The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [24]
The men and women of the lost villages rowed boats out to where they had lived; no one seemed to be able to resist this urge.
Blackbirds went foraging for food, then could not find their nests. For several weeks they circled in unnerving arcs, a continuous return, as if they could bore a hole in the emptiness.
The air was saturated with water. The August wind was high and any moment the rain would come. Along the St. Lawrence, the milkweed had burst, for days its silk had filled the air, ghostly hair clinging to branches and stems. It floated on the water of the sinking fields and looked like ice between the stalks.
Jean took off her sandals. She felt the water loosened grass under her bare feet and the milkweed silk soft against her calves. Then a cold shape bumped against her leg.
She stood still with revulsion. She saw what she had not noticed before, patches of darkness, not shadow, in the water – like clumps of earth that had broken away – but they were not earth.
Avery heard Jean's cry and then he saw too. She ran back to the car and sat with the door open, scraping at her legs with handfuls of grass. By the time he reached her, she had calmed herself and sat quietly, looking out at the field.
– I'm all right.
After a few moments, Avery walked back to the water's edge. He imagined the underground passages, many miles of narrow tunnels, where the moles, hundreds, had drowned. With their powerful shoulders and webbed paws, they had always swam through this earth; precisely as swimmers in water, displacing only the exact space of their bodies. Every movement above and below ground had been audible to them. Avery imagined what they must have understood: the sound of water creeping inexorably toward them through the soil, soil dense as bread with its wealth of bones and insect nests and dormant seeds and scattered stones. When Avery was a child, his father had “adopted” a mink for him – “the public had been appealed to,” to help pay for the upkeep of the smaller animals in the London Zoo during the war: “sixpence a week for a dormouse, thirty shillings a week for a penguin.” The larger, dangerous animals had been evacuated because of the threat of bombing. For more than half his lifetime, Avery had forgotten this. Now, over fields that were slowly becoming a lake, the hot wind was constant, the clouds were blackened with rain, and there, near to him, was the sunburned face of Jean Shaw. Her hair was blowing where it had escaped from under her cotton scarf. Her head, he was sure, was bursting with thought. He realized that this is what made him look at the field and think about the earth in a way he never had before, although he had watched engineered ground being opened countless times and had witnessed the burial of his own father. In the suffocating heat it seemed impossible that, in a matter of eight or ten weeks, the soaked grass at the rim of the new lake would be frozen, long yellow fibres encased in ice.
Jean stood near Avery at the edge of the field, unable to move. She was remembering the destitution of standing above a grave as it is closed, the destitution of standing above.
Avery and Jean drove past a church that had been moved to its new site, at Ingleside. They saw the priest outside and stopped. There was something Jean wanted to ask.
– The question of deconsecration is very … distressing, said the priest. A church, or the old site of a church, the cemetery, and church grounds cannot be deconsecrated unless they are first rendered redundant. A deconsecration ceremony is very sad and disturbing. It means that God will no longer be worshipped in that place.
– But surely God can be worshipped anywhere, said Avery.
– How can a place of worship become redundant? asked Jean.
The priest looked at them and sighed.
– There is such a thing as consecrated ground. In this case, when the congregation moves, the church must move with it. The first place must be deconsecrated so that it cannot be desecrated,