16
Falling Away
THERE IS A FALLING AWAY IN all little families: families having a mother, a father, and one child. There is a new world for every child, sooner or later, no matter what kind of love has lived in the home. Strong love, love that has failed, complicated love, love that does its best to keep a child warm through layers of fear or caution. One day the layers begin to fall. Before his night in hospital, Wayne had not broken from his mother, but he had begun to yearn for the unnameable mystery young people want.
The morning after Wayne’s operation, Jacinta had woken on her own couch with a hangover. Why was the house cold? It was cold in a way she remembered from uninsulated houses of her friends, in winter, in St. John’s. A cold that pried into your joints and tormented you. Treadway never let the house get like this. Five thirty in the morning was late for him to rise. Every night he made sure there were dry splits ready in the box beside the stove. He twisted newspaper and set the splits in a pyramid. Then came pieces of slab from Obadiah Blake’s sawmill, and junks of the same black spruce that sent incense from every chimney in the cove. Jacinta rose, still in her party clothes. She had stumbled uphill at three in the morning and had noticed the truck was gone, but Treadway was always leaving it with Maynard White for one reason or another. He had said something at Eliza’s door about valves. And he had told her Wayne was sleeping over at Brent Shiwack’s, which was unusual. Wayne was not the most popular boy in Croydon Harbour, and Brent Shiwack was not his friend.
Jacinta went down the basement stairs and lit the fire herself. She cut soaked apricots into the little pot of oats and made fruit porridge for herself, and tea with the bag in the cup. When Treadway was in the bush for months at a time, and Wayne at school, she got into a routine of being alone. But this day she grew lonely, so when Treadway came in the door in the afternoon she was glad to see him. But he was not glad. He did not light up at all when she hugged him. His body felt like one of the cold logs out by the fence. He told her what had happened: the blood, the surgeon, the loss of their secret. But there was a new part he did not mention.
“Thomasina Baikie,” he said, “told Wayne everything. And told me more besides.”
“Where is he?” Jacinta felt elation, even while she could see her husband’s face might not recover from its careworn collapse. The life that had drained out of Treadway began filling her face. He saw it. Why was life coming into her when he felt this way?
“Goose Bay.” He opened the fridge, took out his bread, made himself a Maple Leaf bologna sandwich with mustard, and put the kettle on. He sat at the kitchen table, ate the sandwich, and waited for his kettle to boil.
“Is he by himself?”
Treadway shrugged, his mouth full. “There were nurses.”
Jacinta had slung her coat on Treadway’s La-Z-Boy when she came in, and now she put it on. The keys were beside his saucer, and she grabbed them and shoved on the easiest shoes and went out with no scarf, which she never did. Even in summer Jacinta wore a silk scarf or a thin cotton one around her collarbones, but not this day.
When she reached the hospital, she went straight to Wayne’s room and saw that he was so pale his freckles looked as if they were floating in cream. She hugged him and he clung to her, and it was the first time since he was a baby that she could allow love unimpeded to escape her heart and flow to her child. It buzzed like the power line on her old back lane in St. John’s. She had not freely loved the girl part of Wayne, as the girl had not been acknowledged to exist. Jacinta kissed her child on the forehead. She rubbed her own tears into her face and they stung the nicks that the wind had chafed, and she brought her child home.
But the falling away had started. When the child separates from its parents to explore the new world, the parents can do one of two things. They can fight it with rules, pleading, tears, and anger: “Why do you want to go out in minus-fifteen-degree temperatures in that T-shirt when you could wear the wool I’ve warmed for you over the woodstove? It’s so cosy.” Or they can admit the new world exists, dangerous and irresistible. Cosy is not what awakening youth wants. Safety is not what it wants. The material world is not what it wants either.
“Why does Dad watch the stock market report every night?” Wayne asked his mother. She was peeling carrots and he had been writing a poem about Remembrance Day for the annual school contest. “You know what his slippers remind me of?”
The blade on the carrot peeler was loose and it rattled. Jacinta kept the tap running to rinse fluffs of peel off her knuckles.
“You know the holes in them? Dad’s brown socks poke out right where a mole’s nose would be. I pretend his slippers are moles.”
Treadway ordered a supply of Torngat Heavy-Spun work socks from the Hudson’s Bay Company every spring and fall. “You don’t mind if you lose one,” he said, “when they’re all the same. I can never understand why people have socks in a dozen colours and sizes. People like to make work for themselves, I guess.”
“Why does he, Mom?”
“What?”
“Watch the stock market every night.”
“Your dad bought some gold and he likes to track it.”
”Dad bought gold?”
“A little bit. Enough to get by if there’s some sort of crisis in the world. Not for long. Just enough to pass through the crisis. So he likes to keep up on how the price fluctuates, and he likes knowing what’s going on with prices of other things while he’s at it. He’s just interested in it. People can be interested in things.”
But the moles, Wayne thought, were blind. He suspected they were dead. What was the good of having feet if all they did was act like dead moles?
“How come he does the same thing every night? He falls asleep in his chair and he snores. Doesn’t he find it boring?”
“That’s precisely why” — Jacinta flung a carrot in the sink — “your father goes on his trapline for six months of the year. He can’t stand it in here either. Your father is more interesting than you think. I suppose you wonder the same thing about me.”
Wayne looked at her guiltily. He had wanted to ask the night before, as Jacinta read Luke and then John through the stock market report, “Are you hoping God wrote something new in there since last night?” He had begun to wonder, as autumn darkness closed in, why both parents were satisfied with such quietness. With no brothers or sisters in the house, there was no one to share his restlessness.
“Anyway — oh, I hate this peeler.” She threw it down. “Where’s my little white knife? This makes the carrots fluffy. I hate fluffy carrots.”
She searched in a drawer with her back to him. “You might think I’m boring as hell too, but that’s what happens to people who get married and have a kid and buy carrot peelers and Mr. Clean and all the rest of it, and make sure everything goes okay for their kids at school, and go to the hospital in Goose Bay five times a week…” She grew louder. Medical follow-up had meant the two of them had been back and forth to see the doctors many times. Wayne got his stitches out and started a new regimen of hormones. They had to meet Dr. Lioukras and go over signs and symptoms: what to do if the abdominal swelling recurred.
“Women start out,” Jacinta said, “with all kinds of passion. Every time I saw an ordinary old starling I’d look at the gold line around every one of its little feathers. Gold. I saw everything like that. Sharp. Edges of leaves. Sounds. Rain. I loved going downtown with all the streetlights, looking at shoes in shop windows. Portholes all lit up on a big boat from England. But you know what kills me? I’m too tired to do that now, even if I could. Even if St. John’s Harbour was at the end of that fence where your father left his tent bag. Women don’t have tent bags, Wayne. Not Labrador women. Men have the tents. I wouldn’t mind my own tent. Mine would be different from your father’s, I can tell you that.”