Annabel - Kathleen Winter [42]
Treadway pulled off the coverings and decorations. Some were tied with knots he had to cut. Why couldn’t the boy tie sensible knots instead of getting twine and ribbon of all kinds snarled in such inefficient tangles? Why had he not used the knots Treadway had taught him? When this has blown over, Treadway decided, I’m going to reteach him real knots and get him out of the habit of generating such a fraped-up, convoluted, disorganized mess.
He picked up the Hilroy exercise book and looked at Wayne’s sketches. There was a picture of the Pont d’Avignon, and beside it a diagram of two intersecting circles with one smaller circle high in the middle. On other pages were more designs linked to sketches of other bridges. Wayne had been copying the geometry of arches from the great bridge builders of the world. The rain kept up. Treadway sat on Wayne’s bridge with the sketchbook and wondered if he had done the wrong thing. But he had already taken down the corrugated fibreglass ceiling. Other papers were getting wet. Where was the lid for that tin with Thomasina Baikie’s postcards in it? There was Wally Michelin’s green diary, its key tied to the lock with red thread. What was in that? Treadway sat with it. He had no intention of opening it but the impulse came over him. Before his sense of honour intervened he had leafed open a dozen pages. A gust of wind blew papers into the river. Treadway tried to gather everything. He shoved the diary into a box and got to work with his chainsaw in the rain. He had begun the job of dismantling this thing now. If he were making a mistake, he would make up for it in some other way. He would go down to Nansen Melville’s place right after he took down the last two-by-four and get that dog for Wayne. The pups would be six weeks old next Tuesday, Nansen had said. Time enough for them to be taken from their mother.
From the two-by-fours Treadway carefully removed each screw. He saved them in a jar and stacked the wood near the shed so he and Wayne could make something else later. It would make a nice big doghouse, for a start. When he had stacked the wood, he gathered the box of papers and other rubble and brought it into the house. There were twenty yards of good string there, ruined. He threw it in the woodstove along with papers the rain had torn. He went out to bring in the curtain material he had laid on the step beside teacups whose glaze had cracked.
Jacinta came to the gate. Onions hung from her hand. Why had she bought onions, he wondered, when their own were nearly ready in the garden? Why was everyone so inefficient?
“What are you doing?” Jacinta put the onions on the ground and lifted her brocade. It was plain what he was doing, so Treadway did not answer. He watched her pick up the cups and wrap them in the brocade. He went back in the kitchen, thinking she would follow him, but she did not come in. He went out to the step but she was not in the garden, and the bag of onions lay on the ground.
Anytime Treadway had done anything against her wishes, Jacinta had told him how she felt. She had respected him but had told him her position. There was no end to the useful things Wayne could make out of the screws and two-by-fours salvaged from that bridge, Treadway told himself. He would go down to Nansen Melville’s right now and pay Nansen for that thoroughbred pup. A hunting dog, not a pet.
“You have a fine husband, if you compare him to all the dishonest men in the world,” Eliza Goudie said. “There’s a lot to be said for a modest, honest man.” This was a new point of view for Eliza. She had finally allowed her doctor to prescribe her an antidepressant medication, and had become a different person.
“You were hardly depressed before,” Jacinta said. “You were euphoric a lot of the time.