The Whirlpool Read online

  Patrick moved, quietly, a few feet closer. Crouching behind a sumac bush he, once again, brought the glasses up to his eyes. Now he could see her more clearly, her downcast face, the sunlight on her dark yellow hair. In this setting, surrounded by the yellow-green foliage of late spring and seated in blue shadows, she looked to him like a woman in a painting, as though she had been dropped into the middle of the scene for decorative purposes, or to play a part in a legend. Excited by these associations, he moved closer again. All the wildflower specimens he had collected fell, unnoticed, out of his pocket. A pink trillium was squashed under his right foot.

  But now all he could see was the bottom of her blue skirt and her two leather boots, crossed at the ankles. Bending down he stepped, cautiously, several feet to the left and, safely disguised by a Scotch pine, he discovered with joy that the whole woman was within his range. She was sitting on a plaid blanket with her back against the trunk of a poplar, reading a leather-bound book. Her expression was one of great concentration.

  Behind her stood a large white tent and directly in front of her a small campfire burned, causing a tarnished kettle to issue clouds of steam. She was young, slim and, even while seated, seemed to be tall in stature. Through the glasses he could see the wisps of hair, which had escaped the bun at the back of her neck, play around her forehead and cheeks in the breeze. She lifted one hand from the cover of the book in order to turn a page. “My God,” Patrick whispered as the title was revealed – The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning.

  The lenses in Patrick’s eyes and in his mind were wide open. The naturalist in him dissolved in the shadows. When the pursued thrush flew across the path of his glasses he completely ignored it. Instead, he watched the woman now with intense curiosity, scrutinizing the details of her dress, the rings on her slender hands, taking note of the lace on her collar, the gold band on her left hand. Mud on her boots and on the hem of her dress indicated that she had been climbing on the bank. The apron that partly covered the skirt suggested that she must have been occupied with some chore before deciding to come to that exact spot, before deciding to read. Patrick was mildly amused when he discovered that she was drinking tea and, even more so, when he noted that her cup and saucer were made of English bone china. She was, he decided, very beautiful, in an unusual way. Some strength there, in her face, in the way her body relaxed into the landscape – unafraid, unaware of the possibility of an intruder.

  His legs were beginning to cramp but Patrick was afraid to move, lest he might disturb her, or worse, bring attention to himself. He began to examine the woods surrounding the woman with deep interest, as if her environment was an extension of herself. He found one area where the trees had been cleared and another where there was evidence of some sort of cultivation. There was a stump, also, carved into the shape of a large chair and on this rested a notebook and pen, a knife, a loaf of bread, and, most surprisingly, a vase filled with wildflowers. Near the edge of the bank there was some sort of man-made structure which consisted of planks and supports and which appeared to be, somehow, broken. He puzzled for a while over its possible use, then moved the lenses of the fieldglasses deeper into the forest on either side and behind the woman.

  Patrick began to search for evidence of the man connected to the gold band which now, coincidentally, covered the word Ring on the book’s cover. He looked past trees, down the line of the path which he knew led eventually to the road, and into the clear spaces that appear for no reason in otherwise full shrubs and bushes. He changed his position somewhat so that he could see a little way down the bank. The wind shifted and a low, steady noise reached him from the whirlpool.

  He had never been down to the edge of the river. The wide-open lenses in his mind pictured the current for a few seconds. Suddenly he was absolutely sure that the woman was, at this moment, completely alone. He looked at her face through the glasses. Then he rose slowly to his feet and walked, very quietly, away.

  Because she lived, worked, and slept in the same series of rooms, Maud was only dimly aware of the transitional seasons of spring and fall. When she was a child walking to school there had been crisp, dry leaves scraping across the gravel to make her notice autumn and, in spring, crocuses, their colours blazing against dirty snow. Now the less subtle seasons of summer and winter always came as a kind of shock to her when they eventually forced themselves upon her attention. Particularly early summer. The wind would change one day, would slide in through the slightly open window, and would remind her of all she had neglected; the garden, her husband’s memory, her child. Then, quite suddenly, she would want to nurture, to cause each of these things to grow, an emotion most often associated with spring, the season she had been able to utterly ignore.

  On this particular June morning Maud was walking aimlessly back and forth across the Oriental carpet that covered the sunroom floor. The sudden change in the wind, and what it had evoked, had made her restless, almost nervous, and she paused now and then to pick up small items and to rearrange them even though her attention was elsewhere and she did not fully understand what they were. She exchanged a silver vase with a china figurine on the chest of drawers and then, finding herself with the inexplicable vase in her hand, she placed it, for no reason, on the windowsill in the light. The reflected glare bouncing from the object in that setting left her, momentarily, almost blind. Then, as the dark shapes of the room’s furniture came back into focus, she sat down on a large doily-covered armchair and surveyed her surroundings as if she had never really seen them before.

  She realized, with mild astonishment, that the contents of this room, and of all the other rooms that led to and from this one, had, more often than not, been brought into her home by clients who had been unable to pay their accounts at some time or another over the period of the last sixty years. Each chair, each table, each sofa, therefore, called to mind a funeral, or part of a funeral and, in most cases, represented much more than the funeral in question was worth. The piano, for instance, recalled the burial of one of the town mayors; a greedy, vain little man whose brief tenure in power had gone entirely to his head, causing him to croak out the desire for a large, showy funeral just before he died of apoplexy brought about by a heated argument at a town council meeting. Even during business hours when she was absolutely unable to play it, Maud loved the piano as much as she had detested the thoroughly tin-eared mayor, and so now looked upon the instrument’s presence in her parlour as the result of miraculous circumstances. There it stood, so calm, so monumental, discreetly keeping its potential for music intact during times of silence.

  Six years before, when she was newly married, the periods of enforced quiet had disturbed Maud – times when she had sat dutifully over some senseless piece of embroidery while downstairs mourners had recited measurements for coffins. It had been as if, in her own life, emotion had been held in suspense, so that the rest of the world could live and love and, more importantly, die. So the rest of them could respond while she worked garlands of flowers onto a piece of unbleached cotton and her young husband presided over the ritual in progress at the most recently bereaved household. She and her mother-in-law sitting there in the parlour, noiselessly drinking tea, waiting for a long thin line of mourners to appear in the graveyard outside the window; the signal that another funeral was finished, that the men would soon climb the stairs and life, as the women knew it then, would begin again.

  Today, however, there was no one but herself, no funeral to be thought about and worried over, no casket to be hurriedly constructed. Not that it would have bothered her had things been otherwise. She had quickly become familiar with the ever-present corpse and the ever-present sorrow that accompanied it. She had become familiar with the oddities of the business; the cumbersome equipment of the embalming room, the display room with its mahogany and pine boxes, the children’s hearse in the stable, the black plumes for the horses’ heads which hung on the interior walls of that building like successfully hunted birds. All this seemed no more
charged with meaning for her now than the incidents of the rest of her daily life. Now when she saw the children’s hearse being prepared with white flowers and pansies from the garden, on the occasions when she was unable to complete the task herself, she no longer turned her face away from it as she had in the past. Instead, she checked to see that the work was satisfactory; that it was a fitting vehicle for one of the little dead children she invariably became so attached to.

  In many ways she thought the little pony-drawn wagon resembled the coaches she had seen in Toronto on merry-go-rounds of that variety. And once, it had occurred to her that it looked suspiciously like a wedding cake.

  The business and the house that Maud had married into stood practically dead centre on Main Street, flanked by a greengrocer on one side and a bakery on the other. Grady and Son occupied a large frame building, plain in appearance and painted a neutral shade of grey with white trim around the windows and underneath the eaves. Its façade was neither elegant nor shabby, reflecting the taste and commonsense of the first Drummondville Grady who had constructed it shortly after his patriotic trek from Pennsylvania to Canada at the beginning of the century. With him, he had brought his family, a small amount of cash, a tattered and cherished Union Jack, and the tools of his trade: clamps, drills, nails, planers. He was a cabinetmaker. He soon discovered, however, that in the small pioneer settlement where he had chosen to spend the rest of his life, very few could afford mahogany and velvet and that there was much more call for simple pine boxes than for octagonal tea tables. A practical man, and one who had a family to feed, he adjusted, accepted his fate, and became the local undertaker, saving his more creative work for those times when, inexplicably, the steady flow of deaths abated for a while.

  As the century progressed and the business of burying humans became more complex, several additions were tacked on to the original building. The population of the surrounding villages increased until the entire area became a sizeable town called Niagara Falls, not to be confused with the town on the lake which was also called Niagara. Now there were professionals living there who not only wanted, but could also afford, mahogany and velvet. But the second and third Grady did not construct tea tables and used these materials only in their more expensive caskets. The business prospered.

  All of the Mrs. Gradys occupied themselves with arranging and rearranging the half-acre of land behind the frame building that housed not only the business, but their living quarters as well. They planted bulbs, trimmed rose bushes, installed arbours and miniature artificial waterways. They gave little thought to the fact that the land they worked was rich with recent history, the Battle of Lundy’s Lane having been fought where the garden was now and in the orchard and cemetery adjacent to it. Occasionally, they would unearth a bullet or a button, which they would place in an apron pocket where it would lie forgotten until it was thrown in the trash by the housekeeper at wash time. More excitement was caused by the discovery of cannon-balls, which were taken into the stables by the men, scrubbed and kept, although, until the military historian at the hotel across the street became interested, no one quite knew why.

  Main Street was situated far enough up the hill from the river to be spared any of the garish tourist attractions that dominated the lower town and so, in appearance, it resembled the principal thoroughfare of any other Southern Ontario settlement of a similar size. Its inhabitants, therefore, were able to ignore the presence of the giant waterfall in a way the rest of the world seemed unable to. They were familiar enough with its existence that it aroused in them absolutely no curiosity, and they were too far away from it to use it to their financial advantage. The spray and fog which in winter caused the trees closer to the river to be covered with ice, producing a totally altered landscape, did not reach as far as Main Street. Even the roar of the cataract (which was never as loud as it was purported to be) was very rarely heard. Only on exceptionally still, exceptionally cold nights, when all motion had stopped or was frozen, buried, or asleep – only then could you hear it. And then it sounded like the ghost of some battle, so distant, so forgotten, that the rhythms of the cannon fire were practically lost.

  Forgotten history, buried bullets; a long, even breath of noise, an incessant sigh, rubbing against the night.

  Her abrupt awareness of the season had moved Maud over to the windows. She was gazing down at a small mud puddle watching the sun perform inside it like quicksilver. Touched by the wind the fiery ball became fragmented there, broken into piercing shards. Maud closed her eyes. The shards remained, fractured, in her mind’s eye. But the puddle was gone.

  Outside, a trolley approached and moved on. The clock on the mantel ticked. A rectangle of sun on the carpet crept a fraction of an inch closer to the wall.

  Down the hall Maud could hear the housekeeper speaking to the child, dressing him for an outing. “Now you can put on your coat,” she was saying encouragingly. “You can do it all by yourself.”

  No, thought Maud, he can’t. He can’t do anything all by himself. Anger flickered for a moment in her nervous system, like the sun in the puddle, then it drifted away.

  “Now, let me tie your hat,” the housekeeper was saying.

  Maud heard their footsteps move down the hall towards the stairs. The stairs would take a long time, she knew. The child stiff-legged, unco-operative, responding neither to coaxing nor command. She looked across the room to the account book which lay open, unfinished, on the desk. She could faintly hear the footsteps of the men in another part of the house, and then some others, unfamiliar. Going to the display room, she thought vaguely. Sweet Repose, Journey’s End, Gone Before, she murmured, reciting the familiar names of the various coffins.

  She should be cutting roses in the garden, placing them in bowls of water in her dining room and parlour, filling her rooms with seasonal explosions of dark colour. She should at least be weeding the rock garden.

  The crunch of wagon wheels on the gravel below the north windows of the sunroom. Maud recognized immediately the approach of the vehicle that picked up lifeless bodies; the meat wagon, as her husband had called it when he was speaking with the men.

  She walked to the opposite side of the room and looked down. The men were opening the vehicle’s back doors. When, instead of the usual wicker basket, they pulled out a galvanized sealed box shaped like a casket but of perfectly rectangular proportions, Maud brought her right hand, now suddenly cold, up against the warmth of her neck.

  The ice in the river had broken up months ago, had moved downstream and disappeared. The whirlpool had resumed its circular journey. The upper rapids, the lower rapids, had resumed their own special dance of death. The Falls were, as usual, magnificent. Once the river shook off winter, separating into its moods and sequential performances, people began to drown themselves in it, sometimes accidentally, more often not. And the Old River Man, down by the whirlpool, fishing for his ghastly catch at a bottle a find; Maud’s subsequent job… the endless, futile attempts at identification which disturbed and frustrated her.

  Part of the business she now owned. Spring and summer at Grady and Son. Dark roses and drowned flesh.

  She searched the several cubbyholes of the rolltop desk for the small book where she kept the information. It didn’t take her long to find it, and once she had, she discovered that the gum label which had adorned the leather cover had, for some reason, disappeared over the winter. Now, like almost everything described inside it, the book itself was unidentified. She opened one of the small drawers at the upper left of the desk and, moving aside a mass of paper clips, she pulled out a packet of gum-backed labels, edged in red. Licking one, she fixed it to the book’s brown cover with two determined thumps of her right fist. Then, dipping her pen in the well, she wrote: Description of Bodies Found in the Niagara River, Whirlpool, etc., 1887 –

  It was unnecessary to furnish the final date. A smaller document than the battleground that Grady and Son stood upon, its history was not finished. The book was not yet full. />
  In one sense the whirlpool was like memory; like obsession connected to memory, like history that stayed in one spot, moving nowhere and endlessly repeating itself. Above it, stars that appeared stationary traced their path across the sky, actually going somewhere, changing.

  Fleda was outside the tent. Behind her it glowed in the night like a mystical pyramid. Around her, the unidentifiable night sounds; two million species of insects competing for pitch, volume, and space. Fleda stirring water in the last embers of the fire, extinguishing it.

  Inside the tent, separated from her by only a thin piece of fabric, was her husband who, at this moment, had had just about enough of the Siege of Fort Erie. The armies in his mind had attacked and counter-attacked for three hours now until he could barely remember what they had been fighting for. The vague anger that he had felt towards the American Regiments when he had sat down to write had been replaced by boredom. Often, when he was working on his battle histories he could actually feel the regimental energy flow from his pen, almost as if he, himself, were inventing the plan of attack. Tonight, however, working for the first time in the tent, he was easily distracted, unable to maintain the concentration level necessary to sort through the thousands of details of the event.

  He pushed back his chair and turned to look at his wife who, last time he noticed, had been reading in the wicker rocker just in front of the mosquito netting that led to the outdoors. He had wanted her to put down her book, to speak to him, to break his ennui. But where the devil had she got to?