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By Root 558 0

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