Changing Heaven by Jane Urquhart Read Free Book Online Page B

yes,” said Emily, now surrounded by the spring flowers on the moors. “Yes, I see it. Let’s remember houses. We could talk about building them.” She hugged her transparent knees in anticipation. “You must tell me the story of that house. You don’t still want to haunt, do you?”
    “Well, not just yet,” said Arianna, who was already beginning to construct the story in her mind. “But maybe this house we never built was already haunted … by something.”
    “Oh, good,” said Emily sitting, now, cross-legged at her companion’s feet, “a ghost story! I just love ghost stories!”
    Ghosty, ghosty , chuckled the wind, and in quite a lyrical fashion for, by now, it was summer.

T HE HIGHWAY .
    Its arrival in the province has, for Ann, heralded the end of an era. And the beginning of another where four lanes sew the disparate parts of her life together like a long, grey thread. The highway connects everything: the countryside and the city, the known and the unknown. It makes certain of her mother’s friendships possible to maintain. It reduces distance to a manageable time frame. It connects the house in the city with Ann’s mother’s past-a village and a farm in a rural landscape that becomes, with the advent of the highway, a miraculous hour and a half away. An hour and a half of grey speed and you are able to enter the nineteenth century; its general stores, its woodstoves, its large high-ceilinged rooms, its dusty gravel roads.
    Ann had been forced, until recently, to carry rural attributes around in her mind in much the same way she carried Wuthering Heights , the two melding now and then.
    Before the highway, there was Ann’s early childhood in the city and a more complicated road to the past: a road made up of the sequential experiences of earlier forms of travel. Ann sitting in the back of her mother’s lush, curvaceous Buick, meandering along the old road which turned and dipped and then changed with ruler-straight regality, into the King and Queen Street of one small town after another. Pickering, Newcastle, Port Hope, Grafton-their red brick town halls, their clapboard churches, their five-and-dime stores, their gas pumps which resembled undersea divers. There were spots, too, in the countryside between towns where trees would reach towards each other to make a tunnel through which the car hummed. Then light and shade would flicker briefly on the paper dolls andtheir wardrobes which Ann had placed on the plaid fabric of the back seat.
    Farmers rumbled by in pick-up trucks; twelve bales of hay in the back, a dog beside them, alert, in the cab. Other dogs, too, that leapt towards the car, having crouched in anticipation behind farmhouse shrubbery ever since the appearance of the last vehicle some twenty minutes before. Porch swings, rail fences. Brief glimpses of water: a brook, one river, and now and then the Great Lake itself shining on the far side of an orchard.
    All of this seen from deep inside the moving room of the car and through the sun-shot mist produced by the cigarettes her mother smoked as she sat behind the wheel, separated from her daughter by the thick slab of the seat. Ann straddled the hump in the back and picked up the cardboard dolls and laid them down again. Gingham dress after gingham dress. Or she counted horses in disappearing pastures. Or she looked for children of her own age playing near the front stoop of their houses.
    Now that the highway has come into being it eliminates the landscape of getting there. Now there is, as there would later be on jumbo jets, only there and here and a swift void in between.
    Ann sits erect in the back seat, stunned by velocity as new green-and-white signs announce towns she can no longer see. The bright white broken line, the slick, grey overpasses. Near one of these, but in the world rather than on the highway, a brand new dome made of glass is being lowered by a huge crane onto a brand new Catholic church. This is taking place on the