Annabel - Kathleen Winter [97]
A lot of things can go out of order in a lonely house over a lonely autumn and the start of winter, without other people in the village knowing, especially if that village prides itself on an independent spirit. Jacinta’s neighbours could not see, on her windowsill, a doll the size of a thumb that Jacinta had made from clay out of her root cellar, clay she had mixed with water and a dinner spoon. Nor could they see the housedress and cardigan she wore all day and all night throughout the winter. Bread pudding was a thing Jacinta had eaten as a child. Her mother had kept a kitchen drawer especially for bread crusts. The crusts were what the family had left on their plates. Some had jam on them. You broke the crusts into a pan with milk and butter, nutmeg and an egg, and some sugar, and you baked the pudding. If you were a child and your mother was not looking and you were hungry between meals, you would open the drawer and steal a dried crust that had jam on it. There was never mould, because the drawer was airy, and a dry crust with jam on it tasted crispy and delicious between meals. This was what Jacinta ate now, and there was comfort in eating a childhood treat. You could live for a long time on crusts and tea, and you had a lot of hours to think about your son who had a girl hidden inside him.
Did boys not have moments of softness, moments of more incredible tenderness than girls did? Who was to say which moments were which? Many times during Wayne’s childhood a wind had whipped through Jacinta’s mouth. The world had breathed through her and told her that her son was also a daughter. Why had she questioned it? This wind had whipped through her mouth when it wished. One morning Wayne had blown through the door in his hockey gear and that wind had blown in with him. It blew in Jacinta’s mouth and she saw that Wayne’s skin and hair were made of girl material, girl molecules, girl translucence. She gave him Kool-Aid and a hot dog and told him to do his homework. Jacinta had let the blast blow through her and had not responded, but she felt sadder for the lost girl than if the lost girl had been herself.
Had Wayne grown up as a daughter and not as a son, Jacinta would have told him about her own girlhood in St. John’s. She’d have confided the little places to go: Snow’s, at the east end of Duckworth, crammed with violet pastilles and crinolines from the time Jacinta’s own mother was a child. Lar’s, all strung with lights at the bottom of Barters Hill, pyramids of candy apples — how did Lar get them to shine so hard? Caines Grocery, where Lee’s Snowballs were five cents. All of it changing, Jacinta had known, maybe gone, but she would have told Wayne of it, had he lived the life of Annabel. These were the things Jacinta thought in Croydon Harbour, on her own in the lonesome house with Treadway away on his winter trapline.
And it was true, St. John’s was not now the way it had been when Jacinta was a girl. On his first day there Wayne followed the advice of a woman on the ferry and went to the train station on Water Street to look at a bulletin board that had boarding houses and apartments listed on it, but he did not know any of the street names or where they were. He walked to Duckworth Street hoping to find a shop that would have a map, but all he passed were lawyers’ offices, and a shop that sold beans and grain in big glass jars, and the courthouse. He passed some little cafés, and it was not until he had got almost all the way to the Newfoundland Hotel and the Battery that he saw Caines Grocery, which was the kind of place where a person might find the map he needed. By this time he was dying to go to the toilet and he would have liked to sit down and rest, because his bag was heavy and he was tired from looking at everything intensely because it was all so new.
He could smell the ocean in a different way than