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By Root 672 0

House veranda and rapped his knuckles insistently until Thomasina appeared under her porch light. Anyone in town could see him there and see who he was, and that he was not in a good mood. He was so angry he had ceased to be aware that this might be a spectacle, but Thomasina had not, and she stepped back and pleaded with him to come in out of the night, which was beautiful. Orion had appeared from his summer sleep, and northern lights rippled green and pink at the edge of the sky. There was frost, and the sweet, decayed smell of floating twigs and caribou moss that always meant the partridgeberries were ripe in some places and it was time for the men to go on the trapline. This was Treadway’s problem. Just as he was preparing to leave his homestead for months, Thomasina Baikie seemed to be aiming to have Wayne’s whole school study in plain view a subject that should by anyone’s reckoning remain well covered up. On the trapline, stealth was everything. Treadway was an expert in staying upwind of fox, mink, and bear. His own livelihood and that of his family depended on it. You did not go out in plain view and announce your presence, your secrets, your private life. You did not let a wild animal know you harboured fear. Treadway was able to hold a secret like no other. Now, in Thomasina’s hallway by the door to her kitchen, he stood, his fear swallowed and hidden so deep there was no direct way for him to speak it, so he became indirect.

One time, and one time only, before Jacinta had come to the harbour and before Graham Montague had decided he wanted a woman, there had been a dance, and Thomasina had been in Treadway’s arms a good two hours. They were both quiet, solitary people, and each had wondered what it could be that other couples spoke into each other’s ears, laughing, underneath the band. There had been a sedateness to their dance, and they had thought about each other afterwards, but when Treadway sent his sister to ask Thomasina to go to the next dance with him, she had declined. Now, all these years later, they remembered the touch of each other’s body, and there was a tension between them because they were alone. This story could have been told of any woman and any man in the cove. In a small community the whole world dances in one another’s arms on one June night or another. Treadway should not have come.

“Are you all right?” Thomasina asked him. Treadway didn’t look all right. He was suddenly shy as well as angry, so she said, “Do you want to sit down?” He did not answer, only looked at the floor, so she brought him to the kitchen. He had not been in this house before. The house did not really belong to Croydon Harbour, and everyone knew enough about its story that they felt no need to go in. There was a distance about it, taller than the settlers’ houses, imposing, as if the people who built it and who dwelt in it thought they knew better than the settlers.

This was what all houses built by missionaries must be like, Treadway thought now, no matter where they were in the world. The Moravian missionaries’ wives had built drills and terraces all around the sides and back of this house and had grown crops no Labrador settler in his right mind would plant. Parsley and sugar snap peas and summer savory, cucumbers and frilly European lettuces, even tomatoes. They had tried to turn their handkerchief-sized piece of Labrador into a little piece of Europe, and had almost succeeded, using cloches and cold frames and other tender and intricate devices. They had grown sweet peas, for goodness’ sake — a flower that grew into a pod that had no culinary function — and had tied them to six-foot-high stakes with pieces of ribbon. It had worked for as long as the Moravian women were present and vigilant.

When the Grenfell missionaries took over, they had put an end to herbs and sweet peas. The men tended the gardens, with what Treadway considered a trifle more good sense than the Moravian women had. The men had put in carrot, cabbage, beet, and potato, but then they had gone and brought in a cow, reasoning that a local