• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 677 0

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