Annabel (19 page)

“Watch out for the spring at the back.”

“Its lumps are in the right places.”

“How are you doing?”

“You’ve probably heard.”

“When a hundred kids are going around with the news, you don’t need a story in the
Labradorian
. ’Specially if it’s about poo. And what’s wrong with taking a kid to hospital? Didn’t he have appendicitis? Maybe it would’ve ruptured if you hadn’t brought him in. Maybe you saved his life.”

“I should have done it differently. Victoria Huskins is not a well woman.”

“None of the parents blame you one little bit. They should go down to that school board and have you reinstated. But they aren’t going to. They talk about it but they won’t do it. What kind of a trip do you want to take?”

“When I sold my house, I got twenty thousand.”

“That’s the house the Michelins live in now, right? How come you sold it?”

“I paid my way through teachers’ college with four thousand. And I travelled on my own with another four.”

“Did you ever regret selling it?”

“I had no intention of selling it at first.”

Thomasina had begun, right after the drowning of her husband, Graham Montague, and their daughter Annabel, to clear out everything that might trap sorrow within the walls. For weeks she worked in the yard with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge, washing clamps, wrenches, sockets, and hammers, feeling them carefully with her hands the way her blind husband must have done, but knowing her hands could never interpret their shapes the way his had done. Part of her wanted to keep certain tools: his staple gun, his spirit level, the sixty-yard measuring tape in its leather case. But she had not kept them.

“Just like I had no intention of coming in here today.”

Thomasina had gone into her drowned daughter’s room and collected the dolls, the lavender sachets, the books. She had smelled Annabel’s clothes, then given them to Isabel Palliser for children along the coast. She had not kept the salmon pink cardigan with dog buttons.

“It was a house I couldn’t empty. I thought if I got rid of it . . . You’d think a grown woman would know better.”

“I wouldn’t think that. I think a lot of grown women hide a lot of different kinds of sadness.”

Thomasina Baikie found it hard to accept consolation. “I have twelve thousand left and I heard there’s a kind of ticket you can get where you can go around the world. You go to Heathrow and you can fly to Portugal and from there you can go where you want.”

“But you have to decide your route. You can’t backtrack. And you have to complete your trip within twelve months. It sounds to me like you might not want that.”

“I don’t know what I want.”

“You might want to sit in public squares and people-watch for an hour in one place and a month in another. I can tell by the way you’re peeling that grapefruit. You want to get lost. Somewhere where they have ordinary life you can join in. Slip right in there and have a bowl of soup in the clothes you have on now. Go hear a concert you read about stapled to a telephone pole. There are lots of places like that in the world.”

17

A Real Little Man

“Y
OU CAN'T TELL ANYONE,”
Jacinta said.

“Not even Wally Michelin?” Wally stayed to herself. She got the highest marks in the school and went around with her chemistry text against her chest the way she had once carried Fauré’s “Cantique.”

“Not a soul.”

Jacinta was thinking of Wayne’s safety. Part of him knew this, but the new-found part, Annabel, wanted to tell someone. Wayne closed his eyes in bed and saw the hidden part of himself in the schoolyard, in a dress with a green sash and shoes of red leather with a little heel like Gwen Matchem’s. There were lots of things that changed if you were a girl: not just your heels or the way you put your hair, but things you talked about and the way you looked at the world. Wayne felt this in waves.

By grade eight his sequined bathing suit was far too small; its straps cut his shoulders and the crotch was tight, and the time had passed in which he had enough innocence to order another in a larger size. He longed to wear it, but he left it crumpled in its box under his bed. He missed Wally, and he wondered what would happen if he could tell her they were both girls, at least in part. He wished he could ask Wally to call him Annabel. They could be best friends like Carol Rich and Ashley Chalk, who passed battleships-and-cruisers paper to each other in Mr. Wigglesworth’s class and ate hickory sticks on the fire escape. Wally and Annabel.

But Annabel ran away.

Where did she go? She was inside his body but she escaped him. Maybe she gets out through my eyes, he thought, when I open them. Or my ears. He lay in bed and waited. Annabel was close enough to touch; she was himself, yet unattainable.

There was a piece of information about Wayne’s night in the hospital that Treadway had not told Jacinta.

When Treadway went on the trapline, his family did not hear from him, nor he from them. Some men made themselves reachable. Before Graham Montague had died, he had always told Thomasina how she could find him if she needed to get a message to him in the woods. Eliza Goudie’s husband could radio in and out from his cabin. Even Harold Martin, despite his Innu woman, had come out of the woods in two days the time Joan got third-degree burns on her foot from tipping her canning pot as it came to a boil around her winter’s supply of bottled rabbit. Jacinta had never tried to get in touch with Treadway.

“I thought,” Dr. Lioukras told her on a follow-up visit, while Wayne was in the hematology lab having two vials of blood drawn from his arm, “you knew.”

“No.”

“Your husband knew. The woman who was here that night — Wayne’s teacher, I believe — she knew.”

“Thomasina. She’s not Wayne’s mother. I’m his mother.”

“And it’s true I never spoke to you about it.”

“I wasn’t here. I was at a stupid party getting drunk with my friends.”

“I assumed you knew. But I shouldn’t have assumed it.”

“A normal husband would have told me.”

“Perhaps when you go home now, you can discuss it.”

“Treadway won’t discuss anything with me until spring.” Jacinta assessed the Greek doctor. He was a man who could love a woman. Not a closed, cold, unreadable machine. She slumped in the chair. He put a hand on her back and his hand felt warm.

“I know it was drastic.”

“No one told Wayne?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Will I tell him?”

“No.”

“I’m so sick of not telling him things.”

“I can’t stop you. But in my experience — I know my experience is limited — he isn’t mature enough to understand.”

“How could anyone understand a thing like that? Moses couldn’t understand that. I’d like to see you understand it if it happened to you.”

“He might not get as big a shock if he were older.”

Jacinta did not think Treadway had an Innu woman like Harold Martin did. But she thought he had begun to think like the animals he trapped. He had begun to walk like them, and sleep like them. He had become wild, and there was no way you could send a message to him if you did not know the wild language. So Jacinta was alone with the new piece of information.

What Jacinta spoke about, alone for the winter with Wayne, was not the mystery of his body. Treadway had told her, before he left, he wanted her to begin training Wayne to make and use money wisely. “It’s time,” he said, “Wayne started learning how to keep body and soul together. For his own good. How much does he make with those cod ears?”

“I’m not sure,” Jacinta said, though she knew the exact amount. In the summer before grade eight, Wayne had learned how to make twenty-five dollars a week. He peeled shrimp for Roland Shiwack and he cut out cod tongues at the Croydon Harbour wharf and sold them for fifty cents a dozen door-to-door. While he was at it, he cut out the pretty white, shell-like bone in the cod’s head that people called the ear, and soaked these in a pot of water with a few drops of Javex. He sold them to the craft co-op at the new museum in North West River, where they made earrings out of them.

“I’d say he’s saving twenty-five dollars a week.” Treadway was a good judge of how much work a person did, and how much it was worth. “Let him save half. But let him contribute the other fifty dollars a month to the household.”

“You want me to charge him for the electricity he uses listening to his record player?”

“He can start helping pay his own expenses. His books and clothes. He can put a bit on the household bills after Christmas. It’s the principle. It won’t hurt him one little bit. I might stay out longer this spring. I might do the whole spring hunt up the river. Now he’s older he can give you more of a hand.”

When Wayne brought home the school bill for his new chemistry book, Jacinta gave him the money but said, “Your father wanted me to ask you to pay for part of it.”

“Pay for my books?”

“He said keep half your money and give me the other half for books and clothes and the household.”

All his life Wayne had deferred to Treadway’s pronouncements, and he did so now. As far as he knew, other boys’ fathers gave them more money as they grew older, not less. Brent Shiwack’s father bought him an Arctic Cat, and Mark Thevenet’s dad was ordering Mark his own Sea-Doo, which cost more than a car. Wayne did not expect Treadway to act like the other fathers, and he didn’t protest. There was a restrained economy under Treadway’s roof, part self-denial and part moral exercise, and Wayne had been trained into it. There were things he wanted, but a Sea-Doo was not one of them.

“Do you need more money, Mom? The co-op is always after me for more cod ears.”

“Your father just wants you to be self-sufficient. It’s his way of —”

“It’s okay, Mom. I can get more money. Roland Shiwack wants me to work more hours. He doesn’t like giving work to Brent. I could make eighty-five a week easy right now.”

“You don’t have to make that much. Your school work —”

“I’m fine, Mom. My school work is fine.”

Wayne did extra work for Roland and his feet began to peel again, as they had done the summer before grade seven. He told Roland, who said it was because of the shrimp.

“That’s why I can’t do it myself. That and the fact it takes too long and I have a million other things to do. There’s a substance in there that causes my hands to peel red raw. Funny it affects your feet. I guess it migrates. Can I have a look?”

Wayne shoved off his sneaker. The skin on his soles had broken into sheets and curled at the edges. He peeled off a sheet of skin.

“That’s it. That exact same thing, only on my hands.”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“My hands sure hurt.”

“Well, my feet don’t. But I’m glad to know the cause.”

Wayne had always associated his peeling feet with the day Thomasina rushed him to hospital. He had thought it had something to do with his swelling abdomen. This time, he had been afraid the whole thing was starting again.

“It’s a relief to know what it is. That it’ll pass when I get the shrimp done.”

“If you want to stop, I’ll certainly understand. I can get you to shave the ends of that pile of fenceposts instead.”

Jacinta did not tell Wayne that Treadway might stay all spring in the interior. She forced herself to peel potatoes, boil them, then cut and fry them with egg and moose sausage, the way she would have done for the three of them as a family. But when the doctor visits died down and November came, when the clocks turned back and nights grew long, she stayed up later at night. Wayne had to get himself up in the mornings in time for school. At first Jacinta dragged herself out of bed and made a family breakfast. Then she made easier things: toast and jam or peanut butter, and milk; then she let Wayne get his own breakfast. She woke at ten, then eleven, then noon.

She ate store-bought jam, bread, and tea. A boiled egg once in a while. Treadway had cut three months’ worth of wood junks into stove lengths. When it was gone, she used the bucksaw and cut a few lengths each day. One day Wayne came home and the stove was out, and after that he sawed enough wood on Saturday mornings to last the week. The household had always run, as did all households in the harbour, on stored supplies gathered in season and used economically over time. Now the house began to run in a fashion that Jacinta’s mother would have called hand-to-mouth. Wayne made toast and ate rabbit meat out of the jar. He washed his own shirts, pants, gym clothes, and underwear in the little machine on wheels, and he watched his mother become as unreachable as his father had been. One day he found her lying on the couch with something pink all over her face.

“What is that stuff?”

“Mashed strawberries. Out of the freezer.”

“Why is it on your face?”

“It softens your skin.”

There were more strawberries on the kitchen table. Later in the evening he watched as his mother poured Carnation milk on them and ate them. She did not watch television but sat in the chair in front of the set and crocheted cotton dishcloths: green and white, or blue and white. She did this night after night as Wayne conjugated
avoir
and deciphered his slide rule and worried about her. He worried that it was his fault his father went on the trapline earlier than other dads and came home later. He worried that Jacinta was sad because no matter what he did, he would never be a normal son. A son with two testicles, not one. A son whose father did not have to sell his dog to a man he didn’t like.

“Crochet,” Jacinta announced, “is like drawing. You have one line, and you can make it go anywhere. It doesn’t have to be a stupid dishcloth.”

“You said those dishcloths work better than J-Cloths.”

“I don’t need a hundred of them. If you know the basic stitch and a few variations, you can crochet any shape you want. You can crochet a rose, if you have a mind. That wild dog rose by the kitchen door? You can crochet the whole bush if you feel like it. All you have to do is make a chain of three, close it, and go around the ring and make a gathered petal in each stitch, using rows of half-double crochet.” There was yarn all over the house: rose, mustard, green.

“Can you crochet a cup and saucer?”

She studied a cup on the table. “I could try.” When Wayne laid his bookbag on the table the next day, she had done it.

“Can you crochet a horse’s head?”

“If I can figure out how to draw one.”

That school year she lined the shelves, the TV, windowsills, and armoire with replicas of razor-clam and mussel shells, a conch, a trout, a smelt, a salmon, seven sea urchins, three cups and saucers, and twenty-eight starfish. She loved starfish.

Jacinta used up her Briggs and Little wool, then went on to linen yarn and a kind of yarn made with silk and seaweed that she had been saving for booties for the next baby born in the cove. In Treadway’s shed she found his twine and made pots out of it. They stood on their own. She filled them with stones and pieces of juniper, and she crocheted tiny birds and perched them in the juniper. She crocheted a roll of snare wire into a bowl like bowls in the catalogue, into which people in big country homes put their brown eggs, and she bought eggs from Esther Shiwack to put in it. She began to crochet abstractions. A green and brown wool spiral fortified with snare wire. A blue river strung with beads. Extreme close-ups of leaves.

“I let the yarn talk to me,” she told Eliza Goudie on the phone. “I can’t explain all the shapes.” She stayed up all night and made more, and the shapes were not recognizable.

Had Jacinta been in a city this might have been all right. Someone might have understood what she was making. They might have bought one from her and hung it in the lobby of the Bank of Montreal. Wayne would think this later in his life. But at fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen he wished his mother would go back to starfish. His father lived outside the house longer than he lived in it. He brought home wood, caribou, salmon and smelt, and money from his furs. Before he left for the trapline or his cabin on Bear Island, he drove Wayne to Goose Bay for his medical check-ups. They stopped on the way for burgers and root beer at the A&W in Goose Bay, and agreed that a burger was no good without bacon. Treadway never asked how Jacinta fared in the months he was away. They discussed the beaver house at Thevenet’s Bend, thirty miles in; whether the beavers had vacated it or were in there, with steam coming out of the hole. Treadway gave Wayne beaver teeth when he could get them. The co-op paid two dollars a set, for necklaces. They discussed money, and Treadway made sure Wayne remembered how to find the key to his private box in case the family should need the gold while he was gone, or in case Wayne had to consult his checklist of medications, which Treadway kept under his will, which was under the gold.