Annabel by Kathleen Winter Read Free Book Online Page B

sailboats and men stacking pallets of melons and loading crates of wine — the city looked like a place where dreams would come true. You smelled fresh tar that workers were rolling on the roof of Bowring’s, and smoke from the wine-dipped cigar of a man on his way to the lawyers’ office, and the faint sweetness from melons that had fallen and smacked open on the ground near the boats, and perfume from a woman who had just disappeared around the corner where the newspaper seller sat on his bag in the sun eating his sandwich of hot sausage and onion. You felt young — you were young, because you were not yet eighteen and had not yet gone to Labrador to work, and had not yet met the man you would love but who would never understand the greatest part of your soul, the part that lived on such wisps of romance and faded when they were taken away.
    You had not yet thought about how the romance that resided in each of these elements — the melons, the perfume, the rich man with the cigar, the poor man and his newspapers — did not live on its own but must come together with the others in order to exist. The romance was in the whole picture, and each of its parts was only one lonely story, and the story was often sad and without any comfort or answers or poetry or sense, or love.
    Now Jacinta sat in her kitchen in Croydon Harbour holding her baby, Wayne. Instead of longing for her youth, the cinema, and the street life she used to know, she found herself bereft of the old wistfulness, and its absence was harder to bear than its existence. When there was another world to remember, a lost world, she could imagine visiting it again. She could imagine the comfort of being there for a week, then coming back to face her real life. But now her real life, her baby’s real life, had turned into something she did not know how to face. There was no ice-cream wagon, no music, no usher leading the way with a flashlight to the best remaining seat.
    Jacinta was of two minds about Wayne’s christening at St. Mark’s Anglican Church in Croydon Harbour. A church, in her mind, was not what it claimed to be. Its beauty for her lay not in the meaning prescribed by the Apostles’ Creed or the liturgy, or in the banners of red, gold, and blue made by the Anglican Women’s Association proclaiming HE IS WITH US . The beauty of the building lay in its space and architecture, and Jacinta felt this beauty existed more fully at the great cathedral in St. John’s than it did in this little community church, although she tried to evoke it here by straining her imagination to its fullest limit.
    The St. John’s cathedral had gargoyles, a crypt, magnificent windows brought to Newfoundland from England in barrels of molasses so the glass would not break. The windows had white lambs against sapphire skies, Egyptian goddesses in the guise of Christian icons of womanhood, pilgrims with staffs and scarlet robes straight out of the Torah and tarot, doves of hope and ravens of doom and heralds with golden trumpets. The pulpit’s eagle, towering over the congregation with its brooding stare and ravenous beak, had scared her when, as a child, she had gone for the blessing of the animals with her Aunt Myrtle, or placed hay in the crèche at Christmas with the other children, or smelled the Easter lilies, whose perfume mingled with the shade and atmosphere of the great stone walls to create a chalice in which each child sat in wonder like a small, bright, plump bee sucking mysterious nectar, intoxicating and unnerving and powerful.
    In Croydon Harbour the eagle on the pulpit had been carved of pine by her husband’s father, and it had the smooth planes and lines of Inuit stone carvings, which to Jacinta looked open and closed at the same time. She could not get into those lines, into the myth and anger and spiritual flight and story of that Croydon Harbour eagle, and she did not like to look at it. It was golden, for the pine was unfinished, and this too seemed