The Winter Vault

by Anne Michaels

  Jean felt she would give almost anything to hear the heart-pounding sound of the rapids again.

  Every history has its catalogue of numbers. Six thousand people built the seaway. Twenty thousand acres were flooded. Two hundred and twenty-five farms disappeared. Five hundred and thirty-one houses were moved. The houses left behind were deliberately torched, exploded, or levelled by bulldozers. To accommodate the amalgamated population, nine schools, fourteen churches, and four shopping centres were built. Eighteen cemeteries, fifteen historical sites, highway and railway lines, power and phone lines were relocated. Hundreds of thousands of feet of telephone cables and wire fencing were rolled away on giant spools; telephone poles were plucked from the ground and carried off on trucks.

  In clearing land for the new lake, thirty-six hundred acres of timber were logged, and eleven thousand trees more – the “domestic” trees that had grown up close to people, near houses, in the villages, including the more than five hundred-year-old elm with a trunk ten feet wide that had overlooked the woollen mills and grist mills that had brought the town of Moulinette its prosperity. The elm that had survived the building of all the early canals.

  A priest was hired, at a rate of twenty-five dollars a day, to oversee the exhumation of bodies from the graveyards; more than two thousand graves were moved at the request of their families. The thousands of graves remaining were heaped with stones, in order to prevent the bodies from surfacing into the new lake.

  In each church, a last service.

  Thirty tonnes of explosives lay nestled into the rocks of Cofferdam A-1, the barrier that had kept the north channel of the St. Lawrence riverbed dry. On Tuesday, July 1, 1958 – Dominion Day – thousands of spectators gathered along the bank in the hot summer rain. Jean had taken the early train from Toronto to Farran's Point, where Avery waited to meet her. Among the crowd at the barrier, Jean recognized the little girls her father had tutored, now grown women. Soon it was apparent that all the mosquitoes in the county had also come for the spectacle, massing under the umbrellas, seizing their chance of skin. Jean stood among those who had lost their homes and their land and who, in a few moments, would lose even the landscape. Thousands waited in silence, holding their grief to themselves, not because of pride or embarrassment, thought Jean, but warily, as if it were the last thing they possessed.

  All shipping had stopped. The gates of the other dams were shut. Everyone waited. From this single blast, one hundred square miles of fertile farmland would be inundated. At first it was just as the crowd expected; the river did not disappoint them. The water pushed past the blasted dam in a torrent. But very soon the flood slowed and narrow runs of muddy water slithered into the dry bed. The water seeped, two miles an hour, toward the dam, where it would become Lake St. Lawrence.

  Then the very slowness of the rising water became the spectacle.

  For five days, the water sought its level. The river climbed its banks, creeping almost intangibly, and each day more of the land disappeared. Farmers watched their fields slowly begin to glisten and turn blue. In the abandoned towns, the pavement began to waver with water. House and church foundations seemed to sink. Trees began to shrink. Boys from the villages amused themselves by swimming over the centre line of the highway.

  Jean could not keep away. Many mornings before dawn, Avery drove to the city where Jean was waiting with breakfast for him at the flat on Clarendon, and they returned together to the river.

  The men and women of the lost villages rowed boats out to where they had lived; no one seemed to be able to resist this urge.

  Blackbirds went foraging for food, then could not find their nests. For several weeks they circled in unnerving arcs, a continuous return, as if they could bore a hole in the emptiness.

  The air was saturated with water. The August wind was high and any moment the rain would come. Along the St. Lawrence, the milkweed had burst, for days its silk had filled the air, ghostly hair clinging to branches and stems. It floated on the water of the sinking fields and looked like ice between the stalks.

  Jean took off her sandals. She felt the water loosened grass under her bare feet and the milkweed silk soft against her calves. Then a cold shape bumped against her leg.

  She stood still with revulsion. She saw what she had not noticed before, patches of darkness, not shadow, in the water – like clumps of earth that had broken away – but they were not earth.

  Avery heard Jean's cry and then he saw too. She ran back to the car and sat with the door open, scraping at her legs with handfuls of grass. By the time he reached her, she had calmed herself and sat quietly, looking out at the field.

  – I'm all right.

  After a few moments, Avery walked back to the water's edge. He imagined the underground passages, many miles of narrow tunnels, where the moles, hundreds, had drowned. With their powerful shoulders and webbed paws, they had always swam through this earth; precisely as swimmers in water, displacing only the exact space of their bodies. Every movement above and below ground had been audible to them. Avery imagined what they must have understood: the sound of water creeping inexorably toward them through the soil, soil dense as bread with its wealth of bones and insect nests and dormant seeds and scattered stones. When Avery was a child, his father had “adopted” a mink for him – “the public had been appealed to,” to help pay for the upkeep of the smaller animals in the London Zoo during the war: “sixpence a week for a dormouse, thirty shillings a week for a penguin.” The larger, dangerous animals had been evacuated because of the threat of bombing. For more than half his lifetime, Avery had forgotten this. Now, over fields that were slowly becoming a lake, the hot wind was constant, the clouds were blackened with rain, and there, near to him, was the sunburned face of Jean Shaw. Her hair was blowing where it had escaped from under her cotton scarf. Her head, he was sure, was bursting with thought. He realized that this is what made him look at the field and think about the earth in a way he never had before, although he had watched engineered ground being opened countless times and had witnessed the burial of his own father. In the suffocating heat it seemed impossible that, in a matter of eight or ten weeks, the soaked grass at the rim of the new lake would be frozen, long yellow fibres encased in ice.

  Jean stood near Avery at the edge of the field, unable to move. She was remembering the destitution of standing above a grave as it is closed, the destitution of standing above.

  Avery and Jean drove past a church that had been moved to its new site, at Ingleside. They saw the priest outside and stopped. There was something Jean wanted to ask.

  – The question of deconsecration is very … distressing, said the priest. A church, or the old site of a church, the cemetery, and church grounds cannot be deconsecrated unless they are first rendered redundant. A deconsecration ceremony is very sad and disturbing. It means that God will no longer be worshipped in that place.

  – But surely God can be worshipped anywhere, said Avery.

  – How can a place of worship become redundant? asked Jean.

  The priest looked at them and sighed.

  – There is such a thing as consecrated ground. In this case, when the congregation moves, the church must move with it. The first place must be deconsecrated so that it cannot be desecrated, even accidentally, by other customs.

  – But why, insisted Jean, must flooded land be deconsecrated? Can it not remain holy even when it is covered in water?

  At that moment the phone rang in the church office. The priest excused himself and did not reappear, though they waited outside for some time.

  When Avery drove from the St. Lawrence to Clarendon Avenue those first weeks, Jean had breakfast waiting. The little table was pushed under the open kitchen window and was set not only with dishes and cutlery, but with books and flowers, postcards, photographs – all the things Jean had put aside to show him. The eagerness, the earnestness, the innocence of the scene was so affecting that Avery felt a deepening bond each time he took his place at her table.<
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  Sometimes he drove to her in the early evening, and he watched Jean as she cooked for him. She worked in the twilight kitchen until it was almost too dark to see and they ate in that near darkness, listening to the wind in the trees through the small fourth-floor kitchen window. Sitting alone with Jean, Avery felt for the first time that he was part of the world, engaged in the same simple happiness that was known to so many and was so miraculous.

  He wanted to know everything; he did not mean this carelessly. He wanted to know the child and the schoolgirl, what she'd believed in and whom she'd loved, what she'd worn and what she'd read – no detail was too small or insignificant – so that when at last he touched her, his hands would have this intelligence.

  – My mother kept a commonplace book, said Jean, a record of oddments she wished to remember: poems, quotations from books, the lyrics of songs, recipes (ice-water shortbread, cucumber and beet chutney, fish soup with verbena). These yellow copybooks were also filled with cryptic phrases that I both longed to understand and was thrilled not to, their mystery increased their value for me. They sat in a square stack, fifteen of them, on the corner of her writing table. Only sometimes she dated her entries, and this I take to mean that my mother wanted to place a particular strand of thought, a loose thread of a quotation, next to a moment of particular personal potency, the here and now, say, of 22 November 1926 at 3 p.m., when Keats made her feel the keenness of things, somehow marked her place in the world, marked a secret event I would never know. One day, when I was thirteen, my father brought home a notebook for me, ‘just like the ones my students use for their sums, and to mangle their maps of the world,’ and he also handed me the packet of my mother's copybooks to keep, and a Biro my aunt had sent from England a few months before she died, of a sudden illness, a lung disease. I remember writing with that Biro in that copybook: Aunt Grace died across the ocean. I also remember thinking how strange it was that she had lived her whole life and had died in a place I had never seen, the kind of common revelation that, at thirteen, fills one with an aching wonder and a sorrow, an excitement and a disorientation, and the beginning of the very slow realization that one's ignorance continues to grow at precisely the same rate as one's experience …

  All this Jean recounted to Avery in those moments that are the mortar of our days, innocent memories we don't know we hold until given the gift of the eagerness of another. They both felt the randomness of fortune, the unnerving shadow of what so easily might never have happened, as they sat next to each other in the kitchen on Clarendon, talking, listening to the night radio, Avery fingering Jean's hair ribbon that marked his place in an engineering journal, an article on steel, and that gave him the wrenching thought that some day, in the distant future, this ribbon might be discovered in this magazine by someone, a son perhaps, like one of Jean's mother's never-to-be-solved clues, connecting the future to this otherwise unrecorded moment.

  – If my mother hadn't died, would I remember things so vividly? Long after you've forgotten someone's voice, said Jean, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body. I remember my mother and I having a tea party in our garden one day, and looking at her and really thinking about her for the first time: this is my sweet mother who knows how to pour tea into acorn cups and make teacakes out of fir cones, who can make doll's hats out of maple keys and doll's dresses from leaves and flowers. And who knows just the right way to push seeds into the ground with her thumb. My father said my mother had a green thumb, but I knew it was brown, and her knees too, and that this was much better, the earth under her nails just like mine, the earth making the fine lines of our hands suddenly visible. I can still feel her hand over mine, her thumb on mine, and the hard little seed, like a pellet or a stone, under my thumb as we pushed together into the soft earth. She showed me how to plant for height and shape and colour and scent, how to plant for winter. She taught me that teasels attract goldfinches. If you plant the right flowers, the whole garden can become a bird bouquet. Every garden is like a living house, she said, you should be able to walk right into the centre of a garden and lie down … and watch the leaves move, like a curtain through an imaginary window.

  – Please lie down next to me, said Avery.

  He took Jean's hand and led her to the narrow bed, the girlhood bed she'd moved from the house in Montreal, and they lay on top of the sheets in the heat.

  – When my mother was in the hospital she asked my father to bring flowers, her flowers. Watching him cut them from her garden was the first time I understood how ill she was. That day my father wandered around the kitchen boiling eggs, boiling potatoes, making lots of toast. He didn't know what to do. He made the few things he knew how to cook. We ate in silence at that little red-and-white kitchen table, and everything tasted terrible. We listened to each other chewing and swallowing. Everything looked the same, the little square bumpy salt-and-pepper cellars with their red plastic caps, and the little bit of lace under the butter dish. But suddenly it was a different house, a replica of the house I knew, and when we left to take the flowers to my mother after lunch, I started to cry. And then my father started to cry too and he had to stop the car by the side of the road.

  Avery could feel her tears through his shirt.

  – There are so many things, he said quietly, that we can't see but that we believe in, so many places that seem to possess an unaccountable feeling, a presence, an absence. Sometimes it takes time to learn this, like a child who suddenly realizes for the first time that the ball he threw over the fence has not disappeared. I used to sit with my mother in Grandmother Escher's Cambridgeshire garden and we would feel that strong wind from the Ural Mountains on our faces. The wind is invisible, but the Ural Mountains are not! Yet why should we believe in the Ural Mountains that we can't see when we're sitting in a garden in Cambridgeshire and not believe in other things, an inner knowledge we feel just as keenly? Nothing exists independently. Not a single molecule, not a thought.

  – ‘A garden must have a path,’ my mother used to say, and she was right. A path that has worn its way into the earth, sunken cobbles, grass beginning to grow through the cracks, said Jean, a path that has been set into the earth through constant use. The way stone stairs over centuries hollow out in the middle. Imagine mere boots being able to wear away stone – the way some stories bend in the middle after centuries of telling. The ground knows where we have walked …

  At night instead of a bedtime story sometimes my mother and I would look at seed catalogues. She sent to England for some of them, just to dream, and she would whisper a garden for me. I would imagine it with her, every detail, the ivy, the bench beneath the willow, the snow of blossoms in the warm spring air. Until I fell asleep.

  Avery stroked Jean's face. He leaned down and took off her sandals and drew the sheet up her bare legs.

  – Let me tell you a garden story, said Avery, a bedtime story.

  Jean closed her eyes.

  – Each spring, said Avery, when my father was a boy, he waited for the sparrows to return to that garden in Cambridgeshire. By March he was brimming with impatience. Day after day, he faithfully threw the tea crumbs into the ivy. Finally, one morning, the wall began to sing.

  Avery had already imagined, in those first months with Jean, what the chance to grow old with her would mean: not regret at how her body would change, but the private knowledge of all she'd been. Sometimes, his ache so keen, Avery felt that only in old age would he finally have full possession of her youthful flesh. It would be his secret, forged in all the nights next to each other.

  In the flat on Clarendon, when Avery couldn't sleep, Jean whispered to him while he stroked her arm. She recited a list of all the native Ontario plants she could think of: hair grass, arrow leaved aster, the heath aster, swamp aster, long-leaved bluets, foxglove, side-oats grama, the compass plant whose leaves always align on the north-south axis. The sand dropseed, turtlehead, great St. John's wort, sneezeweed, balsam ragwor
t, fox sedge, umbrella sedge, the little bluestem … and then sleep grew farther away still and he began to touch her with purpose.

  The desert heat would not leave Jean; above the yellow sand the air was a shimmering liquid, a palpable transparency; by early morning forty-five degrees Celsius in the shade. Even during the frigid night Jean felt her bones baking, even when the surface of her skin was cool.

  On the deck of the houseboat she stood in her clothes and poured night river water through her hair. For a few ecstatic moments the chill reached her brain and she felt her skeleton cold as metal. But the effect seemed to last only as long as she was under the water.

  To comfort her, Avery told Jean about thermophiles.

  – They're a single-cell bacteria that thrive in heat – in temperatures of one-hundred-and-ten-degrees-Celsius – in thermal vents heated by magma, liquid rock. They squirm with pleasure and swim gleefully in baths boiled by bubbling lava, gorge themselves on sulfuric acid and molten iron. They set up house in the heart of volcanoes and in flues of steam spewing from the ocean floor. When you're hot, you must not think of cool things, such as Emperor penguins or the McMurdo Ice Shelf – it just doesn't work, it makes you feel hotter. Instead, think of thermophiles!

  – I feel better already …

  Among the few books Jean and Avery brought to the desert – aside from reference texts and field guides – were Jean's choice of Elizabeth David's cookery book, Mediterranean Food, and Avery's, of Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki Expedition.

  There was sense to reading, high on a hill in the ancient ocean of the desert at dusk, where whales with feet once swam, about the small Kon-Tiki floating in the expanse of the Pacific, “where the nearest solid was the moon.” To prove that the ocean, a highway of predictable currents, might have connected prehistoric peoples rather than kept them apart, Heyerdahl constructed the raft, following in every detail the design on a petroglyph. Heyerdahl's vessel, at a fast clip, crossed the ocean in a hundred days. During a storm, the crew in its fragile craft climbed mountains and valleys of water, “uncertain where we were, for the sky was overclouded and the horizon one single chaos of rollers.” Avery read aloud as the desert colours flamed hotter, radiant, and the air grew cold. “When night had fallen, and the stars were twinkling in the dark tropical sky, the phosphorescence flashed around us … and single glowing plankton resembled round live coals so vividly that we involuntarily drew in our bare legs …”