The Whirlpool Read online

  One hour later he met the military historian.

  “Major David McDougal,” the large man introduced himself, pumping Patrick’s hand vigorously. “So pleased to meet you. I’ve read some of your work… in the Canadian Appendix to the Younger American Poets, I believe. Yes, I’m sure that’s where it was. Very fine, very fine.”

  “Thank you,” Patrick managed to croak, greatly surprised.

  “We need writers!” the historian continued. “Yes, we need real writers… thinkers. Yes, this country needs thinkers; thinkers that think Canadian. You do think Canadian, don’t you?”

  “Well, I hope… I mean I think I think Canadian,” Patrick replied, laughing.

  “Good!” boomed McDougal emphatically, and without a hint of the other man’s amusement. “Nobody else does. Thinking Canadian is a very lonely business, my boy, and don’t forget it. Do they think Canadian at the University of Toronto? No, they don’t. They think Britain… the Empire and all that nonsense. Do they think Canadian in the churches? No, they don’t. They think Scotland, Rome. Why not a church of Canada, I ask you? Surely we could at least have our own religion. I’ll bet this group assembled here doesn’t have more than one Canadian thought a day, and they pretend to be interested in Canadian history!” The major threw his arms straight up in the air in a gesture of bewildered outrage.

  Throughout the long, well-researched, but undeniably boring lecture, Patrick did his best to appear as if he were thinking Canadian. He was oddly drawn to the speaker, liked his good-humoured, outspoken sense of betrayal, his unaffected pomposity. The poet’s mind, however, tended to slip back into the woods above the whirlpool where he supposed the trilliums were about to disappear for the season. Soon the more colourful wildflowers of early July would replace them. He thought about the woman. He was sure she would still be reading, reading by moonlight, rising only to pour water into the kettle, the fire underneath it stronger in the dark. Occasionally, the major’s voice broke into this picture and then Patrick looked through the windows of the hall into the night where he imagined the glow of battle fire on the surrounding orchards.

  “So, you will come to visit me, I hope,” the major said afterwards to Patrick. “In my rooms at the hotel I have incontestable proof that we won that battle regardless of what any American might try to tell you. Why all this running away, why all this casting of baggage into the river, I ask you? Why all this destroying of ammunition? Is that the way a victorious army behaves? Of course not!” The major snorted contemptuously.

  “We won. There is simply no doubt about it. We fought hard, many, many lives were sacrificed… but we won. Imagine having a victory stolen from you like that. The Americans are robbing us of our victories! It’s unconscionable!”

  Major McDougal was silent for a few moments, considering the atrocity. Then he turned again to Patrick. “Friday at two, then? Bring some poems, if you like,” he added, just before he was swept away by a crowd of admiring matrons.

  Riding home in the buggy through moonlight, while his aunt talked and talked, Patrick began to restructure the geography in his mind. His uncle’s farm, the woman, the war. The farmer had, to the best of his abilities, managed to order the forces of the natural world. The woman had apparently integrated herself with the terrain around her. And the war had forced exaggerated events into the landscape.

  Control, acceptance, and man-made fire.

  The child was watching the fish in the pond, thinking that he would not stop, now that he had begun. He wanted to move the fish around, to remove them from their various prisons, to interrupt their monotonous, seasonal journey from pool to tank and back again.

  Why should they not have the rest of the garden, the rest of the world?

  Why should they not have the dangerous sun as well as the soft, warm water?

  The word pool spread over the child’s brain, soft fins at his temples and then as an echo and then as a spiral.

  When he hit the surface of the water with his palm, the fish moved in a jerky, hysterical fashion, turning sharp corners, their paths becoming rectilinear.

  Gone the gentle undulations, the swishing of membrane through liquid. Enter the straight paths and intersections of fear.

  The child looked at the drops of water on his palm. Suns in every bead of it and colours non-existent in the world.

  The word world moved lazily behind his forehead, followed by the word water. And the word weep was in there too, trying to come forward.

  His mother was working on the other side of the garden. Mud on her shoes, canvas gloves covering her hands. Digging to set in marigolds. Rust and yellow.

  The child moved towards her, carrying a small burlap sack full of toy soldiers in one hand, his rabbit in the other. When he was near his mother he began to arrange the members of his tiny army in order of size, making a clucking noise that had nothing at all to do with soldiers. Perhaps, Maud speculated, the sound had something to do with horses. She would, she decided, buy him some toy horses. Hoping for the day when the syllables he spoke coincided with his activities.

  By the time she had set in four plants he had moved away from the soldiers who remained behind in a rectangular block, perfectly organized upon the lawn. Maud paused to watch her child’s progress across the yard, knowing that he would stop, once again, at the small rockbound pool.

  He would stay there, more than likely, for the rest of the afternoon.

  Pure sun today. Maud looked across the length of the property up the hill to the graveyard where the older stones gleamed from between clumps of cedars and the trunks of giant oaks. Not too much activity there. No funerals. A few widows perhaps, dragging yards of crape and carrying watering cans. This desperate desire to make something grow out of earth that held someone’s bones. Maud kept her gardening close to the house, had not planted even a single geranium at the spot where Charles was buried, flanked by his parents. Pansies for her little friends in the children’s hearse were more important. They had their own little garden right here.

  She had visited Charles’ grave only once; a strange, black-veiled creature she had been then, groping blindly from stone to stone, empty-handed, struggling along in her cocoon of crape. As she had expected, several spiders had made their webs between the marble columns on the front of the stone, from wingtip to wingtip of the angel that stood on top of it and in the grass adjacent. It had started to rain and, concerned about her already greying skin, Maud had hurried away from the spot, convinced that all was well there. She hoped to God that no over-zealous caretaker would decide to remove the webs, believing in her heart of hearts that the ground for miles around would shudder with Charles’ wrath were that to take place. She thought also that, were it possible, she would have an entire sepulchre made for him from the webs of energetic spiders. An odd image this had produced in her imagination; a gauzy tentlike structure, festooned with wild, uncultivated roses, quivering in the breeze. More like the cradle of an enchanted princess than the grave of an ordinary undertaker.

  Now, in her own garden, she began digging again with her little spade and within seconds struck something hard, unyielding. Subsequent attempts to budge the object produced the sound of metal against metal. Finally, she was able to slip the spade beneath the object’s underside and lever it out of the ground to the side of the flower-bed where it rolled for a few inches before coming to a stop. Another cannon-ball. It left a smooth, spherical indentation in the earth where it had rested for some seventy-five years. Maud placed the roots of four or five marigolds there and quickly set the soil in around them. She would have one of the men come out to fetch the cannonball, put it in the barn with the others. She hadn’t the least idea what ammunition such as this was meant to accomplish, whether it was meant to explode, to cause fire, or to shatter bones. Whatever the case, she would keep it for the military historian who lived in the hotel across the street. The one with the strange young wife who some said had gone to live in the woods alone. Maud, however, had seen her several times
during the winter and so was inclined to discredit the story.

  The child clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, imitating horses. Then he breathed through his clenched teeth, imitating the wind in the poplar trees.

  Her task completed, Maud leaned the spade against the wall of the house and began to walk towards the boy. As she got nearer, she saw that he was talking to the carp, moving his mouth in a repetitive fish-like manner. She hoped whatever he was saying would somehow relate to fish, or at least to marine life in general – even to water.

  Then she picked out his words on the breeze.

  “Keeping,” he was saying, looking now at his mother, something approaching contempt altering the features of his small face. “Keeping, keeping, keeping.”

  Patrick was standing ankle deep in the mallows at the shore watching, trying to understand the current of the whirlpool, throwing branches into the water, watching them move out into the width of the river, losing them, then finding them again, with the fieldglasses. The thing that confused him was the size, the breadth of the river here, so large that the bend in the current was practically invisible. Still the most complete stranger would be aware of the giant eddy, would speak the word “whirlpool.” He knew that.

  That morning he had begun a letter to his wife, attempting to describe this geography which she had never seen, attempting to describe his walks. He had surprised even himself by mentioning cliffs, waterfalls, orchards, woods, vineyards and whirlpools all in the same paragraph and he suspected that she would believe him to be romanticizing his surroundings. He told her he had stayed up until dawn after the lecture at the Historical Society thinking about the Battle of Lundy’s Lane – the first time he had approached such a subject. Then, realizing that she would have little interest in either the landscape or the fighting, he had crumpled the paper in his fist.

  He sat down on a rock near the shore and stared out over the water not wishing, as yet, to climb back up the bank. An otter appeared and slid into the water like a ghost without a backbone or a fish with fur.

  This river was not the ocean, but it was staggering in the way he believed that the ocean might be. Its size, endless movement, shocked and moved him in a way that was basically silent. He had brought his notebook there, had the title “Maelstrom” on his mind, but no further words would come to him. It was like a conversation he couldn’t begin, never mind finish, in some crazy way like talking to his wife in the moments of her silent anger when she seemed so much larger than him.

  He remembered the smaller, more accessible lake where he had spent his childhood, remembered its details. He could, in fact, recall the bulrushes near the shore, how they bent in the wind and changed colour with the season. He knew how a slight shift of weather could change the surface of the lake, break apart its reflections. This water was untouchable, inexplicable. He felt he could really only see it from a distance, through a telescope, from another planet.

  And then the sound of the rapids, camouflaging all danger. His childhood lake had magnified noise; in the winter or on still summer evenings you could hear coyotes move on the opposite shore, or the flap of a blackbird’s wing sailing over the water to the forest.

  Rice Lake, where the wild rice grew along the edges. Spook Island crouching offshore.

  Once Patrick had been a swimmer in that shallow, gentle body of water. He would bathe with the Indian children from the reservation, gliding under water while they scrambled and splashed and pushed their bodies, churning through the surface, his fine hair trailing, reed-like behind him. Theirs pushed into irregular shapes by a fiercer combat with the water.

  Submerge. To place oneself below and lose character, identity, inside another element. It was this quiet diving that attracted him, holding his breath for long periods, his eyes open, finally surprising himself when the weird landscape of Spook Island burst out at him when he surfaced.

  There was never anything to see under there, the fine soil of the bottom clouding the water. Never anything to see but soft brown and shafts of sunlight penetrating this from the world above.

  The world above. That’s where he lived all the time now. Patrick had not swum for years. He remembered the liquid envelope, the feeling of total caress. Nothing but water and certain winds could touch him like that, all over.

  It began to rain, large drops of water that were instantly swallowed by the whirlpool’s restless surface. He collected some of them in the palm of his hand before the downpour thickened. When it did, he decided to begin the ascent to the top of the bank. After five minutes of hard climbing, he looked through the grey sheet of rain towards the summit. He was astonished to see the woman standing there under a black umbrella, apparently watching him. He began, once again, to climb, slipping now and then on the steep path which had become, almost immediately, unreliable with the change in the weather. He took his time reaching the top, and when he did, it was with a combination of disappointment and relief that he discovered she had disappeared.

  Patrick, standing alone at the top of the bank, made a decision. He would swim again somehow. He looked out over the difficult whirlpool. He would swim there and take the world above with him, if necessary. This would be his battle and his strength.

  This was Friday, the day he had promised to meet the major at the hotel. Patrick would be gathering his own evidence, doing his own research while he listened to the historian’s incontestable proof. Learning the woman.

  At the edge of the forest he stood for nearly thirty minutes, waiting for the streetcar which would take him up to Main Street. The fog in the air and the slow wind made the whole landscape appear as if it were growing under water.

  Later, he could never decide whether the woman had been close enough to see his face.

  Approaching the white clapboard of Kick’s Hotel, Patrick did not concern himself with thoughts of blood soaking into the soil he walked on. Still, after the lecture, he had discovered that a part of his intellect had become interested in the concept of ownership as it applies to military events. McDougal clearly felt the battle was all his, right down to the last death throes in the dawn hours. The Americans were dismissed, sent back to their own side of the river, giving up, at the moment of retreat, not only their interest in Canada but, if the major had his way, any real participation in the battle. After the lecture, Patrick was able to imagine the American troops, able to visualize them, but always with their backs turned, running away into the morning.

  He climbed three wooden steps, crossed the planked verandah, and entered the hotel. Before he could make inquiries he heard McDougal call him from the top of the staircase. The major had obviously been waiting for him, watching his approach from an upper window. In the interior darkness, Patrick could only see the other man as a vague, featureless silhouette. Then he felt the lens in his brain creak open, ready, for the moment, to take in history.

  “Let me tell you all about Laura Secord.” McDougal broached the subject as he poured the younger man a third cup of tea. “Laura Secord is almost entirely responsible for my career as a military historian.”

  “What… did you know her, then?” Patrick began to employ mental arithmetic to determine if this was chronologically possible.

  “Only by reputation.”

  The two men were sitting by the window in McDougal’s rooms. They had an excellent view of the funeral home from there.

  “Built right on the Lundy’s Lane battlefield, and not much later,” McDougal had said, shaking his head at the travesty.

  The major’s living quarters were not up to much; two rooms filled with books and papers, a few overstuffed chairs, a huge elaborate oak bed and McDougal’s desk… apparently the site of much activity. Out the window, the undertaker’s establishment and Drummond Hill Cemetery rising up behind its roof.

  “Laura’s buried there, you know,” McDougal said, turning in his chair so that he could see the spot. “Not that anyone cares or anything like that. All of this really should be sacred land.” The
sweep of his arm took in most of Main Street: the greengrocer, the barbershop, the blacksmith near the corner. “Look what the Americans have done with Gettysburg! This country buries its history so fast people with memories are considered insane. The Americans still think they won the 1812 war, which I assure you they did not, and nobody up here gives a damn one way or another.”

  “About Laura Secord,” Patrick nudged the other man gently back to the original subject.

  “Ah yes,… she came to me in a dream, you see, saying, Remind them, remind them. I was in college at the time studying anything but Canadian history. I was dreaming a lot too. Don’t dream any more for some reason.”

  “You’re joking, of course… about her talking to you in the dream.”

  “No, I certainly am not joking, and under the circumstances, I’d say she had a point. Why wasn’t I studying Canadian history? Did you know there are no less than three hundred and forty-two books in print in the United States on the subject of the War of 1812?”

  No, Patrick didn’t know.

  “All from their point of view, of course.”

  “What is their point of view?”

  “Total victory! They never lost a battle, a skirmish, a cockfight. Arrogant bastards!”

  “But some British historians…”

  “Ah yes, the celebrated British historians. But they were never here, you see.” McDougal pointed through the floor, two storeys down to the ground. “According to them, the whole goddam war was fought by gallant sailors, all of British birth, on the briny deep.” He threw his hands up in despair. “No credit given to men like Captain Drummond -” he nodded vaguely in the direction of the cemetery – “who was a Canadian by birth. No credit given to Laura Secord. The truth is the Brits dressed some of us up in red uniforms, let some of us fight with pitchforks in our overalls, and then they promptly forgot about all of us. God Save the Fat Unattractive Queen! That’s all they care about.”