The Winter Vault, Page 4

  The Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario had offered to move houses from the villages to Town #1 or Town #2. These were lifted from their foundations by the gargantuan Hartshorne House Mover. The house mover could lift a one-hundred-and-fifty-tonne building like a piece of cake on its giant steel fork and drop not a crumb. Two men, one standing on the other's shoulders, could fit in the diameter of one tire, and the machine could travel six miles an hour with a full load. The inventor and manufacturer of the Hartshorne House Mover, William J. Hartshorne himself, presided over the seaway operations; Avery had watched while two steel arms embraced the house, a frame was fastened under it and hydraulically lifted. Five hundred and thirty-one homes were being moved this way, two per day.

  “Leave your dishes in the cupboard,” boasted Mr. Hartshorne. “Nothing inside will shift an inch!” Even the spoon he had balanced theatrically on the rim of a bowl was still wavering there when they set the first house down and opened the door. The same night, the housewife who owned the spoon in question was so unnerved at being in her own kitchen, many miles away from where she'd eaten her breakfast that very morning, that she dropped and shattered the teapot she'd been so worried about – her mother's Wedgwood, in her family for four generations – as she carried it the short distance from counter to table.

  In 1921, the chairman of the hydro-electric commission, Sir Adam Beck, had referred to the future drowning of the villages along the St. Lawrence and the evacuation of their inhabitants as the “sentimental factor.” Now the paper mill had been taken over by the commission for its headquarters, and its regional offices had ensconced themselves in the stocking factory at Morrisburg Not far from where Avery stood, public telescopes would be erected, overlooking the construction site, and bus tours would be organized for the millions of visitors. An historian would be employed to “collect and preserve historical data” from the places to be destroyed. The number of welfare recipients in the counties would increase 100 per cent. Already, Avery knew, there was a rumour one could earn ten dollars an hour moving graves.

  Every Saturday, when Jean was a child, her father, John Shaw, a French teacher in an English private school in Montreal, took the train – the Moccasin – to tutor the children of the wealthy granary owner at Aultsville. When Jean came downstairs on Sunday mornings, a paper bag of sweet buns would be waiting for her on the kitchen table, the mysterious words Markell's Bakery in their flowing script, satin dark with butter. After her mother died, a silent Jean accompanied her father. They held hands on the train, all the way, and Jean's father learned to slip the book from his pocket and turn the pages with one hand while Jean slept against his shoulder. After his wife's death, John Shaw took to reading the books she'd loved, the books on her side of the bed. He memorized the lines she'd underlined, the verses of John Masefield she'd declaimed when Jean was a laughing baby in her arms, marching across the kitchen linoleum:

  ‘Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smokestack,

  Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,

  With a cargo of Tyne coal,

  Road rail, pig lead,

  Firewood, ironware, and cheap tin trays.’

  Or the Edna St. Vincent Millay, when Jean was up in the night and her mother carried her across her chest wrapped in a blanket:

  ‘O world, I cannot hold thee close enough …

  Long have I known a glory in it all,

  But never knew I this:

  Here such a passion is

  As stretcheth me apart – Lord, I do fear

  Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;

  My soul is all but out of me …’

  The villages along the St. Lawrence were enlivened by both the railway and the river. This created a vigour that Jean could not quite explain, though she recognized it somehow; two stories meeting in the middle. The nine-year-old Jean now knew what it was to starve of love and, in her hunger, was affected by what she saw: the old woman by the river who kept taking out and fingering the same few pages from her handbag, making sure she hadn't lost them, her handbag snapping shut with the same sound as Jean's mother's gold compact; the little boy who kept reaching for the tassel on his mother's coat as it swung from his reach with her every step. Once, in the general store she saw a woman give some potatoes to Frank Jarvis, the grocer, to weigh on his scale; then the woman passed over her baby to be weighed. She saw Jean watching. “Yes.” She smiled. “Jarvis and Shaver sell babies. By the pound.”

  Jean began to yearn for these excursions with her father, and in the summer they disembarked at other stops after his morning's work; sometimes at Farran's Point, where John Shaw liked to visit the saw mill or the grist mill, the carding mill or the marble works. The foreman at the marble works was a former New Yorker and a master stoneworker. While John Shaw examined the cornices and archways lying about the grounds, Jean hunted out small animals, with their intricate stone fur, hiding in the long grass and peering out from behind the shrubbery. They admired the flower gardens at Lock 22, tended by the lock-keepers. They watched as the liquid heat rose above the limestone quarry and they held their noses at the stink of the paper mill at Milles Roches. Wherever the train stopped – Aultsville, Farran's Point, Moulinette – they saw a small crowd waiting on the platform for cargo to be unloaded: great spools of wire fencing, auto parts, livestock. They soon learned to listen for the thud of the mailbags before the train pulled away and to look out for the bulging dirty lumps of sailcloth that had been flung out onto the platform. They saw the train-men walking the track and filling the switch lamps with oil. They saw students returning from their week at college in Cornwall, and shoppers from the villages who'd spent the day in Montreal, awkward paper parcels in their arms or piled at their feet while they waited for someone to meet them at the station. Jean began to understand that there might be mystery for some travellers in both directions, though sadness always descended for her as the train approached the city, and by the time they reached home on Hampton Avenue, Jean, motherless, was emptied of any desire to look about her.

  On private anniversaries, or when the seasons change, bringing memories, boats are rowed resolutely to seemingly meaningless coordinates on the St. Lawrence Seaway, where, abruptly, the rowers pull up their oars and spin to a stop. Sometimes, they leave flowers floating in the place, drifting in silence.

  In the October shallows, one can stand once again in the middle of the Aultsville dairy. One can promenade ankle-deep through the avenue of trees on the main street, now waterlogged stumps. In the first years, even gardens continued to rise out of the shallows, like pilgrims who had not yet heard the news of the disaster.

  When the seaway was built, even the dead were dispossessed, exhumed to churchyards north of the river. However, not all the villagers were willing to accept the hydro-electric company's invitation to tamper with their ancestors and so instead six thousand headstones were moved and the nameless graves remained.

  For many years after, the residents of Stormont, Glengarry, and Dundas counties were afraid to swim; the river now belonged to the dead and many feared the bodies would escape and float to the surface. Others simply could not bring themselves to enter the water where so many and so much had vanished, as if they, too, might never return.

  Jean and her father disembarked at Dickinson's Landing. As soon as they'd left the train station they'd felt it, the whispered hysteria, the aimlessness. From the road they could see that all the houses had been plundered, gouged out from the inside, walls partly torn away. On the lawns, ganglia of wires hung from coarse brains of cement. Inside and outside merged, a fibrous pulpy mash – like seeds scooped from a pumpkin – of wood and plaster. Familiar patterns of broad-loom and wallpaper were exposed to the open air. Lighting and plumbing fixtures, floorboards, ornate Victorian fireplaces, all with a palpable intimacy, were splayed on the grass, to be carted away in trucks. Amid the debris, fires were set.

  It was a cold autumn day, the possibility of snow. The leaves aga
inst the dark sky glowed with the heavy colours of ripe fruit. Jean and her father joined the haphazard procession through the town to Georgiana – Granny – Foyle's front yard. Only the men who moved authoritatively back and forth across the lawn, and stood on the wide, wraparound porch, spoke with normal voices. No one would quite remember what it looked like, there was so much to comprehend; some said it started gradually and took a long time to catch, others said the wall of fire rose instantly, giving off a heat that drove all the observers back to the road. There was an enormous crowd; Georgiana Foyle was perhaps the only one from the county not watching her house as it burned.

  Afterwards, Jean and her father walked to the river. Even there, where the air was refreshed by the water, they smelled the smoke.

  The St. Lawrence flowed as always. But already it was impossible to look at the river in the same way.

  They stood, staring out at the islands. It began to snow. Or at least it seemed to be snowing, but soon they realized that what was in the air was ash.

  The white scraps glowed against the black sky. It fell faster than John Shaw could brush it from his coat. He pressed his fingers to his eyes. Jean put her hand in her father's coat pocket and with her other hand pushed her knitted hat low over her head. Jean, eighteen years old, knew that his emotion was not only on behalf of Georgiana Foyle. Her house is in the air, said John Shaw. Still they did not move, but continued to stand at the water's edge.

  The crests of windwater and the shades of blue and black were so alive with the intensity of cold that Jean could almost not bear the beauty of it, and somehow she could not separate this sight from her father's sadness, nor from the feel of his hand.

  Later, walking back to the train station, it truly began to snow, a heavy wet snowfall that came to nothing when it reached the ground.

  Georgiana Foyle, who until that very moment had prided herself on a lifetime of good manners, banged on the side of Avery's Falcon with the flat of her hand. She began talking before he lowered his window.

  – But they can move your husband's body, said Avery. The company will pay the expenses.

  She looked at him with astonishment. The thought seemed to silence her. Then she said:

  – If you move his body then you'll have to move the hill. You'll have to move the fields around him. You'll have to move the view from the top of the hill and the trees he planted, one for each of our six children. You'll have to move the sun because it sets among those trees. And move his mother and his father and his younger sister – she was the most admired girl in the county, but all the men died in the first war, so she never married and was laid to rest next to her mother. They're all company for one another and those graves are old, so you'll have to move the earth with them to make sure nothing of anyone is left behind. Can you promise me that? Do you know what it means to miss a man for twenty years? You think about death the way a young man thinks about death. You'd have to move my promise to him that I'd keep coming to his grave to describe that very place as I used to when we were first married and he hurt his back and had to stay in bed for three months – every night I described the view from the hill above the farm and it was a bit of sweetness – for forty years – between us. Can you move that promise? Can you move what was consecrated? Can you move that exact empty place in the earth I was to lie next to him for eternity? It's the loneliness of eternity I'm talking about! Can you move all those things?

  Georgiana Foyle looked at Avery with disgust and despair. Her skin, like paper that had been crumpled and smoothed out again, was awash with tears in the mesh of lines, her whole face shone wet. She was so sinewy and slight, her heavy cotton dress seemed to hover without touching her skin.

  Avery longed to reach out his hand, but he was afraid; he had no right to comfort her.

  The old woman leaned against the car and wept un ashamedly into her arms, her long, thin bones now standing out against her sleeves.

  After the houses and farms of Stormont, Glengarry, and Dundas counties had been plundered for building supplies, and the remains eradicated by fire and bulldozers, the politicians gathered just west of Cornwall, at the town of Maple Grove, to push their golden shovel into the ground. Five years of construction and destruction lay ahead. Three major dams would be built, and cofferdams to allow the work to proceed, diverting first one-half of the river and then the other, leaving each half in turn drained for construction. To see the riverbed exposed this way, the intimate riverbed – private, vulnerable, tangled with vegetation, mosses, water life – shrivelling in the sun, sickened Jean, and she could not make out what she must do: to look or to look away.

  It was unnerving, apocalyptic, to be walking on the exposed riverbed, as if the ghost of the river was swirling around Avery's legs. He kept looking down and looking back, feeling that, at any moment, the St. Lawrence might suddenly begin flowing again, a powerful current that would throw him off his feet. But instead there was the new silence. Rocks lay emptied of purpose; it was as if time itself had ceased to flow.

  Far ahead, on the bank, he saw something move. He discerned the shape of a woman. He watched her walking and bending, walking and bending, like a bird leaning down its head, here and there, for food. She was wearing blue shorts and a printed cotton short-sleeved shirt. A canvas bag was slung across her back. He watched her carefully wrap things in newspaper, write something, then cram them into the sack. She must have felt his eyes, for suddenly she stopped and turned and stared at him. Then, obviously having made a decision, she continued walking, away from where he stood.

  In that second, as Avery saw her walking away, an inexplicable sadness came to him and a painful craving to follow. He climbed the bank and when he was quite close, he saw that she was collecting plants.

  – Please don't let me disturb you, said Avery. I'm just curious what you're doing.

  She looked up at him, surprised at his English accent.

  – Have you come all the way from England to gawk at our dried-up river?

  – I'm working on the dam, said Avery.

  Hearing this, she pushed another fold of newspaper into her sack and began to move away.

  – If you don't mind my asking, what are you collecting?

  She kept walking. He saw the fine sun-bleached hair on her arms and on the back of her thighs.

  – Everything that's still growing here, she said with a shrug. Everything that will soon be gone.

  – But why pick these? They're only common plants, said Avery. Tansy and loosestrife, they grow all over.

  – You know a little botany, just a little. This isn't loose strife, it's fireweed.

  She stopped. He saw her determined, sunburned face.

  – I'm keeping a record, she said bitterly. I'm going to transplant these particular plants, this particular generation. Though of course they'll never grow and reproduce themselves exactly as they would have, if they'd been left alone.

  – Ah, said Avery. I understand.

  She started to bend and then stood, unable to continue with him watching her.

  – My father was an engineer, said Avery. I went wherever he was working and the first thing I always learned in a new place were the trees and the flowers … It must have been very beautiful here …

  She looked at him.

  – The wrong thing to say …

  – No. It was very beautiful here … a month ago.

  She looked at the ground.

  – I used to come here, she said, with my father.

  She hesitated, then stepped down into the riverbed and leaned the full length of her back against a boulder. He followed and sat down, a few feet “upstream.”

  – A month ago we wouldn't have been sitting here, said Avery.

  – No, said Jean.

  Jean would never forget what Avery spoke of, their first afternoon in the abandoned river: of the Hebrides, where sea and sky are driven wild by the scent of land; of the Chiltern Hills, with its stone forests of wet beeches; and of his father, William Escher,
who, in the months before he died, had arranged for this work on the seaway for Avery, as his assistant. Now he was working with another engineer, a friend of his father. Jean felt Avery's loneliness for him, even in this briefest recounting. She saw how nervously Avery wound and rewound the strap of his binoculars through the straps of his rucksack. Now it was her turn to feel an un accountable depth of loss, fearing that at any moment he would stop talking and walk away from her.

  – There's a cinema in Morrisburg, Avery said at last. Would you meet me there some time?

  Jean looked into Avery's face. She had never been to the cinema with any man but her father. Then she looked away, downriver, feeling the poverty of her experience in the endless length of exposed clay.

  – All right, said Jean.

  They had emerged from the cinema into a long summer evening, not quite dark.

  – You can drive me home, Jean said.

  – Yes, of course, said Avery, feeling a sharp stab of dejection that she wished to leave so soon. Where do you live?

  – About four hours from here …

  It was past midnight by the time they reached Toronto. Clarendon Avenue was treelined, empty. The leaves of the maples gathered in the warm wind. Jean pushed open the wrought-iron door of an old stone apartment building, pendulous glass lanterns glowing in the entranceway.