Annabel - Kathleen Winter [133]
There was future time, and Treadway could enter only that. It was all he could do, and he did not know what it would mean, but he had a few thoughts about what a father could do to someone who was on the loose and able to do this to his child, or to someone else’s child in the future. There would be no future for that person and his actions if Treadway Blake had anything to do with it. This was the only thought that could stop the scene from playing over again and again, the only thought that could break the pattern of the thing that his mind was playing over and over. It did not break the pattern entirely, but it made it jump. It made a father’s agony hesitate.
What mystified Treadway Blake about downtown streets in St. John’s was the dead ends. You could start down a street that began in a perfectly ordinary fashion, but then you met stairs, and the stairs led into what looked like a lane between back gardens, and before you knew it you had come into an enclosure surrounded by tall fences, and you were met by the headlamps of a black car on a grassy mound, and there was no way out but the way in which you had come. Then there was the strange way in which the houses, because they were all different — crimson, blue, purple with yellow trim, or brown with a window box of geraniums — began after a while to look the same as each other, so that you did not know whether you had encountered a new box of geraniums or travelled in a circle to meet the same one twice. The togetherness of the houses, the way they were so much more densely crowded than any house in Labrador, made him feel the houses were crowding him. It was as if they had shoulders and eyes and were closing in on him, so that he felt St. John’s had swallowed him and he was lost in its guts, and the guts were the streets that twined around and through each other exactly like the intestines of moose and caribou he had hunted and cleaned, except that here in downtown St. John’s, Treadway was no great hunter. He was not even able to find his own son, whose address he carried written on the inside cover of the bank book in his pocket. He kept taking the bank book out and looking at the address anew, but it did not help him find Forest Road. Why, Treadway wondered, had they called it Forest Road when there was no forest in sight? If there had been even the vestige of a forest, Treadway might have known what to do. But there were only the lurid houses on their interlocking tangle of avenues.
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