Annabel (6 page)

Part Two

6

Meat Cakes

T
HOMASINA AND TREADWAY BOTH
, from the beginning, treated Wayne as a person, not a baby. Jacinta took Wayne in his carriage to have toast with Thomasina on her little back deck. While Jacinta dipped the toast in milk and fed it to Wayne, Thomasina showed him the difference between coltsfoot and dandelion. She put quartz in his hand and let him hold it glittering in the sun, then a piece of labradorite.

“See,” Thomasina told him, “you can see trees and the sky in that one. Water too, and the northern lights.”

“I feel,” Jacinta said, “summer hasn’t come at all. I’m always afraid someone will know.”

Wayne’s carriage stood in the coltsfoot. It had a tough canvas hood with green and white stripes that reminded Jacinta of the canopy over Lar’s Fruit Mart at the bottom of Barters Hill in St. John’s.

“Why would they know?”

“The garden party was torture.” Jacinta had taken the baby to the All Saints garden party and shown him off among the picnic cloths and hams and lemonade on the grass. “I was terrified the whole time that someone would plainly see.”

“Was it that bad?”

“I thought for certain someone was going to peek down real close at him and say, ‘Oh, but that’s a little girl, Jacinta! Didn’t you and Treadway know?’”

“But nobody did.”

“No. Eliza Goudie and Grace Montague acted the way they would over any normal baby. Even Kate Davis found no fault.”

Kate Davis had no children of her own and had been the nursing administrator at Goose Bay General Hospital until she retired, and she knew everything there was to know about medical conditions. Kate Davis had come up to Jacinta at the tea table and said in her grating, bossy tone, “Well, that looks like a healthy child,” and Wayne looked back at her the way he looked at all strangers, with a direct gaze that said, I have not been badly treated yet, and so even you are to be trusted.

“You get used to something unusual when you’re the one it happens to,” Jacinta told Thomasina. “If Wayne had two heads I’d get used to that in a few months, and I would wonder why anyone would want to change him. There’s something good to be said for any circumstance. That’s the way I see it.”

But it was not, she knew, the way others saw things, and it was not the way Jacinta herself would have seen them had another woman in the cove had a baby who was a hermaphrodite. Sometimes you had to be who you were and endure what happened to you, and to you alone, before you could understand the first thing about it. So the fact that Wayne had ever been a girl as well as a boy was hidden and never spoken of, and no one in Croydon Harbour knew except his parents and Thomasina.

In Wayne’s second summer, Jacinta let Thomasina babysit him while she did laundry and helped Treadway peel staves for a new fence. Thomasina showed Wayne how you can hear hundreds of black caterpillars munching nettles; if you put your head down close their munching is the loudest noise on a summer day.

“See, Annabel? Every single one of those munchers turns into a red admiral butterfly.” Wayne thought she was calling him Amble. He thought Amble was Thomasina’s own special word for him, like the way Jacinta called him Lassiebun because he loved bread and molasses, and the way Treadway called him Littleman when they were making balls of sinew in Treadway’s shed.

Treadway had been careful to take Wayne down to the shed earlier than he would have taken a girl. He took Wayne to parts of the house that were men’s parts: the basement, with its twelve-inch nails hung with bone saws and horseshoe frames, and the side room where he stretched and dried hides; the shed with its snowmobile and axes and makings of sled runners and fenceposts and its back section for hanging game. He took him there not with affection, for it was an effort to take a child that young into his work spaces, and normally he would have waited until a son was four or five before he trained him in the ways of how to become a man. But with this child Treadway did not want to take a chance. He treated the child seriously and told him with a grim face how to cut hide and shave wood and use the right screwdriver head for the right job, so that by the time Wayne approached kindergarten he would know more about these things than any other boy in the cove.

When Wayne had all his baby teeth, Thomasina gave him cold oranges cut in pieces and rose-petal rhubarb jam on bread with the plate on his knee. He ate on her floorboards, which were of juniper that Graham Montague had cut and shipped from Lewisporte. In the early fall nights he looked through a telescope Thomasina had ordered out of the catalogue. It was a Polar Star 140X telescope, a student model that magnified the constellations by ten.

When he was five, Thomasina showed him how to connect the stars. The constellations were stories in the sky, she told him. Orion was a hunter who had a dog, just like Treadway. The Seven Sisters had lost their youngest sister, Merope, who fell to earth.

“Where did she fall?” asked Wayne.

“I don’t know. Look, there is Cygnus.” Thomasina drew it for him on paper.

“A duck?”

“A swan. In St. John’s, where your mother is from, they have swans. You can feed them cherries and seeds.”

“Swans like cherries?”

“They love cherries. Your mother told me she used to feed them a handful of cherries on Christmas Day when she was a little girl. Glacé cherries, the kind you put in a Christmas cake. See how Cygnus is at the edge of the sky. He’s getting ready to hide for the winter. But in China he’s not a swan. He’s a bridge.”

“Like the one they’re going to build at North West River?” There was always talk of bridges in that part of Labrador, where people had been getting over rivers and marshes for hundreds of years using skid runners, flat-bottomed boats, canoes, even a cable car.

“The Chinese bridge is made of magpies.”

“What are they?”

“Magpies are birds, Annabel. There are two lovers, Niu Lang and Zhi Nu. They are on opposite sides of a river. They belong together, but no one sees this but the magpies. The magpies fly over the river and make a bridge with their wings.”

“Draw me that!”

“Maybe you can draw that yourself.” She gave him her pencil. “You’ll need to draw on your own when you go to school, and read too.”

“I have new jeans and a bookbag. My mom says I can still come visit you after school.”

“I have to tell your mom something, Annabel. But I’m going to tell you first. I’m going to school too.”

“You’re coming to school?”

“I’m going to teachers’ college.”

“What’s that?”

“You go there and you learn how to be a teacher. I’m going for four years, and then after that I might travel. I always wanted to see the world. When my husband was alive, we kept saying we would go and we never did it. I’m going to sell my house, Annabel. There’s a family with a little girl coming here from Deer Lake. Her dad goes back and forth working in Quebec. The Michelins. They are going to buy my house.”

“Are you coming back?”

“If I can get a job at the school here, after I’m done with my courses and my travelling, I’ll come back.”

“Will you live back here?” Wayne liked Thomasina’s house.

“I’ll think about that then. I’ll send you postcards with pictures of interesting things in all the countries I go to.”

“China?”

“Maybe not that far.”

“You could see the magpie bridge.”

“That bridge is in the sky, Annabel. It’s not real. There’s no photograph of it.”

“I forget my address.”

“Your address is Box 43.”

“You better call me Wayne on the postcards.”

“Yes, that way the post office will know for sure they are for you.”

“I told Dad you were calling me Amble and he said he didn’t like it.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll only call you Annabel when there’s no one else around.”

When Thomasina had gone, Wayne made snowshoe twine and knife bindings with his father and ate meat cakes at the table of his parents, the fisheries report and the weather blaring continually out of both the radio and the television on the kitchen counter. Fly-catching tape hung from the ceiling with bluebottles on it, moving their legs but not their wings. A strange tension persisted when Wayne and his mother and father were together, Treadway asking questions like, “So, Wayne, have you gone down in the basement lately to check how our catgut is drying?”

The child knew that a grim, matter-of-fact attitude was required of him by his father, and he learned how to exhibit such an attitude, and he did not mind it because it was the way things were, but it was not his authentic self.

His authentic self loved to fold paper in half and cut out elaborate bilaterally symmetrical shapes: curlicues, geometrics, architectural planes that bore elaborate sills at the bottom and came to luxurious apexes. Some of the shapes had thin parts any five-year-old might snip off by accident, but Wayne was coordinated and meticulous. He cut slowly and carefully, and his mother saved his work in a binder and bought him safety scissors that she allowed him to keep in his room, where he cut at night for fifteen minutes after he had brushed his teeth, before Treadway shouted, “Get those lights off.”

For Wayne, Croydon Harbour and all that was in it had a curious division between haven and exposure. The roads were dirt and there was dust, and this felt raw. The birches, in comparison, felt incredibly soft, their shadows a cool, sizzling green that quenched the parched burning of the roads. Loud engines of trucks and Ski-Doos played against the tinkling of the juncos that made their nests in the ground. A swoop and whisper of wings, then the gun crack. The love he felt for his father, then the cold precision with which Treadway taught him how to perform tasks like scraping rust off traps with the point of a blade. Golden tea under a swirl of steam on the trapline, then walking for miles with no rest until blisters formed on his ankles. When they arrived at the hunting tilt, his father treated them with a mixture of tallow from the haunch of a caribou and black spruce turpentine, which Treadway had collected on the end of his hunting knife after cutting a blister in the trunk of a tree. Treadway administered the ointment silently. He did not say, “You should have told me it hurt before now.”

When they got home and Jacinta saw the wounds, Wayne heard her hiss, “Were you trying to wait until his skin was shredded to the bone? And did he eat? Look at his little breastbone and shoulder blades. They have a mind to poke through his skin. And he has a cough.”

It was true. Treadway could walk for twenty miles through minus-twenty-degree weather and not mind it. He wore wool next to his skin and his body was compact and dense, his core curled into itself. There were nights when he slept in the open, wrapped in a sleeping bag lined with caribou hide, and in the morning he awoke invigorated by the wild, cold air and starlight. He had not made Wayne sleep out in the open, but there were nights when he did not bother to stoke the stove in his hunting tilt because he himself did not need it stoked, and the air inside the tilt grew damp as well as cold, from their breath and the condensed vapour from their own bodies, and by the time they arrived home Wayne had a racking cough that sounded like a high groan when he breathed in. His mother kept him home from school and boiled water in her big kettle all day to make steam in the house, and bundled him up in his father’s chair, and together they ate toast and listened to the radio.

The first and second postcards from Thomasina came together, from the south of France: one had Picasso’s
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
on it, because Thomasina was staying in a hotel in Avignon.

“I had to take a break from teachers’ college, Wayne,” Thomasina wrote. “It is so boring. We have to study statistics. I would much rather study people and history. I think you could graduate without even knowing where all the countries are. I decided to do two semesters at a time and travel between. This is where Picasso found his models for the famous painting on the card.”

Treadway, on his way in and out of the kitchen with armloads of spruce, asked, “What kind of postcard is that to send a child?” He picked it up and studied it. “Naked women?”

“It’s Picasso,” Jacinta said.

“Are they even women? What are they wearing on their faces?”

“What are statistics, Dad?”

“Statistics, son, are facts. Facts connected with numbers. For example, the population of Croydon Harbour is 217. You add or lose a number here or there for a death or a birth, but give or take a half a dozen numbers you know where you stand. There are more interesting questions in science, but it wouldn’t hurt Thomasina Baikie to stay in one place and learn a statistic or two.”

The second postcard was a photograph of the Pont d’Avignon.

“This bridge was built in the eleven hundreds,” Thomasina wrote. “There’s only part of it left, but imagine it standing that long. It’s not the magpie bridge, Wayne, but wings still helped build it. Angel wings. There was a boy about your age. I forget his name but angels told him to build the bridge. He was able to lift massive stones, and he built it. There’s a famous song about this bridge — maybe you’ll learn it one day in French class.”

“What is that woman trying to put in Wayne’s head?” Treadway was covered in spruce shavings. A layer of cold, sweet air from outdoors clung to him.