He looked at the bank book repeatedly, then stuffed it away again, afraid of losing it. In it was a figure that both pleased and disappointed him. It was the total amount of money that the Labrador Credit Union in Goose Bay had agreed to trade him for his gold. The figure pleased him because it was a lot higher than the amount he had originally paid for the gold, but it disappointed him because he knew that now, converted into money, that figure would no longer increase.
The word was liquidation. Treadway had liquidated the gold, and now it would get smaller, because you spent money, you did not save it. The regret he felt was not on his own behalf.
Treadway was going to give the bank book, and the money it represented, to his son. He regretted only that the figure could not grow and that its power was uncertain: when it was spent, his son might be in a position to make a good living in this world, but he might not. Treadway regretted that he could not see into the future and know for certain whether giving this money to Wayne would be fruitful or not. Fruitfulness might be an old-fashioned concept, Treadway thought. It might be something he had read in his hunting cabin in the books of Genesis and Matthew. It might be something the land and the animals of a place like Labrador understood while a city like St. John’s might not. Fruitfulness was a thing that came from seeds and plants and animal life. It was a thing that happened naturally in the wilderness. But it might be forgotten here, in this place where his son now lived. Selling the gold and turning it into money was not fruitfulness, and Treadway knew this, and was aware, on this day in which he was lost in the city, that mere gold could be like many of these streets. It could be a dead end, when what his son really needed was life.
“Dad? Are you near the Fountain Spray?” Wayne had heard someone shout about the Fountain Spray in the background noise. The Fountain Spray was a shop on Military Road, near Bannerman Park.
“I don’t know, son. I’m across the road from a grey and white church.”
“Is it St. Thomas’s Church?”
“I can’t see from here. I’m in a phone booth and there are five roads going in all different directions.”
“Dad, can you see the Newfoundland Hotel?”
“There is a pretty big hotel to my right.”
“It sounds like you’re at the traffic circle on King’s Bridge Road. Can you see any street signs? Can you see Military Road or Ordnance Street?”
“I can’t see the signs from here, but yes, I just walked along Military Road.”
“Okay, stay there and I’ll meet you.”
“Just give me directions, son.”
“It’s okay, Dad. It’s not far, and it’s confusing. I was confused myself by that intersection when I first got here. It would confuse anyone.”
Wayne could not bear to think of his father lost in a telephone booth at the King’s Bridge Road traffic circle. He put the phone down and ran down Forest Road and King’s Bridge Road, and when he saw the telephone booth in the distance with cars and trucks and traffic lights and the hotel all buzzing around his father, who stood in front of the phone booth carrying a rolled-up sleeping bag, he thought how lost his father looked, how small and round and like a wild owl or a shore duck that had been blown a thousand miles off course, far from its own habitat.
When Treadway saw Wayne’s apartment, how bare it was, he said, “It’s a good thing I brought my sleeping bag.” But he did not dwell on this or make Wayne feel as if the apartment was not good. Treadway had slept in harder conditions than this, and he made do with the floor as his son did. There was a bedroom, and Treadway rolled his jacket into a pillow and said the floor was palatial. Hearing his father say this made Wayne realize Treadway had the capacity in him to be funny, which Wayne had not known. Treadway unrolled his sleeping bag and took out of it another bag, one of the woven fertilizer bags he normally used to bring sawdust from Goudie’s sawmill to pack around his carrots in the winter shed. From that bag Treadway took a coil of snare wire and his toothbrush and three pairs of socks and three pairs of underwear, which Wayne realized was the sum of his luggage.
“Let’s go to Ches’s for fish and chips.” Treadway folded the fertilizer bag flat and tucked it into his waistband. Wayne was surprised his father knew about Ches’s.
“It’s famous,” Treadway said. “Everyone has read about Ches’s.”
In fact, Wayne told him, Leo’s was better than Ches’s. Leo’s was not as famous but they fried the fish twice and the batter puffed like a cloud, and the fish was better too. Treadway said he was starving, so they walked together back to Military Road and up to the end of Long’s Hill, where all the fish and chip shops were. As they walked, Treadway kept surprising Wayne with things he knew about the local roads and architecture and details of the city.
“They got the stones for that from Galway,” Treadway said as they passed the basilica. “The limestone anyway. The granite they brought over from Dublin.” He looked at everything and seemed interested in it. When they reached Leo’s, Treadway sat down and scuffed his feet over the floor and said, “You don’t get many terrazzo floors anymore.”
Wayne had been in Leo’s many times and had not noticed the floor. Now he looked at it.
“It’s old. Cracked,” Treadway said. “They can’t get anybody to fix it in this day and age. But beautiful.”
There were a few things Treadway wanted to do, he told Wayne, while he was in St. John’s. He was staying for three days, and he wanted to see the exhibit of Beothuk and Inuit tools and household artifacts and hunting clothes in the Newfoundland Museum on Duckworth Street. There was a carving knife he particularly wanted to see, and a child’s fur coat with part of the tail of the animal intact.
“And I’d like you to tell me,” Treadway said, “the name of the person who attacked you. And if there is a grocery store nearby, there is something I’d like to buy in it.”
It was the first mention Treadway made of why he had really come: the misery and sadness of his son. He had not said anything about Wayne’s appearance but he had taken it in, and he did not appear to be shocked or upset by it. Wayne had always appeared more graceful than other boys as far as Treadway was concerned. He had always had an air of gentleness about his face, and his shape had not been very much different from what it was now, though there had been muscle where there was now litheness. Wayne wore a plain shirt and jeans that were the kind he had always worn, and Treadway had noticed the girl’s breasts on his son before. They were not new to him, and they were small. You could miss them if you were not looking carefully. But Treadway was looking carefully.
He took his pocketknife out and used it to cut his fish, and he noticed everything around him, including the type of engine on the city bus that passed by Leo’s window, and the German make of the clock on the fire hall across Harvey Road.
“Dad, I didn’t know you knew so much about St. John’s.”
“I don’t know anything about St. John’s.”
“You do. You know what kind of stone is in the churches and where it came from, and you know about the floor here and the bus engines, and you know what exhibits are down at the museum. I didn’t even know there was a museum.”
“You would have noticed it sooner or later. And I don’t know about the stone in all the churches, just the basilica and the Anglican cathedral, and some of the churches and castles in England and Scotland, because I read about them. Anything I know about I’ve usually read, even a lot of what I know about trapping. I get a lot from books.”