Annabel (32 page)

There were a few things Treadway wanted to do, he told Wayne, while he was in St. John’s. He was staying for three days, and he wanted to see the exhibit of Beothuk and Inuit tools and household artifacts and hunting clothes in the Newfoundland Museum on Duckworth Street. There was a carving knife he particularly wanted to see, and a child’s fur coat with part of the tail of the animal intact.

“And I’d like you to tell me,” Treadway said, “the name of the person who attacked you. And if there is a grocery store nearby, there is something I’d like to buy in it.”

It was the first mention Treadway made of why he had really come: the misery and sadness of his son. He had not said anything about Wayne’s appearance but he had taken it in, and he did not appear to be shocked or upset by it. Wayne had always appeared more graceful than other boys as far as Treadway was concerned. He had always had an air of gentleness about his face, and his shape had not been very much different from what it was now, though there had been muscle where there was now litheness. Wayne wore a plain shirt and jeans that were the kind he had always worn, and Treadway had noticed the girl’s breasts on his son before. They were not new to him, and they were small. You could miss them if you were not looking carefully. But Treadway was looking carefully.

He took his pocketknife out and used it to cut his fish, and he noticed everything around him, including the type of engine on the city bus that passed by Leo’s window, and the German make of the clock on the fire hall across Harvey Road.

“Dad, I didn’t know you knew so much about St. John’s.”

“I don’t know anything about St. John’s.”

“You do. You know what kind of stone is in the churches and where it came from, and you know about the floor here and the bus engines, and you know what exhibits are down at the museum. I didn’t even know there was a museum.”

“You would have noticed it sooner or later. And I don’t know about the stone in all the churches, just the basilica and the Anglican cathedral, and some of the churches and castles in England and Scotland, because I read about them. Anything I know about I’ve usually read, even a lot of what I know about trapping. I get a lot from books.”

Wayne realized how often he had seen his father reading. He knew there were books in his trapping hut, and there were always books beside his bed at home. He had not thought about the books as having the ability to help his father orient himself in St. John’s, or in any strange city. The thought was new to Wayne. His father might have become lost on the way to the Forest Road Apartments, but he was not lost in the world of terrazzo flooring or German clocks, or the history of his ancestors, and it was because he read.

“I’ve had a lot more time than you have had to read. And I’ve had a lot less to contend with in my life than you have had in yours. What I’d like to know now, Wayne, is the name of the person who attacked you.”

“Derek Warford. Why?”

“Because I might like to have a word with him. And I would like to see the place where it happened. This Deadman’s Pond that Thomasina told me about.”

“Dad.”

“As a matter of fact, I’d like you to show it to me now. But before we go up Signal Hill I’d like to go to a grocery store and I’d like to buy a really nice orange.”

Wayne took his father to the Parade Street Dominion and then they walked down Harvey Road and took the steps to Long’s Hill. They walked along Gower Street, and while they were walking in front of the chain-link fence outside Powers’ Salvage on the east end of Duckworth Street, Treadway handed Wayne the bank book. There was no one to witness this but the gulls that circled the city’s sewage outlet. They stood near the giant pyramid of salt that the city was storing to put on the roads next winter, and there was a smell of seaweed. The fog was coming in but had not come in yet, and the sounds were gulls and cranes and containers echoing as they landed down on the docks, with the squeaking of pulleys and now and then a man shouting. The men were tiny in the distance in their hard hats. Wayne watched them through the fence, and he did not know why his father had handed him a bank book until his father explained — it was the gold.

“The gold you always had in your closet?”

“I want you to have it. Put it in your pocket and we’ll go to the credit union tomorrow and I’m going to sign that account over to you. And you, I want you to use it to do something with yourself. I don’t care what it is but I want you to think about it. Go and visit different places if you want, places where they can teach you something you want to know how to do. It has to be something you have an interest in. And this thing here” — he gave Wayne an envelope — “is a ticket Thomasina Baikie gave me to give you.”

Wayne put the bank book in his pocket and unwrapped the ticket. It was a ticket for a performance of American folk songs by the Boston Downtown Community Choir. The ticket had cost five dollars and the date on it was August the twenty-fifth, which was in six weeks’ time.

“Thomasina wants you to see your old friend. The trip won’t cost much, and even if it did, what else is money for?”

“Dad, I don’t want to take your gold.”

“As I said, son, you’ve had a lot more to contend with than I have ever had. I want you to take that. Your mother and I want you to have it and we want you to do something with it that will mean we don’t have to worry about how you are going to make a living. It’s pure selfishness on our part.”

“Does my mother know?”

“Does she know what, son?”

“Does she know I’ve gone off the drugs? And what about what Derek Warford did? She doesn’t know about that?”

“No. I didn’t say a word about Derek Warford. Your mother would not have been able to stand hearing that.”

“I know.”

“But she knows about the drugs. Your mother has always — part of her — wanted you to be who you are now. She has always been the one who felt the drugs might not be the right thing. Ever since you were little. So yes, I told her about that. And she was happy.”

They were at the intersection that led up Signal Hill and, to the east, along the Battery.

“She was happy?”

“Well she cried, but she said she was happy. And I almost forgot to give you this. I hope to God it’s not bent. She’ll kill me if I’ve bent it.” Treadway took a small square out of his pocket. It was two pieces of cardboard measuring no more than two by three inches and held together by a rubber band, and when Wayne took the band off, he saw it was a photograph. There had been a newspaper clipping that showed the moment Elizaveta Kirilovna had won her gold medal for synchronized swimming, when Wayne was eight years old. Jacinta had clipped it at the time, and they had looked at it together and felt Elizaveta Kirilovna’s joy.

“But this is not newsprint,” Wayne said. “It’s a real photograph.” Elizaveta Kirilovna was waving and her face was wet. You could see a drop of swimming pool water on her mouth. Wayne had, when he was eight, told Jacinta he could almost imagine that Elizaveta Kirilovna was waving to him personally.

“Your mother took it to Sooter’s in Goose Bay and asked them to reprint it on photo paper. They do that now. They can make a poster if you want it. But your mother wanted it small. She asked me to go into S. O. Steele on Water Street and have it put in a sterling silver frame for you, but I didn’t get around to it. Could you do that yourself, son? Your mother doesn’t need to know. I don’t tell her everything, and I sometimes have the feeling there are details she keeps from me.”

They walked past the convent and past the coloured houses that straggled up the hill and petered out before you got to the Battery Hotel, the front all white on the hillside like a cruise ship, though it was dilapidated at the back. Then came the hill’s steepest bend and around it emerged Cabot Tower.

“Deadman’s Pond is in here,” Wayne pointed into the bushes. There were blueberry bushes that had flowers on them: modest pink bells and new green and white and pale purple berries, and on a few, one or two berries that had turned blue. Water peeped through the bushes and they saw the worn-down shrubs where people had driven vehicles to get closer to the pond. Wayne did not know why his father wanted to come here, and he felt uneasy. He had not walked up here since his attack, and he did not want to see the pond.

“I want you to leave me here.”

“Why?” Wayne was afraid someone might come and challenge his father. He knew Derek Warford was unlikely to come here in the daytime but he pictured it anyway. He did not know what his father planned to do and he did not like leaving him here alone.

“I want to have a careful look at the place and I have something I want to do here by myself. I’ve got the key you gave me and I’ll use it to get back in the apartment when I’m done.”

He knew Wayne had to go to work. It was late afternoon. Wayne stood on the side of the road and watched his father walk into the bushes and stoop down and eat a few blueberries as he would have done in the blueberry bushes around home. He saw that his father’s hands were big around the berries, but his thumb and finger had no problem aiming for the delicate berry and picking it.

“All right, Dad.” Wayne did not move.

“Go on, son.”

Once Wayne had turned to go back down into the city he did not look back at his father, though he wanted to, and his back felt exposed and sensitive as if it were a naked screen and the image of his father alone at Deadman’s Pond was projected on it.

33

Red Hawk

T
HE GROUND UNDER THE BLUEBERRY
bushes was, Treadway thought, drier than ground under similar bushes in Labrador, and the berries had a different perfume. But the pond was like a pond he knew back home called Bottomless Pond. This one was called Deadman’s Pond, he figured, because a dead man could disappear in it for a good long time. Of course Bottomless Pond at home had a bottom, and so did this pond, but it was a deep bottom. Treadway could tell how deep from the contours of the pond, from the sediments he saw between the shrub roots and the surface, and from its colour.

He had not been able to stop seeing what Thomasina told him had happened here to his son. But now that he was here the scene changed, as scenes always do when we visit their real setting in person. He had pictured the trampled bushes where vehicles came as being on the pond’s other side, and he had not thought the terrain would be this steep. He walked around the pond looking for the place where it plunged most abruptly to its greatest depth, and he found it next to some boulders on the north side. He dislodged a small boulder from the nest in which it had sat for perhaps hundreds of years and rolled it over the lip of the pond, and it disappeared. He sat on one of the bigger boulders and thought about what he had planned to do.

He had hunted countless times in terrain that was not much different from this terrain. He looked at the path, the twigs on the path, their dryness and how they cracked. He looked at the available boulders and their sizes, and at the diameter of the shrubs and the hiding places underneath the shrubs. He felt the direction of the wind and was glad it was a cold wind, and that it had a sound and a deep loneliness. He was glad this place was as lonesome as he had imagined it might be. He saw evidence of several kinds of small animals and he saw moose droppings.

Treadway did not want to go over in his mind the conversation Thomasina had had with him, but it was the kind of conversation that haunted a father. Though Treadway had never called Wayne anything but his son, he knew and had always known that within his son lay hidden a daughter. He had seen this daughter in the past day here in St. John’s. He had seen Annabel in Wayne’s face, and he had wanted to come to Deadman’s Pond to see if coming here, where this thing had happened, would change his mind or confirm in his mind that he wanted to remove the possibility that Derek Warford could ever do this again to his son, or daughter, or to anyone else’s daughter. He could remove that possibility, he saw now, looking at the landscape. There was little difference in a wilderness like this between trapping a wild animal and hunting a man. There were several ways Treadway could do it. He could use a trap like those he used at home, but that would mean he would have to go buy the trap, and he did not want to go to Wilson’s outfitting shop on Water Street and meet any of the Wilsons or have them remember him. What he had thought about doing, the possibility that seemed most careful to him now, was a thing he had done one winter when he came across a live lynx caught in a trap belonging to Roland Shiwack.

The fertilizer bag in which he had brought his socks, underwear, and toothbrush was a multi-purpose bag. It was light and portable, which made it good for transporting sawdust, yet it was strong enough to carry fifty pounds of fifteen-thirty-fifteen fertilizer, and it could carry more weight than that if need be. Treadway saved fertilizer bags the way he saved wire and any kind of rope, and he had brought this one to St. John’s because it fit easily into his sleeping bag with his clothing in it and because he knew what else he could do with it.

It would not be hard to find Derek Warford and appeal to his vanity and to his wallet.

“They told me at the shop on the corner,” he imagined himself saying, “that of the young fellows around here, you’d be the one who best knows your way around. I’d like to see what all visitors come for: Cabot Tower and the trail down over the cliffs, but I can find those myself. What I want is to get off the main road.”

What this reconnaissance trip was for was to see if everything he had thought of doing was in fact feasible, and it was. Treadway took the fertilizer bag out of the waistband of his trousers. At the pond’s deepest shore he found a large stone. He put the stone in the bag and hid it under the bushes, marking the location in his mind. He had to use the steeple of St. Andrew’s Church in the distance down below as one of his markers, and for the other he used the tip of a transmitter tower on the Southside hills. He was not used to using manmade markers for trapping, and he kept thinking this would work only as long as the same men who had built the steeple and the tower did not decide to come and remove them, which could not happen with a mountain or a river bend or any of the markers he used when hunting in Labrador.

He hid the stone and the bag and he remembered the lynx. Roland Shiwack was a man who was not careful enough with his traps, in Treadway’s opinion. Treadway had trapped many a lynx but he had rarely trapped one that remained alive in the trap. He had used the right kind of trap in the right terrain, whereas Roland Shiwack made do with substitutes for the best trap, and that was why Roland’s lynx had been going crazy when Treadway found it. Treadway had not had his gun at the time, but he did have snare wire, and he had a bag like this one, and he was in a part of the land where there were boulders and a river with rapids that contained a deep pool. Any kind of cat will instantly calm down when you haul a bag over its head, even a wounded lynx, and then you can tie the bag with wire at the animal’s neck, and if you are lucky enough to be beside deep water you can carry the lynx to the pool, and as long as you have tied the snare wire properly and the stone inside the bag is the right stone, you can drown the lynx, and thus end one of the little pieces of torture that plague the secret corners of this earth.

This is what Treadway had in mind to do with Derek Warford. He had doubts, as he had done when he drowned Roland Shiwack’s lynx. What if the bag did not calm the lynx? What if the lynx clawed through the bag before the stone plunged him deep enough? What if the lynx, or Derek Warford, was stronger, or smarter, than Treadway knew?

But Treadway knew instinctively that Derek Warford did not have a lynx’s intelligence, and he knew that while he was almost sixty, his own strength still came when he needed it, and that someone like Derek Warford, who had not trapped in Labrador and had not been alone in the wilderness for months and years and decades of his life, did not know how to fight the way Treadway knew, and would not be expecting Treadway to do the thing he had planned. Still, Treadway knew it was possible that Derek Warford, because he was younger, could overpower him.

He thought a lot about that possibility, and he also thought about the question of malice: was there malice in himself, directed at this person, Derek Warford? He thought about it and he knew there was no malice. He did not want to punish Derek Warford as much as he wanted to simply remove him. A person like that, a person who would do such a thing as Derek Warford had done to Wayne, needed to be removed from the scene. That was all. It was a question of ridding this little place in the world, the Battery, of someone who had done this crime and who would probably do it again to someone else. It was not a crime about which Treadway Blake wanted to consult the police, or anyone like the police. That thought did not rest in his mind at all, the thought of police stations and forms and explaining what had happened to his son, and having to explain the femaleness of his son. But there was someone at the top of Signal Hill with whom Treadway did want to consult.

Treadway had seen a hawk from Military Road and had watched it circle the top of Signal Hill and plummet for prey, then rise and circle again. He had watched it until he knew where it lived, and now he climbed Signal Hill and took the orange he had bought at the Parade Street Dominion out of his pocket and placed it in the grass on a remote tuft of the hill.

He sat for several hours, and the orange was the only bright thing in the grass. When the hawk came, it did not alight. It was a red-tailed hawk whose body glowed red-brown. It hovered, and Treadway spoke to it in the same way he spoke to the boreal owl and to other wild animals in Labrador. He did not have to speak out loud but had only to silently present his idea about ridding the world of Derek Warford. Treadway knew a hawk is a merciless animal. He knew that if a woman happened to be up here on Signal Hill picking blueberries or partridgeberries with a baby, especially a newborn, she had better watch out or the hawk could take that baby. It had happened before, perhaps with this red hawk, and it would happen again: a hawk was a carnivore and it could take a large bird or a baby away and kill it. Treadway had seen a hawk carry off Graham Montague’s biggest rooster. He did not expect a hawk to have mercy for a person like Derek Warford.

But Treadway had read Pascal, and the Bible, and the essays of philosphers, and he had read poets, and against his own will the hawk reminded him of things he had read. It did not speak to him out of its own wildness, perhaps, he thought, because it had spent too much time circling above steeples and libraries and museums that held the thoughts of civilized men. He had not thought a hawk would do this. Now, as it dipped and circled close to him on its flight path between the crags of Signal Hill and the ocean below where its own prey lay — capelin and young cod and sea urchins with peach-coloured roe — this hawk told him something old, the same thing over and over again. It was not what Treadway wanted to hear.

“I would dearly love,” Treadway told the hawk, “to finish off Derek Warford in the manner I have planned.”

The sun was setting and the orange glowed in the grass. The hawk still did not say what Treadway wanted it to say. He had been hoping for a blessing. He had thought the hawk would understand carnage and vengeance. He thought if anyone understood how he felt in his heart at the thought of what Derek Warford had done to his son, his daughter, in that van, the hawk would understand. The hawk had possibly seen with its own eyes what had happened and knew better than Treadway how much Derek Warford deserved to be sunk with a stone to the bottom of a bottomless body of water. But the hawk did not recognize any of this. It did not swoop down and take the orange or land near Treadway. But it hovered. It hovered in front of him and it reminded him of the same words over and over again, from the books of Deuteronomy and Romans and also the book of Hebrews in the bible Treadway kept in his trapper’s hut: Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.

“When?” asked Treadway. “When is the Lord planning on getting around to it? Because I can have it done by this time tomorrow.”

But the hawk used an argument Treadway had used many times himself when Jacinta had asked him to explain or justify a decision he had made. The hawk used the argument of one lone proclamation followed by silence, and in that silence, Treadway knew, he could protest all he liked, but he would not win the argument.