Annabel - Kathleen Winter [48]
“But you were right to wonder,” Jacinta had said. “It is grammatically confusing.” That day the specialist had prescribed the first yellow pills.
“Is what I have,” Wayne said now, “called something?” He did not like to have an ailment for which there was no word. He had never heard of anyone in his class having a nameless medical condition. Even the things that killed you had a name. He had not gone to Stevie White’s funeral, but his class had had that day off school, and Mr. White had taken his car through the Techni-Tone Car Wash in Goose Bay, and Stevie’s sisters and aunts had decorated it with six hundred Kleenex carnations, and Stevie’s coffin had been shiny black with white and pink satin inside and a picture of the Last Supper.
“If I had a brain tumour, would you tell me?”
Jacinta knew this was the last of his questions. It was always the last one, and she always answered it the same way. “You don’t have a brain tumour. I promise you that.”
“Mom?”
“What?”
“My feet are peeling.”
“Stop worrying about everything.”
“In bed. I felt them. The skin was peeling off. I pulled an edge and it came off in sheets.”
“Wait a couple of days and if it doesn’t get any better you can remind me about it.”
“Mom. That’s what you always say about everything.”
“You might already know this.” Treadway’s voice was half lost under the noise of his chainsaw. He was limbing the last log.
“What?” Wayne supposed his father wanted to tell him how to tie the rope that kept the logs on the sled. His father had ways of doing knots that had to be obeyed according to the task. The acrid gasoline fumes got up Wayne’s nose. He liked that. He liked the wood-sap smell, the physical lifting, the noise. His father was happy when Wayne helped him hoist wood. Wood hauling began on cold mornings when the first frost entered the ground, just before school started in the fall. You got to make a fire and boil tea and eat Vienna sausages out of the can with homemade bread and margarine.
“The facts of life,” Treadway hollered.
“It’s okay, Dad.”
“What?”
“It’s okay.”
Treadway shut off the engine. He was not glad of the silence. Their shouts hung over the caribou moss, in the spaces between spruce. “Get those blasty boughs and make a base.”
The circle of rocks was the one they had used last fall. All Treadway had to do was move two that had fallen out of the circle. They had brought birch rinds and back issues of the Labradorian, and Treadway handed Wayne his lighter. “You probably hear the facts of life in school. But a father likes to tell them straight. To make sure his son doesn’t get the wrong end of the stick.”
“Dad, it’s okay. You don’t have to go into it. Honest.” This was not entirely true. Wayne had pieced together certain things, but there were gaps in the process as he understood it.
Treadway lit the sticks. They inhaled the sugary smoke. They were sweaty from hauling wood and they peeled their coveralls down and sat on cushions of frozen caribou moss in their undershirts. Crumbled lichen and needles and sap lay on their collarbones and shoulders.
“I’ll just get it over with,” Treadway said, “and I will have dispatched that part of my duty. Your mother reminded me.”
“Dad.”
“And she’s right. So you probably notice sometimes now, when you wake up, you might have, you know, wetness in the bed.”
“What?”
“You might have thought you wet the bed. You might be worried about it.”
“Dad. I don’t wet the bed.”
“It happens to all boys.”
“It doesn’t happen to me.”
“So it’s just ejaculation and you shouldn’t worry about it. The next thing is you probably noticed you get an erection sometimes.”
“Dad.”
“That’s what they call a hard-on.”
“Dad!”
“But the real name is an erection, and it’s nothing to be embarrassed about. No one can tell.”
“Dad, stop it.”
“You might think they can but they can’t. It can happen any time, not just when you’re thinking about a girl.”
“Okay, Dad. I get it.” Wayne stared at berries that had rolled under the caribou moss. He heard the hiss of torn tin and a broken vacuum seal as his father pulled the ringtop