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head. I could see a sadness in his eyes that I didn’t understand.
    I asked where he was from because he wasn’t from our village.
    He said he was from south of here.
    South? I asked. Where?
    Nowhere in particular, he said. My family’s land is under the Hydro reservoir.
    I touched his arm, shocked.
    Jesus! I said.
    He laughed. What can you do about it? he said. They took our houses, our land, gave us some money and told us to move on, go live somewhere else. And there’s nothing we could do about it.
    I felt sick, the colour draining from my face. I didn’t know what to say.
    Maybe that’s what I feared most: to have the place where I was cared for and loved taken from me. It made me feel dizzy to think about it. If our village were wiped out, who would I even be?
    It’s not your worry he said, smiling and gazing at me.
    All I could do was look at him.
    Then he said, The dreams are the worst. Sometimes I wake up at night with a crushing weight on my chest, I can hardly breathe. It feels like the weight of all that water.

7
    A few weeks later, I went to my father’s one vat paper mill. I didn’t often go there because he didn’t like to be disturbed when he was working. That day he wanted to show me a windsock made for a newborn. I touched the painted eyes of the trout on it. It was made to swim in the wind on a long pole and he said it was for Rose’s child. He had learned to make windsocks at the internment camp in New Slocan. That was during the war, when Mr. Hiraki taught him to make paper. Mr. Hiraki and others had raised flying fish and paper horses over the camp on long poles.
    “They remind us this won’t last forever,” Mr. Hiraki had told my father, watching the figures in the wind over the rows and rows of wooden shacks. “They give us courage.”
    I felt shy around my father when he was making paper; the work required his total attention. Yet I wanted to ask how he knew Rose was pregnant.
    He said she swayed on her hips as though wading in a strong current, gripping her way over stones with her toes. Besides, he’d noticed her thick wrists and the loose clothes she wore.
    Did I know who the father was, he asked me.
    I was surprised at his curiosity. It wasn’t like him to ask about other people’s secrets, though in some ways our house was the clearing house for village secrets and stories. My mother was often away in other people’s homes, there for grief or joy, birth or death. People often dropped by my father’s mill to review their problems. His work was seen to be either odd or useless and therefore worthy of interruption. Sometimes, when he heard a truck or a car drive up, he’d go out the back door to sit among the river poplars and wait till the driver left so he could get on with his work, fretting over the thought that the paper in the press was spoiling.
    Did I know who the father was, he asked me again. I shook my head, though Rose had told me his name.
    I wasn’t sure how much Rose wanted me to tell others then. I felt like I should protect her secret. On the raft she’d told me the father’s name, Michael Guzzo. On the walk home from Mr. Giacomo’s, she told me how she’d met him and that he’d gone traveling in Central America.
    I was watching my father make washi paper. He was sprinkling harmica petals into the pulp, a pale mauve that was my favourite colour and that reminded me of the shadows under Mr. Giacomo’s eyes and at the corners of his lips.
    “What?” he was saying, he thought he’d heard me say something, but I’d said nothing, my mouth pressed into my rough sleeve and my gaze following him. I kept still because I was remembering a story I’d heard from several different people. Around here it’s hard for an interesting secret to stay secret, and I’ve thought of it many times.
    One summer in the ’40s, my father and Mr. Giacomo worked together. In those days, a young man starting out on his own, Mr. Giacomo delivered mail in the valley. He took rice,