Annabel - Kathleen Winter [49]
“You must have noticed changes in your body.”
“My feet are peeling,” Wayne said, “and I get a stomach ache.”
“Your feet?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean?”
“The skin comes off.”
“Take your boots off.”
Wayne took his boots off and sank his bare feet in the caribou moss. “The bottoms.”
Treadway picked up his son’s foot. “Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“Did you ask your mother about it?”
“She told me to tell her if it doesn’t go away. She always says that.”
“Maybe she knows. I never heard of it. But I have to finish telling you this.” Treadway sighed. He did not like being sidetracked.
“Dad, it’s okay.”
“I know you think you know everything about the facts of life. And maybe you do. And if you do, it won’t hurt you to hear them again. But maybe there’s one or two facts you have wrong, and if there are, I’m going to tell you the right ones. That’s all. There’s no big deal. But you have to know the real story. And then I won’t mention it any more. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“So when you get married, you sleep in the same bed with a woman. Women have a vagina. When a man and a wife are in bed together, the penis fits into the vagina. It might not seem like that could happen, but it can. It fits in there. And that’s when the seed of the man, inside the penis, comes out and goes into the woman’s body. And that’s how the embryo of a baby is formed, and of course the baby grows in her belly, and then nine months later, it is born.”
Wayne had not known this. He didn’t know what he had known. Brent Shiwack had saved his hot dog wiener from lunch one day, and had wiggled it through the fly of his jeans at Gracie Slab while everyone was drawing isosceles triangles, and had panted with his tongue out. Davina White up in grade nine had gotten pregnant, and some people said she was a slut but others said no, it happens to the ones who aren’t sluts. Davina White came to the schoolyard with her baby in a stroller at lunchtime to eat bags of chips and drink Pepsi with her friends, and when lunch was over she walked with her baby back down the hill, and Wayne felt sorry for her. Some people said Davina shouldn’t be allowed to come to the schoolyard because her baby might make other girls want to have a baby too.
Treadway had dispatched his duty but he felt extremely awkward and wished he had waited, as his own father had done, until he and his son happened upon the mating of caribou in the herd. It had been beautiful, in slow motion, snowflakes falling on the creatures, and Treadway had instantly understood nearly everything there was to know about male and female intimacy, the mechanics of it. His father had not had to talk about marriage beds or body parts. He had not had to use the word embryo, or any other clinical word. But Jacinta had wanted him to bring up the subject. He felt he had not done the job decently. He had made it seem unnatural. And he had not been able to stop looking at his son’s body and seeing things he did not want to admit. His son looked like a girl. He talked like a girl, his hair was like a girl’s, and so were his throat and chest. When they had peeled down the tops of their overalls, Treadway had seen that his son had breast buds, small and tender through his undershirt, and it had shocked him. He wondered if Wayne had noticed them himself, or if any of the boys at school had teased him about it. The buds were very small, but they were present. What if they grew larger? What was wrong with the doctors?
He carefully folded the bread bag they had used and tucked it into the empty Vienna sausage can with the used teabags, and he wrapped it all in leftover birch rind and put the package in his knapsack. Wayne got on the back of the Ski-Doo behind him and hung on to the passenger handle for dear life, because there