The Rest is Silence Read Online Free Page A

though everyone guessed that the heavy metals would leach into the contents of the bottles like bisphenol A does.
    I placed my box of oats, the produce and avocados, and the cans of corn on the checkout counter. The girl in the green smock, who looked sixteen with her strawberry blond hair tied back in a ponytail, was trying her best. She smiled and asked how I was. Had she lived in a more salubrious era, when most of the country’s population lived on family farms, she would have been a wholesome farm girl wearing gingham and laughing a lot. She had a pasty complexion and flaky patches of eczema at her hairline. She asked me what the green, egg-shaped thingies were.
    â€œAvocados.”
    â€œWhat do you do with them?”
    I asked her if she’d ever had guacamole. She shook her head. She had probably never left the Annapolis Valley.
    On the way home I biked past a dairy farm with three fields. The precision and uniformity of those fields was appealing. Their square edges, the green of the triple-mix hay, the lighter rye grass, and the parallel rows of sprouting corn. Those fields were the only beautiful thing about that farm. Holstein calves taken from their mothers and awaiting vealization were housed in tiny pens the size of outhouses. Dozens of old tires held down gigantic sheets of shredded plastic covering a manure pile, the ammoniac stench of which crossed the road as I pedalled slowly up the hill. My heart thumped against my ribs and I was panting with the effort. Farther along, past the herds of Holsteins and Herefords, pasture gave way to woodlots. I got off the bike and walked it up the hill at the foot of Lily Lake Road.
    By the time I got home, my shirt was damp and blackflies were stuck in the sweat on my neck. I had elevated a small barrel seven feet off the ground atop a platform made of short logs laid logcabin style. The water in the barrel had been heated by a black rubber hose coiled on the side facing the sun. I stood beside the barrel on an oak pallet and opened the spigot. The warm water felt refreshing as it hit my skin and cooled in the air. It takes surprisingly little water to clean the sweat and dirt off my skin. As there was nobody to see me, I walked naked in the luscious warmth of the late-afternoon sun and air-dried my body and hair.
    3
    Lily Lake Road
    On Saturday I coast downhill on my bike to work at Art’s house. Toward the Bay of Fundy, weaving across the median from one side of the road to the other, relishing the sun on my back. In the twenty minutes it takes, only three cars pass. The drivers wave as if we know each other. I come into fog at Margaretsville as it streams off the bay and up the slope at my back. The temperature drops ten degrees. The sharp curve takes me to the right, past the takeout place that sells haddock fish ’n’ chips. All along the high bluffs worn by Fundy’s tides are old houses and summer cottages owned by people from away: Americans, Germans, and what the locals call Upper Canadians. Jenifer described Art’s place to me, a big, white house almost hidden from the road by trees. When I turn in to his gravel driveway a border collie runs at me with a foaming mouthful of teeth. I jump from my bike and stand as still as a heron fishing in the shallows as the dog circles around me, figures I am harmless, and trots back to the house.
    â€œI see you met Lucy.” Art is smiling by the side of his house.
    It is the first time I’ve seen him without a hat. His hair is silver, wavy and thick like the wolf pelt I recall raking my fingers through when I was a kid and my class was on a field trip at a museum. If I have hair like his when I’m eighty, I’m never going to wear a hat. He is good-looking, though I’ll be damned to say so out loud after the embarrassment at the fire hall when we first met. I catch up and walk beside him. He leads me around the side of the house. Rose bushes are growing wild against the house