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sister from Saint-Viateur, standing on the porch beside her, “ C’est le petit gars là , the boy in the bush with the crazy woman.”
    Maguire’s skinny cows are out in the road. My father slows and honks his horn. I lean from the window, put my lips around the Mackintosh box, and blow. “Stop it!” says my mother, putting her hands over her ears.
    From Maguire’s it is another three miles in to our house. Before we are there our dogs have heard us and are out, dancing in the road. The great thing, my father says, is to be able to anticipate an attack. One war may be over, he says, but other wars always begin.
    We spend the afternoon working in the garden. When he’s ready to leave, he puts on his uniform and kisses us goodbye. After he has driven down the road my mother brings a chair out to the porch and sits for hours, watching the skeletons of trees against the red evening sky.
    My father zips into his sky-blue flight suit and walks out to his ship.
    Pardieu comes up the road. We pick up the canoe and carry it to the landing.
    My father settles into the cockpit and locks down the canopy. He runs through a check in twenty-five seconds, then ignition.
    Pardieu and I lay shotguns in the bottom of the canoe and start paddling. The canoe slides through brackish water. The muskeg smells of animals, birds, rotting pine.
    My father has clipped on his oxygen mask and is starting to boost, tapping the throttle stick with the heel of his hand.
    We’ve stopped paddling. We’ve loaded our guns and are trying hard to listen. The canoe rocks gently on the water.
    My father streaks above us all, screaming.

SMELL OF SMOKE
    Green remembers failing sunlight when he last saw her. Four o’clock in the afternoon and shadows of the arborvitae hedge and the maples, firs, and birches were already stealing across the lawn towards the swimming pool. It was still summer and it was almost over.
    His mother and a couple of his aunts were reclining on chaise longues. The women had been sunbathing and were just starting to notice the freshness in the air. Maggie had disappeared into the cabana, wearing a two-piece bathing suit. She came out rubbing her wet hair with a towel, dressed in blue and white striped bellbottoms, a wide leather belt with a brass buckle, a T-shirt, and sandals. She was tanned from days of sailing on Green’s little pram, the Nutshell.
    He was stretched out on a chaiseon the same side of the pool as the women, but separate from them. Turquoise water glinted between him and Maggie. He was still wet. They had raced twenty-five lengths and he had won. His skin stank of chlorine. He was shivering.
    When Maggie called goodbye across the pool, his mother and aunts waved. As far as they were concerned, it was only the beginning of the end of another summer, and Maggie was only returning to Boston, where she took studio classes at the Museum of Fine Arts School — the “Museum of Fine Rats” she called it. Green watched her walk down the gravel path carrying her bathing suit and towel, pass through the gate, get into the white sports car, and drive away down Bord-du-Lac Road.
    Maggie’s parents’ house was one of the oldest on the Lakeshore. In the days of New France it had been a manor house and a fur-trading post, and there were gun slits in the basement, where the seigneur and his family and servants barricaded themselves when the Iroquois and the New Englanders — les bostonnaises — raided up and down the St. Lawrence. The fieldstone-and-rubble walls were three feet thick. The gun slits were stuffed with pink insulation fibre.
    People called it the Lakeshore, but the lake was really just a widening in the St. Lawrence River. The water had current, it had a flow.
    The restless youngsters of New France and the fanatic Jesuits in their black robes used to set off from there, paddling upstream, plunging into the Ohio country, then down the Mississippi,