Annabel - Kathleen Winter [72]
But the moles, Wayne thought, were blind. He suspected they were dead. What was the good of having feet if all they did was act like dead moles?
“How come he does the same thing every night? He falls asleep in his chair and he snores. Doesn’t he find it boring?”
“That’s precisely why” — Jacinta flung a carrot in the sink — “your father goes on his trapline for six months of the year. He can’t stand it in here either. Your father is more interesting than you think. I suppose you wonder the same thing about me.”
Wayne looked at her guiltily. He had wanted to ask the night before, as Jacinta read Luke and then John through the stock market report, “Are you hoping God wrote something new in there since last night?” He had begun to wonder, as autumn darkness closed in, why both parents were satisfied with such quietness. With no brothers or sisters in the house, there was no one to share his restlessness.
“Anyway — oh, I hate this peeler.” She threw it down. “Where’s my little white knife? This makes the carrots fluffy. I hate fluffy carrots.”
She searched in a drawer with her back to him. “You might think I’m boring as hell too, but that’s what happens to people who get married and have a kid and buy carrot peelers and Mr. Clean and all the rest of it, and make sure everything goes okay for their kids at school, and go to the hospital in Goose Bay five times a week . . .” She grew louder. Medical follow-up had meant the two of them had been back and forth to see the doctors many times. Wayne got his stitches out and started a new regimen of hormones. They had to meet Dr. Lioukras and go over signs and symptoms: what to do if the abdominal swelling recurred.
“Women start out,” Jacinta said, “with all kinds of passion. Every time I saw an ordinary old starling I’d look at the gold line around every one of its little feathers. Gold. I saw everything like that. Sharp. Edges of leaves. Sounds. Rain. I loved going downtown with all the streetlights, looking at shoes in shop windows. Portholes all lit up on a big boat from England. But you know what kills me? I’m too tired to do that now, even if I could. Even if St. John’s Harbour was at the end of that fence where your father left his tent bag. Women don’t have tent bags, Wayne. Not Labrador women. Men have the tents. I wouldn’t mind my own tent. Mine would be different from your father’s, I can tell you that.”
“What would yours be like?”
Wayne was stuck on verse two of his Remembrance Day poem but didn’t dare ask her for help. His mother hated the way the school made assignments out of every holiday: Remembrance Day, Christmas, St. Valentine’s Day, even St. Patrick’s. “It’s the same every year,” she complained. “I think they do it because no one in that place has a scrap of imagination. If it weren’t for pumpkins and reindeer and bloody leprechauns all over the walls, they wouldn’t have a clue what to be doing with the youngsters.”
Remembrance Day nearly drove her insane: every child in the school trying to imagine what it was like in the trenches and asking their mothers what rhymes with poppy. Maybe, Wayne thought, that was what the matter was with her now.
“My tent? Well . . . it’d have a string of Chinese lanterns, for one thing, and I’d find a way to have music.”
Wayne knew it didn’t matter what rhymed with poppy. He knew the difference between real feeling and doggerel you wrote for homework. Why did there even have to be words? He sank more teeth-marks into his pencil and tasted the paint and wood. Names of things got in the way. What was a poppy if you didn’t call it a poppy? If you just watched one and refused to give it a name. Thomasina was a good one for naming things in a way that still let you ask questions. That night in hospital, waiting for Treadway, she had tucked the cool sheet around Wayne’s neck and talked about his operation. Thomasina had not called it an operation, or a surgery.
“Those waters rushed, didn’t they.” Her hand had cooled his forehead. “They rushed over the landwash. Our bodies are made mostly of water, Annabel.”
“You’re calling