house. I used to live in the house the Michelins live in now.” Everyone looked at Wally Michelin. Wally shrunk in her desk. “It’s a nice house. It’s a beautiful house for the Michelins. But if I was there I’d look out the windows and see my husband, Graham, coming past the fence with a bucket of water for his horse. I’d see my daughter, Annabel. I’d smell the rain on her clothes. She used to sneak up from behind and hug me. Her breath was like cold petals.”

When Thomasina spoke the name Annabel, Wayne realized this had been the name she called him years ago.

He had thought the name was Amble, which was a nonsense name, he realized now, but when he was small it had been like any other nickname. But it wasn’t Amble. It was Annabel. Why had Thomasina called him that?

Everyone talked about the new teacher at recess. Teachers didn’t tell you about the cold breath of their dead daughters. They didn’t give you stone eyes. Wayne was glad Thomasina had not told the class she had known him when he was younger, or that she had sent him postcards with bridges on them from all the places she had travelled.

Thomasina waited for Wayne to speak to her. He spoke as he fed the newts in the class aquarium while she corrected math reviews. The recess bell had rung and everyone was yelling past the windows. There were crows in the yard, and frost in the asters.

“I made a bridge.” Wayne’s voice came out faint, as if he were trying to talk to Thomasina through layers of old paper. “I got all your postcards and I made my own bridge.” He did not tell her Treadway had helped him build it, or that his father had later taken it down.

“You did?”

“It was like the one in Florence. The one the Germans didn’t destroy in the Second World War.”

“Ponte Vecchio.”

“It was great. Me and Wally Michelin had it going all summer. It’s gone now but we had lights on it and everything. I have all my postcards in a tin.”

Thomasina had been watching Donna Palliser and her clique. She had noticed undercurrents normal for a grade seven class; she had learned at Harlow to watch for them, and she had her own insight. Thomasina had always had insight. Graham Montague had called it second sight, but she knew it was not that. It was simply stepping back from a scene and letting its layers reveal themselves. She did not have to step back far or wait long to see below the surface of the life of Wayne Blake.

“It was Annabel you called me, wasn’t it? When I was little.”

Thomasina saw that the child she had secretly named Annabel, in memory of her own lost daughter, had become graceful and mysterious. She saw how he sat at the back of the class, quietly unrolling the big map or reading library books stuck inside his textbooks. She saw how he walked at the edges of the corridors, the gym, the schoolyard. He had no idea of the circumstances that had surrounded his birth, yet a thoughtfulness lay in his eyes that the other children, save for Wally Michelin, did not have. It was the spirit a poet might have, or a scientist, or anyone who sees the world not as he or she has been told to see it, with things named and labelled. Wayne Annabel, as she called him in her mind now, saw everything as if it had newly appeared. He looked at each thing as if he had never seen it before: chalk, a map of Argentina, or grasses collected in science class, or the steps of the Greek dance she had tried to introduce. When Wayne Blake walked, he floated. He was Wayne, she saw now, and he was Annabel. He was both at the same time, but he did not know this.

“I’m sorry about that, Wayne,” she told him now. “I should have called you the name your father gave you. I didn’t think clearly enough. I should have kept my sorrows about Annabel to myself.”

“Your daughter who drowned. You were calling me after her?”

“I should have kept it to myself.”

“You must have been really sad. You only called me that when we were by ourselves, remember? You can still do that if you want. I don’t mind.”

“You’re kind, Wayne. Very kind.”

In the evenings Thomasina prepared her classes in her kitchen, which was normally shared with whoever rented the other rooms in the Guest House, but no one else was here now. She did not close the blinds, though every woman in Croydon Harbour closed the curtains at dusk. Thomasina had nothing to hide. The Guest House kitchen was white and modern, with a Formica table and a General Electric stove, and it contained the bare necessities. It had counters that she kept spotless, as it did not take long to wipe up a few toast crumbs after herself or clean the drop left by the back of her teaspoon. There was a small washing machine in an alcove but no dryer, and she laid her clean wet clothes on the radiators under the kitchen windows, so they would dry as she worked.

On her table was a stack of pictures with heavy outlines: archers, lyres, winged sandals, golden apples of the Hesperides. Normally she would not give grade sevens colouring sheets, but these were to make booklets about the Greek deities, and she had found the pictures in an Athenian museum. They were informative in a way that would tell a good part of each god’s story without words. Some of her students could read marks on a trail winding through eighty miles of wilderness but they were not good readers of English textbooks. Each student would be responsible for researching one persona: Artemis, Hera, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Apollo, Hermes, Demeter, Ceres. There was a deity to represent every human character, and Thomasina had found them all in her class, though the students did not know it, from the control and manipulation of Artemis reflected in Donna Palliser to the musical Euterpe in Wally Michelin and the presence of a descendant of the child of Hermes and Aphrodite, Hermaphroditus, in Wayne Blake.

Thomasina did not venerate Greek religion over the Protestant Christianity of the settlers in Croydon Harbour, or over the aboriginal stories her dead husband, Graham Montague, had known. She saw all tradition as metaphorical. It was, in her mind, all about story, character, psyche. She would not drum any religion into her students. They would see, she knew, through dogma of any kind. What interested Thomasina in Greek studies was that there was no pretense that the gods had lived. Everyone knew they represented the character in all of us. She would not tell her class this but intended only to let them enjoy playing roles they normally hid. Donna Palliser, for example, concealed from adults the way she led and ranked the girls. Wally Michelin had gone so far underground with her music that only the most intuitive person could spy it. Wayne Blake had no idea there was a girl, fully formed, curled inside his body.

To colour the illustrations Thomasina had artist-quality pencils. The Greek dance recording featured drum music she had bought from street musicians in Athens. A small man had played a bellows-like instrument she was eager for her students to hear, since it sounded like the button accordions their fathers and grandfathers played when they came home from the trapline.

She took her trousers and cardigans off the radiators and put them away, and made toast with homemade strawberry jam. She had stewed the berries whole. There was no place in Croydon Harbour to get strawberries. They were a soft berry, a summer berry, and Croydon Harbour did not have a summer long enough to include them. Thomasina had brought these frozen, insulated in newspapers, in her suitcase on the plane along with her tape recorder, her music, her few clothes, Pears soap, a ten-pound bag of coffee beans, and a small grinder. Could you not make a life for yourself any way you wanted, and in any place?

No man in Croydon Harbour would knock on the door of a woman not his wife on a moonlit night unless it was to inform her that her husband had perished, or unless he was a doctor come to save her life or the life of her child. But the night he saw that Wayne’s homework consisted of colouring a picture of Hermaphroditus — a young man with gladiator’s arms and a beard and a woman’s breasts and hips — Treadway felt he had no choice but to knock at the Guest House door and ask Thomasina Baikie what in the name of God she thought she was up to. If there was anything Treadway could not stand, it was someone who was sneaky or underhanded, and who used a back door as a way to get around his wishes.

He stood on the Guest House veranda and rapped his knuckles insistently until Thomasina appeared under her porch light. Anyone in town could see him there and see who he was, and that he was not in a good mood. He was so angry he had ceased to be aware that this might be a spectacle, but Thomasina had not, and she stepped back and pleaded with him to come in out of the night, which was beautiful. Orion had appeared from his summer sleep, and northern lights rippled green and pink at the edge of the sky. There was frost, and the sweet, decayed smell of floating twigs and caribou moss that always meant the partridgeberries were ripe in some places and it was time for the men to go on the trapline. This was Treadway’s problem. Just as he was preparing to leave his homestead for months, Thomasina Baikie seemed to be aiming to have Wayne’s whole school study in plain view a subject that should by anyone’s reckoning remain well covered up. On the trapline, stealth was everything. Treadway was an expert in staying upwind of fox, mink, and bear. His own livelihood and that of his family depended on it. You did not go out in plain view and announce your presence, your secrets, your private life. You did not let a wild animal know you harboured fear. Treadway was able to hold a secret like no other. Now, in Thomasina’s hallway by the door to her kitchen, he stood, his fear swallowed and hidden so deep there was no direct way for him to speak it, so he became indirect.

One time, and one time only, before Jacinta had come to the harbour and before Graham Montague had decided he wanted a woman, there had been a dance, and Thomasina had been in Treadway’s arms a good two hours. They were both quiet, solitary people, and each had wondered what it could be that other couples spoke into each other’s ears, laughing, underneath the band. There had been a sedateness to their dance, and they had thought about each other afterwards, but when Treadway sent his sister to ask Thomasina to go to the next dance with him, she had declined. Now, all these years later, they remembered the touch of each other’s body, and there was a tension between them because they were alone. This story could have been told of any woman and any man in the cove. In a small community the whole world dances in one another’s arms on one June night or another. Treadway should not have come.

“Are you all right?” Thomasina asked him. Treadway didn’t look all right. He was suddenly shy as well as angry, so she said, “Do you want to sit down?” He did not answer, only looked at the floor, so she brought him to the kitchen. He had not been in this house before. The house did not really belong to Croydon Harbour, and everyone knew enough about its story that they felt no need to go in. There was a distance about it, taller than the settlers’ houses, imposing, as if the people who built it and who dwelt in it thought they knew better than the settlers.