Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin

In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge. I get up to pee, go back to bed, lie twisting in the damp sheets, listening to the monotonous whirring of the fan. Myra says I should get air conditioning, but I don't want it. Also I can't afford it. "Who would pay for such a thing?" I say to her. She must believe I have a diamond hidden in my forehead, like the toads in fairy tales.

The goal for my walk today was The Button Factory, where I intended to have morning coffee. The doctor has warned me about coffee, but he's only fifty-he goes jogging in shorts, making a spectacle of his hairy legs. He doesn't know everything, though that would be news to him. If coffee doesn't kill me, something else will.

Erie Street was languid with tourists, middle-aged for the most part, poking their noses into the souvenir shops, finicking around in the bookstore, at loose ends before driving off after lunch to the nearby summer theatre festival for a few relaxing hours of treachery, sadism, adultery and murder. Some of them were heading in the same direction I was-to The Button Factory, to see what chintzy curios they might acquire in commemoration of their overnight vacation from the twentieth century. Dust-catchers, Reenie would have called such items. She would have applied the same term to the tourists themselves.

I walked along in their pastel company, to where Erie Street turns into Mill Street and runs along the Louveteau River. Port Ticonderoga has two rivers, the Jogues and the Louveteau-the names being relics of the French trading post situated once at their juncture, not that we go in for French around these parts: it's the Jogs and the Lovetow for us. The Louveteau with its swift current was the attraction for the first mills, and then for the electricity plants. The Jogues on the other hand is deep and slow, navigable for thirty miles above Lake Erie. Down it they shipped the limestone that was the town's first industry, thanks to the huge deposits of it left by the retreating inland seas. (Of the Permian, the Jurassic? I used to know.) Most of the houses in town are made from this limestone, mine included.

The abandoned quarries are still there on the outskirts, deep squares and oblongs cut down into the rock as if whole buildings had been lifted out of them, leaving the empty shapes of themselves behind. I sometimes picture the entire town rising out of the shallow prehistoric ocean, unfolding like a sea anemone or the fingers of a rubber glove when you blow into it-sprouting jerkily like those brown, grainy films of flowers opening up that used to be shown in movie theatres-when was that?-before the features. Fossil-hunters poke around out there, looking for extinct fish, ancient fronds, scrolls of coral; and if the teenage kids want to carouse, that's where they do it. They make bonfires, and drink too much and smoke dope, and grope around in one another's clothing as if they've just invented it, and smash their parents' cars up on the way back to town.

My own back garden adjoins the Louveteau Gorge, where the river narrows and takes a plunge. The drop is steep enough to cause a mist, and a little awe. On summer weekends the tourists stroll along the cliffside path or stand on the very edge, taking pictures; I can see their innocuous, annoying white canvas hats going by. The cliff is crumbling and dangerous, but the town won't spend the money for a fence, it being the opinion here, still, that if you do a damn fool thing you deserve whatever consequences. Cardboard cups from the doughnut shop collect in the eddies below, and once in a while there's a corpse, whether fallen or pushed or jumped is hard to tell, unless of course there's a note.

The Button Factory is on the east bank of the Louveteau, a quarter of a mile upriver from the Gorge. For several decades it stood derelict, its windows broken, its roof leaking, an abode of rats and drunks; then it was rescued from demolition by an energetic citizens' committee, and converted to boutiques. The flower beds have been reconstituted, the exterior sandblasted, the ravages of time and vandalism repaired, though dark wings of soot are still visible around the lower windows, from the fire over sixty years ago.

The building is brownish-red brick, with the large many-paned windows they once used in factories in order to save on lighting. It's quite graceful, as factories go: swag decorations, each with a stone rose in the centre, gabled windows, a mansard roof of green-and-purple slate. Beside it is a tidy parking lot. Welcome Button Factory Visitors, says the sign, in old-style circus type; and, in smaller lettering: Overnight Parking Prohibited. And under that, in scrawled, enraged black marker: You are not Fucking God and the Earth is not Your Fucking Driveway. The authentic local touch.

The front entrance has been widened, a wheelchair ramp installed, the original heavy doors replaced by plate-glass ones: In and Out, Push and Pull, the twentieth century's bossy quadruplets. Inside there's music playing, rural-route fiddles, the one-two-three of some sprightly, heartbroken waltz. There's a skylight, over a central space floored in ersatz cobblestones, with freshly painted green park benches and planters containing a few disgruntled shrubs. The various boutiques are arranged around it: a mall effect.

The bare brick walls are decorated with giant blow-ups of old photos from the town archives. First there's a quote from a newspaper-a Montreal newspaper, not ours-with the date, 1899: One must not imagine the dark Satanic milk of Olde England. The factories of Port Ticonderoga are situated amid a profusion of greenery brightened with gay flowers, and are soothed by the sound of the rushing currents; they are clean and well-ventilated, and the workers cheerful and efficient. Standing at sunset on the graceful new Jubilee Bridge which curves like a rainbow of wrought-iron lace over the gushing cascades of the Louveteau River, one views an enchanting faeryland as the lights of the Chase button factory wink on, and are reflected in the sparkling waters.

This wasn't entirely a lie when it was written. At least for a short time, there was prosperity here, and enough to go around.

Next comes my grandfather, in frock coat and top hat and white whiskers, waiting with a clutch of similarly glossy dignitaries to welcome the Duke of York during his tour across Canada in 1901. Then my father with a wreath, in front of the War Memorial at its dedication-a tall man, solemn-faced, with a moustache and an eye-patch; up close, a collection of black dots. I back away from him to see if he'll come into focus-I try to catch his good eye-but he's not looking at me; he's looking towards the horizon, with his spine straight and his shoulders back, as if he's facing a firing squad. Stalwart, you'd say.

Then a shot of the button factory itself, in 1911, says the caption. Machines with clanking arms like the legs of grasshoppers, and steel cogs and tooth-covered wheels, and stamping pistons going up and down, punching out the shapes; long tables with their rows of workers, bending forward, doing things with their hands. The machines are run by men, in eyeshades and vests, their sleeves rolled up; the workers at the table are women, in upswept hairdos and pinafores. It was the women who counted the buttons and boxed them, or sewed them onto cards with the Chase name printed across them, six or eight or twelve buttons to a card.

Down at the end of the cobblestoned open space is a bar, The Whole Enchilada, with live music on Saturdays, and beer said to be from local micro-breweries. The decor is wooden tabletops placed on barrels, with early-days pine booths along one side. On the menu, displayed in the window-I've never gone inside-are foods I find exotic: patty melts, potato skins, nachos. The fat-drenched staples of the less respectable young, or so I'm told by Myra. She's got a ringside seat right next door, and if there are any tricks happening in The Whole Enchilada, she never misses them. She says a pimp goes there to eat, also a drug pusher, both in broad daylight. She's pointed them out to me, with much thrilled whispering. The pimp was wearing a three-piece suit, and looked like a stockbroker. The drug pusher had a grey moustache and a denim outfit, like an old-time union organiser.