PROLOGUE
Cochrane, Ontario, June 1952
SHE HAD STOPPED CRYING OUT. Over the course of many hours, she had learned to let the contractions catch and overtake her, to stop trying to outrun them. She was n***d and sweating, reclined on the damp earth of the silo floor. Between pulses of her heart that shushed like the ocean in her ears, she could hear the river.
The pressure of the child, hard and unyielding, gave her the impression that she was giving birth to all the babies in all the places of the world. She saw her shadow: she was voluptuous and perched on the brink of creation, a sketch on a cave wall, a sculpture anointed with the oil of a million million fingertips in a remote clifftop shrine. Then she laughed, delirious with the pain and the solitude, the fragile echo glancing off t
