I was raised on the prairie, a woman said; which was enough to make him long for the prairie miles ahead. Canada was already making him well. It was an infallible country. What heart-wound or soul-wound could remain unhealed by Canada balsam? How could death ever gnaw away Canada's birches in full-leaf? Why, those leaves had the power to compose an entire yellow-green sky! The grandmother's book was true. He had come back to Paradise.
Passing along the deep brown railroad ties they reached the forest's end. Wet fields of pale green with trees between the rows, a silver silo, long streams of blond hay on the emerald fields — these things now refreshed and greeted him.
Then, like the forest, the world ended in a darker coagulation of blue sky that went on forever: Lake Ontario. Trestles, canals, whitewashed box-houses; they'd reached Port Hope. They continued without stopping. The center was not at the center but at his left hand, which addressed nothing. On the left, nothing but water (lightest closer to shore, with occasional white diagonals across its middle surface, almost all the way to its thick dark horizon-line of blue).
Not a lot to see, though, once you get west, eh? a man said.
No, not a lot, a lady said. We were there once. We got on the flat prairie.
Now and again trees rose tall and summer-leaved around the tracks, and another reddish train-body hurtled by, but then the water would be there again, nearer or farther away.
Pickering's the most special place, the lady said. Wait till you see Pickering.
More semicylindrical hay bales, then a hot, wooded suburb, a vast golf course, a river half-shored with concrete, two men fishing at a sandy spit choked with seagulls — these manifestations he'd finished with. Maybe that was why they didn't stop at Pickering. As for Guild-wood, that town came into being as a hot wasteland of pipes, bulldozers, weeds and apartment towers, but Canada itself could not hurt his Canada. He remained unburied even yet, and they changed at Toronto. In the waiting room he remembered all the waiting rooms of his life. He remembered a crazy old man in Napoli with bandages around his ankles who'd come stamping rhythmically across the floor, raising an army of echoes. The young men put their hands in their pockets and leaned forward grinning. They shouted: March, march! Now suddenly it seemed that all his deeds and hopes and memories were no more than the old man's echoes. But he said: Never mind. I'm in Canada.
Nobody knows what this government's gonna do, a man said. I'm taking a ten percent pay cut in September.
Well, it has booms
Trees as woolly as German participles, pale green, and all the two-storey white houses; yellow flowers, maybe dandelion or mustard (he couldn't tell because the train was going so fast now), like wet stars in the grass; a brown creek; a ferny forest not yet overthrown; a scudding lake with sailboats on it and roller-skaters around it; smooth green pebbles under the water; these were the letters constituting CANADA. Now the land was greener; Orillia was hot and green and shrubby. His joy bloomed bright green like swamp algae, and there were white and purple blooms in the grass. The train honked by the boy on the rusty watchtower in Washago, his bike on the weed-fringed road beneath. The boy called something soundlessly. The lady in the facing seat looked out the window and opened her mouth to reply. He saw her teeth and behind them the inward glistenings of her throat. Her tongue pulsed. Then suddenly he was assaulted by all the useless scraps of language he'd learned: A ring seal was a nutsiq. A harp seal was a
