Annabel - Kathleen Winter [66]
The owl had made no sound and no movement. It looked like a piece of tree. He saw it, then he couldn’t see it. Then he could. He started talking to it in his quietest voice, and he hummed a tune to it. Which he would not have done for any other living being; not his mother, not his father, not his brothers, not himself. He liked, about the owl, that it asked nothing from him, and he had spoken to it ever since as if it were listening to him, though he never saw it again. It calmed him to talk to the owl, and he spoke to it now about Wayne.
“Everyone thinks,” he told it, “that I know what I’m doing. For God’s sake, I don’t have a clue what I’m doing. You know that.”
The owl listened from wherever it was. Deep, deep in the woods, past Beaver River, past the pond, which was the pond in the interior where the waters changed direction and began to run magnetically north to Ungava Bay, the pond whose name was a secret.
“I should have let well enough alone,” Treadway said. “I think that now. What would have happened if I had let Wayne become half little girl?”
The owl allowed Treadway to see Wayne as a girl child. So Treadway stood there in the woods and saw a vision of his daughter. She had dark hair and a grave face. She was an intelligent girl, and Treadway loved her.
“You’re a beautiful child.” But the child could not hear him as the owl could. The owl listened, and Treadway felt, for the first time since his wife had given birth, pain flow out of his heart and into the moss. It sank into the moss and became part of the woods. The owl took some of it. This had not happened to the pain before.
“I could stay here,” Treadway said. “You’re a brave little owl.” He thought of the owl as alone. He thought of it, really, as himself, although he did not think he was brave at all. People call their friends admirable in this way or that way — brave, honest, loyal — but they do not see these qualities in themselves, even if they are present in greater quantity than in the friends. Treadway could not see the good in himself. His wife thought he could, but he could not. He knew he was not as self-contained or as brave as the owl, but he identified with how it had chosen to live. If only the world could live in here, deep in the forest, where there were no stores, roads, windows, and doors, no straight lines. The straight lines were the problem. Rulers and measurements and lines and no one to help you if you crossed them. His owl was not going to come out of the deep woods. It was not going to come near the fences and doorsteps of Croydon Harbour. It knew better than to try and live in that world.
“I wish,” Treadway told the owl, “I could bring him in here with me for a good six months. Longer. Forget about the medicine that keeps him being a boy. Hospital medicine, no. The medicine in these trees. The turpentine. The smell of the blasty boughs. What would happen?”
Where was the owl?
“If I brought him here and never took him back? We could live here.”
The owl had its back to the man.
Treadway stayed out until dark. He navigated home the way he always did, by knowing the contours of the land, by the moon, by parts of Orion and the Dog Star, which appeared in certain clearings. He came home to a note on the table and two plates of dried-up salt fish