Annie thinks she’s alive, just about. Is her barrel swirling in the whirlpool? Dangling, spun and spat from rock to rock? She doesn’t know where or what or how she is. She’s soaked, as cold as a fish, but dry-mouthed. She reckons she’s used up all her air. Funny, that, to stifle in the middle of all this flood. She gasps, she yawns, she hasn’t an inch to stretch and catch a breath.
A lifetime.
The clang of metal makes her jump. Hooked? A scraping, a dragging. Shore!
Annie waits while a saw chews the wood a few inches from her head. Light, like an elbow in the eye. Strangers drag her out onto the rocks, she’s as dizzy as a faun. Her hands unfurl, greenish blue. The decks of the Maid of the Mist are thick with faces. When Annie staggers to her feet and brushes down her wet trunks, a long cheer goes up. Her barrel’s iron hoops are stoved in; the thing looks like flotsam. She manages a curtsey, wipes water off her face that turns out to be blood. Her manager runs forward with a red carnation, and an overcoat to make her decent. But Annie’s staring past the sightseers, up up up the cloudy tumult of the Falls.
A photograph flashes silver.
Is Annie changed? What does she know now? Why, nothing; nothing more than when the first hands wrenched her into the world sixty-three years ago, when she was ignorant, eager for the air.
Note
‘Fall’ is inspired by Annie Edson Taylor (1838–1921), a teacher from Auburn, New York, who on 24 October 1901 was the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls. She hoped to make her fortune on speaking tours, but she was abandoned by her managers, impersonated by more photogenic actresses and had her barrel stolen. She eked out a living selling pamphlets about herself and working as a clairvoyant, and died destitute in the Niagara County Infirmary twenty years after her fall. I have drawn on a slim biography, Charles Carlin Parish’s Queen of the Mist (Interlaken, NY: Empire State Books, 1987). For a full retelling of Annie Edson Taylor’s story, I recommend Joan Murray’s narrative poem Queen of the Mist (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).
‘Fall’ was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 (February 2011) and first published in Stylist (August 2011).
Emma Donoghue
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First published 2011 by Picador
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ISBN 978-1-4472-1304-8
Copyright © Emma Donoghue 2001, 2011
The right of Emma Donoghue to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
‘What the Driver Saw’ has appeared online in slightly different form as part of a Concordia University research project (http://gres.concordia.ca/ecrire/index.shtml). ‘Sissy’ was commissioned by the Globe and Mail (5 May 2001). ‘Fall’ was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 (February 2011) and first published in Stylist (August 2011).
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Three and a Half Deaths (Short Reads) Page 4