The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [14]
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