“I’m going,” Treadway had finally announced, “to give that dog to Roland Shiwack before I go trapping. Since no one here feeds it or gives it water besides myself. Roland offered me seventy-five dollars for it. You can use that while I’m gone.”
Working the hat edge, Jacinta said, “If I’d told you all the times I knew you were my daughter…”
“Tell me now,” Wayne said with such eagerness she lost her stitch count. It had not occurred to her that Wayne would want to hear about those times, as if they were beautiful stories. It had never entered her mind that the countless lost moments could be recovered by speaking about them.
“Tell me about when I was a baby.”
“I don’t know if I can remember individual times.”
“Can you remember any? Even one?”
“Well, I used to rock you in my arms and you had a green blanket and you looked like a little baby girl for sure.”
“I did?”
“And I sang you lullabies with the word girl in them.”
“Like what?”
“I can’t remember them, Wayne. Mothers forget things. Everybody expects them to remember everything. I guess I sang “Dance to Your Daddy.” That was one my dad knew.”
“Sing it.”
“Well, it goes, ‘Dance to your daddy, my little laddie, dance to your daddy, hear your mammy sing.’ If you’re singing it to a baby boy. And if you’re singing it to a baby girl you sing, ‘Dance to your daddy, my little lassie.’ And the rest is the same.”
“Did you sing lassie?”
“I couldn’t sing laddie. That was the thing. You and I were alone and no one heard. I felt if I didn’t sing to the part of you that was a baby girl she would feel so lonely she might get sick and die.”
“Are there any more verses?”
“Well the rest is, ‘You shall have a fishy on a little dishy. You shall have a kipper when the boat comes in.’ First it’s a kipper, then it’s other kinds of fish, and you keep singing it until you run out of kinds of fish or the baby girl is asleep.”
“What other kinds of fish?”
“You shall have a bloater. Then a mackerel. There were all kinds of fish, Wayne. I sang all kinds of fish you can’t get here. Fish they had in England, where the song came from. Fish I heard from my dad.”
“What other times was I almost a girl?”
Treadway came in then and said, “That should fix him.” He meant the weasel. Wayne was shiny-eyed, waiting for his mother’s next revelation, but he didn’t get it that night. Memories of when Wayne was a girl became a secret conversation held while Treadway prepared for his winter on the trapline.
“Your feet were slender,” Jacinta said as Treadway packed his World Famous bags and his caribou pouch in the yard.
“Are they still?” Wayne peeled his socks off.
“Certain parts of you were so feminine I used to think people were going to stop me on the road and tell me they knew you were a girl.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, Wayne. Kate Davis for one, I guess. What mother can remember everything?”
“What parts, then?”
“What?”
“Parts. You said parts with an S on it. Other parts of me that were like a girl.”
“Before you started taking all the pills.”
“Then I wasn’t like a girl any more?”
“Not as much.”
“But before then, what parts?”
“Your face. Your whole face. I don’t know why the whole town couldn’t see what I could.”
“Because you were my mother and they weren’t.”
“I guess.”
“And they weren’t looking.”
“Maybe.”
“My clothes were boy’s. And everyone called me Wayne, except for one person.”
“Thomasina was the only one.”
“Annabel.” It was the first time Wayne had said the name out loud to anyone but Thomasina. “Mom?”
“What?”
“Are they going to let Thomasina come back and teach us?”
“I don’t know if she wants to come back, Wayne.”
“How long did Miss Huskins suspend her for?”
“Miss Huskins didn’t suspend her, Wayne. The Labrador East School Board did.”
“How long for?”
“A month.”
“That’ll be over soon.”
“But sometimes when there’s a break, a change in the way things are, even for a little while, it’s really a chasm.”
“Like the Gulch?”
“Yes. The change is only for a month, or even a week or a day, but it breaks something. It breaks the pattern and things aren’t the same.”
“I love Thomasina.”
“I know you do, Wayne.”
“I hope she comes back.”
“I know.”
“Mom — could you call me my girl name?”
“Annabel?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know.”
“Mom?”
“I can’t — what?”
“Do you remember anything else?”
“Your dad might hear.”
“Dad’s taking his Ski-Doo apart. We’ve got lots of time.”
“I thought he was packing.”
“I heard him laying out his wrenches.” Wayne’s ear was attuned to the clinking of metal on cement, and to all the sounds Treadway made inside and outside the house.
“When you were in kindergarten you cut a tarantula out of a National Geographic. Its legs were as slender as my hair. The teacher said no other boy could do that.”
Attuned though his hearing was, there was one thing Wayne did not hear Treadway do, one thing his father had vowed to do before his months on the trapline. It happened while Wayne was in school and Jacinta was buying sugar cubes, which Treadway preferred to loose sugar. Cubes cost more per weight, and it was not like Treadway to prefer a less economical choice. She had asked him, long ago, “Why do you want me to buy cubes?”
“I like cubes,” he said. “I like the way they fit together in the box. One cube is exactly the right amount in my tea, every time. You can’t spill them. If a rat puts a hole in a bag of sugar, you lose whatever spills out. Humidity will ruin a bag of sugar, but to ruin cubes you’d have to drop them in the river.” He had gone on like this, outlining the advantages of sugar cubes, astonishing Jacinta with his seriousness regarding such a small thing.
So Jacinta was buying sugar cubes, and this gave Treadway a chance to look at the phone book, which was difficult for him to do. Treadway could read Voltaire. He could wait eight hours in silence for a lynx and read the tracks of a dozen duck species and know each by name. He could find them in Roger Tory Peterson’s guidebook, and had read the journals of James Audubon, but the phone book was a torment to him, as were government documents, tax forms, insurance policies, bank statements, and telephone or hydro bills, all of which Jacinta dealt with. She looked things up for him in the phone book when she was at home, but he wanted to do this thing without anyone knowing.
He phoned the library in Goose Bay first. They told him to phone the A. C. Hunter Library in St. John’s, and A. C. Hunter said his best bet was to call Memorial University. By the time he found a woman named Augusta Furey in the office of the dean of music, almost an hour had gone by, and he was worn out as he wrote down the New York address she gave him out of the Albert J. Breton Catalogue of Sheet Music for Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass Voices.
“The price might have changed,” she warned him. “This is last year’s catalogue. We keep asking them to send us the new one as soon as it comes out. But we can’t control everything.”
Treadway wrote Albert J. Breton a letter ordering a copy of “Cantique de Jean Racine” by Gabriel Fauré. He phoned the Croydon Harbour post office and got the number of Gerald and Ann Michelin’s mailbox.