Annabel - Kathleen Winter [50]
Some boys went with their fathers. They just left school to go on the trapline, and no one said anything. Wayne dreaded the day when Treadway would suggest he do this. Wayne was looking forward to school. Thomasina Baikie was coming back. She had sent her last postcard from Wales. On the front was Thomas Telford’s iron bridge over the Menai Strait.
“It broke a world record,” Thomasina wrote, “for the longest suspension bridge in the world. I love it here so much, Wayne, that I’m finishing my last two classes at Harlow. In September I’ll be coming back to Croydon Harbour to teach. I’ll be teaching grades seven, eight and nine.” Wayne was going into grade seven. He was excited about having Thomasina for a teacher. He loved new pencils and rulers and exercise books, and he liked being at home in the nights, in his room, studying and sketching and listening to music.
But his father could go miles without rest or food, and Treadway did not mind what Wayne saw as monotony: miles upon miles of spruce woods, a heavy packsack, and your footprints sinking through a hard crust of snow, and the death of the beautiful animals.
In bed Wayne thought about what his father had said. He imagined a man and a woman in their pyjamas, lying side by side in their marriage bed. The man fell asleep. So did the woman. While they were asleep, the man’s penis somehow reached out of his pyjama pants. It found its way, something like Brent Shiwack’s wiener, over towards the woman. She must have been wearing a short nightdress, not a long one like his mother’s, or loose pyjama pants. Anyway, somehow the penis, which must have had a sense of direction and an ability to explore on its own, got through the woman’s clothes and nosed its way into her vagina. This amazed Wayne. He had not known that such a thing happened, but he did feel there was something powerful and slightly sinister about penises, so he believed his father. The funny thing was that even though this whole story — the facts of life according to Treadway — depended on involuntary activities of body parts unbeknownst to their sleeping owners, the knowledge of it excited the low, aching hunger in Wayne’s belly. He lay in bed and touched his own penis. It did not respond, but the place behind it, underneath it, buried in his body between his legs, did respond. If he touched the skin underneath his testicle and rubbed it, it made the hunger clamour and grow wild. He pressed and pushed a little, and he thought of penises going into vaginas while he did so, and in a couple of minutes the hunger between his legs opened its mouth and devoured a shuddering, delicious and joyful series of electric jolts that delighted his whole body.
Treadway went to bed early and dreamed of a baby fox caught in his trap. He wanted to save the fox because it was too young for its skin to be of any value, and it had soft paws and looked at him with pleading eyes.
While Treadway slept, Jacinta cleaned the surfaces in the house. Treadway had not told her about his father-and-son talk but she knew he had done it as she asked, because he always did what she asked if she asked him in a particular way. A way that said she was counting on him to provide a basic husbandly service she could not do herself. She knew he had carried out the father-and-son talk, and she could tell he was disturbed about it in some profound way he did not want to talk about. Whenever Treadway was emotionally tired, he went to bed even earlier than usual, using sleep like a kind of temporary, convenient death.
Jacinta swept the floors and wiped the counters, then got a bucket of red-hot water with Pine-Sol in it and