The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [23]
Avery did not know what Jean was thinking, only that there was intense thought behind those eyes filled with tears. It was not only her weeping that moved him, but this intensity of thought he perceived in her. Already he knew that he did not want to tamper, to force open, to take what was not his; and that he was willing to wait a long time for her to speak herself to him.
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