Annabel - Kathleen Winter [0]
KATHLEEN WINTER
Copyright © 2010 Kathleen Winter
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All of the events and characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This edition published in 2010 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801
Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4
Tel. 416-363-4343
Fax 416-363-1017
www.anansi.ca
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Winter, Kathleen
Annabel / Kathleen Winter.
eISBN 978-0-88784-276-4
I. Title.
PS8595.I618A55 2010 C813’.54 C2009-906505-3
Cover design: Bill Douglas on The Farm
Cover photograph: Thomas Schmidt/Getty Images
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
To my mother and father
Annabel, Annabel, where did you go? I’ve looked high and I’ve looked low.
I’ve looked low and I’ve looked high . . .
— Kat Goldman
Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix.
In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place,
and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath
the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.
— Virginia Woolf
Prologue
“PAPA!”
The blind man in the canoe is dreaming.
Why would a white caribou come down to Beaver River, where the woodland herd lives? Why would she leave the Arctic tundra, where light blazes incandescent, to haunt these shadows? Why would any caribou leave her herd to walk, solitary, thousands of miles? The herd is comfort. The herd is a fabric you can’t cut or tear, passing over the land. If you could see the herd from the sky, if you were a falcon or a king eider, it would appear like softly floating gauze over the face of the snow, no more substantial than a cloud. “We are soft,” the herd whispers. “We have no top teeth. We do not tear flesh. We do not tear at any part of life. We are gentleness itself. Why would any of us break from the herd? Break, apart, separate, these are hard words. The only reason any of us would become one, and not part of the herd, is if she were lost.”
The canoe, floating in a steady pool at the deep middle, has black, calm water around it, with froth floating on top from the foam around and above and below. The white caribou stands still, in a patch of sunlight between black tree trunks, staring at the man and the girl inside the vessel. The moss beneath the caribou’s hooves is white and appears made of the same substance as the animal, whose outlines are barely there, considering the light above and below it. It could have been poured from light itself and made of light, as if Graham Montague and his daughter had dreamed it into being.
“Papa?” Annabel stands up in the boat. She has been told, from the time before she could walk, not to do this, but she does it. For a moment the canoe stays still, then the girl outstretches her arms towards the enchantment, this caribou that now, she sees, wears a mantle of glittering frost around its shoulders and magnificent chest. In fact there are sparkles of frost throughout its white coat, and she cannot believe her father is both blind and asleep. She cannot believe life would be so unfair that a man could miss such a sight, and she stretches out her hands, which are long, and which her father has loved, and for whose practical industry and fruition he has laboured and hoped, and the canoe capsizes in the river