Kathleen Winter has written dramatic and documentary scripts for Sesame Street and CBC Television. Her first collection of short stories, boYs, was the winner of both the Winterset Award and the Metcalf–Rooke Award. A long-time resident of St. John’s, Newfoundland, she now lives in Montreal.
In 1968, into the beautiful, spare environment of remote coastal Labrador in the far north-east of Canada, a mysterious child is born: a baby who appears to be neither fully boy nor girl, but both at once. Only three people share the secret – the baby’s parents, Jacinta and Treadway, and a trusted neighbour, Thomasina. Together the adults make a difficult decision: to go through surgery and raise the child as a boy named Wayne. But as Wayne grows up within the hyper-male hunting culture of his father, his shadow-self – a girl he thinks of as ‘Annabel’ – is never entirely extinguished, and indeed is secretly nurtured by the women in his life. As Wayne approaches adulthood, and its emotional and physical demands, the woman inside him begins to cry out. The changes that follow are momentous not just for him, but for the three adults that have guarded his secret.
Haunting and sweeping in scope, this is a first novel as much concerned with its characters as it is with their predicament, as much about humanity as it is about a rigidly masculine culture that shuns the singular and the unique. Told with great elegance and empathy, Annabel is the powerfully moving story of one person’s struggle to discover the truth and the strength to change, to find tenderness in a severe and unforgiving land.
I THANK MY BELOVED FAMILY and friends, especially my husband, Jean Dandenault. Thank you to my writing group: enginistas Danielle Devereaux, Lina Gordaneer, Julie Paul and Alice Zorn. Thank you to Agnes Hutchings. Thank you to my wonderful agent, Shaun Bradley. Thank you to Sarah MacLachlan and the staff of House of Anansi Press. Thank you to Lynn Verge and the kind staff of Montreal’s Atwater Library. Special thanks to my editor, Lynn Henry, for her profound expertise and dedication. And thank you, dear reader.
WAYNE BLAKE WAS BORN at the beginning of March, during the first signs of spring breakup of the ice – a time of great importance to Labradorians who hunted ducks for food – and he was born, like most children in that place in 1968, surrounded by women his mother had known all her married life: Joan Martin, Eliza Goudie and Thomasina Baikie. Women who knew how to ice-fish and sew caribou hide moccasins and stack wood in a pile that would not fall down in the months when their husbands walked the traplines. Women who would know, during any normal birth, exactly what was required.
The village of Croydon Harbour, on the southeast Labrador coast, has that magnetic earth all Labrador shares. You sense a striation, a pulse, as the land drinks light and emits a vibration. Sometimes you can see it with your naked eye, stripes of light coming off the land. Not every traveller senses it, but those who do keep looking for it in other places, and they find it nowhere but desert and mesa. A traveller can come from New York and feel it. Explorers, teachers, people who know good hot coffee and densely printed newspapers but who want something more fundamental, an injection of New World in their blood. Real New World, not a myth that has led to highways and more highways and the low, radioactive buildings that offer pancakes and hamburgers and gasoline on those highways. A traveller can come to Labrador and feel its magnetic energy or not feel it. There has to be a question in the person. The visitor has to be an open circuit, available to the power coming off the land, and not everybody is. And it is the same with a person born in Labrador. Some know, from birth, that their homeland has a respiratory system, that it pulls energy from rock and mountain and water and gravitational activity beyond earth, and that it breathes energy in return. And others don’t know it.
Wayne was born, in bathwater, in the house of his parents, Treadway and Jacinta Blake. Treadway belonged to Labrador but Jacinta did not. Treadway had kept the traplines of his father and he was magnetised to the rocks, whereas Jacinta had come from St John’s when she was eighteen to teach in the little school in Croydon Harbour, because she thought, before she met Treadway, that it would be an adventure, and that it would enable her to teach in a St John’s school once she had three or four years of experience behind her.
‘I would eat a lunch of bread and jam every day,’ Joan Martin told Eliza and Thomasina as Jacinta went through her fiercest labour pains in the bathtub. Every woman in Croydon Harbour spoke at one time or another of how she might enjoy living on her own. The women indulged in this dream when their husbands had been home from their traplines too long. ‘I would not need any supper except a couple of boiled eggs, and I’d read a magazine in bed every single night.’
‘I’d wear the same clothes for a week,’ Eliza said. ‘My blue wool pants and grey shirt with my nightie stuffed under them. I would never take off my nightie from September till June. And I would get a cat instead of our dogs, and I would save up for a piano.’
The women did not wish away their husbands out of animosity – it was just that the unendurable winters were all about hauling wood and saving every last piece of marrow and longing for the intimacy they imagined would exist when their husbands came home, all the while knowing the intimacy would always be imaginary. Then came brief blasts of summer, when fireweed and pitcher plants and bog sundews burst open and gave the air one puff, one tantalising scented breath that signalled life could now begin, but it did not begin. The plants were carnivorous. That moment of summer contained desire and fruition and death all in one ravenous gulp, and the women did not jump in. They waited for the moment of summer to expand around them, to expand enough to contain women’s lives, and it never did.
When Jacinta was not groaning with the mind-stopping agony of having her pelvic bones wrenched apart by the baby that was coming, she too indulged in the dream. ‘I don’t believe I’d stay here at all,’ she told her friends as she poured scalding coffee from the small enamel pot, her belly as big as a young seal under her blue apron covered in tiny white flowers. ‘I’d move back to Monkstown Road and if I couldn’t get a job teaching I’d get my old job back at the Duckworth Laundry, washing white linen for the Newfoundland Hotel.’
Thomasina was the only woman who did not indulge. She had not had a father, and she regarded her husband, Graham Montague, with great respect. She had not got over the fact that he could fix anything, that he did not let the house grow cold, that he was the last man to leave for his traplines and the first to come home to her, that he was blind and needed her, or that he had given her Annabel, a red-haired daughter whom she called my bliss and my bee, and who helped her father navigate his canoe now that she was eleven years old and had a head on her as level and judicious as Thomasina’s own. Graham was out now, as were all the hunters in Croydon Harbour, on the river in his white canoe, and Annabel was with him. She rode the bow and told him where to steer, though he knew every movement he needed to make with his paddle before Annabel told him, since before she was born he had travelled the river by listening and could hear every stone and ice pan and stretch of whitewater. He told her stories in the canoe, and her favourite was a true story about the white caribou that had joined the woodland herd and that her father had encountered only once, as a boy, before he had the accident that blinded him. Annabel looked for the white caribou on every trip, and when Thomasina told her it might not be alive any more, or it might have gone back to its Arctic tribe, her husband turned his face towards her and silently warned her not to stop their daughter from dreaming.
As her baby’s head crowned, Jacinta’s bathroom brimmed with snow light. Razor clam shells on her windowsill glowed white, and so did the tiles, the porcelain, the shirts of the women and their skin, and whiteness pulsed through her sheer curtains so that the baby’s hair and face became a focal point of saturated colour in the white room; goldy brown hair, red face, black little eyelashes, and a red mouth.
Down the hall from Jacinta’s birthing room, her kitchen puckered and jounced with wood heat. Treadway dropped caribou cakes into spitting pork fat, scalded his teabag, and cut a two-inch-thick chunk of partridgeberry loaf. He had no intention of lollygagging in the house during the birth – he was here for his dinner and would slice through Beaver River again in an hour in his white canoe. His hat was white and so were his sealskin coat and canvas pants and his boots. This was how generations of Labrador men had hunted in the spring.
A duck could not tell a white hunter’s canoe from an ice pan. The canoe, with the hunter reclining in it, slid dangerously through the black water, silently slowing near the flock, whether the flock flew high overhead or rested their fat bellies on the water’s skin. Treadway lived for the whiteness and the silence. He could not see with his ears as Graham Montague could, but he could hear, if he emptied himself of all desire, the trickle of spring melt deep inland. He could inhale the medicinal shock of Labrador tea plants with their leathery leaves and orange, furry undersides, and watch the ways of flight of the ducks, ways that were numerous and that told a hunter what to do. Dips and turns and degrees of speed and hesitation told him exactly when to raise his gun and when to hide it. Their markings were written on the sky as plain as day, and Treadway understood completely how Graham Montague could hit ducks accurately even though he was blind, for he had himself noticed the constant mathematical relationship between the ducks’ position and the hollow, sweeping sounds their wings made, a different sound for each kind of turning, and their voices that cracked the silence of the land. The movements of the ducks were the white hunter’s calligraphy.
This was a kind of message younger people had lost, but Treadway was attuned to every line and nuance. There were words for each movement of a duck, and Treadway had learned all of the words from his father. People five years younger than he knew only half the words, but Treadway knew them all, in his speech and in his body. This was how he lived, by the nuances of wild birds over land and water, and by the footprints and marks of branches in snow on his trapline, and the part of him that understood these languages detested time in houses. Clocks ticked, and doilies sat on furniture, and stagnant air rushed into his pores and suffocated him. It was not air at all, but suffocating gauze crammed with dust motes, and it was always too warm. If the women dreaming of life without their husbands could know how he felt, they would not imagine themselves single with such gaiety. Treadway did not tell this to other men, laughing over broken buns of hot bread and pots of coffee, but he dreamed it nonetheless. He dreamed living his life over again, like the life of his great-uncle Gaetan Joseph, who had not married but who had owned a tiny hut one hundred miles along the trapline, equipped with hard bread, flour, split peas, tea, a table made out of a spruce stump with two hundred rings, a seal-hide daybed, and a tin stove. Treadway would have read and meditated and trapped his animals and cured pelts and studied. Gaetan Joseph had studied Plutarch and Aristotle and Pascal’s Pensées, and Treadway had some of his old books in his own trapper’s hut, and he had others besides that he read deep into the nights when he was blessed with the solitude of his trapline. A lot of trappers did this. They left home, they trapped, and they meditated and studied. Treadway was one of them, a man who studied not just words but pathways of wild creatures, pulsations of the northern lights, trajectories of the stars. But he did not know how to study women, or understand the bonds of family life, or achieve any kind of real happiness indoors. There were times he wished he had never been seduced by the pretty nightgowns Jacinta wore, made of such blowy, insubstantial ribbons and net that they would not have enough strength to hold the smallest ouananiche. The closest thing to these nightgowns in his world outdoors was the fizz of light that hung in a veil around the Pleiades. He had a Bible in his trapper’s library, and he remembered his wife’s loveliness when he read the lines Who can bind the sweet influence of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? He read these lines on his hard daybed when he had been away from her for months, and they made him remember her loveliness. But did he ever tell her this? He did not.
Home from the trapline, recovered from all loneliness, Treadway loved his wife because he had promised he would. But the centre of the wilderness called him, and he loved that centre more than any promise. That wild centre was a state of mind, but it had a geographical point as well. The point was in an unnamed lake. Canadian mapmakers had named the lake but the people who inhabited the Labrador interior had given it a different name, a name that remains a secret. From a whirlpool in the centre of that lake, river water flows in two directions. It flows southeast down to the Beaver River and through Hamilton Inlet and past Croydon Harbour into the North Atlantic, and another current flows northwest from the centre, to Ungava Bay. The whirling centre was the birthplace of seasons and smelt and caribou herds and deep knowledge that a person could not touch in domesticity. Treadway left this place at the end of the trapping season and faithfully came back to his house, which he had willingly built when he was twenty, but he considered the house to belong to his wife, while the place where waters changed direction belonged to him, and would belong to any son he had.
And now the head of his and Jacinta’s first baby glittered beautifully in the white bathroom without his witnessing it, and so did the shoulders, the belly with its cord, the penis, thighs, knees and toes. Thomasina hooked a plug of slime out of the baby’s mouth with her pinky, slicked her big hand over face, belly, buttocks like butter over one of her hot loaves, and slipped the baby back to its mother. It was as the baby latched on to Jacinta’s breast that Thomasina caught sight of something slight, flower-like; one testicle had not descended, but there was something else. She waited the eternal instant that women wait when a horror jumps out at them. It is an instant that men do not use for waiting, an instant that opens a door to life or death. Women look through the opening because something might be alive in there. What Thomasina knew, as she looked through the opening this time, was that something can go wrong, not just with the child in front of you, another woman’s child, but with your own child, at any time, no matter how much you love it.
Thomasina bent over Jacinta and the baby in a midwife’s fashion, a ministering arc, and wrapped a blanket around the child, a cotton blanket that had been washed many times. She did not believe in putting anything new or synthetic next to a newborn’s skin. As she adjusted the blanket she quietly moved the one little testicle and saw that the baby also had labia and a vagina. This she took in as Treadway, in another room, threw his teabag in the garbage, as he gave his crust to the dog and clicked shut the front door, as he went out on the last perfect duck hunt of his days, and she let Treadway go. Thomasina asked Eliza and Joan to get the warm towels for Jacinta. She herself handed Jacinta the thick pad to soak up the postpartum blood, and helped her into the terrycloth robe that Jacinta would wear for the next few days.
Then she said, ‘I’m going to ask the others to leave, if it’s all right with you. We have something to talk about.’
HAD WAYNE NOT BEEN BORN IN 1968 in a place where caribou moss spreads in a white-green carpet, and where smoke plumes from houses, and where gold sand is so remote no crowds gather – the sand is a lonely stretch under the northern lights – things might have gone differently. Treadway was not an unkind man. His neighbours said he would give you the shirt off his back – and if that shirt had not been full of sweat from hauling wood and skinning animals and auguring ice, he might indeed have done so. He was a soft-hearted man when it came to anyone he felt was less practically talented than himself, and this covered a lot of people. He would help a man split wood, build a house or cut a hole in the right place in the ice, not to show off his superior skills but to save the man time. He did these things out of pure helpfulness, with kindness thrown in.
Pure kindness he saved for his dogs. On one hunting trip he had accidentally shot the eye of his old English setter, a mild-mannered dog whose jaw quivered with tenderness around any bird Treadway asked it to carry. Treadway had ended the trip although it meant he would have to launch it again later, at considerable expense in provisions and time, in order to have enough duck in store for the winter. He had carried the dog a hundred miles on his sled and paid Hans Nilsson the veterinarian a hundred dollars to get up in the middle of the night and tend to the wound, and when Hans told him the dog had to lose the eye, Treadway cried because it was his fault, and he did not eat again himself until the dog could eat, not even when Jacinta fried meat cakes with knobs of pure white pork fat and juniper berries in them. He believed sight to be something the dog loved, valued, and even enjoyed, and it hurt him deeply that he had ruined the dog’s ability to practise the talent for which bird dogs are born. He kept the dog though it could no longer hunt, and no one in Treadway’s ancestry had ever kept a dog that was just a pet, until the dog grew old. Only when the dog grew so arthritic it could not walk without pain did Treadway consent to have it put down, and on that day he walked to the river and stared at the water for more than an hour, thinking about not just how he had failed his dog but how he could be a better man all around if he paid more attention to every detail and let nothing pass that was off-kilter.
After he lost that dog, Treadway hauled and skinned and sweated, and, in his own way, he loved. He loved Jacinta because she was decent and kind to him; the last thing he wanted to do was to hurt her. He played games with her in the part of the season when he lived at home, games she liked, such as cribbage, which she had taught him when they were first married. He had to force himself to do it, to take his mind off the way he planned to sharpen the runners on his sled or condition the jaws of his traps with seal oil, but he did tear himself away from these things so that when he was with her, she would not feel that his mind was far away. He felt a tenderness that was, in part, a feeling of being sorry for her, for she had to stay indoors and lead a gentle life unconnected with all that was great and wild, and he did not see how she could enjoy this. He knew, during the crib games and the times they ate intimately together over the lamplit table, that she would have liked something more, but he did not know what it was. He did not know it was the city she came from, it was rain on the slate roofs of the shops on Water Street in that city, it was a man who would read poetry and philosophy but not keep it from her, who would lay the book right there on the table, beside the bread and the fragments of roast duck leg and the wine, and would talk about it with her.
Days after the birth, in the manner of secrets held from the world of husbands, Treadway had not been told the truth about his child. Jacinta examined her baby with gentle fingertips when Treadway was not in the room, and when he was, or when neighbours visited with bake-apple tarts and partridgeberry cake and hot caribou stew baked under a thick crust with gravy bubbling out of the knife holes, she gazed on her child with the full power of her concentration, and nothing could break that gaze. Neighbours walked and talked around her, and it was as if she were underwater and they were not, and this did not seem too different from the way it normally was with a new mother and her child. No one expected her to come up with idle conversation.
It was Thomasina who took care of the linguistics. Thomasina who, by miracles of deflection, managed to leave unspoken the first thing spoken of any newborn. To Treadway she appeared the most sensible of his wife’s friends.
‘Eliza Goudie,’ he had once told Jacinta, ‘spends far too much money on white sandals and those dresses out of the catalogue, the ones covered in blisters.’
‘Seersucker.’
‘And white sandals. Things that are not practical to wear in this climate.’ And he could not get over the fact that Joan Martin had forbidden her husband to pile wood near their house so she could plant some kind of fancy tulip that should grow only in a botanical garden somewhere.
‘Emperor,’ said Jacinta. ‘Those are Emperor tulips.’
It was a testament to Thomasina’s powers that she managed to stay eight days in Treadway’s house without his protesting. Not even Jacinta’s mother had been able to do that, when she was alive. Treadway did not ban a person outright, but he had an ability to give off such a chilled and hostile response to any guest who overstayed her welcome that no guest, not even the most impermeable, could stand it. He was a man who did not want strangers to observe his routine, not that there was anything remarkable about his habits. He simply liked to inhabit his house, when he had to inhabit it, and go about his ordinary pathways in it without being looked at or talked to, except by his own wife, who did not appear to him to mind it when he ignored the fact that she was there.
‘If I didn’t say anything to him,’ Jacinta sometimes told Joan and Eliza, ‘I think he could go a whole year without speaking to anyone but his dogs.’ She said this, though she felt disloyal, when she got caught up in the women’s derisive talk about husbands in general. And because they knew things like this about him, Joan and Eliza had an air about them, one Treadway could detect, of faint amusement towards him, and he could not tolerate them in the house, so when he was home, they hardly ever came. But because she had more gravity than they did, and because she did nothing for herself and everything for Jacinta and the baby, Thomasina was able to stay the eight days without Treadway’s disapproval, even though it meant the only time he had alone with his wife was the half-hour before sleep.
‘Everything all right?’ he asked Jacinta on the eighth day, his huge, comforting paw heating her belly down into her skin, her fat, her womb and ovarian tubes and ovaries, down into the small of her back. She did not tell her friends about his calm heat, or about the deep trust she had in his ability to create a secure home. There were a lot of instabilities in Eliza’s home. Her husband drank, and she was forever falling in love with someone – this year it was her children’s new geography teacher, a man ten years younger than Eliza, who had come from Vermont and lived in an apartment in the local wildlife officer’s basement. Eliza’s infatuations were always one sided, but they powered her in a way her real life did not, and as a result her own house always felt uninhabited by her, and her children and husband walked around lost in it. Joan was less susceptible to falling in love, but her husband was not. All of Croydon Harbour knew he had an Innu wife in the interior, and that while Joan had no children, his other wife had three daughters and a son.
‘Everything’s perfect.’ Jacinta never lied to Treadway. He ate steel-cut oatmeal every morning for breakfast, with salt on it. His underclothes were of ewe’s wool. When they made love, she climaxed every time, and when she did, he knew. If she were bone tired he stroked her forehead and her hair until she fell asleep. If he did anything that irked her, like drape filthy socks on the bedspread, she asked him not to do it and he did not mind. She agreed with him about Eliza’s impractical sandals but disagreed with him about the Emperor tulips. ‘It won’t hurt Harold Martin,’ she said, ‘to pile and cut his wood at the bottom of the fence so she can get some enjoyment,’ and Treadway did not argue with her or take it as an insult against husbands.
But about their own newborn baby, Jacinta did lie.
Siamese twins had been on the news, joined so tightly at the skull doctors the world over had despaired, and the mother – Jacinta had watched her on television – had loved those babies, and had decided, fiercely, that it didn’t matter if they were joined. She would bring them both up in the world just like that, no matter what, and Jacinta had not felt sorry for her. She knew better than to feel sorry for anyone. It was one of the things she had learned. Feeling sorry for a person was no help to them at all. People should get on with things. Privately she thought the woman would come to her senses one day and allow the babies to die.
But when you are the mother, you take it in stride. You take albino hair in stride, when you are the mother. When you are the mother, not someone watching that mother, you take odd-coloured eyes in stride. You take a missing hand in stride, and the same with Down syndrome, and spina bifida, and water on the brain. You would take wings in stride, or one lung outside the body, or a missing tongue. The penis and the one little testicle and the labia and vagina were like this for Jacinta. Baby Wayne slept in his cradle under his green quilt and white blanket. His black belly button stuck out, and Jacinta cleaned it with an alcohol swab, waiting for it to fall off. She played with his little red feet, and felt close to him when he crammed her breast in his mouth and sucked while raising his eyes slowly, slowly across her collarbone, across the ceiling, gazing at Thomasina or the stove or the cat, back again to her collarbone, then up, up, till he found her eyes and locked on, and that was a kind of flying, flying through the northern lights or a Chagall night sky, with a little white goat to give a blessing. There was blessing everywhere between Jacinta and this baby, and there were times when she completely forgot what it was about him that she was hiding from her husband.
‘Everything,’ she told Treadway, ‘is all right,’ and she believed that this was about to become true.
‘All I need,’ she had said earlier to Thomasina, ‘is a little more time, and everything will become clear. Everything will straighten itself out. The baby will, in some way we still have to learn about, be just fine.’
Treadway persisted. ‘Baby’s healthy?’ Jacinta knew he never spoke idly, and he was not speaking idly now, and he was asking her for an honest answer. But what was the most honest answer?
‘Yes.’ She tried this in a normal voice but it came out as a whisper. The strength of her voice, her real tone, which was a tone of plainness, like rain, which Treadway loved but had not told her he loved, did not inhabit the whisper. She wished she could go back and say yes again. Heat still radiated from Treadway’s hand deep into her belly.
‘He’s a big baby,’ Treadway said, and the heat stopped.
Jacinta wanted to blurt, ‘Why do you say he? Are you waiting for me to confess?’ But she did not. She said yes, louder than normal this time because she did not want another whisper to betray her. Her yes was a shout in their quiet room. Their bedroom was always quiet. Treadway liked a place of repose, a tranquil sleep with a white bedspread and no radio music or clutter, and so did she. She lay there waiting for his hand to heat her belly again, but it did not. Had he moved it away consciously? Treadway was a man whose warmth always heated her unless an argument stood between them.
In the morning Jacinta told Thomasina, ‘I went stiff as a hare. What are we going to do?’
Any time fortune came to Thomasina – acceptance of her grass baskets by the crafts commission, the flowering of a Persian rose in this zone where no one could grow any rose, not even the hardy John Cabot climber – she knew happiness was only one side of the coin and the coin was forever turning. She had been single until she was well past thirty, when Graham Montague had told her he didn’t care that she had a curved spine and felt old – he wanted to marry her if she would marry him. Annabel had been born the following year and Thomasina had every reason to be happy, but instead she held her heart at the same level she had always held it, because she did not trust extremes of feeling. Now she told Jacinta, as they spread jam on toast thinly, the way they both liked it, so gold shone through, ‘We will love this baby of yours and Treadway’s exactly as it was born.’
‘Will other people love it?’
‘That baby is all right the way it is. There’s enough room in this world.’
This was how Thomasina saw it, and it was what Jacinta needed to hear.
For days after the birth Treadway knew there was a secret, and it was only a matter of opening his attention in a way he was used to doing out on the land before the truth about the baby came to him. He did not need to investigate with his hands or move close when no one was looking. In the wilderness when he opened his attention, it was a spiritual opening, a way of seeing with your whole being, and it helped him see birds and caribou and fish that were invisible to anyone who was not hunting and had not opened their second eyes. He felt the secret in the house exactly as he felt the presence of a white ptarmigan behind him in the snow, and he understood the secret’s details, its identity, as easily as he would know the bird was a white ptarmigan before he turned around and saw it. He knew his baby had both a boy’s and a girl’s identity, and he knew a decision had to be made.
Where had their baby come from? There was no relative in the past, no story to which Treadway might turn. There was only the fact of which sex organ was the most obvious, which one it would be most practical to recognise, the easiest life for all concerned. For if there was one thing Treadway Blake considered with every step, it was how a decision of his affected not just himself but everyone. He understood privacy but he could not understand practical selfishness. Every part of him knew it was physically connected to every part of everyone else on this coast, and not just to people but to the sky, and the land, and the stars. He was both Scottish and Inuit, and he was nothing if not fair. To him the land was a universal loaf of bread, every part nourishing and meant for everyone.
It never once occurred to Treadway to do the thing that lay in the hearts of Jacinta and Thomasina: to let his baby live the way it had been born. That, in his mind, would not have been a decision. It would have been indecision, and it would have caused harm. He did not want to imagine the harm it would cause. He was not an imagining man. He saw deeply into things but he had no desire to entertain possibility that had not yet manifested. He wanted to know what was, not what might be. So he refused to imagine the harm in store for a child who was neither a son nor a daughter but both. He filled a bag with bread, meat and tea and went outdoors. He went without his gun and walked to a height of land from where he could consider the eagles and foxes and let them teach him the path of most practical wisdom.
Thomasina worked in his kitchen those first eight mornings, kneading touton dough, soaking beans, wringing diapers and administering to the mother, because without company Jacinta would have wandered off in a drift of worry. Everything Treadway refused to imagine, Jacinta imagined in detail enough for the two of them. Whereas he struck out on his own to decide how to erase the frightening ambiguity in their child, she envisioned living with it as it was. She imagined her daughter beautiful and grown up, in a scarlet satin gown, her male characteristics held secret under the clothing for a time when she might need a warrior’s strength and a man’s potent aggression. Then she imagined her son as a talented, mythical hunter, his breasts strapped in a concealing vest, his clothes the green of striding forward, his heart the heart of a woman who could secretly direct his path in the ways of intuition and psychological insight. Whenever she imagined her child, grown up without interference from a judgemental world, she imagined its male and female halves as complementing each other, and as being secretly, almost magically powerful. It was the growing up part she did not want to imagine. The social part, the going to school in Labrador part, the jeering part, the what will we tell everyone part, the part that asks how will we give this child so much love it will know no harm from the cruel reactions of people who do not want to understand.
Thomasina brought Jacinta back from these thoughts with her wholehearted company. She kept the kitchen going, the fire crackling, the hum and heat of normal life throbbing, and the undercurrent of her seemingly ordinary, homey activities was one of open acceptance. Jacinta could feel, when Thomasina took the child and held it so she could eat or go to the toilet or rest on the daybed for half an hour, that Thomasina believed the child’s difference was a strange blessing that had to be protected. That it was a jeopardised advantage, even a power. Thomasina hid this undercurrent behind business so apparently normal that even the most vigilant opponent of enchantment would not perceive it was there. When Treadway came in from his trip to the height of land, Thomasina was boiling partridgeberries and sugar, and the kitchen was full of their bloody, mossy tang that smells and tastes more of regret than of sweetness.
When he finally spoke, Treadway caused no drama. He sat at the table stirring his tea for a long time. Thomasina was in a state of something akin to prayer, but not as helpless. Bearing the situation up, sitting with it.
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.
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 dress. She did not wear a black hat or even a Sunday hat of green or lavender felt with a satin band. She wore her ordinary coat, a blue wool coat with flat buttons that had belonged to her mother, and she wore ordinary clothes underneath it: a grey and green dress that had no waistband, for she hated waistbands, and no sleeves, for she liked a dress you could work in and not be encumbered by seams or small openings and eyelets and finicky fastenings. She liked a dress you could pull over your head and forget about.
The inside of the church was something she could not stand that day. She liked to sing inside it on other days, and was part of the small choir, and wore the same choir robes as everyone else. But today she could not go in. She did not want to contain her thoughts about Graham and Annabel inside the walls, which shut out the light this spring day, and which smelled of old wooden pews and the fragrant paper of ancient prayer books and the soap and perfume of people who had washed themselves clean enough to come to a religious ritual. She could not bear to have the lives of her husband and daughter reduced to this ritual when out here the sun and air were boundless, and insects had begun to inhabit the place again after the long winter, and there was, even though Graham and Annabel had drowned, glad birdsong. This was the litany she wanted to hear. She could not understand it, but she wanted to hear it, and she would not hear it if she went inside.
Through the church walls she could hear what was inside if she leaned back and touched the boards – there was a low murmur, a strain of sad music from the pedal organ Wilhelmina Simpson had brought in from Boston and on which she would soon play ‘Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,’ as Easter Sunday would be early this year, the moon almost full now and March not yet ended. The people inside that church did not realise that Thomasina would be able to sing resurrection anthems when Easter came. They did not know that her idea of resurrection was different from that of the Church, as were her ideas of Christ, of light, of immortality and holiness. Christ, for Thomasina, was not so much a person as an opening in the grass, a patch of sun, a warm spot in the loneliness. She had never been a person who respected stained glass or altars. That butterfly’s small early wings were her stained glass. That patch of earth, peeping through the melting snow, was her altar. Her mother had not called her Thomasina for nothing. ‘If you were a boy,’ her mother had said when she was young, ‘I was going to call you Doubting Thomas, after the disciple who wanted to see Christ’s nail marks with his own eyes. But you were a girl. So I called you Doubting Thomasina.’
After the funeral, at which Wilhelmina Simpson played Bach’s ‘Sheep May Safely Graze,’ the hymn she played at every funeral, the people walked down the hill to the cemetery, and the gravediggers, Simon Montague and Harold Pierson, lowered the coffins into the graves, and Thomasina watched the part of the procession visible from her sunlit corner. She stood there, the wind blowing her coat, a faintly ominous vision, a figure who had stepped out of the bounds of what was normal for people in this place. Those who stole a look in her direction felt someone should do something, someone should go to her, put an arm around her and guide her into the group; after all, they were supposed to be mourning with her. They thought someone should do this, but nobody did. When the handfuls of earth had been thrown into the graves, the crowd walked up to the tiny community hall across the road from the church, and they walked the way they had descended, along the east and north walls, not the south and west walls at whose corner Thomasina stood – all except Jacinta, who handed the baby to Treadway.
‘Go in and get a sandwich and tea,’ she told Treadway. ‘Talk to Harold Pierson about shovelling the ice off Thomasina’s roof before it slides off in a sheet and kills her.’
Jacinta picked her way through last year’s thistles. Snow filtered into her ankle-boots as she stood beside Thomasina, raising her face to the sun as Thomasina did, leaning against the church wall inches from where a spider with white stripes made an iridescent web. Not many spots trapped this kind of warmth in Croydon Harbour. Jacinta saw the blue butterfly – a small moth really; a mud-puddle moth, but pretty, and pale blue like the spring sky – and she knew what Thomasina was doing. Jacinta did not think her crazy, and she did not try to draw her to the reception or to move her from this moment of peace. Women did not get many moments like this in their lives, sun beating on their eyelids in a hidden corner and no one asking them for anything. No one asking them to find the salt, or wait for a man who might come home in three months but who might not. Women of Croydon Harbour knew what was expected of them at all times, and they did it, and the men were expected to do things too, and they did these, and there was no time left.
Jacinta closed her eyes long enough for tiredness to drain out of them. Not all the tiredness, but some of it. A spoonful of tiredness out of each eye. If only a person could stay like this as long as she needed; if only the sun could stay, and the wind not come up, and obligations not line the road.
All Thomasina wanted to do now was go home. Not to talk to well-wishers. Not to intercept casserole dishes full of cabbage rolls and moose sausage and Rice-A-Roni with ground caribou meat. Who would eat it? What Thomasina would eat, if she ate anything, was milk lunch biscuits and tea. The wind changed and the moment of peace in the sun was gone; the two women were chilled. Thomasina walked towards her house and Jacinta walked with her. They did not talk but went together into the kitchen, a plain kitchen, clean, with nothing but a tea canister on the counter. Thomasina boiled the kettle and put out biscuits and she and Jacinta sat there and were silent until Thomasina said, ‘What are you going to do about that baby?’
‘Treadway wants him to live as a boy.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I don’t know how to argue with him. He’d say what I’m thinking makes no sense.’
‘No sense?’ In the years of her marriage to Graham Montague, that was a thing of which Graham had never accused Thomasina. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking maybe if we just waited everything would change.’
‘It might.’
‘But everything keeps shifting in my imagination. Other things. Completely different things. The baby’s ears. Or his face. I think, what if those or other things changed? I don’t want anything to change. I don’t want to do anything to the baby. I don’t want to make any mistakes.’
‘You want to do everything right the first time? Is that what makes sense to Treadway?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If sense is a partridge in the willows, you have to follow it. You don’t know where it’s leading. Do you call that baby a she?’
‘No.’
‘Have you tried?’
‘Not out loud.’
‘She might want to hear it. She might want to hear you call her “My little daughter.”’
‘Thomasina.’ Jacinta laid down her mug with the queen of diamonds on it. ‘I’m sorry you lost Annabel.’
Thomasina drank her tea. She smoothed the plastic tablecloth, which had permanent creases. She said, ‘You want to be careful what you let Treadway have done to that baby.’
There was a mirror on the wall and Jacinta could see both their faces in it. She realised that of the two, her own had no strength left, while Thomasina’s held reserves. She had walked here thinking she would comfort the other woman, but Thomasina did not need comforting.
‘If a stranger came here now,’ Jacinta said, ‘they would guess I was the one who had lost a man and a daughter.’
‘You won’t lose Treadway unless you want to lose him. Treadway is a husband for life.’
‘I know.’
‘But it looks to me like I’m not the only one who has lost a daughter.’
‘I’ve always felt,’ Jacinta said, ‘that daughter is a beautiful word.’
The first thing Thomasina did when the funeral was over was rid the house of food she disliked. Venison sausages, large roasts of moose, seabirds Graham had caught in his net. These things filled a third of her freezer and were what Graham had wanted for his suppers, and she had not minded cooking them for him. Half the time he had cooked for himself. Theirs had not been a marriage of sharply defined roles. Men of the cove generally were kings outside their houses – kings of the grounds and sheds and fences – and the women were queens of inner rooms and painted sills and pelmets and carpet cleaners. Thomasina and Graham had come and gone as they pleased, each one knowing how to use a knife for cleaning fish or cutting bread, how to sweep a floor, how to mend a gate or clean the chimney. Thomasina had a grain of sense, men of the cove said, and she walked about in brown cardigans with her hair tidy but not styled. She did not own a pair of shoes in which she could not walk ten miles over rough ground.
Unlike Eliza Goudie in her seersucker and white sandals, unlike Joan Martin with her bulb-planting tool for her Emperor tulips, Thomasina would not fall apart at the loss of her husband. Though they complained about their husbands, the first two would have looked at a dripping tap, a leaky ceiling, a tree fallen on the property as insurmountable difficulties over which they had no control. They were the kind of women of whom the Apostles had written that it was necessary to help from a safe distance. They had not, during their marriages, held any part of themselves in reserve. They joked, when they got together, of how easy their lives would become if they did not have to cook for the men, but if these women ever lost their husbands, they would themselves be as lost as orphaned whitecoat seals.