Annabel - Kathleen Winter [40]
Treadway watched and did not like the look of the whole thing.
“We never sang in our forts. We didn’t read,” he told Jacinta.
“You read John Donne in your hunting cabin. You read Poe and Stevenson.” All the trappers read by a flame for a chapter, a poem, two at the most, before they dropped, dead tired. “You read Pascal’s Pensées.”
Treadway went to bed at nine thirty. But Wally Michelin’s singing kept him awake. He endured this until he looked at the clock and saw it was nearly midnight. He got himself a glass of water. The window was open and he stood listening, then he rinsed his glass and went in the living room, where Jacinta was gathering the front of a rabbit-nose slipper with her long needle.
Jacinta had been listening too. “She’s a good singer.”
“Why do we let him stay up all hours of the night with that girl?”
A rabbit-nose was harder to sew than the moccasins Jacinta had learned to make when she first came to Labrador. A rabbit-nose has a series of tiny gathers, and it is hard to get the tension of both slippers identical. Jacinta would have stayed up until three in the morning if Treadway had not minded. He always woke when she came to bed, and couldn’t get back to sleep.
“But it’s summer,” Jacinta said.
“I know what season it is.” Treadway grimly considered the carpet. He knew it was summer. He had not at any age wished to stay up past midnight talking to a girl. If his wife could not see there was something wrong with it, he saw no point in explaining.
Jacinta had challenged him in the past and had lost. The Florentine bridge over the creek struck her as lovely, and she wished she could go lie down on it with the children.
“If that was happening next door,” Treadway said, “I’d wonder what kind of parents would let a boy and a girl spend half the night alone outside together.”
“They’re in grade six.”
“They’re done grade six. I’m surprised Ann and Gerald Michelin let her stay out. If I was her father I’d be over here by nine and I would take my daughter home.”
“Wayne?” The moon had come out and Wally Michelin lay on the bridge floor watching it through one of the spandrels.
“What?”
“Remember what Mr. Ollerhead said about the moon?”
“I remember his shirt.” Mr. Ollerhead had worn a shirt of pink and silver stripes. He had brought his guitar to school.
“He said if you look at the moon long enough, you’ll find out something.”
“Like what?”
“He never said.”
Mr. Ollerhead had broken the hearts of girls in his class, Wayne knew. He didn’t mean to break them, and he didn’t know he had broken them, but he couldn’t help it.
“Do you like Mr. Ollerhead?” Wayne asked.
“As a teacher?”
“No. I mean, do you like him?”
“You mean do I kiss my pillow and pretend it’s him like Gracie Watts?”
“Yeah.”
“No. When I’m singing, I’m singing for someone. I don’t know who it is yet, but it’s not Mr. Ollerhead.”
10
Alto
“ROLAND SHIWACK,” Treadway told Wayne, “has a boatload of shrimp that need peeling.”
Wayne was stirring Carnation into his hot chocolate. Treadway did not believe in buying canned milk, or any milk, because it was insanely expensive in Labrador, and no one used it in tea. If you needed milk, Davina Thevenet had six goats and would trade you as much milk as you wanted for fenceposts or a couple of bales of hay. Was it the can of milk Treadway was looking so grim about now? Jacinta restricted herself to buying two cans a week, out of consideration for her husband’s disapproval. When Treadway disapproved of anything, Wayne felt his own chest tense up. If it wasn’t the milk, what was it?
“Can you do it for him?”
“Peel shrimp?”
“He’ll pay eight dollars.”
“I was going to work on something else today.”
“With Wally Michelin?” It was late for his father to be in the kitchen. Had Treadway been waiting for him?
Wayne did not