The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [17]
Georgiana Foyle looked at Avery with disgust and despair. Her skin, like paper that had been crumpled and smoothed out again, was awash with tears in the mesh of lines, her whole face shone wet. She was so sinewy and slight, her heavy cotton dress seemed to hover without touching her skin.
Avery longed to reach out his hand, but he was afraid; he had no right to comfort her.
The old woman leaned against the car and wept un ashamedly into her arms, her long, thin bones now standing out against her sleeves.
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