Annabel - Kathleen Winter [9]
As Treadway regarded his blue Royal Albert saucer, Thomasina saw he knew what had been going on with the baby whom Jacinta nursed on the daybed by the stove under a crocheted blanket.
“Since neither of you is going to make a decision one way or the other,” he said, “I’m going to make it. He’s going to be a boy. I’m going to call him Wayne, after his grandfather.”
Jacinta continued to nurse the baby. A look of relief crossed her face. Not at his decision but at his acknowledgement that their baby had been born the way it had. Thomasina stood up, looked at Treadway, and said, “Be careful.”
“We’ll get the doctor in,” Treadway said, “and we’ll see.”
After Treadway had spoken, there was a holy lull in the house in which Treadway and Jacinta cared for each other and for the baby alone, with no one to look on or advise and with few words of their own. Treadway moved Jacinta’s hair tenderly to behind her shoulder so he could see the child nurse, and at no time did he examine the child or treat it critically. She could see he loved it. There was nothing wrong with the child other than its ambiguous sex. It nursed and cooed and slept, and its skin was dewy and cool, and when the kitchen grew too hot, its parents let the fire die down in the stove so that the child’s cheeks would not have red spots, and if it grew too cool they wrapped the baby securely. Treadway sat and rocked it, and he sang to it as well. His singing was one of the beautiful things women other than Jacinta did not know about. He sang his own songs, songs he improvised after his time alone in the wild, as well as ancient Labrador songs passed down by generations of trappers and nomads and hunters who have heard caribou speak. The baby loved this; it began a life of waking to warmth and song and colour and drifting into dreams threaded with parent song.
After a fortnight Treadway left to go hunting. It was one of the last days you could go white hunting. When the ice melted to a certain degree, when whiteness in the natural world decreased by a margin every hunter knew by an inner system of measurement, white hunting was no longer done. Not because it had become ineffectual — ice still existed in large pockets around the shore, and a hunter could stay well hidden — but because it was unfair; migratory birds were returning in larger numbers to nest, and many had young or needed to keep their eggs warm. The birds’ travels were hunting journeys, short flights to find food for their young, and the Labrador hunters knew what was at stake. The next year’s hunting was at stake, but so was the livelihood of the flock, and the hunters respected that intrinsically, apart from any vested interest of their own.
So on this day, close to the end of the hunting season, Treadway left his family at home, and so did the other men of Croydon Harbour. And so did Thomasina’s daughter, Annabel, and husband, Graham Montague, to navigate the Beaver River in a white canoe.
3
Thomasina Outside the Church
THOMASINA DID NOT GO INSIDE the church at the funeral of her own husband, Graham, and daughter, Annabel, because outside was where the blue butterfly was, darting in and out of the reeds that stuck up out of the snow in the sunny corner facing the sea. Thomasina stood at this corner, a corner small and southerly and windowless, leaning against the clapboard with her face closed and upturned to the sun. Jacinta had not tried to get her to come inside. But everyone else said Thomasina had become temporarily insane, for how else could you explain a woman who did not want to take comfort in red and blue glass candle holders full of light, in stained glass windows with the apostle Mark talking to a brown dove, in the Book of Common Prayer and its order for the burial of the dead, in the gathering of the community, the solemnity of the eight pallbearers, the two coffins made of boards that Graham Montague had hand-planed, intending a bureau for his wife?
Thomasina did not put on a black