Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“Okay, Dad. I get it.” Wayne stared at berries that had rolled under the caribou moss. He heard the hiss of torn tin and a broken vacuum seal as his father pulled the ringtop on the Vienna sausage can. He smelled the meat and the brine. He’d had an erection only once. He had not been thinking about a girl. His father handed him the can and he ate three sausages with his fingers while his father buttered some bread. There had been other feelings, deeper and more hungry than an erection.

“You must have noticed changes in your body.”

“My feet are peeling,” Wayne said, “and I get a stomach ache.”

“Your feet?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you mean?”

“The skin comes off.”

“Take your boots off.”

Wayne took his boots off and sank his bare feet in the caribou moss. “The bottoms.”

Treadway picked up his son’s foot. “Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“Did you ask your mother about it?”

“She told me to tell her if it doesn’t go away. She always says that.”

“Maybe she knows. I never heard of it. But I have to finish telling you this.” Treadway sighed. He did not like being sidetracked.

“Dad, it’s okay.”

“I know you think you know everything about the facts of life. And maybe you do. And if you do, it won’t hurt you to hear them again. But maybe there’s one or two facts you have wrong, and if there are, I’m going to tell you the right ones. That’s all. There’s no big deal. But you have to know the real story. And then I won’t mention it any more. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“So when you get married, you sleep in the same bed with a woman. Women have a vagina. When a man and a wife are in bed together, the penis fits into the vagina. It might not seem like that could happen, but it can. It fits in there. And that’s when the seed of the man, inside the penis, comes out and goes into the woman’s body. And that’s how the embryo of a baby is formed, and of course the baby grows in her belly, and then nine months later, it is born.”

Wayne had not known this. He didn’t know what he had known. Brent Shiwack had saved his hot dog wiener from lunch one day, and had wiggled it through the fly of his jeans at Gracie Slab while everyone was drawing isosceles triangles, and had panted with his tongue out. Davina White up in grade nine had gotten pregnant, and some people said she was a slut but others said no, it happens to the ones who aren’t sluts. Davina White came to the schoolyard with her baby in a stroller at lunchtime to eat bags of chips and drink Pepsi with her friends, and when lunch was over she walked with her baby back down the hill, and Wayne felt sorry for her. Some people said Davina shouldn’t be allowed to come to the schoolyard because her baby might make other girls want to have a baby too.

Treadway had dispatched his duty but he felt extremely awkward and wished he had waited, as his own father had done, until he and his son happened upon the mating of caribou in the herd. It had been beautiful, in slow motion, snowflakes falling on the creatures, and Treadway had instantly understood nearly everything there was to know about male and female intimacy, the mechanics of it. His father had not had to talk about marriage beds or body parts. He had not had to use the word embryo , or any other clinical word. But Jacinta had wanted him to bring up the subject. He felt he had not done the job decently. He had made it seem unnatural. And he had not been able to stop looking at his son’s body and seeing things he did not want to admit. His son looked like a girl. He talked like a girl, his hair was like a girl’s, and so were his throat and chest. When they had peeled down the tops of their overalls, Treadway had seen that his son had breast buds, small and tender through his undershirt, and it had shocked him. He wondered if Wayne had noticed them himself, or if any of the boys at school had teased him about it. The buds were very small, but they were present. What if they grew larger? What was wrong with the doctors?

He carefully folded the bread bag they had used and tucked it into the empty Vienna sausage can with the used teabags, and he wrapped it all in leftover birch rind and put the package in his knapsack. Wayne got on the back of the Ski-Doo behind him and hung on to the passenger handle for dear life, because there were a lot of bumps and it often felt like if he didn’t hang on using all his muscle power, a bump would fling him onto the trail and his father might not notice until he got home. That’s how loud the engine was, and how relentless its momentum, on the woods trail. They had a good load of wood, enough to heat the house for two weeks. Half a dozen more loads like this and they would be done, and Treadway could go on his trapline.

Some boys went with their fathers. They just left school to go on the trapline, and no one said anything. Wayne dreaded the day when Treadway would suggest he do this. Wayne was looking forward to school. Thomasina Baikie was coming back. She had sent her last postcard from Wales. On the front was Thomas Telford’s iron bridge over the Menai Strait.

“It broke a world record,” Thomasina wrote, “for the longest suspension bridge in the world. I love it here so much, Wayne, that I’m finishing my last two classes at Harlow. In September I’ll be coming back to Croydon Harbour to teach. I’ll be teaching grades seven, eight and nine.” Wayne was going into grade seven. He was excited about having Thomasina for a teacher. He loved new pencils and rulers and exercise books, and he liked being at home in the nights, in his room, studying and sketching and listening to music.

But his father could go miles without rest or food, and Treadway did not mind what Wayne saw as monotony: miles upon miles of spruce woods, a heavy packsack, and your footprints sinking through a hard crust of snow, and the death of the beautiful animals.

In bed Wayne thought about what his father had said. He imagined a man and a woman in their pyjamas, lying side by side in their marriage bed. The man fell asleep. So did the woman. While they were asleep, the man’s penis somehow reached out of his pyjama pants. It found its way, something like Brent Shiwack’s wiener, over towards the woman. She must have been wearing a short nightdress, not a long one like his mother’s, or loose pyjama pants. Anyway, somehow the penis, which must have had a sense of direction and an ability to explore on its own, got through the woman’s clothes and nosed its way into her vagina. This amazed Wayne. He had not known that such a thing happened, but he did feel there was something powerful and slightly sinister about penises, so he believed his father. The funny thing was that even though this whole story — the facts of life according to Treadway — depended on involuntary activities of body parts unbeknownst to their sleeping owners, the knowledge of it excited the low, aching hunger in Wayne’s belly. He lay in bed and touched his own penis. It did not respond, but the place behind it, underneath it, buried in his body between his legs, did respond. If he touched the skin underneath his testicle and rubbed it, it made the hunger clamour and grow wild. He pressed and pushed a little, and he thought of penises going into vaginas while he did so, and in a couple of minutes the hunger between his legs opened its mouth and devoured a shuddering, delicious and joyful series of electric jolts that delighted his whole body.

Treadway went to bed early and dreamed of a baby fox caught in his trap. He wanted to save the fox because it was too young for its skin to be of any value, and it had soft paws and looked at him with pleading eyes.

While Treadway slept, Jacinta cleaned the surfaces in the house. Treadway had not told her about his father-and-son talk but she knew he had done it as she asked, because he always did what she asked if she asked him in a particular way. A way that said she was counting on him to provide a basic husbandly service she could not do herself. She knew he had carried out the father-and-son talk, and she could tell he was disturbed about it in some profound way he did not want to talk about. Whenever Treadway was emotionally tired, he went to bed even earlier than usual, using sleep like a kind of temporary, convenient death.