Annabel - Kathleen Winter [69]
“Why do you think that?”
“He would lose ten pounds. He would start eating vegetables. He would go to the Garden Club and offer to plant Persian rose bushes by the boardwalk. You’d want to descend right back down from heaven and go to bed with him on the spot.”
By the time Treadway knocked on Eliza Goudie’s door, Joan and Eliza had forgotten what a husband looked like. They had drunk so much that the sight of Treadway on the doorstep puzzled them. An alien creature had found its way to the house. Only Jacinta recognized him, and he knew, when he saw her, he did not want her to accompany him to the hospital in that state.
“I have to go in to Goose Bay, on an errand. In case you went home and found me not there. I didn’t want you to worry.”
“What errand?”
“Valves for my compressor.” She was in no condition to hear about Wayne. Treadway did not want to drive over the wilderness road to Goose Bay with a hysterical woman in the truck. So he lied. “Maynard White has them and I need them before I go into the bush.”
“What about Wayne?”
“Wayne is at a sleepover.”
“Where?”
“He’s at a sleepover with Roland Shiwack’s kid.” The other two women were making a racket in the living room. They had recovered from the feeling that a husband on the doorstep had elicited and were listing habits their own husbands had not revealed until after a few years of marriage.
“Harold refuses to eat chicken,” Joan said, “because he says they pee through their skin.”
“Pee?”
“He says their skin is constantly bathed in pee and he doesn’t see how anyone can eat it. He says if you watch the back end of a chicken you’ll see chicken shit only.”
“Is everything all right?” Jacinta asked Treadway. Orion’s Dog Star hung above his shoulder, and she remembered she loved him, and he did not look his ordinary self. He looked as if he wanted to say something no one in the world but herself could understand.
“My husband,” said Eliza in the distance, “is a connoisseur of his own farts.”
“What do you mean?” Joan asked.
“Everything’s fine,” Treadway said. “If you go home, watch your step. There’s not much of a moon.”
“I might stay here.”
“Better do that, then.” And he gave Jacinta a formal little hug.
“Your coat is damp.”
“It’s only a bit of night dampness.” Treadway left her in the lit-up doorway and climbed into his truck.
The northern lights were putting on a show of pink along with the turquoise and silver, which was unusual, and normally Treadway would have stopped the truck and got out on the side of the road. His parents, and his grandparents, had respected the mystery of those lights in a way people did not do now. The elders looked at them the way English children once lay in fields and picked dreams out of clouds. Sounds had come from the sky then. Only the old people heard them now. Treadway, though twenty years younger than most of the good listeners, had heard the moaning song. But he did not hear it tonight. In his childhood he had broken a leg in three places, and his mother had taken him to Goose Bay, and the anesthetic had been too strong. He had not woken at the right time. The doctors had told his mother this was all right. They had sent her home to wait for news. When she got home, Treadway’s father asked her where Treadway was, and when she said, “I left him at the hospital,” his father had driven his truck over two rivers after midnight instead of waiting for the morning ferry, and had brought Treadway home and laid him in a cot by the stove. Whenever Treadway heard his father tell that story, it always ended with “I’ll never know how she could leave him like that.”
And it is true it is hard to know how much anesthetic to give a young person. Wayne’s doctors had not been in agreement about it and had given him a measurement between the doses allotted a child and an adult. It put him in a state between waking and sleeping, and dulled the pain from the cut Dr. Lioukras made to open the vagina that had been hidden. The flesh was a centimetre deep, and when he cut it, Dr. Lioukras asked the nurse to get a stainless steel