The Winter Vault (6 page)

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 against 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.