Annabel - Kathleen Winter [89]
Wayne wished he could write back to Thomasina. He wished her postcards did not come with no return address, and that they did not take so long to get here. The card from Bucharest was dated in April, and it was September now. What was the good of having someone for a friend, no matter how much they cared about you, if you couldn’t reach them? He could not reach any of the people he should have been close to. His father spent more time than ever in the bush. His mother sat for hours at a time in her kitchen, crocheting or doing nothing at all. The one person for whom he would have given up all other friends, Wally Michelin, was farther from him than ever. Her parents had sent her to stay with her cousin in Boston and work in her aunt’s shop. Boston in those days was where a lot of people went. There was excitement connected with the place. If you went there you would be in America, but it was the elegant and sedate part of America. So it was a place of new beginnings but it was not like the Wild West. If you went to Boston, the people back home in St. Anthony or Croydon Harbour knew you were serious about your future.
Young people had fallen from Croydon Harbour like leaves from the birches along the inlet, especially the young men, now that there were other opportunities besides trapping and hunting. A lot of boys went to military college in New Brunswick, lured by the shine on the soldiers at the American base in Goose Bay. Tim McPhail, the boy with whom Wally Michelin had gone to the prom, went to St. Francis Xavier to study engineering. His yearbook entry said his first love was physics, but any boy knew you had to have something practical to fall back on, though not hunting or trapping. The old ways of earning a living had been enough for the fathers and grandfathers, who considered them a kind of freedom and did not understand what would make a son want to wear work clothes you had to buy in a Goose Bay department store instead of coats and boots of seal and caribou. Treadway was not the only father who did not understand the new sons of Labrador, but he was the only one who did not lament about the subject with the other men. If he lamented he did so in solitude, on his trapline, or he consulted with the wild animals there. The only real friend Wayne had in Croydon Harbour was Gracie Watts, and he worried about this friendship.
Gracie’s father was the kind of alcoholic who gets nasty and red in the face and whose cruelty is matched only by his cowardice and self-loathing when not drunk. Gracie’s mother kept their house spotless. It had next to no furniture, because anything with legs or spindles, Geoffrey Watts broke. To look at Gracie’s mother you would think her pious and stern. You would think she had decided to approach life as a parsimonious woman, joyless by choice. She looked religious but she was not so much pious as she was scoured: all joy stripped from her by marriage. Gracie had seen this happen and intended to get out. She had asked Wayne to make her a hope chest and he had made it for her. He often went over to her house after her father had passed out on his daybed in the room beyond the kitchen and her mother had closed the door behind her in the little room she used as a sewing room. Their house was so quiet at these times you would think Mr. and Mrs. Watts were paper outlines, or shadows.
Wayne worried about the hope chest. There were young couples in Croydon Harbour, people his and Gracie’s age, who appeared to gravitate together by some tidal pull rather than by desire or