Annabel (23 page)

“Look over by that birch.” Wayne did not like remembering that night in the hospital. A willow ptarmigan had been sitting on a low branch, and now it had descended and walked on the ground. “He’s looking for insects. He must have a late hatching of young.”

“Isn’t it a she?”

“It’s the male. They’re vegetarian except when they feed the babies, and male willows are the only kind of ptarmigan where the father looks after the young.” Treadway had taught him this, along with thousands of other pieces of information on Labrador birds and mammals and fish. He remembered more than his father thought, but something about the knowledge made Wayne feel lonely now.

“What else do you remember, Wayne?”

“The word
hermaphrodite
. One of the doctors saying it. Me thinking, Why is he talking about the Greek myths we learned in your class? Me not knowing what he was talking about until Dr. Lioukras explained it to me. Even after that, not really knowing. Long after.”

He meant now. He meant things had not fallen into place even now. He looked at his hand on the steering wheel. His arm. With the last round of hormones it had become more like other young men’s arms, but in school his arms had been thin, his body lanky. He had tried to conceal his slightness from his father, who had wanted him to have breadth. Wayne had walked as if covering a smaller boy with his arms, protecting him. He had walked with his arms away from his body, as if they encircled the smaller boy. You don’t need to keep doing that, he thought now. You can walk like a man. But he had to keep reminding himself. He was always the smaller boy, the girl-boy, in his mind.

“Do you remember your father came to the hospital, and we had a fight?”

“You argued. In the corridor. Not like arguments between my mother and father. Your voice is a lot lower than my mother’s. Dad was meaner than at home. Then you left.”

“I did.”

“My father sat under the window on a radiator with slits in it and paint that had dried in drips down the side. He didn’t talk. You never said goodbye. After being with me the whole time. I never saw you after.” Wayne looked for the female willow ptarmigan. She should be somewhere in the undergrowth.

“What I’m going to say might horrify you, Wayne. It might give you terrible dreams. I know it has given me dreams. And I want you to know I’m sorry. I’m sorry it happened, and I’m sorry I’ve known for years and not told you. I wrote to your father that I wanted him to tell you. I’m going to tell you now because it could happen again and it might be different. You might have to do something.”

Ptarmigans stayed in pairs. They roosted on adjacent branches, and when one foraged, the other was always somewhere near. But Wayne could not see the female. Had a hunter killed her?

“When I took you to the hospital, there was menstrual blood. You knew that.”

“I figured it out. It doesn’t sink in at first. What something like that really is. Even when they tell you, it doesn’t sink in. I know the medical terms. I know I’m supposed to take the white pills and the yellow pills and now one big green pill. There’s lots I don’t know though. It seems like no one knows. Not even the doctors.”

“There was menstrual blood, yes. But also, trapped in a Fallopian tube . . . it would never have lived. Wayne, there was a fetus.”

The ptarmigan cackled and shouted in short, angry barks, like a man shouting, “Get out!” over and over again to the silent woods.

“It can happen internally, Wayne. When the male and female reproductive organs are adjacent in the same body. It was nothing you thought or did. It has nothing to do with masturbation or ejaculating or anything people might think. The fetus could never have grown because of its location. Dr. Lioukras removed it with the rest of the lining and the fluid and blood. I asked him what the chances were of it happening again, and he said he didn’t know. He said it shouldn’t have happened. I asked if it did happen again, would the fetus always die? Or could it grow?”

There was the female ptarmigan, in the blackness under low spruce boughs. The male joined her and they walked into the darkness with their jerky little henlike movements, their fat bodies that made them so easy to shoot. But for now the couple was all right. Off they went to feed their young. The white on their bellies had already started to spread against their brown upper bodies. In winter they would be indistinguishable from the snow.

“Dr. Lioukras couldn’t answer me, Wayne. He couldn’t say yes or no.”

Wayne turned the radio on and started the truck. He took Thomasina to his parents’ house and gave her the unopened letter. He did not tell his mother he was giving back the letter. He told his mother Thomasina had come to have a look around old haunts, and after he gave her the letter he took her outside and drove her around Croydon Harbour. He slowed as they passed her old house, where Wally Michelin’s parents still lived, then he took her down to the beach where he kept his canoe for his outfitting jobs, as if this were an ordinary occasion of showing someone around the place, but he was thinking about that fetus.

“Why,” Gracie said that night, “do I always feel like you’re not here even when you’re sitting right there?” They were playing cribbage. He knew she had the seven of hearts because a corner was torn off it. He knew she had the queen of spades as well. Her little nephew had scribbled Magic Marker on it. She had borrowed three books from her cousin whose boyfriend had taken the paramedic course she wanted to take, and these were stacked on the windowsill. He had read the titles and marvelled that Gracie really meant to know everything in these books.
Hollinshead’s Textbook of Anatomy
. A big, expensive book on medical physiology by someone named Arthur Guyton, who Gracie said had polio and wrote the book after he realized the polio meant he could not become a surgeon.
Basic and Clinical Pharmacology
by Bertram G. Katzung. Wayne looked at the books, and he watched Gracie put down her queen of spades for two points, and he remembered what the willow ptarmigan had shouted. Get out! Get out! He wondered if there was anything in those textbooks that outlined his own physiology, his own anatomy. Would Gracie get to page 217 or page 499 and see a diagram of a person who had female and male reproductive organs in the same body? Would there be a cross-section diagram of a man who had a womb, or a Fallopian tube with a fetus trapped in it? Get out! Get out!

In his own bed he remembered the red world. The way the hospital room, the sheets and utensils and surgeons, had receded under the redness inside his eyelids. He remembered the masked faces, the gelled lens, the word
blood
. Then red, black-red, red-orange. Then dizziness; a red pool, whirling, and he was in it underwater, and something had been in there with him. He remembered that. Something had been in there looking at him, drowning and trying to speak, and he had not known what it was. It dawned on him that his father had known. His father had known all along that the doctors had found a fetus. Where was Treadway Blake now? He had disappeared into the same woods as the ptarmigan. Where was the fetus now? It had had eyes, and the eyes had watched him. He had been in the red world and the fetus and he had looked at each other. Had it wanted him to save it? If he had not lost it, if it had grown into a person, who would that little person be now?

“What I’m going to say might horrify you,” Thomasina had said. But it did not horrify him. He found it the saddest thing in the world. She had said it might give him terrible dreams. But he did not dream about it, because he did not sleep.

By morning he had made a decision to take the ptarmigan’s advice and get out of Labrador.

It would not be hard to tell Gracie. Gracie had her textbooks. She had her fierce little fist full of cards she was determined to play even if they were marked and torn. His mother would be the hard one. Wayne did not like to leave Jacinta alone. But he would leave her all the same, and his sadness over this was not bottomless like his sadness about the fetus.

Wayne’s sadness over Jacinta was the sadness all sons and daughters feel when their ferry starts moving and the parent stands on the dock, waving and growing tiny. A sadness that stings, then melts in a fresh wind.

Part four

21

Caines Grocery

I
F THOMASINA HAD SPENT THE WINTER
in Croydon Harbour instead of Goose Bay, she could have gone up the hill, climbed Jacinta’s three steps, knocked on the door with an apple pie in her hands, and stayed on the step until Jacinta answered the door. Thomasina would have seen, immediately, that things were not right. She would have touched Jacinta about the shoulders, turned her around, stuck the soiled teacups in hot suds, and opened some windows. Thomasina would have done a load of laundry and she would have lifted the tangled sea of yarn that covered the living room floor. She would have helped Jacinta wash her hair and she would have brushed it for her, and she would have held her in her arms and listened.

A lot of things can go out of order in a lonely house over a lonely autumn and the start of winter, without other people in the village knowing, especially if that village prides itself on an independent spirit. Jacinta’s neighbours could not see, on her windowsill, a doll the size of a thumb that Jacinta had made from clay out of her root cellar, clay she had mixed with water and a dinner spoon. Nor could they see the housedress and cardigan she wore all day and all night throughout the winter. Bread pudding was a thing Jacinta had eaten as a child. Her mother had kept a kitchen drawer especially for bread crusts. The crusts were what the family had left on their plates. Some had jam on them. You broke the crusts into a pan with milk and butter, nutmeg and an egg, and some sugar, and you baked the pudding. If you were a child and your mother was not looking and you were hungry between meals, you would open the drawer and steal a dried crust that had jam on it. There was never mould, because the drawer was airy, and a dry crust with jam on it tasted crispy and delicious between meals. This was what Jacinta ate now, and there was comfort in eating a childhood treat. You could live for a long time on crusts and tea, and you had a lot of hours to think about your son who had a girl hidden inside him.

Did boys not have moments of softness, moments of more incredible tenderness than girls did? Who was to say which moments were which? Many times during Wayne’s childhood a wind had whipped through Jacinta’s mouth. The world had breathed through her and told her that her son was also a daughter. Why had she questioned it? This wind had whipped through her mouth when it wished. One morning Wayne had blown through the door in his hockey gear and that wind had blown in with him. It blew in Jacinta’s mouth and she saw that Wayne’s skin and hair were made of girl material, girl molecules, girl translucence. She gave him Kool-Aid and a hot dog and told him to do his homework. Jacinta had let the blast blow through her and had not responded, but she felt sadder for the lost girl than if the lost girl had been herself.

Had Wayne grown up as a daughter and not as a son, Jacinta would have told him about her own girlhood in St. John’s. She’d have confided the little places to go: Snow’s, at the east end of Duckworth, crammed with violet pastilles and crinolines from the time Jacinta’s own mother was a child. Lar’s, all strung with lights at the bottom of Barters Hill, pyramids of candy apples — how did Lar get them to shine so hard? Caines Grocery, where Lee’s Snowballs were five cents. All of it changing, Jacinta had known, maybe gone, but she would have told Wayne of it, had he lived the life of Annabel. These were the things Jacinta thought in Croydon Harbour, on her own in the lonesome house with Treadway away on his winter trapline.

And it was true, St. John’s was not now the way it had been when Jacinta was a girl. On his first day there Wayne followed the advice of a woman on the ferry and went to the train station on Water Street to look at a bulletin board that had boarding houses and apartments listed on it, but he did not know any of the street names or where they were. He walked to Duckworth Street hoping to find a shop that would have a map, but all he passed were lawyers’ offices, and a shop that sold beans and grain in big glass jars, and the courthouse. He passed some little cafés, and it was not until he had got almost all the way to the Newfoundland Hotel and the Battery that he saw Caines Grocery, which was the kind of place where a person might find the map he needed. By this time he was dying to go to the toilet and he would have liked to sit down and rest, because his bag was heavy and he was tired from looking at everything intensely because it was all so new.

He could smell the ocean in a different way than he had smelled it in Labrador. Sewage ran into the harbour here, and there was a lot of it, with gulls circling over the outlet down below Caines Grocery, and you could smell it. There were also smells of seaweed, and fish and chips and vinegar from a van on the street. The houses were much brighter yellows, reds, and greens than in Labrador, and they were tall and narrow and stuck together. The houses looked bright but stern, and the air was so clear the colours shouted out loud at him, and he felt weary from the force of all the corners and the sharp lines of the clapboard.

There was a news rack with the
Evening Telegram
and the
Newfoundland Herald
, some real estate listings, and other brochures, and there were road maps of the entire highway system of Newfoundland and Labrador, but he could not see a map that was only of St. John’s. There was a man talking to a woman who had come to the cash register with two boxes of macaroni and cheese and a bag of apples. He was handing her something, a cheque. He did not address her by name.

“I think,” he said, “you must have mistakenly written this cheque the last time you came in here, not realizing it would bounce.” He said this kindly. He wore a shop apron stained with fingerprints and with blood from the meat counter, but Wayne felt that he was not a clerk. He had white hair and said everything to the woman in a gentle voice. There was no way the woman could argue. She took money out of her purse and was about to put the apples and the macaroni back, but the man told her it was all right. “You can take those,” he said, “and settle with us the next time you come in.” He let her go out feeling that he believed she had not written his store a bad cheque on purpose. Now the man turned to Wayne, and Wayne felt he could ask him for what he needed.

“I’m looking for a place to stay, and I need a map. And I would also like to use the toilet if you have one.”

The toilet was up the narrowest set of stairs Wayne had ever seen. When he came down again, the man, who said he was Mr. Caines, told him the stairs were a hundred years old, and two men were coming the next day to tear every one of them down and put up a new set that did not sag or creak and that would be six inches wider.

“You’ve just seen a relic that is about to be no more. I’m curious to know how they’ll do it.” Mr. Caines opened a new box of Caramel Log bars and set them beside the licorice. “I’d like to see how they dismantle that.”

He did not have a map for sale but he had his own map of downtown St. John’s behind the counter, and he opened it and showed Wayne how King’s Bridge Road opened onto a road called Forest Road behind the Newfoundland Hotel. “The Forest Road Apartments,” he said, “are the best place for someone like you to go. Someone new in town. You’ll get a clean apartment and it won’t be too expensive, and it’s only a twenty-minute walk from downtown . . . Steve!”

A boy who had been putting egg sandwiches in a cooler came over. Mr. Caines marked the route three times with a pencil, trying to be sure Wayne knew how to get there, then he said, “Steve, walk up the rest of the east end of Duckworth Street with this man here and show him how you get to Forest Road.” Mr. Caines looked up the phone number of Chesley Outerbridge. He said Chesley Outerbridge owned the Forest Road Apartments and would help Wayne if he told him Mr. Caines had directed him.

Steve was about fifteen years old and Wayne wondered why he was not in school. “Forest Road is useless,” he told Wayne. “You should go to the Battery, where I live. I know at least four places for rent over there, and you’ll get them a lot cheaper and it’s way more interesting. Katie Twomey’s place has no one living in it, and one wall is bare rock where water comes down into a little pool on the floor that you can drink out of.”

“Steve,” Mr. Caines said, “I’ve told Wayne about the Forest Road Apartments because lots of people new in town go there. They are good apartment buildings for anyone new.” To Wayne he said, “The Battery is all right if you were born into it, or if you’re a teacher at the university and you tear down one of the old houses and build your own new house. But half those houses have no water or sewer, and it’s a rough place.” He wrote down Chesley Outerbridge’s phone number and gave it to Wayne and asked Steve to do what he said and show Wayne the way, then come back and finish stocking the cooler.

Wayne bought a couple of pepperoni sticks and a box of chocolate graham squares and thanked Mr. Caines. The boy, Steve, came out with him.

“I can find it by myself.”

Wayne wondered if there was something about him that had made Mr. Caines think he could not find Forest Road by himself from a map that had been perfectly clear. He worried that Mr. Caines had thought he looked unintelligent. But when they got to the traffic circle on King’s Bridge Road, Wayne was glad of Steve, because the road turned crazy. It went five ways: down King’s Bridge Road, Military Road, Gower Street, Ordnance Street, and Fort William Place, leading to the hotel. Forest Road was just beyond this circle to the right, but without Steve, Wayne would not have found it. Steve told him his last name was Keating, and he wasn’t in school because it was after three o’clock. He couldn’t wait to be out of school for good though, because school was torture, and furthermore it was useless. Steve Keating said these things but Wayne could tell he was a smart kid. He could tell from the way Steve gave him his final directions, and because enthusiasm bubbled out of Steve Keating though he was only going back to Caines Grocery to stock Mr. Caines’s cooler with sandwiches and apple flips.