You had not yet thought about how the romance that resided in each of these elements — the melons, the perfume, the rich man with the cigar, the poor man and his newspapers — did not live on its own but must come together with the others in order to exist. The romance was in the whole picture, and each of its parts was only one lonely story, and the story was often sad and without any comfort or answers or poetry or sense, or love.
Now Jacinta sat in her kitchen in Croydon Harbour holding her baby, Wayne. Instead of longing for her youth, the cinema, and the street life she used to know, she found herself bereft of the old wistfulness, and its absence was harder to bear than its existence. When there was another world to remember, a lost world, she could imagine visiting it again. She could imagine the comfort of being there for a week, then coming back to face her real life. But now her real life, her baby’s real life, had turned into something she did not know how to face. There was no ice-cream wagon, no music, no usher leading the way with a flashlight to the best remaining seat.
Jacinta was of two minds about Wayne’s christening at St. Mark’s Anglican Church in Croydon Harbour. A church, in her mind, was not what it claimed to be. Its beauty for her lay not in the meaning prescribed by the Apostles’ Creed or the liturgy, or in the banners of red, gold, and blue made by the Anglican Women’s Association proclaiming HE IS WITH US. The beauty of the building lay in its space and architecture, and Jacinta felt this beauty existed more fully at the great cathedral in St. John’s than it did in this little community church, although she tried to evoke it here by straining her imagination to its fullest limit.
The St. John’s cathedral had gargoyles, a crypt, magnificent windows brought to Newfoundland from England in barrels of molasses so the glass would not break. The windows had white lambs against sapphire skies, Egyptian goddesses in the guise of Christian icons of womanhood, pilgrims with staffs and scarlet robes straight out of the Torah and tarot, doves of hope and ravens of doom and heralds with golden trumpets. The pulpit’s eagle, towering over the congregation with its brooding stare and ravenous beak, had scared her when, as a child, she had gone for the blessing of the animals with her Aunt Myrtle, or placed hay in the crèche at Christmas with the other children, or smelled the Easter lilies, whose perfume mingled with the shade and atmosphere of the great stone walls to create a chalice in which each child sat in wonder like a small, bright, plump bee sucking mysterious nectar, intoxicating and unnerving and powerful.
In Croydon Harbour the eagle on the pulpit had been carved of pine by her husband’s father, and it had the smooth planes and lines of Inuit stone carvings, which to Jacinta looked open and closed at the same time. She could not get into those lines, into the myth and anger and spiritual flight and story of that Croydon Harbour eagle, and she did not like to look at it. It was golden, for the pine was unfinished, and this too seemed un-eagle-like to her, benevolent and untrue, not like the texture of her life.
Jacinta knew Treadway did not look at the Croydon Harbour eagle the way she did. He saw other things in it, things that had to do with his travels over the land, things he and Graham Montague and the other men of the cove, and many of the women, recognized as their own spirit, made of the energy that came off the land. There was an energy in the English eagle and another energy altogether in the Labrador eagle. They were so different that everyone knew — Treadway knew, and Jacinta knew in a different way — that the pine eagle did not belong in an Anglican church at all. But it was here, and so were the spruce-wood pews, and the plain windows, and the wooden nave, and the ordinary house carpet, and the glass jugs of flowers from patches of ground descended from the tender but incongruous gardens planted by Moravian missionaries along this coast in the early nineteen hundreds. There were pansies, poppies, and English daisies, flowers that the cliffs and seas and raging skies dwarfed but that the hearts of the first German and Scottish women had needed in order not to break upon the Labrador stones. This whole religion, Jacinta thought — and Treadway knew without thought — depended on people more than people depended on it. You didn’t need it unless you did not have the land in your heart; the land was its own god.
The minister’s name was Julian Taft — such an English name. He had a square little face, and his body, hidden under his white robe, had no curves. The thought popped into Jacinta’s mind, He is made of wood. He is a little wooden minister. Part of her was glad he could not see into her heart. He did not know her baby’s secret, just as he did not know the secrets of anyone in Croydon Harbour. He could not see into the past, nor could he see into the future. He did not know her baby had undergone an operation at the hospital in Goose Bay, or that Jacinta’s friend Eliza would begin her affair with the geography teacher after the next community garden party, or that he himself would fall in love with the same Eliza in a couple of years’ time, after the geography teacher had temporarily moved to Assumption High on the Burin Peninsula. So it stood to reason, Jacinta hoped and prayed, that the little wooden minister would not see into the present either. She wondered at his purple scarf, the gold thread in the cloth, the stiffness of him, the royalty of the textiles and the perpendicular drape of them.
But now here they were, she and Treadway and the baby Wayne, and the whole little community gathered, somehow believing in the minister’s ability to bless them. Jacinta wanted there to be a different church: a yellow house with blue sills and an open door. She wanted a big woman to own the house, to be inside it. A woman who would not turn to page 254 of the Book of Common Prayer and recite, “Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin…” What kind of words were these to start off a baby’s life? She knew Treadway had no part in the words, yet he was here. Everyone in the harbour was here, light from the windows falling on their heads and darkness inside the church making everything but the lit-up sides and tops of their faces invisible. It was dark in here, and the minister was made of wood, and sunlight blazed and could blind you outside the open door, where freedom lay so bright and frightening.
After the service, Jacinta, Treadway, the uncles and aunts, and Thomasina moved to the font, and Reverend Taft asked the parents to name the child.
“Wayne,” Treadway said.
It’s the last moment, Jacinta thought, of my daughter’s existence. She looked at the door. Where was her little girl in a sunlit dress? Run to me, quick! But the door was empty. Jacinta closed her eyes and spoke to Isis in the cathedral window in St. John’s. Not Mary. Isis, whose son, Horus, was both child and falcon.
“I baptize you” — Julian Taft took cold water and drew a cross on the baby’s forehead — “Wayne Blake.”
Thomasina stood behind Julian Taft in her choir robe, her breast grazing his shoulder, her breath in his ear, and whispered.
Julian Taft knew how to keep his lips motionless and his voice so low only Thomasina could discern it. He concealed his real voice from the people with great skill. “What did you say?”
With skill greater than his, Thomasina whispered, “Annabel,” so low he could not hear. Thomasina believed there was power in a name.
The name Annabel settled on the child as quietly as pollen alongside the one bestowed by Treadway.