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By Root 656 0

maps of the campus and drawing circles around course numbers, that he was in a kind of wilderness; it was similar in some ways to being in the bush with his father. There was a sense that the sun was strong and there was no domesticity for miles. Any venture you made was because you were setting out on a kind of exploration that was the same as a hunt. The students around him were beginning a journey that was open-ended, like his father’s journeys away from the curtains of his mother’s kitchen and into a vastness of territory that remained unnamed. If anyone named it, you could unname it. There were no walls around the terrain. It occurred to him that his father would have liked such a place as this, and he wished his father had come with him so he could see it.

The other thing Wayne noticed was that among the students he did not feel out of place because of his body’s ambiguity, as he had felt on the streets of downtown St. John’s. Many of these students looked to Wayne as if they could be the same as him: either male or female. There was not the same striation of sexuality that there was in the ordinary world outside a campus. There were girls who looked like he did, and there were boys who did too, and there were certainly students who wore no makeup and had a plain beauty that was made of insight and intelligence and did not have a gender. He felt he was in some kind of a free world to which he wanted to belong, and he wondered if all campuses were like this.

In the train on his way back from Boston he kept thinking about this. His father had given him money. He had not known what to do with it when Treadway had handed him that bank book near the salt pile for the roads of St. John’s. But he knew what to do with it now. Wally Michelin had helped him see it, and so had his father, and so had Thomasina Baikie, and now, on the train, he did not travel the route by which he had come. Between the Vermont border and the Newfoundland ferry were five schools that Wally Michelin and her aunt had helped Wayne find in brochures and university calendars. He intended to stop at them all. He did not yet know which world he wanted to be in, but he had begun to glimpse the worlds.

Again as his train passed the backs of towns, Wayne noticed intimate pieces of domestic life like those that had touched him on his way to visit Wally Michelin. Washing lines with plaintive little pulleys; men and women who lived near the track and had watched a thousand trains pass. It was a beautiful world, the one inside the houses where kettles boiled on blue gas flowers, but he was glad he was not in it, and in this respect he was the same as his father.

He thought about the bridges the train would cross, and bridges that had not yet been envisioned. He knew now that there were schools where you learned how to design bridges that would be built, bridges that were beautiful. This was what he wanted to do. In his pocket lay the Labrador Credit Union bank book containing the record of his father’s gold. He knew on the train that in his thinking he was not so different from his father. His father would, this coming winter, walk his trapline towards unnamed places, and Wayne would finally be on his way to a landscape that was for him as magnetic and as big as Labrador.

Epilogue

LE THÉÂTRE CAPITOLE IN QUEBEC CITY was a relic from the twenties, when you did not watch a show, you attended a spectacle. The seating was not in little English rows but in sweeping arcs upon which rested chairs that swivelled around black tables with room enough for one martini each. By intermission, cigarette smoke hung in blue swirls so thick you were lucky to see the performer’s face rising over it like a mythical demigod. Thomasina loved it. She had bought the tickets and had asked for them to be held at the box office, and they were good tickets, in the first row of the second-highest tier. She had told Wally Michelin that she and Wayne would arrive together.

Thomasina had decked herself out with a good little car. When you were forty and fifty, it was all right