Annabel (18 page)

His mother did not find her little white knife. Wayne wished he could find it for her. He was glad after supper when he saw her open her tin of crochet hooks. The tin was oval, and decorated with a woman in a white robe.

“How have you forgiven me?” She broke a piece of new green wool for the edge of a hat.

“For what?” Wayne liked watching her make something. Treadway was pouring a bucket of cement down three weasel holes he had found in the root cellar.

“Keeping the secret.”

Though Dr. Lioukras had told Wayne the name of his condition, the family had not discussed it. They had come home and resumed their old life, as if everything was ordinary. “You let me order my bathing suit,” Wayne said.

“The suit” — Jacinta laid her hook on the hat — “was such a small thing. That was nothing compared to not telling you.”

“You gave me the Niblets box to hide the suit in. And now the suit’s getting too small. Dad’s the one who didn’t say anything. The dog . . .” Wayne had never been able to love the dog Treadway brought home the day he dismantled the Ponte Vecchio. He wanted to love the dog but he couldn’t, and he blamed his father. “The dog deserved love.”

“I know. Love gets blocked if you dam it. Your father builds dams in his sleep. He doesn’t know he’s doing it.” Wayne had a dog he could not love though he wanted to love it, and Treadway had a son he could not love though he wanted a son and he wanted to love that son. Father and son suffered from backed up, frozen love, and this ate Jacinta’s heart.

“I’m going,” Treadway had finally announced, “to give that dog to Roland Shiwack before I go trapping. Since no one here feeds it or gives it water besides myself. Roland offered me seventy-five dollars for it. You can use that while I’m gone.”

Working the hat edge, Jacinta said, “If I’d told you all the times I knew you were my daughter . . .”

“Tell me now,” Wayne said with such eagerness she lost her stitch count. It had not occurred to her that Wayne would want to hear about those times, as if they were beautiful stories. It had never entered her mind that the countless lost moments could be recovered by speaking about them.

“Tell me about when I was a baby.”

“I don’t know if I can remember individual times.”

“Can you remember any? Even one?”

“Well, I used to rock you in my arms and you had a green blanket and you looked like a little baby girl for sure.”

“I did?”

“And I sang you lullabies with the word
girl
in them.”

“Like what?”

“I can’t remember them, Wayne. Mothers forget things. Everybody expects them to remember everything. I guess I sang “Dance to Your Daddy.” That was one my dad knew.”

“Sing it.”

“Well, it goes, ‘Dance to your daddy, my little laddie, dance to your daddy, hear your mammy sing.’ If you’re singing it to a baby boy. And if you’re singing it to a baby girl you sing, ‘Dance to your daddy, my little lassie.’ And the rest is the same.”

“Did you sing
lassie
?”

“I couldn’t sing
laddie
. That was the thing. You and I were alone and no one heard. I felt if I didn’t sing to the part of you that was a baby girl she would feel so lonely she might get sick and die.”

“Are there any more verses?”

“Well the rest is, ‘You shall have a fishy on a little dishy. You shall have a kipper when the boat comes in.’ First it’s a kipper, then it’s other kinds of fish, and you keep singing it until you run out of kinds of fish or the baby girl is asleep.”

“What other kinds of fish?”

“You shall have a bloater. Then a mackerel. There were all kinds of fish, Wayne. I sang all kinds of fish you can’t get here. Fish they had in England, where the song came from. Fish I heard from my dad.”

“What other times was I almost a girl?”

Treadway came in then and said, “That should fix him.” He meant the weasel. Wayne was shiny-eyed, waiting for his mother’s next revelation, but he didn’t get it that night. Memories of when Wayne was a girl became a secret conversation held while Treadway prepared for his winter on the trapline.

“Your feet were slender,” Jacinta said as Treadway packed his World Famous bags and his caribou pouch in the yard.

“Are they still?” Wayne peeled his socks off.

“Certain parts of you were so feminine I used to think people were going to stop me on the road and tell me they knew you were a girl.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, Wayne. Kate Davis for one, I guess. What mother can remember everything?”

“What parts, then?”

“What?”

“Parts. You said parts with an S on it. Other parts of me that were like a girl.”

“Before you started taking all the pills.”

“Then I wasn’t like a girl any more?”

“Not as much.”

“But before then, what parts?”

“Your face. Your whole face. I don’t know why the whole town couldn’t see what I could.”

“Because you were my mother and they weren’t.”

“I guess.”

“And they weren’t looking.”

“Maybe.”

“My clothes were boy’s. And everyone called me Wayne, except for one person.”

“Thomasina was the only one.”

“Annabel.” It was the first time Wayne had said the name out loud to anyone but Thomasina. “Mom?”

“What?”

“Are they going to let Thomasina come back and teach us?”

“I don’t know if she wants to come back, Wayne.”

“How long did Miss Huskins suspend her for?”

“Miss Huskins didn’t suspend her, Wayne. The Labrador East School Board did.”

“How long for?”

“A month.”

“That’ll be over soon.”

“But sometimes when there’s a break, a change in the way things are, even for a little while, it’s really a chasm.”

“Like the Gulch?”

“Yes. The change is only for a month, or even a week or a day, but it breaks something. It breaks the pattern and things aren’t the same.”

“I love Thomasina.”

“I know you do, Wayne.”

“I hope she comes back.”

“I know.”

“Mom — could you call me my girl name?”

“Annabel?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know.”

“Mom?”

“I can’t — what?”

“Do you remember anything else?”

“Your dad might hear.”

“Dad’s taking his Ski-Doo apart. We’ve got lots of time.”

“I thought he was packing.”

“I heard him laying out his wrenches.” Wayne’s ear was attuned to the clinking of metal on cement, and to all the sounds Treadway made inside and outside the house.

“When you were in kindergarten you cut a tarantula out of a
National Geographic
. Its legs were as slender as my hair. The teacher said no other boy could do that.”

Attuned though his hearing was, there was one thing Wayne did not hear Treadway do, one thing his father had vowed to do before his months on the trapline. It happened while Wayne was in school and Jacinta was buying sugar cubes, which Treadway preferred to loose sugar. Cubes cost more per weight, and it was not like Treadway to prefer a less economical choice. She had asked him, long ago, “Why do you want me to buy cubes?”

“I like cubes,” he said. “I like the way they fit together in the box. One cube is exactly the right amount in my tea, every time. You can’t spill them. If a rat puts a hole in a bag of sugar, you lose whatever spills out. Humidity will ruin a bag of sugar, but to ruin cubes you’d have to drop them in the river.” He had gone on like this, outlining the advantages of sugar cubes, astonishing Jacinta with his seriousness regarding such a small thing.

So Jacinta was buying sugar cubes, and this gave Treadway a chance to look at the phone book, which was difficult for him to do. Treadway could read Voltaire. He could wait eight hours in silence for a lynx and read the tracks of a dozen duck species and know each by name. He could find them in Roger Tory Peterson’s guidebook, and had read the journals of James Audubon, but the phone book was a torment to him, as were government documents, tax forms, insurance policies, bank statements, and telephone or hydro bills, all of which Jacinta dealt with. She looked things up for him in the phone book when she was at home, but he wanted to do this thing without anyone knowing.

He phoned the library in Goose Bay first. They told him to phone the A. C. Hunter Library in St. John’s, and A. C. Hunter said his best bet was to call Memorial University. By the time he found a woman named Augusta Furey in the office of the dean of music, almost an hour had gone by, and he was worn out as he wrote down the New York address she gave him out of the Albert J. Breton Catalogue of Sheet Music for Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass Voices.

“The price might have changed,” she warned him. “This is last year’s catalogue. We keep asking them to send us the new one as soon as it comes out. But we can’t control everything.”

Treadway wrote Albert J. Breton a letter ordering a copy of “Cantique de Jean Racine” by Gabriel Fauré. He phoned the Croydon Harbour post office and got the number of Gerald and Ann Michelin’s mailbox.

Over the next week Treadway cleaned and reassembled his Ski-Doo. He filled his sled box and his reading case. He packed his
Collected Works of Robert Frost
.

“Sometimes,” Jacinta told Wayne, “you looked at me like you knew.”

“But I didn’t!”

“I imagined you did. People think all kinds of things when they are alone with a secret. They think what they want to think. Maybe I imagined the whole look.”

Treadway wrapped fourteen extra pounds of flour and cornmeal, and he hoped the woods would be lovely, dark and deep.

There was a tiny travel agency on the main road in Goose Bay. Thomasina thought of it as a hidden gate. The agent, Miriam Penashue, had spent all her summers in the bush near the Quebec border and had not finished high school. Miriam had not even finished grade six, and she had no plans of ever going to school again until she found out that if you took the travel agent course at the community college in Goose Bay, the government would pay for you to see six travel destinations. Once she had seen them, Miriam Penashue was no ordinary travel agent. She did not put up posters of Dominican Republic resorts or offer deals to Disney World. Her shop had one handbill on the door; Miriam Penashue had made it herself. It read,
COME IN AND TALK TO MIRIAM PENASHUE ABOUT WHERE YOU WANT TO GO
.

After the Labrador East School Board sent Thomasina its letter of suspension, something about Miriam Penashue’s sign appeared so unpretentious and so promising, she went in. She was carrying a bag from Happy Valley Northmart with six grapefruit in it that she wished were better grapefruit. They would be all right once she had sliced their membranes down to the drupes, but in their trip from California a layer of air had developed between the rinds and the fruit. When you have received a letter that says you have not acted in the best interests of the children you are teaching, it is hard not to feel ashamed. Thomasina felt ashamed and angry at the same time: ashamed because she should have done things differently. She could have been more discreet, more patient, instead of getting all righteous and hauling Wayne to the hospital in a way that attracted the attention of people who had no sympathy. People like Mr. Henry, who had caught wind of the hospital trip and had made a point of inquiring about it at the school office. The principal herself, Victoria Huskins, with her white pants and her intercom.

“There are two reasons I have no choice but to have you disciplined,” Victoria Huskins had said. “Taking a child off school property without adherence to a single one of the regulations we have in place. And lesser, but pretty important to me as someone who has to keep a semblance of order here, publicly ridiculing my reprimand of the child who wilfully left poo on the washroom floor. Filth. You should know better, Thomasina Baikie. For the children’s sake. People are going to think we don’t care about the children. I can’t have that at my school.”

Shame was what Thomasina felt the day she noticed Miriam Penashue’s handbill. It was undeserved shame, but it did its job nevertheless. It dampened her heart, then burnt its edges so she was left with a mess of charcoal and saddened fire. From Miriam Penashue’s handbill came a puff of freedom:
COME IN AND TALK TO MIRIAM PENASHUE ABOUT WHERE YOU WANT TO GO
.

Miriam Penashue was halfway between the ages of Thomasina and her grade seven students. She wore her hair in a bob and kept bubblegum in her mouth and had a coffee mug that said
GRENFELL HUSKIES
. She hired no one and her office was painted with turquoise paint left over from the fish plant where her boyfriend worked. The thing Thomasina liked about her was that she really did want to talk to you about where you wanted to go, and not where she wanted to send you. It appeared that she did not care whether or not she sold you a ticket to anything.

“Some places,” Thomasina said, “you go and you just feel like sighing and sitting down in an armchair like the one you’ve put right here.”