Annabel - Kathleen Winter [41]
Treadway ate a piece of bread spread thick with duck jelly and stirred five cubes of sugar into his tea. His hands were black from filing his chainsaw. Nothing Treadway could have said would have matched the disparaging crush of his silence.
“I could do the shrimp,” Wayne said finally. He knew his father did not like Roland Shiwack.
“You do remember how?”
The family had eaten shrimp lots of times. You snapped the head, slit the shell with your thumbnail, unzippered it, and eased the fan off the tail. You didn’t want to lose meat. You reamed the black thread from its groove and rinsed the meat in cold water.
“There’s a lot more than what we did here,” Treadway warned. “A boatload will keep you busy for the good part of a day.”
“Okay.”
“Bring a feed bag. And bring some shells home for my compost.” Roland Shiwack did not have a garden, which was another reason Treadway held him in low esteem.
“Okay. Dad?” His father was looking under the sink for SOS pads to scour his hands. What the SOS pads did not clean, Treadway would scrape off with a knife. He did not answer his son. This was not unusual, but Wayne felt he had done some indescribable wrong. He felt ashamed and did not know why. He feared he would not peel the shrimp correctly, that Roland Shiwack, of all people, would tell Treadway that Wayne had torn off too many tails, or dropped heads in the cleaned meat, or taken eight hours to do what should have been completed in five. There were so many ways Wayne could fail. He did not have to ask his father why Roland’s own son, Brent, could not do the job. Brent had gone to army cadet camp in New Brunswick. At least Treadway did not encourage Wayne to do that.
“Yes, son?”
“If Wally comes over, tell her I’ll be back after supper and we can go on the bridge then.”
Roland Shiwack had set up a chair under the aspen in his backyard. He equipped Wayne with two barrels of cooked shrimp, one of cold brine for rinsing, a hose connected to the outside tap, and eight five-gallon buckets to put the peeled shrimp in. Wayne was glad of the aspen. The shrimp were so plentiful, with their tiny black eyes, that when he closed his own eyes he saw versions of them made of pale green light. He enjoyed peeling them for the first half-hour. There was finality in zipping off their brittle coats, and he liked the firmness of the meat, and even ate a few. Mrs. Shiwack brought him cold lemonade, which he held in a briny hand that had shards of pink armour and feelers stuck all over it. The lemonade had the sourness he liked. He did not like it too sweet. What was the point of a lemon if you couldn’t salivate and pucker? After an hour the shrimp were tiresome, and in the afternoon Wayne felt grateful for a rain squall that broke the monotony. When Mrs. Shiwack asked him if he’d like to come in and watch The Price Is Right until the rain stopped, he told her he didn’t mind the rain.
In the rain, Treadway walked with his chainsaw towards the bridge. He took the brocade down and folded it to lay beside Jacinta’s mending pile. He did not mean to destroy anything. He wanted to dismantle what he saw as a deterrent to his son’s normal development. It was no good to have an obsession that made you sedentary as a child when you should be walking, working, travelling by foot over the land, fishing, hunting, learning what the wilderness had to teach a young person. If Wayne dropped his habit of lolling around this bridge with that girl, Treadway told himself, he would enjoy the summer the way a boy should. It wasn’t even a bridge: it was not what Treadway had envisioned as he and Wayne built the base of it. The base was covered now in curtain material, flowers, papers everywhere, crayons, and trinkets. Wayne and Wally had brought out gilt chain and tassels, so every part of the bridge inside was decorated like some sort of carnival