Annabel - Kathleen Winter [32]
Wayne did not mind working on the catgut. Catgut was its name but it was really caribou sinew. You took the stomach of the animal, you dried it, then, using a homemade knife with an extremely thin blade, you sliced it in a spiral into a long, thin string, useful for many things in the bush and on the water. Wayne liked the meditative slice of the knife through the sinew. He liked the colour of the sinew, and he took pride in cutting it just the right width for both slightness and strength.
“There’s a time for catgut, Wayne, and there’s a time for parties. Tonight you need to go to that party. Even if you don’t like it. You’ll thank me one day.”
Jacinta was in the kitchen rolling pastry and spreading caribou paste on it with knobs of fat on top and covering it and cutting it into pies for Treadway to take down the river. She made one pie for Wayne, and on Wayne’s pie she shaped the knobs of fat into a heart. No one knew this, as more pastry covered it up. Wayne did not know it, and Treadway especially did not. She did this with the mustard on Wayne’s school-lunch sandwiches as well, but with words. She wrote subliminal messages to her son, messages that he would eat. She wrote “Beloved Son” and “Be brave.” She wrote them to give her child secret sustenance. Once she wrote “Daughter,” but she could not bring herself to put that sandwich in Wayne’s lunch box. What if the sandwich fell open and the word was still legible and someone read it? So she ate the daughter sandwich herself.
Whenever Treadway and Wayne came in the house arguing, her chest tightened and she tried to stop herself from interfering. She tried to let the argument play out. The argument was always the same. It was always the same argument in any one of a thousand disguises. The one about how to act like a real boy. The hardest part of it for her was knowing that Wayne had no idea his father stood against his own son out of fear.
While Wayne was still in grade five, he started to get books out of the school library and read them in class while eating chips or hickory sticks in a surreptitious way he had developed. His regular teacher, Miss Davey, never noticed. But one day the class had a substitute teacher, Mr. Henry, who observed the class carefully. Wayne flattened a bag of roast chicken chips inside his desk with the heel of his hand. He had bitten a tiny hole in the bag to let air out. A bag of chips lasted a lot longer when its contents were crushed to a powder that you licked, one coating at a time, off your finger. The substitute teacher smelled like the strong brown soap on a rope Wayne’s aunt had sent Treadway one Christmas. The soap was the shape of a stretched egg and had sand in it. The smell made Wayne’s stomach lurch. He was on page 174 of The Railway Children and reaching for some chip dust when a wave of the soap came over him, like the time his mom permed her hair at the sink and ended up crying. Wayne realized Mr. Henry could plainly see The Railway Children tucked into his math book, but it was not The Railway Children Mr. Henry wanted to discuss.
“Do you realize,” he said, loud as an actor, “how fattening potato chips are?” At the word fattening his teeth smiled but his tongue coiled like an eel. Wayne pushed his chip bag deep inside his desk but kept his hand in there too. There was chip dust all over his finger.
“Fattening,” Mr. Henry said again. “You don’t want to get fat, do you?”
Donna Palliser and the girls who had joined her club laughed. The boys did not. Brent Shiwack stabbed holes outlining the island of Newfoundland in his desk with a compass.
“Do you,” persisted Mr. Henry, his perfume overpowering, “want to become fat?” The girls in Donna Palliser’s club waited, and Wayne felt caught in their world in a way the other boys were not. Something about Mr. Henry was caught in the girl world as well, but Wayne did not know what it was. He did not like the way Mr. Henry and the girls all looked at him. This uneasiness followed him all day.
Ice hung on the wool of his mittens, and