Annabel (3 page)

It never once occurred to Treadway to do the thing that lay in the hearts of Jacinta and Thomasina: to let his baby live the way it had been born. That, in his mind, would not have been a decision. It would have been indecision, and it would have caused harm. He did not want to imagine the harm it would cause. He was not an imagining man. He saw deeply into things but he had no desire to entertain possibility that had not yet manifested. He wanted to know what was, not what might be. So he refused to imagine the harm in store for a child who was neither a son nor a daughter but both. He filled a bag with bread, meat, and tea and went outdoors. He went without his gun and walked to a height of land from where he could consider the eagles and foxes and let them teach him the path of most practical wisdom.

Thomasina worked in his kitchen those first eight mornings, kneading touton dough, soaking beans, wringing diapers, and administering to the mother, because without company Jacinta would have wandered off in a drift of worry. Everything Treadway refused to imagine, Jacinta imagined in detail enough for the two of them. Whereas he struck out on his own to decide how to erase the frightening ambiguity in their child, she envisioned living with it as it was. She imagined her daughter beautiful and grown up, in a scarlet satin gown, her male characteristics held secret under the clothing for a time when she might need a warrior’s strength and a man’s potent aggression. Then she imagined her son as a talented, mythical hunter, his breasts strapped in a concealing vest, his clothes the green of striding forward, his heart the heart of a woman who could secretly direct his path in the ways of intuition and psychological insight. Whenever she imagined her child, grown up without interference from a judgemental world, she imagined its male and female halves as complementing each other, and as being secretly, almost magically powerful. It was the growing up part she did not want to imagine. The social part, the going to school in Labrador part, the jeering part, the what will we tell everyone part, the part that asks how will we give this child so much love it will know no harm from the cruel reactions of people who do not want to understand.

Thomasina brought Jacinta back from these thoughts with her wholehearted company. She kept the kitchen going, the fire crackling, the hum and heat of normal life throbbing, and the undercurrent of her seemingly ordinary, homey activities was one of open acceptance. Jacinta could feel, when Thomasina took the child and held it so she could eat or go to the toilet or rest on the daybed for half an hour, that Thomasina believed the child’s difference was a strange blessing that had to be protected. That it was a jeopardized advantage, even a power. Thomasina hid this undercurrent behind business so apparently normal that even the most vigilant opponent of enchantment would not perceive it was there. When Treadway came in from his trip to the height of land, Thomasina was boiling partridgeberries and sugar, and the kitchen was full of their bloody, mossy tang that smells and tastes more of regret than of sweetness.

When he finally spoke, Treadway caused no drama. He sat at the table stirring his tea for a long time. Thomasina was in a state of something akin to prayer, but not as helpless. Bearing the situation up, sitting with it.

As Treadway regarded his blue Royal Albert saucer, Thomasina saw he knew what had been going on with the baby whom Jacinta nursed on the daybed by the stove under a crocheted blanket.

“Since neither of you is going to make a decision one way or the other,” he said, “I’m going to make it. He’s going to be a boy. I’m going to call him Wayne, after his grandfather.”

Jacinta continued to nurse the baby. A look of relief crossed her face. Not at his decision but at his acknowledgement that their baby had been born the way it had. Thomasina stood up, looked at Treadway, and said, “Be careful.”

“We’ll get the doctor in,” Treadway said, “and we’ll see.”

After Treadway had spoken, there was a holy lull in the house in which Treadway and Jacinta cared for each other and for the baby alone, with no one to look on or advise and with few words of their own. Treadway moved Jacinta’s hair tenderly to behind her shoulder so he could see the child nurse, and at no time did he examine the child or treat it critically. She could see he loved it. There was nothing wrong with the child other than its ambiguous sex. It nursed and cooed and slept, and its skin was dewy and cool, and when the kitchen grew too hot, its parents let the fire die down in the stove so that the child’s cheeks would not have red spots, and if it grew too cool they wrapped the baby securely. Treadway sat and rocked it, and he sang to it as well. His singing was one of the beautiful things women other than Jacinta did not know about. He sang his own songs, songs he improvised after his time alone in the wild, as well as ancient Labrador songs passed down by generations of trappers and nomads and hunters who have heard caribou speak. The baby loved this; it began a life of waking to warmth and song and colour and drifting into dreams threaded with parent song.

After a fortnight Treadway left to go hunting. It was one of the last days you could go white hunting. When the ice melted to a certain degree, when whiteness in the natural world decreased by a margin every hunter knew by an inner system of measurement, white hunting was no longer done. Not because it had become ineffectual — ice still existed in large pockets around the shore, and a hunter could stay well hidden — but because it was unfair; migratory birds were returning in larger numbers to nest, and many had young or needed to keep their eggs warm. The birds’ travels were hunting journeys, short flights to find food for their young, and the Labrador hunters knew what was at stake. The next year’s hunting was at stake, but so was the livelihood of the flock, and the hunters respected that intrinsically, apart from any vested interest of their own.

So on this day, close to the end of the hunting season, Treadway left his family at home, and so did the other men of Croydon Harbour. And so did Thomasina’s daughter, Annabel, and husband, Graham Montague, to navigate the Beaver River in a white canoe.

3

Thomasina Outside the Church

T
HOMASINA DID NOT GO INSIDE
the church at the funeral of her own husband, Graham, and daughter, Annabel, because outside was where the blue butterfly was, darting in and out of the reeds that stuck up out of the snow in the sunny corner facing the sea. Thomasina stood at this corner, a corner small and southerly and windowless, leaning against the clapboard with her face closed and upturned to the sun. Jacinta had not tried to get her to come inside. But everyone else said Thomasina had become temporarily insane, for how else could you explain a woman who did not want to take comfort in red and blue glass candle holders full of light, in stained glass windows with the apostle Mark talking to a brown dove, in the Book of Common Prayer and its order for the burial of the dead, in the gathering of the community, the solemnity of the eight pallbearers, the two coffins made of boards that Graham Montague had hand-planed, intending a bureau for his wife?

Thomasina did not put on a black dress. She did not wear a black hat or even a Sunday hat of green or lavender felt with a satin band. She wore her ordinary coat, a blue wool coat with flat buttons that had belonged to her mother, and she wore ordinary clothes underneath it: a grey and green dress that had no waistband, for she hated waistbands, and no sleeves, for she liked a dress you could work in and not be encumbered by seams or small openings and eyelets and finicky fastenings. She liked a dress you could pull over your head and forget about.

The inside of the church was something she could not stand that day. She liked to sing inside it on other days, and was part of the small choir, and wore the same choir robes as everyone else. But today she could not go in. She did not want to contain her thoughts about Graham and Annabel inside the walls, which shut out the light this spring day, and which smelled of old wooden pews and the fragrant paper of ancient prayer books and the soap and perfume of people who had washed themselves clean enough to come to a religious ritual. She could not bear to have the lives of her husband and daughter reduced to this ritual when out here the sun and air were boundless, and insects had begun to inhabit the place again after the long winter, and there was, even though Graham and Annabel had drowned, glad birdsong. This was the litany she wanted to hear. She could not understand it, but she wanted to hear it, and she would not hear it if she went inside.

Through the church walls she could hear what was inside if she leaned back and touched the boards — there was a low murmur, a strain of sad music from the pedal organ Wilhelmina Simpson had brought in from Boston and on which she would soon play “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” as Easter Sunday would be early this year, the moon almost full now and March not yet ended. The people inside that church did not realize that Thomasina would be able to sing resurrection anthems when Easter came. They did not know that her idea of resurrection was different from that of the Church, as were her ideas of Christ, of light, of immortality and holiness. Christ, for Thomasina, was not so much a person as an opening in the grass, a patch of sun, a warm spot in the loneliness. She had never been a person who respected stained glass or altars. That butterfly’s small early wings were her stained glass. That patch of earth, peeping through the melting snow, was her altar. Her mother had not called her Thomasina for nothing. “If you were a boy,” her mother had said when she was young, “I was going to call you Doubting Thomas, after the disciple who wanted to see Christ’s nail marks with his own eyes. But you were a girl. So I called you Doubting Thomasina.”

After the funeral, at which Wilhelmina Simpson played Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze,” the hymn she played at every funeral, the people walked down the hill to the cemetery, and the gravediggers, Simon Montague and Harold Pierson, lowered the coffins into the graves, and Thomasina watched the part of the procession visible from her sunlit corner. She stood there, the wind blowing her coat, a faintly ominous vision, a figure who had stepped out of the bounds of what was normal for people in this place. Those who stole a look in her direction felt someone should do something, someone should go to her, put an arm around her and guide her into the group; after all, they were supposed to be mourning with her. They thought someone should do this, but nobody did. When the handfuls of earth had been thrown into the graves, the crowd walked up to the tiny community hall across the road from the church, and they walked the way they had descended, along the east and north walls, not the south and west walls at whose corner Thomasina stood — all except Jacinta, who handed the baby to Treadway.

“Go in and get a sandwich and tea,” she told Treadway. “Talk to Harold Pierson about shovelling the ice off Thomasina’s roof before it slides off in a sheet and kills her.”

Jacinta picked her way through last year’s thistles. Snow filtered into her ankle-boots as she stood beside Thomasina, raising her face to the sun as Thomasina did, leaning against the church wall inches from where a spider with white stripes made an iridescent web. Not many spots trapped this kind of warmth in Croydon Harbour. Jacinta saw the blue butterfly — a small moth really; a mud-puddle moth, but pretty, and pale blue like the spring sky — and she knew what Thomasina was doing. Jacinta did not think her crazy, and she did not try to draw her to the reception or to move her from this moment of peace. Women did not get many moments like this in their lives, sun beating on their eyelids in a hidden corner and no one asking them for anything. No one asking them to find the salt, or wait for a man who might come home in three months but who might not. Women of Croydon Harbour knew what was expected of them at all times, and they did it, and the men were expected to do things too, and they did these, and there was no time left.

Jacinta closed her eyes long enough for tiredness to drain out of them. Not all the tiredness, but some of it. A spoonful of tiredness out of each eye. If only a person could stay like this as long as she needed; if only the sun could stay, and the wind not come up, and obligations not line the road.

All Thomasina wanted to do now was go home. Not to talk to well-wishers. Not to intercept casserole dishes full of cabbage rolls and moose sausage and Rice-A-Roni with ground caribou meat. Who would eat it? What Thomasina would eat, if she ate anything, was milk lunch biscuits and tea. The wind changed and the moment of peace in the sun was gone; the two women were chilled. Thomasina walked towards her house and Jacinta walked with her. They did not talk but went together into the kitchen, a plain kitchen, clean, with nothing but a tea canister on the counter. Thomasina boiled the kettle and put out biscuits and she and Jacinta sat there and were silent until Thomasina said, “What are you going to do about that baby?”

“Treadway wants him to live as a boy.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know how to argue with him. He’d say what I’m thinking makes no sense.”

“No sense?” In the years of her marriage to Graham Montague, that was a thing of which Graham had never accused Thomasina. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking maybe if we just waited everything would change.”

“It might.”

“But everything keeps shifting in my imagination. Other things. Completely different things. The baby’s ears. Or his face. I think, what if those or other things changed? I don’t want anything to change. I don’t want to do anything to the baby. I don’t want to make any mistakes.”

“You want to do everything right the first time? Is that what makes sense to Treadway?”

“I don’t know.”

“If sense is a partridge in the willows, you have to follow it. You don’t know where it’s leading. Do you call that baby a she?”

“No.”

“Have you tried?”

“Not out loud.”

“She might want to hear it. She might want to hear you call her ‘My little daughter.’”

“Thomasina.” Jacinta laid down her mug with the queen of diamonds on it. “I’m sorry you lost Annabel.”

Thomasina drank her tea. She smoothed the plastic tablecloth, which had permanent creases. She said, “You want to be careful what you let Treadway have done to that baby.”

There was a mirror on the wall and Jacinta could see both their faces in it. She realized that of the two, her own had no strength left, while Thomasina’s held reserves. She had walked here thinking she would comfort the other woman, but Thomasina did not need comforting.

“If a stranger came here now,” Jacinta said, “they would guess I was the one who had lost a man and a daughter.”

“You won’t lose Treadway unless you want to lose him. Treadway is a husband for life.”

“I know.”

“But it looks to me like I’m not the only one who has lost a daughter.”

“I’ve always felt,” Jacinta said, “that daughter is a beautiful word.”

The first thing Thomasina did when the funeral was over was rid the house of food she disliked. Venison sausages, large roasts of moose, seabirds Graham had caught in his net. These things filled a third of her freezer and were what Graham had wanted for his suppers, and she had not minded cooking them for him. Half the time he had cooked for himself. Theirs had not been a marriage of sharply defined roles. Men of the cove generally were kings outside their houses — kings of the grounds and sheds and fences — and the women were queens of inner rooms and painted sills and pelmets and carpet cleaners. Thomasina and Graham had come and gone as they pleased, each one knowing how to use a knife for cleaning fish or cutting bread, how to sweep a floor, how to mend a gate or clean the chimney. Thomasina had a grain of sense, men of the cove said, and she walked about in brown cardigans with her hair tidy but not styled. She did not own a pair of shoes in which she could not walk ten miles over rough ground.

Unlike Eliza Goudie in her seersucker and white sandals, unlike Joan Martin with her bulb-planting tool for her Emperor tulips, Thomasina would not fall apart at the loss of her husband. Though they complained about their husbands, the first two would have looked at a dripping tap, a leaky ceiling, a tree fallen on the property as insurmountable difficulties over which they had no control. They were the kind of women of whom the Apostles had written that it was necessary to help from a safe distance. They had not, during their marriages, held any part of themselves in reserve. They joked, when they got together, of how easy their lives would become if they did not have to cook for the men, but if these women ever lost their husbands, they would themselves be as lost as orphaned whitecoat seals.

Thomasina was no whitecoat; she was a fierce grey and silver grown-up who had held her entire self in reserve for a day such as this. Jacinta she felt, lay somewhere between those other women and herself: self-containment was half-formed in Jacinta; she had depths of judgement to which she could turn but did not fully trust them. She had surrendered part but not all of herself to the wisdom of her husband. Jacinta, Thomasina felt, would never be wholly at ease with any decision about which she and Treadway had differing ideas. Thomasina and Graham had married late. Perhaps that was why each never thought to question the judgement of the other. Thomasina had never questioned Graham’s blind hunting or his taking Annabel out in the white canoe or any other boat, and he had not questioned Thomasina when she went on her own journeys alone or with Annabel into the interior, which no other white women did. Danger faced Graham and Thomasina and their child equally at every turn, as did discovery, and this was something each faced for himself or herself. In her misfortune, Thomasina did not blame Graham.

None of the townspeople knew the extent of Thomasina’s grieving because she did not fall apart in front of them. Nor did she fall apart alone in her house. She sat on the daybed under a small window that looked over the backyard and the inlet and stared for half an hour the morning after the drowning of Graham and Annabel, and she did the same that evening, and the next morning as well. She sat on the daybed because that spot was an in-between place, not a living room or kitchen where scenes of family life had played out. This was a passage in which everyone moved and was unfathomable, which was how Thomasina saw people. She was not a person who froze someone’s character in her mind, calling this one egotistical and that one not nearly confident enough and another one truthful or untruthful. To Thomasina people were rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming. It was unbearable to her that she had lost Annabel and Graham, but she had borne unbearable things, and she knew how to keep going. She had her own way of saying goodbye to her lost beloved, and she said it in private. Then she went about the business of being around for those who were living. Especially, she decided, for that little baby of Jacinta’s, Wayne, whom no one wanted to call a daughter.