The Whirlpool Read online

  “Fleda-a-a!” he bellowed in a voice he found most effective when shouting orders at a platoon of men marching half a mile away.

  She appeared instantly, flung aside the mosquito netting, collapsed in her wicker chair, and picked up her book.

  “Fleda,” he began again, his mouth relaxing amiably under the weight of his walrus moustache, “Fleda, I’m bored.”

  “Absolutely not,” she replied, “and besides the dress isn’t here.”

  “You didn’t bring the dress?”

  “No.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “Because I left it at the hotel.” She shifted in her chair, turned a page of the book. “Besides, I’m bored with that outfit. If you want to play dress-up with me, why not something a little more glamorous? It doesn’t take long for a muddy calico dress to become boring. Why not silk or velvet? The whole thing makes me decidedly uncomfortable. I hate the way you look at me in that dress.”

  “But why, for heaven’s sake, it’s simply research… you know it’s the subject of my next paper.”

  “So that explains why every time you want me to dress up as Laura Secord you get that look on and say” – this in a whining voice imitating his own – “‘Fleda, I’m bored.’” She finally looked up from her book. “Did it ever occur to you,” she asked him, “that you married me precisely and only because, in some odd way, I remind you of Laura Secord?”

  Major David McDougal laughed good-naturedly. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, without a great deal of conviction.

  “No, really, it could be absolutely true.” She moved the idea around in her mind for a few moments and then sat bolt upright in her chair.

  “That’s really insulting, you know,” she continued, “marrying me for a reason like that. For all I know she may have been hideous, she may have had no front teeth, she may have weighed more than her cow.”

  Now, Major David McDougal roared with laughter. His wife was cheering him up, there was no doubt of that. He decided to pursue the subject further.

  “How tall would you say she might have been? A giantess perhaps?” McDougal seemed to like this idea. “How about an amazon… perfectly proportioned, but huge. Imagine the breasts! No wonder the Indians didn’t attack her!”

  “Maybe she was prematurely old, wrinkled, and grey.” Fleda turned to her husband and continued wickedly. “Or maybe… she was fraternizing with the American officers. Did you ever think of that?”

  “Impossible!”

  “Why?”

  “Far too patriotic.”

  “Maybe she did it for patriotic reasons… or,” Fleda smiled innocently at David, “maybe she tried to fraternize with them and failed as a result of her awful appearance. Then her heroic act would be merely the revenge of a woman scorned. Remember, her husband was wounded.”

  “Do you want to know what I really think?” David asked, moving over to the bed at the far end of the tent. “I always thought, and I still do, that Laura was loyal, strong, and very beautiful.” He lay back on the bed and rested his head on his hands behind him. Then he looked at his wife teasingly. “I always imagined her arriving at Fitzgibbon’s headquarters, flushed and panting, her hair in a state of lovely disarray.”

  “She’s the only woman in the whole story, so you simply romanticize her to death!. Really, David.”

  “No more than Patmore romanticizes his precious angel in his precious house. As for the celebrated Mr. Browning… need I even comment?”

  “Leave Browning out of this… and as for Patmore… you gave me that book. Besides, it’s poetry.”

  “Aha!” McDougal pounced on his wife’s last statement. “So what we are saying is that we may romanticize poetic women but not historical women, is that it… is that what we are saying?”

  “Well, it seems the proper thing to do, if you must romanticize your women at all… the Lovely Elaine, the Lady of Shallot.”

  “Yes, but supposing those ladies are historical as well as poetic… then the historical would have to come first. Though, I must say, I do have trouble believing that Patmore’s wife ever existed… that she was anything more than a figment of his imagination. Didn’t she conveniently die?”

  “Yes, but you can hardly blame Patmore for that.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, it must be uphill work being an angel, especially in a poet’s house. Maybe she died of ennui.” Fleda scowled at him. He eyed her closely. “Who would you rather be, if you had a choice, Patmore’s wife or Laura Secord?”

  “Since it seems very unlikely that I shall have the opportunity to be either, I find that question impossible to answer. The Americans are quite well-behaved these days, there is absolutely no point reporting their activities to the military hereabouts.”

  McDougal interjected at this point. This was a subject on which he had very definite and serious opinions. “Don’t be so sure,” he muttered darkly. “Don’t be so bloody sure.”

  “As for Patmore’s wife,” Fleda gestured to the canvas walls around her, “I have no house to be an angel in.”

  “You’ll have your house, but you still haven’t told me which you’d rather be, if you had the choice.”

  “Patmore’s wife, I suppose, even if she is dead. I would love to have my portrait painted by Rossetti. And the book, imagine having your husband write a book for you.”

  “I will write a book on Laura Secord and pattern her character on yours.”

  “Really, David, I doubt that she and I would have a single thing in common.” Fleda left her chair and moved over to the bed, willing now to take part to a certain extent in the game. “Supposing she wasn’t like me at all, not a single bit?”

  “Well, I imagine her looking exactly like you, but wilder and in greater disarray, of course, after her valorous trek through the woods.” McDougal pulled his wife down beside him on the bed and said, “Then I imagine that Fitzgibbon would be strangely moved by her appearance.”

  Major McDougal was beginning to undress.

  “David…”

  “Then I imagine,” he said, leaving his clothes in an untidy pile on the floor and climbing under the blankets, “that Fitzgibbon would dismiss his colleagues so that he could speak to Laura alone… confidential military information and all that. Then I imagine…” he began to undo the small buttons on the front of her dress. “Then I imagine….”

  “David… just a moment.”

  “Mmmm?” he said, biting her ear.

  “You are overlooking a very important fact.”

  “What’s that?” he asked, reaching up under her long skirt and pressing his face against her neck.

  “Laura Secord was a married woman.”

  “So are you,” he replied, leaning outwards from the bed in order to extinguish the coal-oil lamp.

  He made love, for all his kindness, like a man fighting a short, intense battle, a battle that he always won. She lay passively beneath him like a town surprised by an invasion of enemy troops. Afterwards, he fell asleep almost immediately, like a man overcome by battle fatigue.

  She crept across the tent, after, to find her long white nightgown with its high neck and lace cuffs. Then she walked outside, barefoot in the cold, wet grass, down the path to the bank. She could see the whirlpool from there and, further away, the rapids in the moonlight. She knew that she had lied. She wouldn’t ever want to be Patmore’s wife, Patmore’s angel. Not now, not ever.

  The next time Patrick entered the woods above the whirlpool he was prepared and unencumbered. He had left his bird dictionary and his wildflower book on a small wooden table at the farm. He had dressed in browns and greens for the purpose of camouflage. He had snuck through the orchards like a deserter, his fieldglasses bumping quietly against his ribs.

  He was sure she would be there.

  The previous days had been overcast, wet, hardly weather to be reading Browning in the woods. Yet somehow, Patrick could not imagine this woman occupying rooms. He believed she would have remained throughout the down
pour, hardly moving except to turn the pages of her book. Patrick had stayed indoors, watching the fog in the orchard through the window and also reading Browning, as if in preparation.

  At night he dreamed of faceless women, shadows of leaves moving on their white skin.

  He was sure she would be there and rejected any possibility that she might have been a transient, a traveller, one who could have paused in that spot merely to catch her breath… for à rest. Something in her posture suggested permanence. The woods were easy with her. And she would be there. He knew it.

  Until that moment a week earlier, it had never occurred to him that a figure would enter any of his landscapes. They were fierce places, wild with growth, crazy with weather. Places where, a hundred miles north, huge fires ate their way through darkness while animals ran helplessly before them. Patrick feared the fires though he knew they rarely travelled this far south. He feared them and dreamed them, imagining the inside of his rooms turning orange.

  The fires, he supposed, had never made an appearance on this woman’s mind.

  Once, when he was a child, a neighbouring barn had burned in winter, melting the snow for yards around. He would always remember the heat of that fire on his face and the cold and the cast of the fire on the faces around him.

  Terrifying.

  This woman’s face was cool, absorbed.

  Now as Patrick crossed the car tracks at the edge of the woods he was pleased to see that the rain had brought the foliage out to such an extent that it created a solid mesh of light green. This screen would perfect his camouflage.

  Once he stepped onto the path he began to move in the manner of Indians, checking the ground for fallen twigs and avoiding them, performing a sort of silent, drunken dance. He was amazed to find himself in a set of circumstances where even the snap of a twig might alter everything utterly. Normally, landscape seemed too large for him to have any effect at all upon his surroundings. Now, detail drew him in, connecting him with the earth beneath him. The floor of the woods became an obstacle course, cluttered with natural traps that could result in error.

  He recognized the spot he was searching for by the familiar sumac bush and a small, unhealthy cedar that looked as if it couldn’t decide whether to grow beyond shrubhood. Crouching down behind the latter, and adjusting himself to the most comfortable hidden position, he brought the glasses up to his eyes and focused them on the correct location.

  No woman.

  Patrick was dumbfounded. He knew she would be there. How could this portion of the forest exist were she not in it? He wanted to start all over again; to walk out the door, over the orchards, through the woods, to approach this spot one more time. As if there had been a mistake in his route that he could now correct. He would do it all over again, right to the moment of lifting his glasses to his eyes. Then she would be there. He searched again. Still no woman. Just lime green woods and several birds whose identities, at this moment, didn’t interest him in the least.

  Still no woman. Sick with disappointment and self-doubt, he wanted to turn and leave the place. He felt cheated – as if the woman had made him a promise that she had never intended to keep. He would turn and leave the place. He would never come back, never see her again. He would never again allow a figure to enter his landscapes. He was perspiring with the utter futility of it all.

  Then a sudden movement in the bushes near the bank. Instinctively he searched for a bird. A thin, high sound moved through the woods. Singing. And then the woman’s face, followed by her blue dress, emerging from the other side of the bank.

  Patrick froze. He was now standing, unprotected by greenery, and she was coming closer and closer. Very, very slowly he returned to the crouching position. He was afraid that she might hear his heart, which seemed to have moved from its normal location in order to pound, disturbingly, in his brain. She was so near now that there was no need for the glasses. His inclination was to bolt, run right out of the woods, back to the farm, onto a train. Vacate the province. Leave the country.

  But he couldn’t move. At this moment his eyes were less than two feet away from her blue skirt, which for some crazy reason he now noticed was wrinkled, and covered with spots of mud. She’s been reading, he thought, and the mud comes from the bank.

  The sound of pouring-water. Objects he had previously overlooked came into focus: a wash-tub vaguely in the middle distance, and a barrel, not three feet away from him, probably for collecting water. He remembered the tea.

  She was now using a dipper, pouring water from the barrel into a galvanized pail. He heard the pot scrape against the edge of the wood and then the luxurious sound of water falling and connecting with liquid already in the pail.

  The sound soothed him. He knew she would not see him now, now that she was absorbed in this activity. He relaxed, listening to the rhythm of the task. Dip, pour… dip, pour. Her skirt moving in front of him like a heavy curtain in the wind, as she leaned forward to scoop the water out of the barrel, and then sideways to pour it into the pail.

  When she was finished, she bent to lift the pail and walked, straight-backed, away from him, the weight that she carried never once interfering with the level line of her shoulders. Then, as she moved into the distance, he watched that level tilt to the left as she poured the liquid from the pail into a large pot which hung over the makeshift fireplace. Several dishes were scattered around this location; cups, plates, saucers and cutlery gleaming in the sun.

  Suddenly he understood. Breakfast. A domestic event had taken place very near the spot where he had first sighted her. This water was for washing up. She would begin, once the water was warm, to wash the dishes, like an ordinary woman. As if there had been walls around her, and furniture.

  Patrick lifted the glasses and focused on her face. He wanted to see if he could tell by a change in her expression, the exact moment when the water began to boil.

  Fleda, breathing heavily because of the long, steep climb, returned from the whirlpool late in the morning. At the top of the bank she leaned her back against a fir tree which grew out at an angle over the drop. She could feel the roughness of the bark push its way through her cotton clothing, and with one hand she absently caressed this uneven texture while she waited for her heartbeat to return to normal. When it did, she placed her two palms against the tree behind her and levered herself into an upright standing position. Then she walked over to the tent to search for her diary.

  David had repaired the makeshift desk at the edge of the bank so Fleda, journal now in hand, headed in its direction. When she arrived she pulled up a suitable stump, fastidiously removed one or two bird droppings from her workplace, and placed the notebook on the weathered planks. Taking a pencil from her pocket she began to write.

  25 June 1889

  Every day when David leaves, either for the camp or for the rooms in town, I go down to the whirlpool.

  All by myself at the water’s edge I make small boats out of folded birch bark and then I push them out into the current.

  This takes most of the morning.

  Little white vessels departing from the shore, set adrift on a long tour of the whirlpool. Like people, just like people. A complete revolution would be a long, long life. Not many are able to go the distance. Those that do I am unsure of. Have they moved around the full circumference or have they doubled back somehow on an unknown current? Have they been affected by wind? I have begun to mark my boats in some way, making each one different from the others. And I have begun to give them names, like real ships. “Adonais,” “Dreamhouse,” “Warrior,” “Angel.”

  With a pencil from my apron pocket I write the words on the birch bark in clear block letters. Then I launch my small craft from the shore and pick up Browning in order to read while I wait for them to return.

  Yesterday, the Old River Man passed by and I spoke to him but he didn’t answer. He walks around the edge of the whirlpool as if he is looking for something among the stones, even pushes his walking stick into the tall gras
s that grows beyond them. He seems, at these times, to be completely ignoring the water. I think I understand this.

  He knows the water. There is hardly anything that he doesn’t know about the water. He knows the whole river. He can’t live in the water but he lives as close to it as he can. But he has to be careful. The land is something he will never entirely learn, so, for him, each step there is investigative, an exploration. He won’t ever speak to me because I belong to the land, which is what I know. For me, the water is dangerous. I suppose I’ll never really understand it. So I study it. He stands at the very edge of the water and looks at that land which, for him, is as unfathomable as the whirlpool is to me, as undecipherable as the upper and lower rapids.

  People are always building houses out of the materials they know so that they can crawl inside and think about the materials that they don’t. The River Man lives beside the water, which is safe for him and he thinks about dry rocks, sand, grasses, trees, cliffs, hills, fields. He can’t kill in a territory he doesn’t understand, so he doesn’t hunt, he fishes. Everything he swallows is either made of water or comes from the water. It is his survival.

  I am surrounded by grasses, trees, earth. Everything I eat grows on the land, but I think about the water all the time. It is constantly on my mind.

  My games are played with small, benign toys. Today “Warrior” came in first, followed shortly thereafter by “Adonais” and “Dreamhouse.”

  Fleda lifted her head and tightened the muscles in her neck, shoulders, and back. In this alert posture she resembled a small animal who was trying to ascertain the level of danger in a distant, barely discernible sound.

  In fact she was not listening to, or for, anything; had merely startled herself by what she had written.

  The little boat, “Angel,” had not returned, or if it had, she had completely failed to notice it.