Kathleen Winter - Annabel

When the Grenfell missionaries took over, they had put an end to herbs and sweet peas. The men tended the gardens, with what Treadway considered a trifle more good sense than the Moravian women had. The men had put in carrot, cabbage, beet, and potato, but then they had gone and brought in a cow, reasoning that a local supply of milk would give greater health to Labrador babies. A cow, in Labrador. You might as well put a cow on the North Pole and expect it to live. Again, with hot water bottles and blankets and God knew what other foolishness, the Grenfell missionaries managed to keep the cow and its daughter alive for five or six years, but then the brutal grandeur of the real Labrador took over. They didn’t call this place the big land for nothing. It was big in a way that people who came in either respected and followed or disdained at their peril. You could live like a king in Labrador if you knew how to be subservient to the land, and if you did not know how, you would die like a fool, and many had done. What Thomasina was doing in this guest house, Treadway did not know. She had started out sensibly enough, as a Labrador woman who knew how the big land breathed, but something — Treadway reckoned it was the death of her husband and daughter — had caused her to forget, and act like a stranger.

“The windows are painted shut,” he said. No one living in a normal house in Croydon Harbour would have been able to stand this.

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“It’s unhealthy.”

“I don’t have a wood stove like you.”

He had a screwdriver in his shirt pocket, and he started chipping away at the painted seam. “Have you got a thin-bladed knife?”

Thomasina opened the cutlery drawer and hunted through knives and forks the Grenfell Society had put there. They were not the quality you would buy for yourself, but she found him a knife. He slit the paint, and the knife slipped, and he stuck his bloody finger in his mouth and sat down.

He couldn’t say a word to her about Greek gods with breasts and beards. He might as well have tried to bring up the subject of his own nakedness. “This,” he said, “is an awfully bare room.” He saw a bottle of Scotch on her shelf and Thomasina took it down and poured them each a glass. When they had drunk a second glass, she asked him, “Does Jacinta know you’re here?”

“It’s likely by now that she does. It’s the homework I’m here about. Wayne’s homework. It’s — God, Thomasina. What — I don’t know if you’re trying to give him some kind of hint or what…”

“You don’t want him to have any idea of who he is.”

“Have you got some kind of chip on your shoulder?”

“What?”

“Some kind of mental problem that came from losing your own family?”

“If you look at the school board curriculum you’ll see everything I’m teaching is in there. I didn’t make the curriculum up. And I didn’t make Greek mythology up either. It happens to be in the school program, and your son is in my class.”

“Right. Don’t — just…”

“Are you ever going to tell him?”

“I’m not. Why should I? No. I’ll tell you something, Thomasina Baikie. It’s all right for some people to go around psychologizing, but the rest of us have to live in the real world. Wayne has to live in the real world. I would prefer it if you didn’t go giving him colouring books with half-men, half-women in them. To me that’s interfering. It’s more than interfering.”

“He isn’t like the other boys.”

“It’s interfering in a big way.”

“Can you see it?”

“I don’t believe — no. What…”

“You hope you can’t. He’s not like them at all, Treadway.”

“Who says so? Is — has anyone said a word to him at that school? Has Roland Shiwack’s son said something?”

“I was thinking I might say something.”

“The hell you will.”

“I was thinking I might tell him my version of the way things were at his birth.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because his hair is soft. He has two tiny breast buds. And no Adam’s apple to speak of at all.”

Treadway was taken aback by this. He had seen Wayne’s breast buds the day he had tried to tell his son the facts of life. But he had hoped no one else had noticed. Treadway had to go on his trapline now. He had come here to clue things up, not to open new questions he had no time to answer. He put his glass on Thomasina’s table and walked back out under Orion, who glittered brightly, except for the dying red star that marked the hunter’s left foot.

WAYNE HAD GOT USED TO HIS feet peeling. He decided there must be a lot of layers of skin on the bottoms of everyone’s feet, because a layer of his came off every day and it didn’t hurt. It didn’t seem to matter, and he did not mention it to his mother again. Seven layers, eight, ten. The layers must be growing at the same rate at which they are peeling, he reasoned. He monitored the other new thing about his body: the ache in his abdomen. It was like the pulled muscle he once got doing sit-ups in gym, only this was deeper inside and did not hurt as much. He figured he would let this go away on its own along with the peeling, which was the more interesting condition of the two in his mind, so long as his feet did not bleed.

Wally had not come to see Wayne since Treadway destroyed her music. Wayne missed her like crazy and wanted to show her his diagrams of Thomas Telford’s bridge and tell her about his peeling feet. But he did not have the guts to go and get her or tell her he was sorry for what his father had done. He felt it was his fault, and he did not know how to make her forgive him.

By the time school started, Wally Michelin had turned into a stranger to Wayne. She was taller and skinnier. No one but Wayne seemed to remember that from grades one to six she had been strong, brave, and independent. It was as if she were an awkward new girl. She did not possess one article of clothing from the catalogue, and she kept her hair in two ponytails with elastic bands. By the first day of grade seven Donna Palliser was the undisputed queen of the class, and no one remembered the time before Donna, when everyone had loved Wally.

Donna Palliser’s parties had grown more numerous and elaborate each year. At her Hallowe’en party her mother had decorated the house with bats and cobwebs. Donna had come to the door to greet each guest with a plate of shortbread cookies shaped like severed thumbs and fingers with red icing. There was a haunted house on the mantel, with diabolical laughter coming out of it. Donna had Remembrance Day parties, Christmas parties, New Year’s Eve parties, Valentine’s Day parties, Easter parties, and Summer Holiday Eve parties, and if there was a lull between these she had sleepovers for selected girls and pizza parties for both girls and boys. Throughout grades five and six she had these parties and had not invited Wally Michelin, the Groves twins, or Gracie Watts, who continued to wear the same wool sweater every day, and Wayne had not told his father about the parties so had managed to avoid them. But in grade seven Donna Palliser changed her definition of a party, and her new tactics entrapped him.

For the first party of grade seven, which Donna called her Junior High Fete, Donna invited those she usually left out. Wayne saw Donna hand an invitation to Wally Michelin at recess, and he hoped she would not go. Anyone could see Donna had something planned for the unpopular people. He vowed not to go, and threw his invitation in the cafeteria garbage. Gracie Watts saw him do it and came over.

“Donna Palliser told Tweedledum and Tweedledee you’re trying to decide which one of them you want to go out with.” Wally Michelin and Wayne were the only students who did not call the Groves twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee.