Kathleen Winter - Annabel

Treadway took his socks off. He was always peeling his socks off and leaving them inside out on the floor. “We didn’t have cake. We didn’t have cups with flowers on them.”

“It’s only a few cracked mugs.”

Treadway held a judgement in his body. He moved his body with unnecessary precision, his face rigid with purpose. He became unreachable but his body spoke, and Jacinta hated this. She wanted words to come out of his mouth but they came out of his bones. His bones said, You may be lenient or blind, but I am neither.

Wally Michelin and Wayne created a temporary cover for the bridge out of rope and blankets and a waterproof tarp. The bridge was not the same as the snow forts Wayne had made. Snow forts were all about construction. At no time were they complete. Once you had carved a mound and fitted it with windows and an entrance, you connected it, by tunnel, to a new mound; an endless, interconnected complex of frozen interiors infused with quiet blue light. You were underneath the snow, whereas on the bridge you were suspended over the water of the creek. Wally brought her music and practised singing her scales, while Wayne brought paper and drew designs for other kinds of walls and latticework and coverings for the bridge itself. He brought Thomasina’s postcards in their Peek Freans shortbread tin and studied the bridges of London, Edinburgh, Paris, and Florence. The bridges had the same symmetry he loved in synchronized swimming. Wayne looked at their arches and interlacings and copied them on paper.

Wally Michelin had a little radio and she listened to music on it continually, then sang what she had just heard. “It’s a way of training your memory. You listen to something just one time, then you copy it. You have to remember every note.”

“But how do you know you got it right?”

“It’s like hunting for new kinds of wild mushrooms. My dad says you have to peel your senses. You don’t let anything get in the way or you’ll die.”

“But you won’t die if you don’t get the music right.”

“But I am going to get it right.”

“But if you didn’t you wouldn’t die.”

“If you were on a concert stage and you sang the wrong note, it would be dying. I’m going to do my dying right now, before anyone can hear it except us.”

Wally stole her brother Tyrone’s xylophone and brought it onto the bridge. “Play six notes. Then I’m going to sing them, and you tell me if I sang them right. Then we’ll do twelve notes, and then sixteen.”

“I don’t know myself which are the right ones. By the time you start singing them I forget what they were.”

“I’ll bring my mother’s tape recorder and play them into the tape, then we’ll have a record.”

Wayne told his father he wanted to make the top of his bridge like the Ponte Vecchio. “I like the way things are going on in it all the time. People aren’t just going across it. They have shops full of gold. They stay on it and they play music.”

“All you need to do to make arches, son, is join and brace those posts. Then you cover them with Masonite, or some of that corrugated fibreglass I’ve got left over from the greenhouse. Put that on the roof and the light will still shine in. Come on.” He found two hammers and a box of screws and showed Wayne how to use a drill and set the screws straight. He made a big compass out of string and an old broom and got Wayne to draw his arches on the Masonite, then he showed him how to cut with a jigsaw.

“It looks just right, Dad. It looks like the bridge on Thomasina’s card.”

“It looks pretty good, son. Not what I’d put on top of that base if I were doing it, but it’s what you wanted.”

“It is, Dad, it’s great. Can we borrow your big extension cord?”

“Why do you want that?”

“To put lights up.”

Wayne strung Christmas lights along the arches. He read reclining on boughs and cushions while Wally Michelin did her voice exercises and wrote in her diary. They ate lettuce sandwiches with cans of Sprite. Every time Wally learned a new bar of Fauré’s “Cantique de Jean Racine” she underlined it in green ballpoint. Wayne was amazed at how slowly but certainly the green lines grew. Wally’s diary was green; she had ordered it from Avon and it had a tiny key. When she wrote in it under the lights or sang as Wayne drew his designs, the bridge took on the enchantment of an airborne caravan, something out of a dream.

Treadway watched and did not like the look of the whole thing.

“We never sang in our forts. We didn’t read,” he told Jacinta.

“You read John Donne in your hunting cabin. You read Poe and Stevenson.” All the trappers read by a flame for a chapter, a poem, two at the most, before they dropped, dead tired. “You read Pascal’s Pensées .”

Treadway went to bed at nine thirty. But Wally Michelin’s singing kept him awake. He endured this until he looked at the clock and saw it was nearly midnight. He got himself a glass of water. The window was open and he stood listening, then he rinsed his glass and went in the living room, where Jacinta was gathering the front of a rabbit-nose slipper with her long needle.

Jacinta had been listening too. “She’s a good singer.”

“Why do we let him stay up all hours of the night with that girl?”

A rabbit-nose was harder to sew than the moccasins Jacinta had learned to make when she first came to Labrador. A rabbit-nose has a series of tiny gathers, and it is hard to get the tension of both slippers identical. Jacinta would have stayed up until three in the morning if Treadway had not minded. He always woke when she came to bed, and couldn’t get back to sleep.

“But it’s summer,” Jacinta said.

“I know what season it is.” Treadway grimly considered the carpet. He knew it was summer. He had not at any age wished to stay up past midnight talking to a girl. If his wife could not see there was something wrong with it, he saw no point in explaining.

Jacinta had challenged him in the past and had lost. The Florentine bridge over the creek struck her as lovely, and she wished she could go lie down on it with the children.

“If that was happening next door,” Treadway said, “I’d wonder what kind of parents would let a boy and a girl spend half the night alone outside together.”

“They’re in grade six.”

“They’re done grade six. I’m surprised Ann and Gerald Michelin let her stay out. If I was her father I’d be over here by nine and I would take my daughter home.”

“Wayne?” The moon had come out and Wally Michelin lay on the bridge floor watching it through one of the spandrels.

“What?”

“Remember what Mr. Ollerhead said about the moon?”

“I remember his shirt.” Mr. Ollerhead had worn a shirt of pink and silver stripes. He had brought his guitar to school.

“He said if you look at the moon long enough, you’ll find out something.”

“Like what?”

“He never said.”

Mr. Ollerhead had broken the hearts of girls in his class, Wayne knew. He didn’t mean to break them, and he didn’t know he had broken them, but he couldn’t help it.

“Do you like Mr. Ollerhead?” Wayne asked.

“As a teacher?”

“No. I mean, do you like him?”

“You mean do I kiss my pillow and pretend it’s him like Gracie Watts?”

“Yeah.”

“No. When I’m singing, I’m singing for someone. I don’t know who it is yet, but it’s not Mr. Ollerhead.”

“ROLAND SHIWACK,” Treadway told Wayne, “has a boatload of shrimp that need peeling.”

Wayne was stirring Carnation into his hot chocolate. Treadway did not believe in buying canned milk, or any milk, because it was insanely expensive in Labrador, and no one used it in tea. If you needed milk, Davina Thevenet had six goats and would trade you as much milk as you wanted for fenceposts or a couple of bales of hay. Was it the can of milk Treadway was looking so grim about now? Jacinta restricted herself to buying two cans a week, out of consideration for her husband’s disapproval. When Treadway disapproved of anything, Wayne felt his own chest tense up. If it wasn’t the milk, what was it?