Annabel (2 page)

2

Beaver River

H
AD WAYNE NOT BEEN BORN IN
1968 in a place where caribou moss spreads in a white-green carpet, and where smoke plumes from houses, and where gold sand is so remote no crowds gather — the sand is a lonely stretch under the northern lights — things might have gone differently. Treadway was not an unkind man. His neighbours said he would give you the shirt off his back — and if that shirt had not been full of sweat from hauling wood and skinning animals and auguring ice, he might indeed have done so. He was a soft-hearted man when it came to anyone he felt was less practically talented than himself, and this covered a lot of people. He would help a man split wood, build a house, or cut a hole in the right place in the ice, not to show off his superior skills but to save the man time. He did these things out of pure helpfulness, with kindness thrown in.

Pure kindness he saved for his dogs. On one hunting trip he had accidentally shot the eye of his old English setter, a mild-mannered dog whose jaw quivered with tenderness around any bird Treadway asked it to carry. Treadway had ended the trip although it meant he would have to launch it again later, at considerable expense in provisions and time, in order to have enough duck in store for the winter. He had carried the dog a hundred miles on his sled and paid Hans Nilsson the veterinarian a hundred dollars to get up in the middle of the night and tend to the wound, and when Hans told him the dog had to lose the eye, Treadway cried because it was his fault, and he did not eat again himself until the dog could eat, not even when Jacinta fried meat cakes with knobs of pure white pork fat and juniper berries in them. He believed sight to be something the dog loved, valued, and even enjoyed, and it hurt him deeply that he had ruined the dog’s ability to practise the talent for which bird dogs are born. He kept the dog though it could no longer hunt, and no one in Treadway’s ancestry had ever kept a dog that was just a pet, until the dog grew old. Only when the dog grew so arthritic it could not walk without pain did Treadway consent to have it put down, and on that day he walked to the river and stared at the water for more than an hour, thinking about not just how he had failed his dog but how he could be a better man all around if he paid more attention to every detail and let nothing pass that was off-kilter.

After he lost that dog, Treadway hauled and skinned and sweated, and, in his own way, he loved. He loved Jacinta because she was decent and kind to him; the last thing he wanted to do was to hurt her. He played games with her in the part of the season when he lived at home, games she liked, such as cribbage, which she had taught him when they were first married. He had to force himself to do it, to take his mind off the way he planned to sharpen the runners on his sled or condition the jaws of his traps with seal oil, but he did tear himself away from these things so that when he was with her, she would not feel that his mind was far away. He felt a tenderness that was, in part, a feeling of being sorry for her, for she had to stay indoors and lead a gentle life unconnected with all that was great and wild, and he did not see how she could enjoy this. He knew, during the crib games and the times they ate intimately together over the lamplit table, that she would have liked something more, but he did not know what it was. He did not know it was the city she came from, it was rain on the slate roofs of the shops on Water Street in that city, it was a man who would read poetry and philosophy but not keep it from her, who would lay the book right there on the table, beside the bread and the fragments of roast duck leg and the wine, and would talk about it with her.

Days after the birth, in the manner of secrets held from the world of husbands, Treadway had not been told the truth about his child. Jacinta examined her baby with gentle fingertips when Treadway was not in the room, and when he was, or when neighbours visited with bakeapple tarts and partridgeberry cake and hot caribou stew baked under a thick crust with gravy bubbling out of the knife holes, she gazed on her child with the full power of her concentration, and nothing could break that gaze. Neighbours walked and talked around her, and it was as if she were underwater and they were not, and this did not seem too different from the way it normally was with a new mother and her child. No one expected her to come up with idle conversation.

It was Thomasina who took care of the linguistics. Thomasina who, by miracles of deflection, managed to leave unspoken the first thing spoken of any newborn. To Treadway she appeared the most sensible of his wife’s friends.

“Eliza Goudie,” he had once told Jacinta, “spends far too much money on white sandals and those dresses out of the catalogue, the ones covered in blisters.”

“Seersucker.”

“And white sandals. Things that are not practical to wear in this climate.” And he could not get over the fact that Joan Martin had forbidden her husband to pile wood near their house so she could plant some kind of fancy tulip that should grow only in a botanical garden somewhere.

“Emperor,” said Jacinta. “Those are Emperor tulips.”

It was a testament to Thomasina’s powers that she managed to stay eight days in Treadway’s house without his protesting. Not even Jacinta’s mother had been able to do that, when she was alive. Treadway did not ban a person outright, but he had an ability to give off such a chilled and hostile response to any guest who overstayed her welcome that no guest, not even the most impermeable, could stand it. He was a man who did not want strangers to observe his routine, not that there was anything remarkable about his habits. He simply liked to inhabit his house, when he had to inhabit it, and go about his ordinary pathways in it without being looked at or talked to, except by his own wife, who did not appear to him to mind it when he ignored the fact that she was there.

“If I didn’t say anything to him,” Jacinta sometimes told Joan and Eliza, “I think he could go a whole year without speaking to anyone but his dogs.” She said this, though she felt disloyal, when she got caught up in the women’s derisive talk about husbands in general. And because they knew things like this about him, Joan and Eliza had an air about them, one Treadway could detect, of faint amusement towards him, and he could not tolerate them in the house, so when he was home, they hardly ever came. But because she had more gravity than they did, and because she did nothing for herself and everything for Jacinta and the baby, Thomasina was able to stay the eight days without Treadway’s disapproval, even though it meant the only time he had alone with his wife was the half-hour before sleep.

“Everything all right?” he asked Jacinta on the eighth day, his huge, comforting paw heating her belly down into her skin, her fat, her womb and ovarian tubes and ovaries, down into the small of her back. She did not tell her friends about his calm heat, or about the deep trust she had in his ability to create a secure home. There were a lot of instabilities in Eliza’s home. Her husband drank, and she was forever falling in love with someone — this year it was her children’s new geography teacher, a man ten years younger than Eliza, who had come from Vermont and lived in an apartment in the local wildlife officer’s basement. Eliza’s infatuations were always one-sided, but they powered her in a way her real life did not, and as a result her own house always felt uninhabited by her, and her children and husband walked around lost in it. Joan was less susceptible to falling in love, but her husband was not. All of Croydon Harbour knew he had an Innu wife in the interior, and that while Joan had no children, his other wife had three daughters and a son.

“Everything’s perfect.” Jacinta never lied to Treadway. He ate steel-cut oatmeal every morning for breakfast, with salt on it. His underclothes were of ewe’s wool. When they made love, she climaxed every time, and when she did, he knew. If she were bone tired he stroked her forehead and her hair until she fell asleep. If he did anything that irked her, like drape filthy socks on the bedspread, she asked him not to do it and he did not mind. She agreed with him about Eliza’s impractical sandals but disagreed with him about the Emperor tulips. “It won’t hurt Harold Martin,” she said, “to pile and cut his wood at the bottom of the fence so she can get some enjoyment,” and Treadway did not argue with her or take it as an insult against husbands.

But about their own newborn baby, Jacinta did lie.

Siamese twins had been on the news, joined so tightly at the skull doctors the world over had despaired, and the mother — Jacinta had watched her on television — had loved those babies, and had decided, fiercely, that it didn’t matter if they were joined. She would bring them both up in the world just like that, no matter what, and Jacinta had not felt sorry for her. She knew better than to feel sorry for anyone. It was one of the things she had learned. Feeling sorry for a person was no help to them at all. People should get on with things. Privately she thought the woman would come to her senses one day and allow the babies to die.

But when you are the mother, you take it in stride. You take albino hair in stride, when you are the mother. When you are the mother, not someone watching that mother, you take odd-coloured eyes in stride. You take a missing hand in stride, and the same with Down syndrome, and spina bifida, and water on the brain. You would take wings in stride, or one lung outside the body, or a missing tongue. The penis and the one little testicle and the labia and vagina were like this for Jacinta. Baby Wayne slept in his cradle under his green quilt and white blanket. His black belly button stuck out, and Jacinta cleaned it with an alcohol swab, waiting for it to fall off. She played with his little red feet, and felt close to him when he crammed her breast in his mouth and sucked while raising his eyes slowly, slowly across her collarbone, across the ceiling, gazing at Thomasina or the stove or the cat, back again to her collarbone, then up, up, till he found her eyes and locked on, and that was a kind of flying, flying through the northern lights or a Chagall night sky, with a little white goat to give a blessing. There was blessing everywhere between Jacinta and this baby, and there were times when she completely forgot what it was about him that she was hiding from her husband.

“Everything,” she told Treadway, “is all right,” and she believed that this was about to become true.

“All I need,” she had said earlier to Thomasina, “is a little more time, and everything will become clear. Everything will straighten itself out. The baby will, in some way we still have to learn about, be just fine.”

Treadway persisted. “Baby’s healthy?” Jacinta knew he never spoke idly, and he was not speaking idly now, and he was asking her for an honest answer. But what was the most honest answer?

“Yes.” She tried this in a normal voice but it came out as a whisper. The strength of her voice, her real tone, which was a tone of plainness, like rain, which Treadway loved but had not told her he loved, did not inhabit the whisper. She wished she could go back and say yes again. Heat still radiated from Treadway’s hand deep into her belly.

“He’s a big baby,” Treadway said, and the heat stopped.

Jacinta wanted to blurt, “Why do you say he? Are you waiting for me to confess?” But she did not. She said yes, louder than normal this time because she did not want another whisper to betray her. Her yes was a shout in their quiet room. Their bedroom was always quiet. Treadway liked a place of repose, a tranquil sleep with a white bedspread and no radio music or clutter, and so did she. She lay there waiting for his hand to heat her belly again, but it did not. Had he moved it away consciously? Treadway was a man whose warmth always heated her unless an argument stood between them.

In the morning Jacinta told Thomasina, “I went stiff as a hare. What are we going to do?”

Any time fortune came to Thomasina — acceptance of her grass baskets by the crafts commission, the flowering of a Persian rose in this zone where no one could grow any rose, not even the hardy John Cabot climber — she knew happiness was only one side of the coin and the coin was forever turning. She had been single until she was well past thirty, when Graham Montague had told her he didn’t care that she had a curved spine and felt old — he wanted to marry her if she would marry him. Annabel had been born the following year and Thomasina had every reason to be happy, but instead she held her heart at the same level she had always held it, because she did not trust extremes of feeling. Now she told Jacinta, as they spread jam on toast thinly, the way they both liked it, so gold shone through, “We will love this baby of yours and Treadway’s exactly as it was born.”

“Will other people love it?”

“That baby is all right the way it is. There’s enough room in this world.”

This was how Thomasina saw it, and it was what Jacinta needed to hear.

For days after the birth Treadway knew there was a secret, and it was only a matter of opening his attention in a way he was used to doing out on the land before the truth about the baby came to him. He did not need to investigate with his hands or move close when no one was looking. In the wilderness when he opened his attention, it was a spiritual opening, a way of seeing with your whole being, and it helped him see birds and caribou and fish that were invisible to anyone who was not hunting and had not opened their second eyes. He felt the secret in the house exactly as he felt the presence of a white ptarmigan behind him in the snow, and he understood the secret’s details, its identity, as easily as he would know the bird was a white ptarmigan before he turned around and saw it. He knew his baby had both a boy’s and a girl’s identity, and he knew a decision had to be made.

Where had their baby come from? There was no relative in the past, no story to which Treadway might turn. There was only the fact of which sex organ was the most obvious, which one it would be most practical to recognize, the easiest life for all concerned. For if there was one thing Treadway Blake considered with every step, it was how a decision of his affected not just himself but everyone. He understood privacy but he could not understand practical selfishness. Every part of him knew it was physically connected to every part of everyone else on this coast, and not just to people but to the sky, and the land, and the stars. He was both Scottish and Inuit, and he was nothing if not fair. To him the land was a universal loaf of bread, every part nourishing and meant for everyone.