Young people had fallen from Croydon Harbour like leaves from the birches along the inlet, especially the young men, now that there were other opportunities besides trapping and hunting. A lot of boys went to military college in New Brunswick, lured by the shine on the soldiers at the American base in Goose Bay. Tim McPhail, the boy with whom Wally Michelin had gone to the prom, went to St. Francis Xavier to study engineering. His yearbook entry said his first love was physics, but any boy knew you had to have something practical to fall back on, though not hunting or trapping. The old ways of earning a living had been enough for the fathers and grandfathers, who considered them a kind of freedom and did not understand what would make a son want to wear work clothes you had to buy in a Goose Bay department store instead of coats and boots of seal and caribou. Treadway was not the only father who did not understand the new sons of Labrador, but he was the only one who did not lament about the subject with the other men. If he lamented he did so in solitude, on his trapline, or he consulted with the wild animals there. The only real friend Wayne had in Croydon Harbour was Gracie Watts, and he worried about this friendship.
Gracie’s father was the kind of alcoholic who gets nasty and red in the face and whose cruelty is matched only by his cowardice and self-loathing when not drunk. Gracie’s mother kept their house spotless. It had next to no furniture, because anything with legs or spindles, Geoffrey Watts broke. To look at Gracie’s mother you would think her pious and stern. You would think she had decided to approach life as a parsimonious woman, joyless by choice. She looked religious but she was not so much pious as she was scoured: all joy stripped from her by marriage. Gracie had seen this happen and intended to get out. She had asked Wayne to make her a hope chest and he had made it for her. He often went over to her house after her father had passed out on his daybed in the room beyond the kitchen and her mother had closed the door behind her in the little room she used as a sewing room. Their house was so quiet at these times you would think Mr. and Mrs. Watts were paper outlines, or shadows.
Wayne worried about the hope chest. There were young couples in Croydon Harbour, people his and Gracie’s age, who appeared to gravitate together by some tidal pull rather than by desire or by any conscious decision. They went to a few dances together, and before you knew it one of their fathers was clearing space at the back of the family land for a new bungalow. Then before you knew it again, the men of Croydon Harbour were digging a foundation and laying down cement, and the girl was pregnant, and in what felt like an instant the new little family was ensconced in their brand-new bungalow.
Now Gracie sat and circled the order number on a Panasonic sandwich griddle on sale for $16.99 in the Canadian Tire catalogue. “It says here it corrugates the bread and increases its surface area so a sandwich grills in half the normal time.”
“I don’t want,” Wayne said, “to be like Archie Broomfield and Carol Rich.” He had been looking at the undersides of moths that had alighted on the window outside, armoured and malevolent. The wings looked delicate but the mechanism that nourished and propelled the wings was ugly.
Wayne had dovetailed the edges of Gracie’s hope chest and made its floor of cedar to keep moths away from her pillowcases and a tablecloth her mother had edged in satin stitch. The hope chest was small, and the things in it were small, but he feared they held some sort of power he needed to guard against. He knew Gracie was buying silverware, one place setting at a time, from the Eaton’s catalogue, and that the name of the design was Sambonet.
There were times Gracie made him feel desire, like the time she had melted him and made him feel protective of her with one touch of her hand at the prom. The latest pills Dr. Lioukras had given him were cumulative: over time they had increased his muscle mass and succeeded in making him look like any other son of Croydon Harbour. His voice sounded like a young man’s voice, and he was stronger than a girl. He and Gracie looked, from the outside, like a couple.
Because Gracie wanted a home more than anything else, she came to his house when he was not working. She took him out for walks and she kissed him in the bushes. She had kissed many boys before, and she believed Wayne’s kisses were the kisses of a normal young man. There was nothing to tell her otherwise, but she had no choice but to sense that he was holding back.
“Don’t you want to make love to me?”
“Yes.” He did. When Gracie got close to him and he smelled her Evening in Paris perfume and felt how soft the skin was inside her wrists, and when she touched him with the hungry way she had, yes. It was when he was alone in his room, thinking about his life and where he wanted it to go, that he knew he did not love Gracie. She did not ignite him, though his physical body responded to the fact that she wanted him. This was not the same as being ignited through your electric and imaginative bodies, but a long time can go by in which two people remain together because of the fierce longing of one of them. A lifetime can go by, and he worried about this.
“I don’t want to be like Carol Rich and Archie Broomfield either,” Gracie said. “I don’t want to get pregnant, for one thing. And I’m going to make my own money. I’m going to take the paramedic course in Goose Bay. I’m going to do something useful. I’m going to drive a hundred miles an hour in an ambulance and carry people on stretchers and give emergency blood transfusions. I’m going to have my own job, my own paycheque, my own bank account.”
Was she telling him this so he would not be afraid of having to make enough money for both of them? While his classmates had chosen normal career paths, Wayne had continued to sell cod tongues, some fillets, and packages of Roland Shiwack’s shrimp. He sold these, gave tours, and cut wood for women whose husbands were on the trapline and whose sons had gone away to work. He knew this was a haphazard way to make a living. He did not know what else to do. How had his classmates been so certain about what they wanted to do after high school? To him the world seemed big and small at the same time. There was Croydon Harbour, with everything he knew, then there was the world outside Croydon Harbour, about which he knew nothing. How did you get to know anything?
“I didn’t know Carol Rich was pregnant.”
“Well, she is. She’s five months. That’s why her father and his brothers have her and Archie’s house half built behind the marsh. They have to have it done by the time the baby gets born next January. What did you think they were building it for?”
“I didn’t know is all.”
“And don’t think Carol Rich got pregnant by accident. And don’t think for a second that that’s what I want. I told you, I’m going to earn my own money, and I’m not going to have a baby until I’m at least twenty-five. That’s not for another six years.”
But how, he wondered, did she plan to spend those six years? He had noticed she kept the lid of her hope chest open. He could not help thinking it looked like an open mouth, hungry. He responded to her physical touch but it was her mental hunger that frightened him, and he did not know how he was going to escape from it. He felt compassion every time he looked at Gracie, with her fierce little statements about how she would staunch blood and bandage trauma victims in her ambulance. She would have a transmitter that announced urgencies in the night: wounds, heart failure, poisoning. Gracie had told him she would love this. She would love triage, emergency cauterization, administering oxygen. She wanted to be the capable one amid panic or crisis: the one needed, the one who saved. That would be her work and then she would come home, where there would be peace and quiet. This idea of peace and quiet bothered Wayne. In his fear of domestic stasis he was more like his father than he knew.