Annabel - Kathleen Winter [37]
“I don’t mean the top,” Treadway said. “The top is airy-fairy. You can stick any kind of top on it. What I’m talking about is the foundation. How are you going to make the base? That’s what you have to think of first.”
“That’s why I asked you about the logs that are already there. Could we just put some boards over those?”
“That’s just a log skid. You’re only going over that once in a blue moon with a sled. The logs are slippery and half rotten. That’s no good for a fort. For a fort you want something that goes down into the creek bed.”
“Dad, I don’t need anything like that. I just need a small place.”
Treadway did not untangle any more strings. He took a pencil out of his pocket, found a package of soldering wire that had no writing on the back, and drew Wayne a diagram. He drew two concentric circles.
“This is how the Romans did it. You can’t be thinking about the thing from the top down. This is a cofferdam. They drove a circle of piles deep into the riverbed. Then another circle inside it. Then they filled the outer ring with a kind of clay.”
“Dad.”
“Real waterproof stuff. Then, the water trapped inside, in the inner circle, they got slaves with buckets to bail it out. People died. They got crushed. But they emptied that inner circle. They made a dry spot right in the middle of the riverbed. They built the central pier of a bridge or section of a bridge in that.”
“Dad, I just want to make something really easy.”
“There is nothing really easy, Wayne. Not in this life. Not if it’s any good. I’m telling you, if you want to make any kind of structure over that creek, even a small creek like that, you need to think about the river bottom. Measure it and study it. If you don’t do that, your bridge is going to fall, with you in it. What kind of a father would let that happen to his son?”
“Dad, the creek has only got, like, eight inches of water in it.”
“What I’m saying is, Wayne, you’ve got to study what’s below that eight inches of water. Is it mud? Is it stone? Is it sand? Is it going to be gouged out by the current? You’ve got to know what you’re building on. If you do that, if you study it real good, mind, you can have that wood, son. I’ll help you get started. We can start on it this afternoon if you want.”
Wayne wanted the wood but he was not sure he wanted his father to help him make a bridge over the creek. “Will we finish cleaning up the cabbages?”
“That’s what your mother calls them. Cabbages. Instead of cabbage. That’s one way you can tell she wasn’t born in Labrador.”
Wayne knew his father was right. Anyone from Labrador called vegetables by their single name. Cabbage. Turnip. Carrot. No matter how many individual specimens, you spoke of them as one entity. He realized Treadway thought about people in the same way. Men, to him, were all one man.
The outer cabbage leaves insulated the inner parts, which Wayne’s mother rationed until mid-June, two weeks away, when there would be fresh turnip greens and dandelion. The cabbages hung hard and cold and knocked Wayne’s head when his mother sent him to get berries out of the barrels, and that hurt. You had to smack the berries with the cup, then they rolled apart, clicking like cold marbles. The shed was dark. You felt your way to the produce. The food transformed once Jacinta boiled it in the kitchen: its colours and flavours burst alive as if the wood fire were the heat of the sun, which Treadway said it was, indirectly. A lot of Labrador was like that. Dull and frozen and in the dark one minute; bursting with sour and sweet and red and green when you did something with it. Labrador was a place where the human touch meant everything.
“What you really want over that creek,” Treadway said in the kitchen, “is a simple cantilever.” He tore the top flap off the cornflakes box and raised his pencil stub.
“Dad, it doesn’t have to be anything complicated.”
“That way you won’t have to deal with the creek bottom. See?” He showed Wayne a diagram. “You anchor each end to a couple of bases on the riverbank and they meet