Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“Well, I don’t want you to do anything,” Wally had told him. She did not want her aunt and uncle paying thousands of American dollars for her to sing for her own pleasure. She told her aunt this on the phone.

“But your own pleasure,” her aunt said, “is sometimes the only pleasure you have in this life. You’re over there now. You’re in England. Get the most out of it that you can.”

The doctor did the best work he could and told Wally to rest her voice for six weeks. Then, if she wanted to sing for her own pleasure, she could gently begin with voice exercises he set for her. He told her again that it was possible she could sing in a choir if she chose.

“You don’t have to have a solo voice to be in a choir,” he said. “In fact, there is something about a choir that brings together imperfections in the voices and uses them to make something new, like an infusion of different kinds of tea leaves. It can be quite beautiful.”

He had been a kind man, and Wally had felt his kindness, though he had not done what she wanted him to do and had not said what she had hoped with all her heart he would say.

JACINTA BLAKE APPEARED TO SOME people to have retreated from the vigour she had possessed when her son lived in the house and when her husband spent more time with her. She walked less often the road to the Hudson’s Bay store, and she had not been to church through the winter, not even for the funeral of Kate Davis, who had been the nursing administrator at the hospital in Goose Bay and whose funeral was attended by everybody, even the lieutenant-governor of Newfoundland, who had flown up from Government House in St. John’s. It was true that, over the fall, winter, and spring when her son was away, Jacinta had not eaten enough and had lost sight of what day it was, but from her point of view it was not she who had retreated from living.

She remembered, or thought she remembered, a time when her husband had stayed at home for more than a week or two at a stretch, and had looked at her when they spoke instead of looking at the stove, or out the door towards the kindling, or farther, to the sky and to gulls and scoters and other birds that moved in that sky. She tried to remember that intimacy. Had it been an illusion? She was sure it had not. And it was no illusion either that she now floated in an existence in which she remained untouched. No one touched her body, and now that Wayne had gone away, no one touched her soul. She had become unreal, she thought, to anyone outside herself. And as a result she was losing a sense of her own effect on the world. She had an effect on the kettle if she put it on the stove. It boiled. She made tea. If she drew the curtains the curtains remained closed. She had no problem having an effect on the curtains. Her slippers lay where she had placed them after their last use, as did her glasses, her cup, and her saucer. But as for an effect on the larger world, which she had had as a mother and did not now feel she had as a woman living practically alone, that effect had lost its power.

When Treadway came home in the spring, he saw that she was not sure whether it was a Wednesday or a Saturday, and that was when he wrote to Wayne that he thought she was confused. But she was not confused, not in her own mind. She watched Treadway tidy the house and open the curtains and doors and windows. He even washed the windows, which surprised her. He washed them with Windex and did it in the methodical way he had with every task, using a system that included three types of cloth. When they went to bed, he kissed her goodnight on the cheek as if he were kissing a niece or a nephew goodbye at the train station, then he turned his back to her and began his soft snoring almost instantly. She had never been bothered by his snoring, which was a kind of music to her, but she was sure she remembered a time in their marriage when being with Treadway while he was sleeping did not feel the same as being with him while he was awake.

Now he did other tasks that belonged to the month of May. He climbed a ladder to the roof and cleaned the chimney, and he descended into the root cellar and brought up last year’s old, soft potatoes to use as this year’s seed potatoes in the garden. He did not know she had bought potatoes at the store while he was on his trapline. She had done this because it was nicer to walk outside in the daylight and buy clean, unsprouted potatoes than it was to go down the cellar steps and carry up potatoes that had to be washed and that had sprouted long white tentacles and developed wrinkly skins. So there were plenty of seed potatoes remaining, and Treadway laid them in a pile on the front path and began to cut them in pieces so he could plant them before he left. In the past it had been normal for him to stay at home in the summer. His new pattern, his wish to be away in the wilderness all the time, went unacknowledged.

He sat on the chopping block, a chunk of birch he had rolled over from the woodpile. Sun shone through its loose bark and turned it red gold, and when he cut the potatoes with his small knife, the task looked inviting to Jacinta. The fact that Treadway had carried the seed potatoes up from the dark, that he had poured them into a neat pile, and that he had made a little seat to sit on while he cut them, made Jacinta feel she wished she could cut them herself. The pile of seed potatoes had gained human care and attention from Treadway, and now the sun shone and warmed them even more. Treadway filled one bucket with the cut potatoes and went to his shed to fetch another bucket, and she took his spot on the chopping block and began cutting the potatoes herself. When he came back with the bucket, he set it at her feet and stood looking at her for a minute. This felt like the long-est they had spoken to each other in a long time, though neither said anything out loud; then he went to tidy the woodpile, which had dwindled over the winter, so that he could replenish it on a solid base.

When she had finished cutting the seed potatoes, she left them in the sun to dry their surfaces so mould could not attack them before they began to grow, then she went to the sink to wash the ingrained dirt out of her hands and wrists and nails. She scrubbed until her skin tingled and then she decided to take a bath and change her clothes. Treadway had to go in the truck to Goose Bay to replace some of his drill bits in order to repair his Ski-Doo, and she asked if she could go with him. She stood in the Mealy Mountain Outfitters’ Co-op while he spoke with the owner. She smelled the oakum and canvas and metal dust from the key-cutting machine, and she asked him how he felt about going in to Mom’s Home Cooking for some fries and a couple of hot dogs and a cup of coffee. Treadway liked onions on his hot dogs, and Mom’s Home Cooking was the only place in Goose Bay where they had a bowl of chopped onions on the counter beside the ketchup, mustard, and relish, because that was what Americans working on the base liked, and Georgina Hounsell had paid attention.

Treadway said, “I haven’t been in there for a long time.” He saw she had been looking at fancy gardening gloves hanging on a display rack with a sale price on them, left over from Mothers’ Day. He had his drill bits in his hand along with a box of cotton work gloves and a packet of sandpaper. “Do you want me to buy you a pair of those?”

“No.”

“They have nice flowers on them.”

“I don’t like flowers on gardening gloves. If I’m going to work in the garden I want plain work gloves like those you’ve got there.” His work gloves were white cotton and a box of twenty pairs cost the same as one pair of the ladies’ gardening gloves. He had known this about Jacinta, that she liked using his plain white gloves, and he had always liked the fact, but it was one of the things he had forgotten.