He carefully folded the bread bag they had used and tucked it into the empty Vienna sausage can with the used teabags, and he wrapped it all in leftover birch rind and put the package in his knapsack. Wayne got on the back of the Ski-Doo behind him and hung on to the passenger handle for dear life, because there were a lot of bumps and it often felt like if he didn’t hang on using all his muscle power, a bump would fling him onto the trail and his father might not notice until he got home. That’s how loud the engine was, and how relentless its momentum, on the woods trail. They had a good load of wood, enough to heat the house for two weeks. Half a dozen more loads like this and they would be done, and Treadway could go on his trapline.
Some boys went with their fathers. They just left school to go on the trapline, and no one said anything. Wayne dreaded the day when Treadway would suggest he do this. Wayne was looking forward to school. Thomasina Baikie was coming back. She had sent her last postcard from Wales. On the front was Thomas Telford’s iron bridge over the Menai Strait.
“It broke a world record,” Thomasina wrote, “for the longest suspension bridge in the world. I love it here so much, Wayne, that I’m finishing my last two classes at Harlow. In September I’ll be coming back to Croydon Harbour to teach. I’ll be teaching grades seven, eight and nine.” Wayne was going into grade seven. He was excited about having Thomasina for a teacher. He loved new pencils and rulers and exercise books, and he liked being at home in the nights, in his room, studying and sketching and listening to music.
But his father could go miles without rest or food, and Treadway did not mind what Wayne saw as monotony: miles upon miles of spruce woods, a heavy packsack, and your footprints sinking through a hard crust of snow, and the death of the beautiful animals.
In bed Wayne thought about what his father had said. He imagined a man and a woman in their pyjamas, lying side by side in their marriage bed. The man fell asleep. So did the woman. While they were asleep, the man’s penis somehow reached out of his pyjama pants. It found its way, something like Brent Shiwack’s wiener, over towards the woman. She must have been wearing a short nightdress, not a long one like his mother’s, or loose pyjama pants. Anyway, somehow the penis, which must have had a sense of direction and an ability to explore on its own, got through the woman’s clothes and nosed its way into her vagina. This amazed Wayne. He had not known that such a thing happened, but he did feel there was something powerful and slightly sinister about penises, so he believed his father. The funny thing was that even though this whole story — the facts of life according to Treadway — depended on involuntary activities of body parts unbeknownst to their sleeping owners, the knowledge of it excited the low, aching hunger in Wayne’s belly. He lay in bed and touched his own penis. It did not respond, but the place behind it, underneath it, buried in his body between his legs, did respond. If he touched the skin underneath his testicle and rubbed it, it made the hunger clamour and grow wild. He pressed and pushed a little, and he thought of penises going into vaginas while he did so, and in a couple of minutes the hunger between his legs opened its mouth and devoured a shuddering, delicious and joyful series of electric jolts that delighted his whole body.
Treadway went to bed early and dreamed of a baby fox caught in his trap. He wanted to save the fox because it was too young for its skin to be of any value, and it had soft paws and looked at him with pleading eyes.
While Treadway slept, Jacinta cleaned the surfaces in the house. Treadway had not told her about his father-and-son talk but she knew he had done it as she asked, because he always did what she asked if she asked him in a particular way. A way that said she was counting on him to provide a basic husbandly service she could not do herself. She knew he had carried out the father-and-son talk, and she could tell he was disturbed about it in some profound way he did not want to talk about. Whenever Treadway was emotionally tired, he went to bed even earlier than usual, using sleep like a kind of temporary, convenient death.
Jacinta swept the floors and wiped the counters, then got a bucket of red-hot water with Pine-Sol in it and a mop, and scoured the kitchen floor and hallway. She dumped the water down the toilet and filled the bucket again, then put rubber gloves on and took a rag and a scrubbing brush and got down on her knees on an old flat cushion and washed every speck of dirt out of the corners and off the baseboards, then she washed the stairs by hand, and polished the toaster and the fridge, and washed the fingerprints off the walls near all the light switches and off the doors near the doorknobs and off the telephone. She went outside and then came in again to smell with a fresh nose how clean the house smelled, and then she got in bed beside sleeping Treadway and thought how good it would be when he went on his trapline, how there would be fewer footprints to clean.
Part Three
12
General Electric
WHEN THOMASINA RETURNED TO Croydon Harbour, she rented a room in the Guest House, the big white house built by Moravian missionaries and bought by Sir Wilfred Grenfell’s society to rent to new teachers and doctors. Thomasina did not intend to build again. She was past building, or sending down roots, or planning into the deep future. Approaching fifty, she knew there is a deep future in one’s life for only so long, then there is no deep future. There is a cliff, you drop off it, and your life comes to an end, and hopefully it has been a life in which you touched other lives with some sort of constructive tenderness.
Wayne’s grade seven classmates were not sure what to make of their new teacher. Some of their parents had a few things to say about Thomasina Baikie around the dinner table. How she had gone off gallivanting, after her husband, Graham Montague, had drowned with their little red-haired daughter. She did not look now the way she had looked before. Her hair had turned salt-and-pepper and she had cut it, and she wore wire glasses and jeans. You got the feeling something radical could happen with her around.
“What is she doing living in that place?” Brent Shiwack said at recess time. “My dad says she must be nuts to pay rent there. It’s only for visitors.”
In class Thomasina did not speak to her students as if they were children, and she did not single Wayne out.
“When you were all babies,” she said, “my husband died.”
Wayne knew this. He remembered the photograph of Graham Montague that had sat on her sideboard.
“I wanted to see the world, and he said that was all right with him, just wait a year. But it never happened. And then he died.”
The class did not know what to make of this.
“You don’t say died,” Donna Palliser whispered. “You say passed away.” There was an uncomfortable feeling in the room. Those who did not smirk tried to look respectful. A man had died.
“So now I can go wherever I want.” Thomasina handed them each a blue stone on a piece of elastic. Each stone bore a painted eye that looked out with severity. Wayne felt wary of the eye. The girls tied theirs onto their wrists and the boys laid them on their desks. The eyes had come from Greece. Thomasina showed them a clay lantern that was nothing but a bowl that fit in your hand, and you filled it with olive oil and lit a piece of wick that floated in the oil, and that was how you had light. Using the projector with clacking, whirring sprockets whose sound Wayne loved, she showed them a Greek dance in which everyone did steps that looked easy but were not.