“That’s because I don’t bring firewood out of that part of the woods anymore. You can’t keep bringing wood from the same place or you’ll have no woods. I should have hauled up those logs last year.”
“But could you leave them there and could I have them? I want to make a place.”
“You want to make a fort over the creek.”
“I guess. Yeah.”
“A hideout.”
“Kind of.”
“We had hideouts. We used to spend the whole summer in them.”
“Did you?” Wayne liked it when his father remembered being young.
“Did we ever. We ate and slept in them. Me and Danny Fortescue and Jim Baikie and a gang of other lads. But why would you want to have your fort over the creek? You want a hideout in the woods, not out in the open.”
“I think it would be really great over the water.”
“I suppose a lot of forts did have approaches by water. You could see the enemy coming that way, by boat.”
Wayne had not been thinking of enemies. “Can I use that wood in the corner?”
“I was going to use that to repair the shed.” Treadway assessed the pile. “But I suppose you could have some of it. That creek is not very wide. But have you got a clue how you’re going to build a fort over it?”
Wayne had something in mind. He did not know if he could explain it to his father. “It has a cover. Like a roof. But spaces to look through.”
“I don’t mean the top,” Treadway said. “The top is airy-fairy. You can stick any kind of top on it. What I’m talking about is the foundation. How are you going to make the base? That’s what you have to think of first.”
“That’s why I asked you about the logs that are already there. Could we just put some boards over those?”
“That’s just a log skid. You’re only going over that once in a blue moon with a sled. The logs are slippery and half rotten. That’s no good for a fort. For a fort you want something that goes down into the creek bed.”
“Dad, I don’t need anything like that. I just need a small place.”
Treadway did not untangle any more strings. He took a pencil out of his pocket, found a package of soldering wire that had no writing on the back, and drew Wayne a diagram. He drew two concentric circles.
“This is how the Romans did it. You can’t be thinking about the thing from the top down. This is a cofferdam. They drove a circle of piles deep into the riverbed. Then another circle inside it. Then they filled the outer ring with a kind of clay.”
“Dad.”
“Real waterproof stuff. Then, the water trapped inside, in the inner circle, they got slaves with buckets to bail it out. People died. They got crushed. But they emptied that inner circle. They made a dry spot right in the middle of the riverbed. They built the central pier of a bridge or section of a bridge in that.”
“Dad, I just want to make something really easy.”
“There is nothing really easy, Wayne. Not in this life. Not if it’s any good. I’m telling you, if you want to make any kind of structure over that creek, even a small creek like that, you need to think about the river bottom. Measure it and study it. If you don’t do that, your bridge is going to fall, with you in it. What kind of a father would let that happen to his son?”
“Dad, the creek has only got, like, eight inches of water in it.”
“What I’m saying is, Wayne, you’ve got to study what’s below that eight inches of water. Is it mud? Is it stone? Is it sand? Is it going to be gouged out by the current? You’ve got to know what you’re building on. If you do that, if you study it real good, mind, you can have that wood, son. I’ll help you get started. We can start on it this afternoon if you want.”
Wayne wanted the wood but he was not sure he wanted his father to help him make a bridge over the creek. “Will we finish cleaning up the cabbages?”
“That’s what your mother calls them. Cabbages. Instead of cabbage. That’s one way you can tell she wasn’t born in Labrador.”
Wayne knew his father was right. Anyone from Labrador called vegetables by their single name. Cabbage. Turnip. Carrot. No matter how many individual specimens, you spoke of them as one entity. He realized Treadway thought about people in the same way. Men, to him, were all one man.
The outer cabbage leaves insulated the inner parts, which Wayne’s mother rationed until mid-June, two weeks away, when there would be fresh turnip greens and dandelion. The cabbages hung hard and cold and knocked Wayne’s head when his mother sent him to get berries out of the barrels, and that hurt. You had to smack the berries with the cup, then they rolled apart, clicking like cold marbles. The shed was dark. You felt your way to the produce. The food transformed once Jacinta boiled it in the kitchen: its colours and flavours burst alive as if the wood fire were the heat of the sun, which Treadway said it was, indirectly. A lot of Labrador was like that. Dull and frozen and in the dark one minute; bursting with sour and sweet and red and green when you did something with it. Labrador was a place where the human touch meant everything.
“What you really want over that creek,” Treadway said in the kitchen, “is a simple cantilever.” He tore the top flap off the cornflakes box and raised his pencil stub.
“Dad, it doesn’t have to be anything complicated.”
“That way you won’t have to deal with the creek bottom. See?” He showed Wayne a diagram. “You anchor each end to a couple of bases on the riverbank and they meet in the middle.”
“But there’s a crack in the middle. It’ll fall down.”
“It won’t. The end pieces are going to anchor it. I have some cement and some rebar and some old bolts from Graham Montague’s wharf. What we need to do is each get a shovel and start digging foundations for the posts.”
“Dad, I don’t want to get a shovel. I have math homework.”
“What kind of math homework?”
“Measuring triangles. We have to find out the lengths of the missing pieces.”
“Perfect. Get your math homework out and we’ll incorporate it into our construction project.”
“Dad.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun.”
It was a Saturday and on Saturdays Jacinta made bread, so they were all in the kitchen most of the day. The radio was on. There was rain against the windows and some steam, and the family felt happy. By the time Jacinta had kneaded six loaves and set them to rise twice, the table was covered in drawings. Treadway was concentrating on the bridge as if it was his own, and Wayne liked making fair copies of the diagrams with a six-inch metal ruler and a carpenter’s pencil Treadway had sharpened with a razor. He liked the flat, chunky width of the pencil.
“Can I keep this pencil, Dad?”
“Yes, son, you can have it.”
In the morning Treadway took him to the creek to haul up the old logs and dig holes and build forms for the posts. He showed Wayne how to use a pickaxe and how to mix cement. Wayne liked the sound cement made when you had it wet, when you mixed it with the shoveclass="underline" a sluicing, slicing sound that meant you were making something big. His father showed him how to mix stones into the cement, and how to place the rebar inside the forms. It took three weekends of this before they had four support posts ready.
“When is it going to be done, Dad? School is over. Me and Wally want to use the bridge and all we’ve got done is the posts.”
“You and Wally Michelin?”
“Yes. We really want to use the bridge.”
“I thought you were going to play on the bridge with some boys, Wayne. Brent Shiwack and some of the other lads.”
“No! I want to go on it with Wally.”
“I was thinking we should construct the bridge so you can remove a section if you don’t want the other team to be able to cross it. That is an old, old tactic used in wartime for millennia.”