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By Root 611 0

of wood junks into stove lengths. When it was gone, she used the bucksaw and cut a few lengths each day. One day Wayne came home and the stove was out, and after that he sawed enough wood on Saturday mornings to last the week. The household had always run, as did all households in the harbour, on stored supplies gathered in season and used economically over time. Now the house began to run in a fashion that Jacinta’s mother would have called hand-to-mouth. Wayne made toast and ate rabbit meat out of the jar. He washed his own shirts, pants, gym clothes, and underwear in the little machine on wheels, and he watched his mother become as unreachable as his father had been. One day he found her lying on the couch with something pink all over her face.

“What is that stuff?”

“Mashed strawberries. Out of the freezer.”

“Why is it on your face?”

“It softens your skin.”

There were more strawberries on the kitchen table. Later in the evening he watched as his mother poured Carnation milk on them and ate them. She did not watch television but sat in the chair in front of the set and crocheted cotton dishcloths: green and white, or blue and white. She did this night after night as Wayne conjugated avoir and deciphered his slide rule and worried about her. He worried that it was his fault his father went on the trapline earlier than other dads and came home later. He worried that Jacinta was sad because no matter what he did, he would never be a normal son. A son with two testicles, not one. A son whose father did not have to sell his dog to a man he didn’t like.

“Crochet,” Jacinta announced, “is like drawing. You have one line, and you can make it go anywhere. It doesn’t have to be a stupid dishcloth.”

“You said those dishcloths work better than J-Cloths.”

“I don’t need a hundred of them. If you know the basic stitch and a few variations, you can crochet any shape you want. You can crochet a rose, if you have a mind. That wild dog rose by the kitchen door? You can crochet the whole bush if you feel like it. All you have to do is make a chain of three, close it, and go around the ring and make a gathered petal in each stitch, using rows of half-double crochet.” There was yarn all over the house: rose, mustard, green.

“Can you crochet a cup and saucer?”

She studied a cup on the table. “I could try.” When Wayne laid his bookbag on the table the next day, she had done it.

“Can you crochet a horse’s head?”

“If I can figure out how to draw one.”

That school year she lined the shelves, the TV, windowsills, and armoire with replicas of razor-clam and mussel shells, a conch, a trout, a smelt, a salmon, seven sea urchins, three cups and saucers, and twenty-eight starfish. She loved starfish.

Jacinta used up her Briggs and Little wool, then went on to linen yarn and a kind of yarn made with silk and seaweed that she had been saving for booties for the next baby born in the cove. In Treadway’s shed she found his twine and made pots out of it. They stood on their own. She filled them with stones and pieces of juniper, and she crocheted tiny birds and perched them in the juniper. She crocheted a roll of snare wire into a bowl like bowls in the catalogue, into which people in big country homes put their brown eggs, and she bought eggs from Esther Shiwack to put in it. She began to crochet abstractions. A green and brown wool spiral fortified with snare wire. A blue river strung with beads. Extreme close-ups of leaves.

“I let the yarn talk to me,” she told Eliza Goudie on the phone. “I can’t explain all the shapes.” She stayed up all night and made more, and the shapes were not recognizable.

Had Jacinta been in a city this might have been all right. Someone might have understood what she was making. They might have bought one from her and hung it in the lobby of the Bank of Montreal. Wayne would think this later in his life. But at fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen he wished his mother would go back to starfish. His father lived outside the house longer than he lived in it. He brought home wood, caribou, salmon and smelt, and money from