The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan
I slide the bracelet around my wrist thirty times.
I stare, with narrowed eyes, at the grave-faced men who come to help. I bat away their hands.
I slide the bracelet around my wrist fifty times.
Then sixty. A hundred.
32
Isit at the whirlpool, alone, an afternoon to myself. I stay put, even as the light changes from high and white and clear to low and golden and soft. At one point a young couple appears on the stone beach, but they see me there and head back into the woods. They had come upon a private moment: the riverman’s widow watching the water circle, endlessly so.
I stood here for three weeks, afterward. After Tom had gone in. For three weeks I threw any scrap of wood I could find into the pool. And sometimes I hit the bit of swirling green where I had glimpsed the white underside of Jesse’s foot as he was pulled from sight. Sometimes the wood was sucked under and sometimes it bobbed up to the surface and broke through. Still, never once had it resurfaced at the spot where Jesse had reappeared.
Maybe it was only that the wind was different or that it had rained the night before. Or maybe the river had little to do with Jesse coming up where he had.
Once Jesse and I were home from the whirlpool, and Mrs. Mancuso was in place to intercept anyone who came to the door, I carried him up the stairs, in my arms, the way I had before he was able to manage the climb on his own. I laid him on his bed and wrapped a length of muslin around his waist and smoothed his still-damp hair from his eyes.
What to say to him?
He knew what had happened. He knew we would not find Tom at home. Men at the whirlpool had said, “He isn’t coming up, ma’am. Let me help you get the boy home.” And there were tears in people’s eyes and on their cheeks. “I’m sorry,” they said. “He was a good man.”
And a constable had come to the stone beach, the same one who had come the night of the scow. “You’re sure it was him? You saw him go into the pool?”
“Yes,” I said. “I did.”
“He went in after the boy?”
I nodded, almost imperceptibly. Jesse was huddled in my lap, and it seemed wrong to implicate him, though he was clever enough to have figured it out for himself.
As I sat on his bed that first awful night, Jesse gathered my skirt into his arms and held on for dear life. I stretched out alongside him and pulled him close and kissed his hair. “It’s all right,” I said into a tangle of curls. But it was not all right. I did not know how we would go on, not without Tom. He had only just begun teaching Jesse to row a boat and Francis to set a snare. He would see neither fall in love and marry. He would see neither hold a child of his own. Never again would he row with his wife across a lapping, moonlit river, beneath a starry sky.
Would Francis have anything more than the vaguest memories of his father? Tom had taken him to the river more times than I could count and taught him to predict whether a twig tossed into an eddy would circle endlessly or escape and be pitched downstream. These lessons he would keep. But would he remember Tom putting a warmed brick in his bed on a cold winter’s night, or humming as he tinkered with his snares? Would he know a fellow ought to pull a chair out for a woman and take off his cap when it is time to eat? Jesse would remember more. And there is the rub. He would remember too much. His father went into the whirlpool after him. And then his father drowned.
When Jesse had lain quiet a good while, just when I thought he might have drifted off, he spoke. “I want to know about Isabel,” he said. It was miles from what I had expected to hear. Truth be told, it was a relief. I had been dreading the questions I could not begin to answer, not even for myself.
He knew Tom had pulled Isabel’s body from the whirlpool; it was a story we had never kept from him. He knew, too, how it was the bodies ended up circling there, in the whirlpool, before they were fished out. I had told him that she was not mangled, that only her dress was torn, a white tea dress I had made for her. These were details it had seemed important for him to know.
“She made up nonsense words to the hymns we sang at church,” I said. “She held her hymnbook upside down.”
“Her dress was ripped.”
“It was a white tea dress. I made it for her. She was wearing it when she drowned.”
“Is she a ghost?”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Is she in heaven?”
“I think so,” I said, because just then, when surely he was really asking about Tom, it seemed best to lie. “And she’s here and here.” I touched my temple and then the spot just over my heart. “Here, too.” I touched his temple, then his chest. “Like Daddy.”
At that moment, I wanted faith and heaven and God as never before. I wanted my brokenhearted son to believe our existence was not trivial, something to be snatched away on a whim. I wanted him to believe his father would be with him, always, in the way Fergus had been with Tom.
Tears rose in my throat but did not come, because just then Jesse said, “She was in the whirlpool and she pushed me up.”
“Isabel?”
“I was getting pulled down and I saw Isabel. Then she pushed me up.”
“Jesse,” I said, “Isabel isn’t in the whirlpool.”
“I was scared.”
“Our imaginations can play tricks.”
“There were pearls on her neck. Lots of them.”
“Pearls?” I said. I had never once mentioned the choker Edward had given me, the choker I had buried with Isabel, not even to Tom.
“Yes,” he said. “It was a necklace, a necklace with pearls.”
There was a procession along Main Street and then Stanley Avenue to Fairview Cemetery. I had asked for a headstone to be put alongside Sadie’s and Fergus’s, though the river had given up no body to bury there. It was a block of limestone, hauled out of the glen, carved with the words TOM COLE. RIVERMAN. BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER.
The day of the procession, the wind was westerly and harsh for early autumn. I had been to the whirlpool in the morning, and the standing waves were as high and as angry as any I had ever seen. I had thrown in several pieces of wood and watched them circle, or disappear and sometimes come up far from the spot where Jesse had reappeared.
Despite the drizzle and the wind, most of the town came out and formed a wide semicircle fifty-odd deep around the stone. There were friends from his years at the Windsor Hotel, laborers from the Hydro-Electric Power Commission, neighbors from Silvertown, associates from the Friends of Niagara, hundreds of acquaintances, hundreds more who felt compelled to come though their knowledge of Tom was limited to newspaper accounts and bits of lore traded on the streets. Many wore Save Niagara Falls buttons pinned to the lapels of their coats, and when I finally realized it, I remembered I had seen the same words scrawled on a placard leaning against the window of the Polish butcher and then again on a banner strung across the façade of Clark’s Hardware, where Tom bought his lures.
I stood between the boys in a dress I had worn at Loretto and then again after Isabel died. It was out-of-date, and the elbows were shiny and threadbare. Mother had offered me the slightly less worn crepe suit she had brought for herself, but I shook my head and she knew to leave well enough alone. She stood beside Francis, with Father next in line, and held Francis’s hand and picked him up when he began to cry. Mrs. Mancuso was ready with a handkerchief and a pocketful of sweets on Jesse’s far side. But he did not cry or look up from the ground. Kit and Leslie were there, her face against the black of his jacket, his shoulders slumped, his chest as hollow as I had ever seen. I glimpsed Boyce Cruickshank at the rear of the crowd, his hands empty of the bouquet of yellow irises that had caught my eye as the procession filed past Isabel’s grave. A new wave of sorrow came upon me, seeing him there, pining for what was gone, and I felt my knees go weak. Then Mother’s arm was firm around my waist, reminding me that I must persist, for the boys, that as her daughter I could, now and always. Mrs. Andrews was home from Egypt and stood just behind me, sniffling and
Iwalk to the spot on the stone beach alongside where Jesse had come to the surface gasping for breath. I suppose everyone who has looked into the gorge from above and seen me here thinks I am still waiting for Tom. But I am not. I am merely remembering him.
I stood at this very spot for three weeks, tossing wood, always the same thought churning in my mind. When he touched my hair that final time and said, “Believe in me, Bess,” what had he meant?
He was letting out rope and more rope. Nearly three minutes had passed since the white underside of Jesse’s foot had slipped from sight. Then he touched my hair. He touched my hair so tenderly, like a loving husband might before setting off to war.
Believe in me, Bess.
As he waited on the shore, his son tethered to a rope, he surely knew going in after him meant almost certain death. Yet he dove into the pool. Had he thought there was a chance? In my darkest moments I wonder if Tom knew he would die but went into the whirlpool anyway. I have imagined what afterward would have been like, with Tom, without Jesse. And I might have blamed him. He had taught Jesse to love the river. He had held him in the current when he was just three years old.
Had Tom imagined what afterward would have been like and seen what I did? Had it edged him closer to the whirlpool? The day of the rockslide in the gorge and then again, after the ice bridge and the scow, he had said there were things he knew, things he could not explain. Would I have remained doubtful if he had not gone into the whirlpool, if Jesse had drowned, if afterward Tom had said he knew it would have been for naught?
He watched the gorge walls, predicted when ledges would collapse. He could forecast the weather with uncanny accuracy. He happened to be at the whirlpool when Isabel’s body turned up. Some called it intuition or second sight. Some said his perception was just keener than most. I had wondered if, in his mind, the curious things he knew were things Fergus could see, things he whispered into Tom’s ear. And I had scoffed.
Now there is the wood that never comes up at the spot where Jesse had. But it is impossible that the river should ever again be exactly as it was that awful day. There is also the choker Jesse was able to describe. But maybe the Atwells had gossiped, maybe all of Niagara Falls knows what I buried with Isabel. Maybe Jesse was told somewhere along the way. Maybe not.
Icaught a pike the other day, the first of my life. Jesse had shown me how to cast, and Francis clapped as I reeled it in. Afterward they watched me gut it, astonishment on their faces, like paint on a clown’s. “It’s something Daddy taught me,” I said.
“Me too,” Jesse said.
Francis looked at his feet, and it seemed our happy moment had come to an end.
“I’ll show you,” Jesse said. “Other stuff, too, like where to camp and how to throw a grappling hook.”
That night as I tucked Jesse in, I said, “You were a good big brother this afternoon.” The words were sincere, planned, an introduction to the discussion that could no longer be put off. “You know you can’t go down to the river, not by yourself, not with Francis, not without me, not yet.”
“I want to do the measuring. I know where the notches are.”
“Only if I’m with you. You know what can happen there.”
He nodded and shifted over a smidgen from the center of the bed, making room for me to sit down. “Did I make Daddy drown?”
“No, Jesse.” I swallowed hard. “I could say it was my fault for not letting you go with Daddy in the first place. And Daddy could say it was his fault for letting you think you could. And Francis could say it was his fault for not telling me sooner when you left.”
“Was Daddy mad?”
“Not a bit. He was full of love. So, so full. That’s why he went in.” I threaded my arms around his neck and pulled him close.
“Daddy used to say Great-grandpa was with us, on the river.”
“He could feel Fergus loving him.”
“I’m going to be like Daddy,” Jesse said, and I knew it was true.
Tom’s eyes were the thing I noticed that long-ago day I first saw him. A sister out in front and a tail of paired-off Loretto girls trailing behind, we were making our weekly outing to the falls. I said, “Good day.” He tipped his cap, and I thought his eyes were exactly like the river, green, full of vigor.
“You have Daddy’s eyes,” I said.
“Green.”
“The color of the river.”
“It’s all the eroded limestone that makes it green,” he said. “Daddy told me that.”
Mr. Bennett, from the Friends of Niagara, came to the house one day. He sat in the kitchen and drank the tea I offered and asked if I had noticed the placards and banners cropping up all over town. “Folks that keep their old newspapers are tacking ‘Bleeding the River Dry’ to their front doors,” he said.
There have been obituaries in the Niagara Falls Evening Review, the St. Catharines Standard, The Hamilton Spectator, even The Buffalo Evening News and Toronto’s Globe, all of which Father has managed to get ahold of and send along to me. Each covered the predictions and rescues, also the notches cut into the gorge wall, the drop in the river’s height, and the disappearance of the heron from the shallows and the wild grapes from the shoreline. I lifted the teapot. “More?”
He held out his cup. “The circular with the newspaper story has been printed. We’ve been sitting on it.”
“If you’re waiting out of respect for Tom, it isn’t what he’d want.”
“It seemed best to ask.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I have stood at the brink of the falls, that thin line that separates eternity from time. I have looked for aberrations in the rising mist, those flecks of shimmering silver, those orbs of color a shade more intense than their surroundings that I had once seen from my window seat. I have counted to ten before opening my eyelids, and let my gaze become unfocused, and crossed and uncrossed my eyes, and waited in the mist until I was soaked through to the bone, until it finally occurred to me that faith is believing without proof. Someday I would stop needing proof.
I have imagined asking Kit if the fate of the choker is a secret between just the two of us, now that Edward is gone. I even parted my lips once to speak the words. But in the end, I pressed them shut.
The day when I will finally be ready to ask sometimes seems hazy and far off, though there are moments when it feels but a hairbreadth away. They come more and more, brief stretches when the answer holds little sway, usually when I am out canvassing, with Jesse quoting figures from Tom’s notebook, and Francis marching along with his Save Niagara Falls button pinned to his coat, and one or two of the others from the Friends of Niagara Women’s Auxiliary chatting away. For now I am content to wait, until I have grown unshakable in what I have come to know. To ask any sooner might be to snuff out the flickering sliver of light that says Isabel has been with us all along, that Tom is with us still.
Author’s Note
William “Red” Hill (right)
BORN AND BRED IN NIAGARA FALLS, ONTARIO,I grew up awash in the lore of William “Red” Hill, Niagara’s most famous riverman. I’d see the rusted-out hull of the old scow still lodged in the upper rapids of the river and be reminded of him rescuing the men marooned there in 1918. I’d see the plaque commemorating the ice bridge tragedy of 1912 and know he’d risked his life to save a teenage boy named Ignatius Roth. I’d open the newspaper and read a story about his son Wes carrying on the Hill tradition and rescuing a stranded stunter.
When I set out to write a novel capturing the wonder I feel while standing at the brink of the falls, Red Hill’s life was a natural place t
The ten turbines of the Queenston powerhouse all became operational in Red Hill’s lifetime. Perhaps he saw the Niagara as diminished and, like Tom Cole, in some way mourned the river as it once was. Both men were spared the 1950 Niagara Diversion Treaty still in use today. With the drastically more lenient diversion limits set out in that treaty, the water plummeting over the Horseshoe and American falls now amounts to about 50 percent of the natural flow during the daylight hours of the tourist season and 25 percent otherwise.
There were aspects of Red Hill I did not incorporate into Tom Cole. Red Hill shot the lower rapids in a barrel three times, in one instance becoming trapped in the whirlpool. The oldest of his sons, Red Junior, lashed a rope around his waist and plunged into the water, eventually hauling his father’s barrel to shore. According to local lore, Red Junior was paraded about on his father’s shoulders, a hero. My riverman would not have lauded the daring. The Niagara was not a river to be mocked.
Red Junior and his brother Major both shot the rapids. Both attempted “the big drop.” Major’s trip was cut short when his barrel was tossed ashore in the upper rapids. Red Junior was not so lucky. In 1951 he plunged to his death in a barrel constructed of inflated rubber tubes, canvas, and fishnets. Corky, another of the Hill brothers, died in an accident while working in a hydroelectric diversion tunnel.