“But you were right to wonder,” Jacinta had said. “It is grammatically confusing.” That day the specialist had prescribed the first yellow pills.
“Is what I have,” Wayne said now, “called something?” He did not like to have an ailment for which there was no word. He had never heard of anyone in his class having a nameless medical condition. Even the things that killed you had a name. He had not gone to Stevie White’s funeral, but his class had had that day off school, and Mr. White had taken his car through the Techni-Tone Car Wash in Goose Bay, and Stevie’s sisters and aunts had decorated it with six hundred Kleenex carnations, and Stevie’s coffin had been shiny black with white and pink satin inside and a picture of the Last Supper.
“If I had a brain tumour, would you tell me?”
Jacinta knew this was the last of his questions. It was always the last one, and she always answered it the same way. “You don’t have a brain tumour. I promise you that.”
“Mom?”
“What?”
“My feet are peeling.”
“Stop worrying about everything.”
“In bed. I felt them. The skin was peeling off. I pulled an edge and it came off in sheets.”
“Wait a couple of days and if it doesn’t get any better you can remind me about it.”
“Mom. That’s what you always say about everything.”
“You might already know this.” Treadway’s voice was half lost under the noise of his chainsaw. He was limbing the last log.
“What?” Wayne supposed his father wanted to tell him how to tie the rope that kept the logs on the sled. His father had ways of doing knots that had to be obeyed according to the task. The acrid gasoline fumes got up Wayne’s nose. He liked that. He liked the wood-sap smell, the physical lifting, the noise. His father was happy when Wayne helped him hoist wood. Wood hauling began on cold mornings when the first frost entered the ground, just before school started in the fall. You got to make a fire and boil tea and eat Vienna sausages out of the can with homemade bread and margarine.
“The facts of life,” Treadway hollered.
“It’s okay, Dad.”
“What?”
“It’s okay.”
Treadway shut off the engine. He was not glad of the silence. Their shouts hung over the caribou moss, in the spaces between spruce. “Get those blasty boughs and make a base.”
The circle of rocks was the one they had used last fall. All Treadway had to do was move two that had fallen out of the circle. They had brought birch rinds and back issues of the Labradorian, and Treadway handed Wayne his lighter. “You probably hear the facts of life in school. But a father likes to tell them straight. To make sure his son doesn’t get the wrong end of the stick.”
“Dad, it’s okay. You don’t have to go into it. Honest.” This was not entirely true. Wayne had pieced together certain things, but there were gaps in the process as he understood it.
Treadway lit the sticks. They inhaled the sugary smoke. They were sweaty from hauling wood and they peeled their coveralls down and sat on cushions of frozen caribou moss in their undershirts. Crumbled lichen and needles and sap lay on their collarbones and shoulders.
“I’ll just get it over with,” Treadway said, “and I will have dispatched that part of my duty. Your mother reminded me.”
“Dad.”
“And she’s right. So you probably notice sometimes now, when you wake up, you might have, you know, wetness in the bed.”
“What?”
“You might have thought you wet the bed. You might be worried about it.”
“Dad. I don’t wet the bed.”
“It happens to all boys.”
“It doesn’t happen to me.”
“So it’s just ejaculation and you shouldn’t worry about it. The next thing is you probably noticed you get an erection sometimes.”
“Dad.”
“That’s what they call a hard-on.”
“Dad!”
“But the real name is an erection, and it’s nothing to be embarrassed about. No one can tell.”
“Dad, stop it.”
“You might think they can but they can’t. It can happen any time, not just when you’re thinking about a girl.”
“Okay, Dad. I get it.” Wayne stared at berries that had rolled under the caribou moss. He heard the hiss of torn tin and a broken vacuum seal as his father pulled the ringtop on the Vienna sausage can. He smelled the meat and the brine. He’d had an erection only once. He had not been thinking about a girl. His father handed him the can and he ate three sausages with his fingers while his father buttered some bread. There had been other feelings, deeper and more hungry than an erection.
“You must have noticed changes in your body.”
“My feet are peeling,” Wayne said, “and I get a stomach ache.”
“Your feet?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean?”
“The skin comes off.”
“Take your boots off.”
Wayne took his boots off and sank his bare feet in the caribou moss. “The bottoms.”
Treadway picked up his son’s foot. “Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“Did you ask your mother about it?”
“She told me to tell her if it doesn’t go away. She always says that.”
“Maybe she knows. I never heard of it. But I have to finish telling you this.” Treadway sighed. He did not like being sidetracked.
“Dad, it’s okay.”
“I know you think you know everything about the facts of life. And maybe you do. And if you do, it won’t hurt you to hear them again. But maybe there’s one or two facts you have wrong, and if there are, I’m going to tell you the right ones. That’s all. There’s no big deal. But you have to know the real story. And then I won’t mention it any more. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“So when you get married, you sleep in the same bed with a woman. Women have a vagina. When a man and a wife are in bed together, the penis fits into the vagina. It might not seem like that could happen, but it can. It fits in there. And that’s when the seed of the man, inside the penis, comes out and goes into the woman’s body. And that’s how the embryo of a baby is formed, and of course the baby grows in her belly, and then nine months later, it is born.”
Wayne had not known this. He didn’t know what he had known. Brent Shiwack had saved his hot dog wiener from lunch one day, and had wiggled it through the fly of his jeans at Gracie Slab while everyone was drawing isosceles triangles, and had panted with his tongue out. Davina White up in grade nine had gotten pregnant, and some people said she was a slut but others said no, it happens to the ones who aren’t sluts. Davina White came to the schoolyard with her baby in a stroller at lunchtime to eat bags of chips and drink Pepsi with her friends, and when lunch was over she walked with her baby back down the hill, and Wayne felt sorry for her. Some people said Davina shouldn’t be allowed to come to the schoolyard because her baby might make other girls want to have a baby too.
Treadway had dispatched his duty but he felt extremely awkward and wished he had waited, as his own father had done, until he and his son happened upon the mating of caribou in the herd. It had been beautiful, in slow motion, snowflakes falling on the creatures, and Treadway had instantly understood nearly everything there was to know about male and female intimacy, the mechanics of it. His father had not had to talk about marriage beds or body parts. He had not had to use the word embryo, or any other clinical word. But Jacinta had wanted him to bring up the subject. He felt he had not done the job decently. He had made it seem unnatural. And he had not been able to stop looking at his son’s body and seeing things he did not want to admit. His son looked like a girl. He talked like a girl, his hair was like a girl’s, and so were his throat and chest. When they had peeled down the tops of their overalls, Treadway had seen that his son had breast buds, small and tender through his undershirt, and it had shocked him. He wondered if Wayne had noticed them himself, or if any of the boys at school had teased him about it. The buds were very small, but they were present. What if they grew larger? What was wrong with the doctors?