The Winter Vault (7 page)

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.

– Step outside, said Jean, holding the door open for Avery to enter.

Inside, the foyer ceiling glowed with stars.

– This is where my mother and father lived when they were first married, said Jean. The painter J. E. H. MacDonald designed everything – the symbols of the zodiac, the patterns on the beams – and his apprentice, a young man named Carl Schaefer, climbed the ladder and painted them. Schaefer worked at night, with the door to the courtyard open. How moving it must have been to paint the night sky in gold leaf while the real night was all around him … Later my parents moved to Montreal, and my mother used to say that she started her garden there because she no longer had the stars. Almost immediately after they moved, her brother died in the air, flying at night. He was in the
RCAF
. My father said my mother always connected the two events, though she felt too foolish to confess it. The moment she stopped keeping watch over the night sky, he was lost. There were only the two children – my mother and her brother – and they died within three years of each other.

Avery and Jean walked under the stars. The floor of the lobby was marble and ceramic tile; ornately braided stone archways led to the lift.

– This is the first ceiling in Canada made of poured concrete, said Jean proudly. The paint is acid-proof with Spar varnish; the heavens will never crack or fade!

– No one would ever guess the whole of heaven was here, said Avery, inside this stone building.

– Yes, said Jean, it's like a secret.

They had driven for hours together, but the night fields had been all around them and, between them, through the open car windows, the cool summer wind. Now in the tiny lift they stood cramped and awkward.

Upstairs, Jean opened the door to moonlight and street-lamp light; she'd left the curtains open and the living room floor, covered entirely with plants, glowed, the light glinting off the edges of hundreds of jars filled with seedlings and flowers.

– Here are some good examples of indigenous species, said Jean. And she thought, Here I am.

They left Avery's car at the edge of the forest. The track was overgrown, not much wider than one's shoulders; how quickly the forest forgets us. There was little to carry, a paper bag of groceries, Jean's satchel. The low canopy of leaves pounded with the sound of the rapids. Mist was caught between the trees, as if the earth were breathing. The cabin was still some way from the Long Sault, yet even here the roar exploded. A handful of cabins had once stood where now only one remained. Inside, a wooden table, three chairs, a bed too old to be worth the trouble of moving. A wood-stove. The forest-shadow and the river-depth had penetrated the cabin for so many years there would always be dampness and the memory of dampness. The same day Avery had found the cabin, while assessing the site of the rapids, he had moved his gear from the hotel in Morrisburg, purchased bedding, a lantern, a supply of mantles.

Stepping inside, Jean could hardly believe how loud the Long Sault boomed – it seemed an acoustical mirage – as if amplified by the small bare space. Immediately the coldness of the cabin and the smell of cedar and woodsmoke became inseparable from the crashing of the river. She felt she would either have to talk with her mouth against Avery's ear, or shout, or simply mouth her words. When Jean leaned toward Avery to speak, her hair touching his face felt to him unbearably alive.

– After a time, said Avery, the sound becomes part of you, like the rushing of your own blood when you cover your ears.

Avery lit the lamps. He built the fire. Jean unpacked their groceries; there was nothing fresh from Frank Jarvis's own garden, and the fact that there would never again be a garden and the reality of the almost empty General Store had unnerved her. They'd bought canned tomatoes instead, carried by ship all the way from Italy, and a long carton of pasta, a small jar of basil, and a shiny white cardboard box from Markell's, containing the same kind of sweet buns her father used to bring home to Jean when she was a girl. These she laid out on the wooden table.

Because of the noise of the river, neither spoke much; instead they felt intensely their every movement in the small room. Avery watched Jean push her hair from her eyes with her forearm as she washed her hands at the sink. She saw his discomfort as he scanned the cabin for embarrassing traces – the grimy rind of soap by the kitchen sink, his mud-stiff trousers hanging from the back of the door.

There was little room to move; the table was at the foot of the bed, only a patch of rug on the plank floor separated the kitchen from the bedroom. All was orderly, the axe in its leather sheath by the door, the Coleman water containers waiting to be refilled. A narrow shelf for a wash basin, the folded square of frayed towel. On the floor next to the bed,
Edible Plants, The Pleasure of Ruins, The Kon-Tiki Expedition, Bird Hazards to Aircraft, Excavations at the Njoro River Cave
. On the windowsills, the usual collection of stones and driftwood, but here organized by shape or colour, kept for their resemblance to another form – the stone shaped like an animal or a bird. It has always been this way, Jean thought, the desire for a likeness, for the animate in the inanimate. The whole cabin was organized as a chef might organize a kitchen, everything in its place for ease of use. Avery was acutely aware of how deeply the room betrayed his habits.

Jean added oil and basil to the tomatoes and threw salt into the boiling water. They ate in the sound of the rapids. From the window there was only forest and this, too, cast its spell: the very invisibility of the overpowering river. As the room grew darker, the noise of the Long Sault seemed to increase. For the first time, Jean thought about the intimacy within that sound, the continuous force of water on rock, sculpting every crevice and contour of the riverbed.

After the meal, through which they had barely spoken, with nowhere else to go, Avery took Jean's hand and they lay down.

– If we're getting into bed, then we'd better get dressed, said Avery, and he passed her a wool jumper and a ball of thick socks. It's very cold at night and sometimes I wear everything I have, even with the fire.

The sight of Jean in his clothes almost broke Avery's resolve. But he remained quiet beside her.

He could smell the woodsmoke in her hair. And she, in the wool of his sweater, could smell his body, lamp oil, earth.

The lantern light, the fire, the river, the cold bed, Jean's small, strong, still hand under his sweater.

To claim the sight of her. To learn and name and hold all that he sees in her face, as he, too, becomes part of her expression, a way of listening that will soon include her knowledge of him. To learn each nuance as it reveals a new past, and all that might be possible. To know in her skin the inconsistencies of age: her child hands and wrists and ears, her young woman's upper arms and legs smooth and firm; each anatomical part of us seems to attain a different maturity and, for a long time, remains so. How is it the body ages with such inconsistency? Looking at her across the table, or looking at her now, his face next to hers, his limbs along hers, the yielding of her face as she listens, of one face into another and another, always another openness, a latent openness, so love opens into love, like the slightest change of light or air on the surface of water. Lying next to her, he imagined even his thoughts could alter her face.