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By Root 957 0

of some of the earliest settlers in the province. Though it was still too dark to see clearly, she was aware that much of this old architecture was sad, neglected; some of the properties were completely abandoned. A few houses in the County had been restored by city people seeking charm, however, and always seemed to her to be unnaturally fresh and clean, as if the past had been scrubbed out of their interiors, then thrown carelessly out the door like a bucketful of soiled water. She knew the histories of the old settlers as well as she knew her own body. Better, in some ways. She knew the three-pronged ladders leaning against trees in autumn orchards, the arrival at barn doors of wagons filled with hay, the winter sleighs, the suppers held on draped tables outdoors in summer, the feuds over boundary lines, politics, family property, the arrival of the first motor car, the first telephone, the departure of young men for wars, the funeral processions departing from front parlours. She knew these things as well, as if they bore some weighty significance in her own life lived behind the brick walls of a house situated in the town.

A graveyard swept by the window near her right shoulder, scarred, decaying stones inscribed with names still common in her County. These tombs stood stark and pale in the early-morning light that lay in pools on the sooty snow surrounding the bases of the tombstones and in small snow-filled hollows scattered here and there in the fields. Trees were dark against the lightening sky, darker than they had been in midwinter when they often became frosted by a coating of snow. She loved the trees, their reliability, the fact that they had always been there on the boundaries of fields or along the edges of roads. She loved certain boulders for the same reason. And there were cairns left behind as a visual reminder of the past. These were some of the markers Andrew had spoken of. The old settlers, he had once told her, had left nothing behind but a statement of labour, nothing but a biography of stones.

Andrew’s voice, telling her such things over and over, was inside her head almost all the time now. In the past she leaned toward his whisper, had once or twice heard him sing, and then, near the end, had heard the terrible noise of his weeping. A recording of the sounds he had made was always playing in her mind, but she was losing the shape of his face, the look of his legs and arms and hands, the way his body occupied a chair, or moved across a room toward the place where she stood, as she had always stood each time, waiting for him to touch her. She had never told Andrew how touch, until him, had been a catastrophe for her, how having leapt over the hurdle of touch, he would then become a part of her—without him ever being aware of this—how the idea of him would be like something she was carrying with her, like an animal, or a baby, or a schoolbag, or maybe something as simple and essential as this purse that rested on the passenger seat of the moving car.

Afterwards she would rise and dress, cross the orchard, walk to her car, and drive the concessions with the smell of him still on her, wanting to keep this with her, not bathing until minutes before Malcolm returned from the clinic.

And then would come the distant days, days when she would not, or could not, inhabit her own body, as if she had taken the decision to go with Andrew wherever he had gone, as if she were out of doors mapping the scant foundations of houses abandoned by vanished settlers, or following the vague line of an old, disused road, though she did not see such things in her imagination. Then, gradually, she would feel her self begin to return, tentatively, like a guest anxious not to take up too much of her time, and a certain taste or smell would connect her to the present for a moment or two: that, or something like the sight of poplar leaves flickering in an otherwise invisible breeze just beyond the glass of the kitchen window. If it were winter, she might become focused on the movement of flame, the snap of cedar kindling,