Annabel - Kathleen Winter [21]
When he was five, Thomasina showed him how to connect the stars. The constellations were stories in the sky, she told him. Orion was a hunter who had a dog, just like Treadway. The Seven Sisters had lost their youngest sister, Merope, who fell to earth.
“Where did she fall?” asked Wayne.
“I don’t know. Look, there is Cygnus.” Thomasina drew it for him on paper.
“A duck?”
“A swan. In St. John’s, where your mother is from, they have swans. You can feed them cherries and seeds.”
“Swans like cherries?”
“They love cherries. Your mother told me she used to feed them a handful of cherries on Christmas Day when she was a little girl. Glacé cherries, the kind you put in a Christmas cake. See how Cygnus is at the edge of the sky. He’s getting ready to hide for the winter. But in China he’s not a swan. He’s a bridge.”
“Like the one they’re going to build at North West River?” There was always talk of bridges in that part of Labrador, where people had been getting over rivers and marshes for hundreds of years using skid runners, flat-bottomed boats, canoes, even a cable car.
“The Chinese bridge is made of magpies.”
“What are they?”
“Magpies are birds, Annabel. There are two lovers, Niu Lang and Zhi Nu. They are on opposite sides of a river. They belong together, but no one sees this but the magpies. The magpies fly over the river and make a bridge with their wings.”
“Draw me that!”
“Maybe you can draw that yourself.” She gave him her pencil. “You’ll need to draw on your own when you go to school, and read too.”
“I have new jeans and a bookbag. My mom says I can still come visit you after school.”
“I have to tell your mom something, Annabel. But I’m going to tell you first. I’m going to school too.”
“You’re coming to school?”
“I’m going to teachers’ college.”
“What’s that?”
“You go there and you learn how to be a teacher. I’m going for four years, and then after that I might travel. I always wanted to see the world. When my husband was alive, we kept saying we would go and we never did it. I’m going to sell my house, Annabel. There’s a family with a little girl coming here from Deer Lake. Her dad goes back and forth working in Quebec. The Michelins. They are going to buy my house.”
“Are you coming back?”
“If I can get a job at the school here, after I’m done with my courses and my travelling, I’ll come back.”
“Will you live back here?” Wayne liked Thomasina’s house.
“I’ll think about that then. I’ll send you postcards with pictures of interesting things in all the countries I go to.”
“China?”
“Maybe not that far.”
“You could see the magpie bridge.”
“That bridge is in the sky, Annabel. It’s not real. There’s no photograph of it.”
“I forget my address.”
“Your address is Box 43.”
“You better call me Wayne on the postcards.”
“Yes, that way the post office will know for sure they are for you.”
“I told Dad you were calling me Amble and he said he didn’t like it.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll only call you Annabel when there’s no one else around.”
When Thomasina had gone, Wayne made snowshoe twine and knife bindings with his father and ate meat cakes at the table of his parents, the fisheries report and the weather blaring continually out of both the radio and the television on the kitchen counter. Fly-catching tape hung from the ceiling with bluebottles on it, moving their legs but not their wings. A strange tension persisted when Wayne and his mother and father were together, Treadway asking questions like, “So, Wayne, have you gone down in the basement lately to check how our catgut is drying?”
The child knew that a grim, matter-of-fact attitude was required of him by his father, and he learned how to exhibit such an attitude, and he did not mind it because it was the way things were, but it was not his authentic self.
His authentic self loved to fold paper in half and cut out elaborate bilaterally symmetrical shapes: curlicues,