Annabel (9 page)

“I’m not going to that party,” Wayne said in the truck.

“Why not?”

“It’s a stupid party. Some stupid thing with these really bad invitations. The new girl. I don’t want to go to that.”

“Are the other boys going?”

“I don’t know.”

“How come you don’t know?”

“What?”

“How come, son, you don’t know what the other boys are doing?”

“I just don’t. They can do what they want, Dad.”

“Boys, in Labrador, Wayne, are like a wolf pack. We’ve got to be like members of the dog family. We’ve got to know what each other is doing. That’s how you survive.”

“Well I guess they’re going. But I don’t know if they want to or not.”

“If they’re going, son, it doesn’t matter what they want. It’s a question of order.”

“I’ll work in the basement. I’ll work on the catgut.”

Wayne did not mind working on the catgut. Catgut was its name but it was really caribou sinew. You took the stomach of the animal, you dried it, then, using a homemade knife with an extremely thin blade, you sliced it in a spiral into a long, thin string, useful for many things in the bush and on the water. Wayne liked the meditative slice of the knife through the sinew. He liked the colour of the sinew, and he took pride in cutting it just the right width for both slightness and strength.

“There’s a time for catgut, Wayne, and there’s a time for parties. Tonight you need to go to that party. Even if you don’t like it. You’ll thank me one day.”

Jacinta was in the kitchen rolling pastry and spreading caribou paste on it with knobs of fat on top and covering it and cutting it into pies for Treadway to take down the river. She made one pie for Wayne, and on Wayne’s pie she shaped the knobs of fat into a heart. No one knew this, as more pastry covered it up. Wayne did not know it, and Treadway especially did not. She did this with the mustard on Wayne’s school-lunch sandwiches as well, but with words. She wrote subliminal messages to her son, messages that he would eat. She wrote “Beloved Son” and “Be brave.” She wrote them to give her child secret sustenance. Once she wrote “Daughter,” but she could not bring herself to put that sandwich in Wayne’s lunch box. What if the sandwich fell open and the word was still legible and someone read it? So she ate the daughter sandwich herself.

Whenever Treadway and Wayne came in the house arguing, her chest tightened and she tried to stop herself from interfering. She tried to let the argument play out. The argument was always the same. It was always the same argument in any one of a thousand disguises. The one about how to act like a real boy. The hardest part of it for her was knowing that Wayne had no idea his father stood against his own son out of fear.

While Wayne was still in grade five, he started to get books out of the school library and read them in class while eating chips or hickory sticks in a surreptitious way he had developed. His regular teacher, Miss Davey, never noticed. But one day the class had a substitute teacher, Mr. Henry, who observed the class carefully. Wayne flattened a bag of roast chicken chips inside his desk with the heel of his hand. He had bitten a tiny hole in the bag to let air out. A bag of chips lasted a lot longer when its contents were crushed to a powder that you licked, one coating at a time, off your finger. The substitute teacher smelled like the strong brown soap on a rope Wayne’s aunt had sent Treadway one Christmas. The soap was the shape of a stretched egg and had sand in it. The smell made Wayne’s stomach lurch. He was on page 174 of
The Railway Children
and reaching for some chip dust when a wave of the soap came over him, like the time his mom permed her hair at the sink and ended up crying. Wayne realized Mr. Henry could plainly see
The Railway Children
tucked into his math book, but it was not
The Railway Children
Mr. Henry wanted to discuss.

“Do you realize,” he said, loud as an actor, “how fattening potato chips are?” At the word
fattening
his teeth smiled but his tongue coiled like an eel. Wayne pushed his chip bag deep inside his desk but kept his hand in there too. There was chip dust all over his finger.

“Fattening,” Mr. Henry said again. “You don’t want to get fat, do you?”

Donna Palliser and the girls who had joined her club laughed. The boys did not. Brent Shiwack stabbed holes outlining the island of Newfoundland in his desk with a compass.

“Do you,” persisted Mr. Henry, his perfume overpowering, “want to become fat?” The girls in Donna Palliser’s club waited, and Wayne felt caught in their world in a way the other boys were not. Something about Mr. Henry was caught in the girl world as well, but Wayne did not know what it was. He did not like the way Mr. Henry and the girls all looked at him. This uneasiness followed him all day.

Ice hung on the wool of his mittens, and though students were forbidden to leave clothes on the radiator in the cloakroom, everyone did it. Things got burnt. Wayne told Mr. Henry he had to go to the washroom, but what he wanted was to get away from the soap and rescue his mitts. He was shoving them in his coat sleeve when Mr. Henry came in. Wayne felt that Mr. Henry was not going to get mad at him about the mittens. He felt that Mr. Henry had something else in mind, and he was right.

“Did you need to get away by yourself?” Mr. Henry’s
voice was softer than it should have been. Wayne wanted to run out of the cloakroom, but it was small and narrow, and he would have had to run right under Mr. Henry’s armpit. He stayed by the tiny window, which was frosted over. Hardly any daylight came into the cloakroom. There was one bulb, and its light was yellow. There was a smell of wet wool, sock sweat, and now the soap Wayne had wanted to get away from. Mr. Henry moved close to Wayne and rested a finger on his jawbone and drew a line along Wayne’s face, up to his ear and exquisitely, painfully, ever so lightly, around the back of Wayne’s ear, where no one had touched him before. The skin was so sensitive Wayne was scared it might break. Flowers were bursting open between his legs, but the flowers were ugly flowers that he did not like. He had no room to back up. Behind him was the radiator. If he touched it, it would burn right through his shirt. As it was he could smell the cotton getting hot, like it did when his mother ironed his shirts. Didn’t Mr. Henry have to go back to the class? Where did everyone think he was?

“I just wanted to get something out of my coat pocket.”

“I need to get away by myself sometimes too.” Mr. Henry took hold of a piece of Wayne’s hair, which Wayne vowed to cut as soon as he got home, if he ever got home out of this, if Mr. Henry did not take all the grade five coats off their hooks and smother him. The teacher held the lock of Wayne’s hair the way Wayne’s mother held knobs of cold shortening with flour streaming down as she tenderly made pastry, using only her fingertips so as not to heat the silky mixture, then he let it go.

“If you ever need someone to talk to, about special things, things you don’t want anyone to know” — Mr. Henry’s voice was so low it was deadly, as if he were saying Wayne could murder someone and tell Mr. Henry about it and Mr. Henry would help him conceal the crime — “you can come to me.”

The bell rang, and it was so loud and shrill it made Wayne’s heart jump twice, and the corridor outside was filled with everyone yelling and clanging lockers open. The smell of chicken pies — the cheap kind in frozen boxes heated at 425 degrees for forty minutes — wafted around the doorpost, and the moment of Mr. Henry’s tenderness was, luckily for Wayne, finished. Mr. Henry spun on his shoe and barrelled towards the staff room without even saying goodbye to the boy he wanted. Wayne knew Mr. Henry wanted him. He didn’t know how, exactly, but he knew it had to do with appetite, and he avoided being alone with that man again. No matter what Mr. Henry did to meet Wayne alone, Wayne was a step ahead, even if he had to run. So he escaped from Mr. Henry, but he could not escape from the fact that a man had wanted him, and that his body had responded to that man with a secret desire of its own. An exquisite stirring, unwanted, involuntary, mysterious. A child of eleven awakens to sexual ecstasy and keeps it to himself, and thinks for a brief time that he, or she, is the only one in the world to whom this has happened. For a little while Wayne’s ecstasy remained hidden, like the bulb of any bloom, underground.

“It’s like Dad is mad at me all the time.” Wayne sat on the tall stool at the kitchen counter, talking to his mother while she cut onions. “How come?”

“He’s not mad at you.”

“He is.”

“He’s probably just tired. He wants the best for you. All fathers want the best for their children. He just wants to give you the skills you need to have a good life. He wants his son to be happy.”

“He is mad. I can tell by his voice.”

“Your father doesn’t raise his voice.” This was true. Treadway’s mother and father had screamed at each other throughout his childhood, and he had told Jacinta early in their marriage that he would not yell, and he did not want her to yell.

“It all comes out one way or another,” Jacinta told her sister later on the phone, but her sister was in a Mount Pearl subdivision and could not help her.

Treadway had no idea how to deal with tension. His house was as quiet as he had vowed it would be, but inner yelling was new to him, and when it began, he left the house and went in his boat to the island, or down his trapline.

9

Lettuce Sandwich

T
HERE WAS A WAY YOU COULD WALK
nonchalantly past Wally Michelin’s picket gate and make it seem you were on your way to the shortcut everyone used to get to the Hudson’s Bay store. Wayne wished he could go through Wally’s gate and knock on her door, but he could not. He wished he could pick pearly everlasting growing in the rocks, wrap the stems in long grass, and stick the bouquet in her letterbox anonymously, though in a way that she would instantly recognize as being from him only, but he could not do that either. He walked past her gate without glancing at it, and felt like a complete idiot.

A red water gun hung in the Hudson’s Bay store window. He had outgrown water guns. A plastic radio did not interest him either. Everything in the window looked as if it had sat there too long. It looked as if the things had been sent to Labrador because people in other places had no use for them. It was one of the things his mother complained about.

“They have blueberries,” she said, “in quarter-pint tubs for two dollars, when we pick our own five-gallon buckets a hundred feet from our own back steps.”

The blueberries in the store were twice the size of the local ones and were nearly rotten. And the store had no fresh milk. Jacinta was the only person Wayne had ever heard mention this. In Labrador you drank tea black, with sugar. The store never ran out of sugar.

On Wayne’s fifth day of walking nonchalantly past her house, Wally Michelin came out.

“Do you want a lettuce sandwich?”

Wayne had never heard of making a sandwich that contained only lettuce.

“It’s really good with a can of Sprite. I always make one when my mom’s out selling Avon.”

Wayne remembered the house from when Thomasina Baikie had owned it. Now it was different. Wally’s father had put in big kitchen windows through which the light of Hamilton Inlet spilled, and it was in this light that Wally placed four slices of Holsum bread. With a spatula she scraped Miracle Whip on the bread, where it sank into the white holes.

“The most important thing is the mayonnaise.”

“My mom waterproofs bread with margarine.”

“I never heard of waterproofing bread.”

She tore curls of lettuce from an iceberg head, shredded them, and scattered them on the bread, then shook salt. Wayne expected the sandwich to be tasteless. He thought it would taste as if someone had forgotten the luncheon meat.

Wally bit. “See?”

The lettuce tasted green, crisp, cold. Part of him felt that only a deprived person would think lettuce on its own tasted exciting. But it did, and this gave him a new sense that you could strip things down more than his parents had done; a thing like lettuce could sustain you. All the worries his father had, a man’s efforts for the survival of himself and his family, were they too elaborate?

His mother was elaborate as well. Here, in Wally Michelin’s empty house, without her parents, without meat, and in the blazing light from which his own house turned away, Wayne felt an excitement he could not name.

After the lettuce sandwich Wayne and Wally became friends. Wayne loved Wally in the way that children can love each other only in that flickering window when they no longer play with toys but are not fully sexual. Her mother and father left Wally alone in the house often, because she was intelligent and they trusted her. She was allowed to make tea, and she made it with maple syrup from Quebec. They drank it sitting on cushions stacked on the deck facing the bright south and the mountains. The space let them talk about things that required vision, and they did not go inside to watch
Bewitched
or
Jeopardy
.

“You have to have a goal.” Wally was as certain about her vision as she had been about lettuce sandwiches. This startled Wayne, whose parents concerned themselves with what he was beginning to see as only a segment of life. The kitchen: his mother, her pans of fried liver, heart, little shoulder chops of caribou, and the other animals his father hunted — was that all? There was always what Jacinta called beautiful music: Brahms, Chopin. But the music came in to them through the radio, and there was no portal back out through which his mother could leave the realm of the ordinary. Wayne knew Jacinta had come from another world, that she remembered an elsewhere, but she was here now. She was staying here and the radio music could visit her, but she could not escape. She could not go out to meet it. And his father’s life was small in a different way. Treadway loved the wilderness, but Treadway’s wilderness did not call to Wayne. It did not seduce him and he did not wish he could spend more time in it than he did. Wally Michelin had a different world to go to, and Wayne felt it here, in the sun, on the deck of her house.

“If you don’t have a goal” — their backs touched the wall, which was hot though there were patches of snow — “you might as well blindfold yourself and see where you end up.”

Wally Michelin’s father spent his trucker’s wages on building supplies every chance he got, and he had covered the walls with terracotta stucco no one else in Croydon Harbour had. It retained heat like clay. Treadway had not approved.

“That’s going to crumble inside five winters,” he’d said, as Gerald Michelin and his visiting brothers-in-law had applied the mud with graceful trowels. But it had not crumbled, and Wayne had heard Jacinta tell Eliza Goudie she envied the way Ann Michelin’s pots of geraniums splashed red against it like an Italian villa.

“I’ve got a goal.” Wally gave Wayne a stack of Oreos. The Michelins ate brand-name groceries. Wayne was used to food procured from raw materials.

“What?”

“To sing in German.”

“Like Lydia Coombs?”

“I wrote her a letter and guess what. Lydia Coombs wrote me back. And she sent me a present. An important present. Want to see it?”

Lydia Coombs had come to Croydon Harbour Elementary on a national tour of outpost schools, to show children the life and work of a real opera singer. Lydia Coombs had told them that, when she was ten years old in her town on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, one of the nuns, Sister Angelica, had told the class to run away. She had told them that if she, Sister Angelica, had run away in time, she could have gone to Vienna and made a life there for herself as a professional contralto. She told the class this in secret. Run away, before it’s too late. When the mother superior was outdoors milking the school’s cow every morning at eleven, too far away to hear, Sister Angelica had sung Schubert for the children. “It became normal for us to hear Schubert,” Lydia Coombs said, “and nothing in my whole life has ever been as beautiful as that voice, and I promised myself I would run away and learn to sing like that.” Then Lydia Coombs had sung something for Wayne and Wally’s class.

“What was that German thing she sang?” Wayne asked now.

“It wasn’t German,” Wally said. “It was a French poem by Jean Racine, and Gabriel Fauré composed the music.”

Wayne could not imagine anyone else in his class remembering this. After Lydia Coombs had sung for them the recess bell had rung. Donna Palliser had leaned against the wall licking syrup out of her Cherry Blossom until she held an empty cup of chocolate with the bare cherry in it. She nibbled the walls of the cup and popped the cherry on its chocolate disc into her mouth while the other girls repaired hopscotch lines and Bruce McLean and Mark Thevenet scuffed the ground looking for Export A butts with enough tobacco in them to light. Lydia Coombs might as well have spoken to them about dentistry or responsible government.

“You copied her address off the board.”

“Yeah.”

“What did your letter say?”

“That I’d like her to send me a copy of the poem by Racine. And she did. She sent this too.” Wally showed him an envelope of strange limp paper, unlike anything in the stationery section at the Hudson’s Bay store. In it was Lydia Coombs’s letter, written in black ink, and a creamy booklet.

“This is the sheet music of Fauré’s score.” Wally held it carefully. The notes, staff, title, and price in francs were marked in a lovely, mysterious script. There were music sheets in school, but they had been copied on an ancient Gestetner, and the notes were sparse on a bare ground of paper: one junco’s tracks on snow. These sheets were covered in grace notes, sixteenth notes, sharps, flats, and accidentals; not the tracks of one lonely bird but the song notes of that bird in a glorious meeting of its sisters, friends, and cousins.

“Wow.”

“I have to study it every night in bed. Some night a tiny part is going to make sense, and then that part will grow, and one day I’ll understand it all.”

Wally’s mother did not listen to music the way Wayne’s mother did. There was no musical instrument in Wally’s house. How would she learn the piece? How would she learn anything? Wayne felt dismayed. He had met no one who had such a goal, and felt disturbed by Wally’s confidence in something that seemed to him destined to die.

“I remember one part,” Wally said, and she hummed the notes. “If I study the notes really hard, I’m going to find it on the paper, and then I’ll know where I am.”

Through grade six, Wayne and Wally remained friends, and while Treadway wished Wayne would befriend a boy, he did not act. He hoped the friendship with Wally would end on its own. But when he watched Wayne and Wally meet in the mornings and walk to school, he did not like it.

“Dad.”

“What, son?” Treadway had asked Wayne to help him tidy old strings and cabbage leaves in the shed. Treadway hung his cabbages from their thick necks with the same nylon string he used to make his woodcutting snowshoes, which were more temporary and rougher than the trapping shoes he made of sinew. He grew between fifty and seventy-five cabbages each year, depending on the weather and the cabbage moth, and he hung these over the barrels of partridgeberries and blueberries, which froze, and which each had a cup lying on top for pies and jam. The outer leaves of the cabbages wrinkled and froze, and in spring you had to clear up old leaves that had fallen all over the floor.

“You know those logs over the creek?”

“Yes.”

“Can I have them?”

“What do you want those for?”

“I don’t want to take them. I want to put better wood over them. The wood that’s over them now is rotting.”

“That’s because I don’t bring firewood out of that part of the woods anymore. You can’t keep bringing wood from the same place or you’ll have no woods. I should have hauled up those logs last year.”

“But could you leave them there and could I have them? I want to make a place.”

“You want to make a fort over the creek.”

“I guess. Yeah.”

“A hideout.”

“Kind of.”

“We had hideouts. We used to spend the whole summer in them.”

“Did you?” Wayne liked it when his father remembered being young.

“Did we ever. We ate and slept in them. Me and Danny Fortescue and Jim Baikie and a gang of other lads. But why would you want to have your fort over the creek? You want a hideout in the woods, not out in the open.”

“I think it would be really great over the water.”

“I suppose a lot of forts did have approaches by water. You could see the enemy coming that way, by boat.”

Wayne had not been thinking of enemies. “Can I use that wood in the corner?”

“I was going to use that to repair the shed.” Treadway assessed the pile. “But I suppose you could have some of it. That creek is not very wide. But have you got a clue how you’re going to build a fort over it?”

Wayne had something in mind. He did not know if he could explain it to his father. “It has a cover. Like a roof. But spaces to look through.”

“I don’t mean the top,” Treadway said. “The top is airy-fairy. You can stick any kind of top on it. What I’m talking about is the foundation. How are you going to make the base? That’s what you have to think of first.”

“That’s why I asked you about the logs that are already there. Could we just put some boards over those?”

“That’s just a log skid. You’re only going over that once in a blue moon with a sled. The logs are slippery and half rotten. That’s no good for a fort. For a fort you want something that goes down into the creek bed.”

“Dad, I don’t need anything like that. I just need a small place.”

Treadway did not untangle any more strings. He took a pencil out of his pocket, found a package of soldering wire that had no writing on the back, and drew Wayne a diagram. He drew two concentric circles.

“This is how the Romans did it. You can’t be thinking about the thing from the top down. This is a cofferdam. They drove a circle of piles deep into the riverbed. Then another circle inside it. Then they filled the outer ring with a kind of clay.”

“Dad.”

“Real waterproof stuff. Then, the water trapped inside, in the inner circle, they got slaves with buckets to bail it out. People died. They got crushed. But they emptied that inner circle. They made a dry spot right in the middle of the riverbed. They built the central pier of a bridge or section of a bridge in that.”

“Dad, I just want to make something really easy.”

“There is nothing really easy, Wayne. Not in this life. Not if it’s any good. I’m telling you, if you want to make any kind of structure over that creek, even a small creek like that, you need to think about the river bottom. Measure it and study it. If you don’t do that, your bridge is going to fall, with you in it. What kind of a father would let that happen to his son?”