“Why does Treadway have no idea that he has no right to destroy someone else’s possession?”
But her friend was unmoved. “The property is Treadway’s. It’s on Treadway’s land, and a man’s land belongs to no one but himself.”
Jacinta thought of all the times she had listened to Eliza. No matter how outrageous Eliza’s reasoning, Jacinta had tried to understand it. Even now Jacinta did not argue about the Valium, though she felt Eliza’s new outlook was a chemically induced illusion. This is my problem, Jacinta thought. I am dishonest. I never tell the truth about anything important. And as a result, there is an ocean inside me of unexpressed truth. My face is a mask, and I have murdered my own daughter.
Roland Shiwack gave Wayne his eight dollars, and Wayne walked home feeling the bills in his pocket. He could buy supplies for the bridge: some Caramel Log bars, and Cheezies, and a couple of cans of Sprite. It would be great if he and Wally had some art supplies they could leave there instead of bringing them back and forth from home. There was a spyglass in the Eaton’s catalogue. He could save up for it and use it to watch the constellations. He could lie on his bridge and find the magpie bridge in the sky. He could save up for a new sketchbook.
There were dragonflies, ladybugs, and strange, flat bugs whose copper-coloured carapaces glittered amazingly. If you had a spyglass you could watch the secret life of the creek and take scientific notes or make accurate sketches. Yes, he would put money aside, and see what other work he could get, and buy the spyglass. If he saved his whole eight dollars and forgot about the junk food, he’d need only seven more days’ work from Roland Shiwack. And Wally could contribute too. She helped Gertie Slab with her grade four homework for three dollars an hour, and she babysat.
The great thing about walking home with eight dollars in your pocket was that you could imagine spending it, over and over, on a whole bunch of different things you might want, and it was fun to envision all of them.
By the time Wayne had walked up the hill he had spent the money, in his mind, on Caramel Logs, on the spyglass, and on things for other people. There was an Italian cheese grater his mother wanted but would not send for from the catalogue. She had a grater but it was ugly. The Italian one grated hard and soft cheeses. The top had a knob that fit snugly in your hand, and it would never rust. And there was a tool in the Hudson’s Bay store that his father looked at every time he went in. It was a long iron bar, called a pince-monseigneur, that you could use to lever just about any heavy object from one place to another. Treadway had used an ordinary crowbar to move all the boulders from the front yard except one, a piece of pink granite near his mother’s old-fashioned roses. That granite needed the pince-monseigneur, but Treadway did not want to spend thirty-five dollars on something he considered a toy.
I could surprise him, Wayne decided as he approached home. I could put it on layaway and carry it home and let Dad find it propped against the shed door.
Wayne saw the neatly stacked two-by-fours and did not realize where they had come from. He saw the jar of screws and did not recognize those either. He walked into the house, looked around, and wondered where everyone was. His father was not home, and neither was his mother, and there was no cooking, which was unusual, because at five o’clock there was always something sizzling in the cast iron pan or cooking in the boiler. So he went outside and looked around the back, and then he knew the two-by-fours were from his bridge, and he knew it had not been destroyed by an animal or by wind or by anything accidental. He ran inside and saw the string, untangled and carefully wound, hanging on a chair. He went out the back door and looked at the creek with its naked posts that he and his father had taken weeks to pour and set. The creek frilled around reeds and stones. The creek was not thinking of him. It had left him alone.
Treadway walked into the house carrying a mandarin orange box that held a golden Lab puppy on a piece of brocade from the bridge. He laid the box by the woodstove, and Wayne knew what he had done.
Wayne had never felt two such conflicting feelings in his body: devotion for the puppy, who whimpered and tried to peer over the side of the box, and an utter, bereft betrayal. Treadway looked at Wayne for a second, then at the puppy. The puppy was a safe place to look. You could look at the puppy all day and your feelings could sink into the puppy, and the puppy would not reproach you.
Wayne could not ask Treadway about the bridge, and Treadway said nothing. It was five o’clock, and Jacinta came in the door with a bag from Eliza. It contained a hot loaf. Eliza had rubbed the crust with butter until it glittered and cracked. Jacinta laid it on the table. She got butter out, and a tin of oysters, and corned beef, and some mustard, and an onion which she sliced thin, and some milk and pickled beet, and she opened the tins and sliced the corned beef, and no one mentioned the puppy.
Wayne went upstairs and looked out his window, where he could see the back corner of Wally’s house, and he guessed he would have to go down in the morning and see her. He could not believe his father had gone out and found a puppy to make up for what he had destroyed. It gave Wayne a new insight into the character of his father, one he regretted knowing with all his heart. It would have been better, he thought, if his father had just done what he wanted to do and not tried to pay for it. It was the paying, with a live puppy, that Wayne found unforgivable.
At six in the morning Wally Michelin knocked on the back door and Treadway opened it, his kipper with Keen’s mustard steaming on the table. He thought Wally looked like a strong little person on his step, her hair making her face narrower, her pale skin and thousand freckles. She was starting to grow tall and she was bony; her shoulder blades stuck out, and she marched around with her head a little bit forward like someone forever ducking raindrops. She had watched him dismantle the bridge from her bathroom window and had come for the most important thing in it.
“It’s twelve pages. The paper is yellow.”
“I don’t remember it.” Treadway was honestly mystified. He remembered his son’s Hilroy scribbler. He had saved that. It sat now on the chair visitors used. Wally’s green diary was under it and she took it, and looked around to see if her “Cantique de Jean Racine” was sticking out from under the TV guide or wedged behind the toaster.
“It was with this.” She held up her diary, which still had its key. “Did you read my diary?”
Treadway had searched for what she might have written about Wayne. He hated himself for doing it, especially when most of the parts he read were about music. They were about the northern lights; how she had sung to them and they had sung back to her; and about how she had found out the name of something that happened to her but did not happen to any of the friends she had asked, including Wayne. It was called phantom music: some people heard music replayed inside their heads, every note accurately. It could be something they had heard before, on the radio or somewhere, or it could be music no one had ever heard. It happened when Wally was tired, especially if she was in a vehicle or if something near her were moving, like the creek under the bridge.
The phantom music had first happened to her on the school bus trip to Pinhorn Wilderness Camp, on their way home, after the bus had stopped at Mary Brown’s Fried Chicken in Goose Bay and continued on the road to Croydon Harbour. Sometimes she could catch a tiny fragment and pull it until the rest unrolled in her mind, but usually she had no control over the phantom music. She loved it and wished she could hear it always. Treadway had read all of this.