Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“Hey, Treadway, how are things?”

“Dad.” Brent was in a hurry to get to the party and drink the punch.

“Pretty good.” Treadway looked disgustedly at the sticky mousetraps that were in plentiful supply. The mouse would stick to such a trap for twenty seconds and then you would never catch that mouse again.

“You got mice.”

“I don’t have mice. I’d like to make sure I don’t have them in the future, and I don’t want to have to get a cat.”

Treadway disliked cats. He disliked himself for implying to Roland that he might get one. He disliked Roland. The reason he disliked Roland was that Roland was a Knight of Columbus, and every time he saw Treadway he gave Treadway the secret sign, which Treadway knew but pretended he did not know. Graham Montague, who was not Catholic either, had showed it to him one night after a few beers, having learned it from God knows what traitor, but Treadway was damned if he was going to let Roland Shiwack know that. It irked him that Roland did it every time, that he never let up, that Roland had some kind of childish obsession.

“You can have one of our cats,” Roland said heartily. He was a pleasant, friendly man who had no idea Treadway felt the way he did. “Melba’s got a dozen of them in the basement. Our cat had kittens again.”

“Dad,” Brent said. “I’m gonna be late.”

“He’s going to a party,” Roland told Treadway.

“I see.”

“Wayne must be going to the same one. Over at Pallisers.”

“Yes, he is.”

“No, I’m not, Dad.”

Treadway ignored his son. “It’s probably time, then, to go home and get ready.” And he turned away from the Shiwacks.

“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?