Annabel - Kathleen Winter [140]
“When?” asked Treadway. “When is the Lord planning on getting around to it? Because I can have it done by this time tomorrow.”
But the hawk used an argument Treadway had used many times himself when Jacinta had asked him to explain or justify a decision he had made. The hawk used the argument of one lone proclamation followed by silence, and in that silence, Treadway knew, he could protest all he liked, but he would not win the argument.
34
The Fire of Your Grace
WHEN HE GOT ONN THE TRAIN from Portland to Boston, Wayne felt what his father had promised he would feel.
“Don’t go in the van,” Treadway had said. “Leave your van and get on the bus to Port-aux-Basques. Get the ferry to North Sydney but don’t get on the train there. Go to Yarmouth and get the Yarmouth ferry to Portland, and then you’ll be almost in Boston. You don’t want to be in the van, navigating.”
Treadway had carefully studied a map he had bought in the gift shop at the Newfoundland Hotel. “You want to sit back and look out the windows at everything. You don’t want the trip to be one road sign after another and a maze of overpasses. Trains and ferries will give you a real journey to Boston. Your van is a responsibility. Navigating is a chore. A train will take the weight of the world away.”
The train went through what seemed to Wayne to be private sections of ordinary people’s lives: balconies and backyards where shovels had been left against fences, and clothes hung in a damp wind that made them tremulous, so that the clothes appeared intimate. The balconies had chairs on them: wooden chairs and a few upholstered chairs that no one minded leaving in the rain. Some balconies held small tables and the people who lived there had left pitchers and coffeepots on them, and had done so recently, so that the balconies, as Wayne passed them on the train, felt as if remnants of conversation hung inside them. There was a tumbledown feel to the flowers that clung to trellises at the backs of American towns, and in blue clematis or scarlet runner beans against red brick lay a feeling of peace Wayne found unaccountable, yet he felt it as he looked out the train window. His father had been right.
Wally Michelin’s aunt Doreen had answered the phone and told Wayne to come down. She had a small spare room. Wally was excited about having been accepted into the Boston Downtown Community Choir. Yes, the ticket had been for Thomasina, and no, Wally would not mind that Thomasina had given it to Wayne.
“Thomasina wrote and told us,” Doreen said. “She told us to look after you.”
In the weeks following Treadway’s visit, summer had turned. No leaf had changed colour but the sky had changed. It was silver and leaden and it brought out the colours beneath it in a way the summer sky did not. Summer sky swallowed colour, but the sky of late August made colour ricochet back to earth, and there were sharp edges on all the buildings and curbs and even on the leaves of the trees and on the impatiens in the flowerbeds of all the towns through which Wayne travelled to reach Wally Michelin. The closer he got to Boston, the sharper this light grew, and the more he feared he had done the wrong thing in coming. It was one thing to have a ticket in your pocket for a choir performance. That gave you permission to go into the theatre and take your seat. But did it give you permission to re-enter the life of a beloved friend after you and she had left each other behind?
Wally’s aunt