Annabel - Kathleen Winter [22]
For Wayne, Croydon Harbour and all that was in it had a curious division between haven and exposure. The roads were dirt and there was dust, and this felt raw. The birches, in comparison, felt incredibly soft, their shadows a cool, sizzling green that quenched the parched burning of the roads. Loud engines of trucks and Ski-Doos played against the tinkling of the juncos that made their nests in the ground. A swoop and whisper of wings, then the gun crack. The love he felt for his father, then the cold precision with which Treadway taught him how to perform tasks like scraping rust off traps with the point of a blade. Golden tea under a swirl of steam on the trapline, then walking for miles with no rest until blisters formed on his ankles. When they arrived at the hunting tilt, his father treated them with a mixture of tallow from the haunch of a caribou and black spruce turpentine, which Treadway had collected on the end of his hunting knife after cutting a blister in the trunk of a tree. Treadway administered the ointment silently. He did not say, “You should have told me it hurt before now.”
When they got home and Jacinta saw the wounds, Wayne heard her hiss, “Were you trying to wait until his skin was shredded to the bone? And did he eat? Look at his little breastbone and shoulder blades. They have a mind to poke through his skin. And he has a cough.”
It was true. Treadway could walk for twenty miles through minus-twenty-degree weather and not mind it. He wore wool next to his skin and his body was compact and dense, his core curled into itself. There were nights when he slept in the open, wrapped in a sleeping bag lined with caribou hide, and in the morning he awoke invigorated by the wild, cold air and starlight. He had not made Wayne sleep out in the open, but there were nights when he did not bother to stoke the stove in his hunting tilt because he himself did not need it stoked, and the air inside the tilt grew damp as well as cold, from their breath and the condensed vapour from their own bodies, and by the time they arrived home Wayne had a racking cough that sounded like a high groan when he breathed in. His mother kept him home from school and boiled water in her big kettle all day to make steam in the house, and bundled him up in his father’s chair, and together they ate toast and listened to the radio.
The first and second postcards from Thomasina came together, from the south of France: one had Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon on it, because Thomasina was staying in a hotel in Avignon.
“I had to take a break from teachers’ college, Wayne,” Thomasina wrote. “It is so boring. We have to study statistics. I would much rather study people and history. I think you could graduate without even knowing where all the countries are. I decided to do two semesters at a time and travel between. This is where Picasso found his models for the famous painting on the card.”
Treadway, on his way in and out of the kitchen with armloads of spruce, asked, “What kind of postcard is that to send a child?” He picked it up and studied it. “Naked women?”
“It’s Picasso,” Jacinta said.
“Are they even women? What are they wearing on their faces?”
“What are statistics, Dad?”
“Statistics, son, are facts. Facts connected with numbers. For example, the population of Croydon Harbour is 217. You add or lose a number here or there for a death or a birth, but give or take a half a dozen numbers you know where you stand. There are more interesting questions in science, but it wouldn’t hurt Thomasina Baikie to stay in one place and learn a statistic