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morning my father – as if he were going down to the docks to begin a long sea voyage and not just walking down the road to a stolid brick boys' private school, with a smile holding all the intimacies between husband and wife – spoke the same sweet words: ‘Wish me well.’
    The forest around them was the forest of a dream. The sound of the river embraced them, safeguarded Jean's words, a pact between them. She felt there was no other place for her than beside him, a man who could transform the world this way, transform the dark into this darkness, the forest into this forest.
    – My mother was connected to a ventilator. My father wrote a note and strung it across the bed, across those futile, thin hospital blankets, from one bedrail to the other. In case she woke and we weren't there. He wrote it again – I love you – and pinned the note to his shirt, in case he fell asleep in his chair …
    For days I sat next to my mother and listened to the ventilator breathe for her. Until finally I realized that this was what I had to do – breathe for her. What does it mean to breathe for another person? To take them in and give them rest. To enter them and give them rest … as good a definition of forgiveness as any …
    Her name was Elisabeth, said Jean.
    Then slowly, not to wake Avery, Jean reached down and took off her shoes.
    Sometime after dawn, Jean woke. For several moments she thought she'd gone deaf.
    Repeatedly the seaway engineers had tried to still the Long Sault. Thirty-five tonnes of rock had been unloaded into the river, but the current had simply flung these gargantuan boulders aside, like gravel. Finally they built the hexapedian, a huge insect of welded steel, and now this, at last, had pinioned the rocks into place.
    The detonation of silence.
    Jean lay next to Avery, unmoving. Even the leaves on the trees were mute; so absolute the stillness, all sound seemed to have been drawn from the world.
    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