“China?”
“Maybe not that far.”
“You could see the magpie bridge.”
“That bridge is in the sky, Annabel. It’s not real. There’s no photograph of it.”
“I forget my address.”
“Your address is Box 43.”
“You better call me Wayne on the postcards.”
“Yes, that way the post office will know for sure they are for you.”
“I told Dad you were calling me Amble and he said he didn’t like it.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll only call you Annabel when there’s no one else around.”
When Thomasina had gone, Wayne made snowshoe twine and knife bindings with his father and ate meat cakes at the table of his parents, the fisheries report and the weather blaring continually out of both the radio and the television on the kitchen counter. Fly-catching tape hung from the ceiling with bluebottles on it, moving their legs but not their wings. A strange tension persisted when Wayne and his mother and father were together, Treadway asking questions like, “So, Wayne, have you gone down in the basement lately to check how our catgut is drying?”
The child knew that a grim, matter-of-fact attitude was required of him by his father, and he learned how to exhibit such an attitude, and he did not mind it because it was the way things were, but it was not his authentic self.
His authentic self loved to fold paper in half and cut out elaborate bilaterally symmetrical shapes: curlicues, geometrics, architectural planes that bore elaborate sills at the bottom and came to luxurious apexes. Some of the shapes had thin parts any five-year-old might snip off by accident, but Wayne was coordinated and meticulous. He cut slowly and carefully, and his mother saved his work in a binder and bought him safety scissors that she allowed him to keep in his room, where he cut at night for fifteen minutes after he had brushed his teeth, before Treadway shouted, “Get those lights off.”
For Wayne, Croydon Harbour and all that was in it had a curious division between haven and exposure. The roads were dirt and there was dust, and this felt raw. The birches, in comparison, felt incredibly soft, their shadows a cool, sizzling green that quenched the parched burning of the roads. Loud engines of trucks and Ski-Doos played against the tinkling of the juncos that made their nests in the ground. A swoop and whisper of wings, then the gun crack. The love he felt for his father, then the cold precision with which Treadway taught him how to perform tasks like scraping rust off traps with the point of a blade. Golden tea under a swirl of steam on the trapline, then walking for miles with no rest until blisters formed on his ankles. When they arrived at the hunting tilt, his father treated them with a mixture of tallow from the haunch of a caribou and black spruce turpentine, which Treadway had collected on the end of his hunting knife after cutting a blister in the trunk of a tree. Treadway administered the ointment silently. He did not say, “You should have told me it hurt before now.”
When they got home and Jacinta saw the wounds, Wayne heard her hiss, “Were you trying to wait until his skin was shredded to the bone? And did he eat? Look at his little breastbone and shoulder blades. They have a mind to poke through his skin. And he has a cough.”
It was true. Treadway could walk for twenty miles through minus-twenty-degree weather and not mind it. He wore wool next to his skin and his body was compact and dense, his core curled into itself. There were nights when he slept in the open, wrapped in a sleeping bag lined with caribou hide, and in the morning he awoke invigorated by the wild, cold air and starlight. He had not made Wayne sleep out in the open, but there were nights when he did not bother to stoke the stove in his hunting tilt because he himself did not need it stoked, and the air inside the tilt grew damp as well as cold, from their breath and the condensed vapour from their own bodies, and by the time they arrived home Wayne had a racking cough that sounded like a high groan when he breathed in. His mother kept him home from school and boiled water in her big kettle all day to make steam in the house, and bundled him up in his father’s chair, and together they ate toast and listened to the radio.
The first and second postcards from Thomasina came together, from the south of France: one had Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon on it, because Thomasina was staying in a hotel in Avignon.
“I had to take a break from teachers’ college, Wayne,” Thomasina wrote. “It is so boring. We have to study statistics. I would much rather study people and history. I think you could graduate without even knowing where all the countries are. I decided to do two semesters at a time and travel between. This is where Picasso found his models for the famous painting on the card.”
Treadway, on his way in and out of the kitchen with armloads of spruce, asked, “What kind of postcard is that to send a child?” He picked it up and studied it. “Naked women?”
“It’s Picasso,” Jacinta said.
“Are they even women? What are they wearing on their faces?”
“What are statistics, Dad?”
“Statistics, son, are facts. Facts connected with numbers. For example, the population of Croydon Harbour is 217. You add or lose a number here or there for a death or a birth, but give or take a half a dozen numbers you know where you stand. There are more interesting questions in science, but it wouldn’t hurt Thomasina Baikie to stay in one place and learn a statistic or two.”
The second postcard was a photograph of the Pont d’Avignon.
“This bridge was built in the eleven hundreds,” Thomasina wrote. “There’s only part of it left, but imagine it standing that long. It’s not the magpie bridge, Wayne, but wings still helped build it. Angel wings. There was a boy about your age. I forget his name but angels told him to build the bridge. He was able to lift massive stones, and he built it. There’s a famous song about this bridge — maybe you’ll learn it one day in French class.”
“What is that woman trying to put in Wayne’s head?” Treadway was covered in spruce shavings. A layer of cold, sweet air from outdoors clung to him.
“Maybe you should put those away,” Jacinta told Wayne. “Do you want a tin?” She gave him a Peek Freans shortbread tin and Wayne put Thomasina’s cards in it.
“Thomasina is liable to run out of money and get stuck in one of those places,” Treadway said. “Some people have an awfully funny way of going on.”
7
Elizaveta Kirilovna
WAYNE LOVED SYMMETRY, and so he loved grade three when his teacher taught about three-dimensional geometric shapes. One night while Jacinta was bottling rhubarb he asked her, “Have we got any of those wire things with paper on them that you close garbage bags with?”
“Twist ties?”
“You close garbage bags with them.”
Jacinta was fishing Mason jar lids out of her pot with a pair of tongs. “Look in the garbage-bag box.”
“Have we got any bread that isn’t homemade?”
“Your dad’s.” Treadway used store-bought bread for his toast every night at nine o’clock.
“I only need a couple of slices.”
“Behind the bologna.” Jacinta was waiting for the lids to pop down on two dozen jars. She liked it when the lids popped. She liked the definite, abrupt sound that meant no one in her family would get botulism. She liked the shiny jars on the counter, shoulder to shoulder. The accomplishment of it. Treadway might get lost out on the trapline. If he did, there would be jars of food. She filled and arranged the jars and washed the rhubarb pot and put away the sugar and cloves and the extra raisins. By the time she looked at Wayne he was sitting on the living room floor surrounded by decahedrons and cubes and hexagonal globes all the way from Treadway’s Reader’s Digest stack to the television set. Wayne had peeled the twist ties down to the wire. Then he had taken the bread and kneaded pieces into little balls of putty and connected the wires to each other using the putty. The shapes were fragile and powerful.