by Anne Simpson
He supposed he might have been more of a help to the boy. He knew he had the capacity to do such things, to offer a word when people were in trouble, and that this time he hadn’t managed it. He’d been a judge for more than twenty-five years. He’d gained a tolerance and kindness that went beyond professional tact. It had taken him longer to come to conclusions in the last decade than it had in the beginning, but he thought that these latter decisions had been a cut above the rest of his work. He’d been invited to sit on the Supreme Court, but Cecily had been sick then, and he’d declined the offer and retired.
Now he recalled that he hadn’t asked the boy his name, because it hadn’t been relevant. But he’d been so young, and so had the girl.
The dog whimpered again.
All right, Max, said the man finally, rising out of the chair. All right. He gave in and opened the door.
Through the windows of the ambulance, everything was as clear to Damian as if he were looking through binoculars, so close that it was unreal, but later he would not remember it quite this way.
It was a perfect late-summer morning, with sunlight falling generously across the slopes of Sugarloaf. It lay across a cornfield, where the stalks of corn were tall and leafy, with silky tassels, and it lay across the meadows below. It flecked the water of a small pond. It shone on the marmalade-coloured fur of a cat lying in the sun on the deck behind a house. The hour was not yet noon, but already the air shimmered with heat.
On the harbour road, the ambulance was nearing the hospital. It appeared and disappeared, threading through stands of trees, mostly spruce and birch, on either side of the road, a tiny, white shape on the sinuous road that wound in and out along the water and then away from it. Occasionally the ambulance gleamed in the sunlight as it rounded a curve, going past a farm on one side, then a farm on the other, where a cattle barn was being raised. At a new house past the farm, a woman finished putting out her second load of laundry and gave the line a last, quick jerk to send it out farther.
Below the road, the water of the harbour was serenely blue. A bald eagle could be seen making a slow circle through the air above an island off William’s Point. A man cutting the grass at the small golf course at the end of the point stopped his tractor mower and got off to light a cigarette. He dragged deeply on it, scanning the water and the broad shoulder of Sugarloaf. Someone was paddling a green canoe beyond the islands just below him. Across the water to the west, the man could see a flash of white on the road near Lanark, but he didn’t know it was an ambulance. He threw the cigarette down into the grass and stepped on the butt.
After the ambulance passed the abattoir and the north end of the Landing, a trail that traced the edge of the harbour wetlands, it turned into the hospital. The angelus was ringing at the convent, a large brick building that lay on the slope above the hospital, just as the ambulance drew up at Emergency. The paramedics jumped out and quickly took the body on the spinal board inside. Damian followed. Though it was hot, he still had the blanket around his shoulders like a cloak.
It was over, Damian thought. How quickly life went out of someone. This was his first time seeing it, and he knew, without absorbing any of it fully, that he would never be able to forget it. He would walk through these doors and something would come crashing down. The years would come to him; he could see them as if they were shapes in the distance, but this single event would mark the rest of his life. He was alive, and Lisa was not.
He hesitated for a moment. It was dark beyond the doors, but once he got inside his eyes would adjust to the light. This went through his mind as he paused, though he paused for no more than a second or two. One of the paramedics glanced back at him, and he knew he had to follow. He took one step, then another, but as he moved it seemed to him that he moved through one year, another, a third. He went across the threshold and felt the unbearable weight come down on him.
Then the glass doors closed behind him, and he was lost to view.
THEY COULD HEAR THE ROAR of Niagara Falls when they got out of the car.
Damian stretched, but Ingrid set off immediately down the wooden stairway, lured by the thundering sound that came up through the leaves of the darkly crowded maples. He caught up with his mother at the bottom of the steps in a parking lot set with rows of jewel-bright cars. Beyond was a green swath of lawn and clicking sprinklers near the old power plant, and tour buses making a slow funereal procession along the road by the river. A great plume of mist lifted into the air as powerfully as a raised fist, forming and dissolving into a shifting, changing shape that softened and folded into air above.
You shouldn’t be seeing it like this, murmured Ingrid.
Damian glanced at her: white hair pulled back from her face, straight nose, tanned skin. Her chin was lifted up slightly, as if she were trying to catch the scent of something.
How should I be seeing it? he asked.
I should have brought you here years ago – you and Lisa.
It had been a long drive, and now the heat made him dizzy. He closed his eyes and stood swaying as small, dancing shapes sparkled behind his eyelids. He wasn’t keeping up with her train of thought.
Are you all right? she said.
I’m okay.
He was thinking of how his father had taken him, together with his sister, to see the waterfall at James River when they were young. It had been nothing like this; it had been merely a modest rush of water over some rocks. The path to the waterfall had been thick with spruce, but there were places where the trees weren’t so dense and dark. They seemed to be filled with light, and his father called them hardwoods. He had scooped up Lisa and carried her over a puddle and set her down on her feet again, and it was then – just then – that a ruffed grouse made such a loud drumming that Damian, startled, fell back against a birch. Finally they had come to a very steep bank where someone had rigged ropes to guide people to the bottom.
It’s fine, his father had said. We’ll just go slowly and hold on to the ropes.
But his father wasn’t with them now, Damian thought, as he walked across the parking lot with his mother. They were two sleepwalkers, walking a little apart, as if leaving space between them for another person. They’d arrived at Niagara Falls in the middle of the afternoon, but he had the feeling of having woken up in another country. A country of clamour. The exhaust from the buses was blue, and there were tinny voices on intercoms hawking tickets. A helicopter flew over once, twice, and at intervals a great balloon, striped with gold and scarlet, rose straight up, slowly, and descended just as slowly, settling on the American side of the Falls. Damian crossed the road, lagging behind his mother, and a leather-clad man on a motorcycle swerved to miss him. The man turned to raise a gloved hand, middle finger extended.
Now get together, said a man with a camera, facing a little group posing in front of a flowerbed, where exotic blooms of amaryllis stood, darkly crimson, behind them. The man pushed his cap back on his head and waited for people to move out of the way.
All righty, let’s get this show on the road. No, get in closer, Dwayne. Closer. Okay, say cheese.
Ingrid said she’d meet Damian in half an hour in the same spot. Was he listening? She was going to buy a few bottles of water. Her white hair was beaded with diamond-fine droplets as the mist fell over it. He nodded, wanting to tell her about the droplets, but she’d already turned to leave, and he squeezed into a place at the railing beside a heavy-set woman. The Niagara River ran swiftly past, just beneath where he stood, and thinned to green transparency before falling over the ledge of stone. It began with water, thought Damian. Things began and ended with water.
I don’t like vinegar on them, said the woman beside him.
Damian half turned to her, but she was speaking to her friend.
I like gravy, though. Donald can’t stand it on fries, but I like it.
A person caught in that current might possibly have a chance of swimming to the bank, Damian considered. But the current would be unrelenting; it would
sweep the swimmer away just at the moment he held out a hand for help. He’d be tossed over the edge.
He who hesitates is lost, his father called. Don’t be afraid.
Damian knew he’d slide and fall straight into the dark, rushing river below. So Lisa went first. She was only five. She did what their father told her to do and laughed when she tumbled against him at the bottom. Damian’s heart was thumping hard as he reached for the rope and held it with both hands. Thumping hard as a grouse. He clutched the rope and skidded down, holding on so tightly that the rope seemed to rip the skin from his hands.
His father caught him, rubbing the burns on his hands, and the three of them stood on the bank together. Damian’s heart was still beating fast, but he was dazzled by the water pouring into the deep, black pool, a pool that was ringed around with a wall of rock topped with spruce trees. They gazed at the waterfall without speaking. Bright and dark. Then their father tore off his T-shirt and jeans, his socks and shoes, and made a swift, shallow dive into the pool. He came up, laughing, his hair plastered against his head.
God knows where Donald got to, anyway, said the woman. He said he was going for a leak, but it can’t take that long.
Damian lifted his eyes to see, farther away, a place where the river dipped and rolled before it coursed over the Falls. It furled in vivid green, a constant wave that seemed to stay in one place, thick as a muscle. Just at the edge, the water became a froth of white.
The lip of the waterfalls made a long, rounded curve. In the middle distance was Goat Island, separating the American Falls from the Canadian. The American Falls were less impressive, with piles of rocks below. Lisa had told him that they’d once stopped the Falls for several months on that side, as if they’d been turning off a tap. They’d wanted to get rid of the talus at the base, though in the end they’d decided to leave it. But in halting the flow they’d found things they didn’t expect. Bones. Twelve quarts of coins. More bones. All those people, Lisa had said, had thrown themselves in. They’d killed themselves.
How did she know that?
She’d done a project on it. The one she’d done for Mr. Craig.
A whole project on how many people killed themselves at the Falls?
He was stupid, she told him. He was a stupid idiot.
He remembered the tone of her voice. Stupid.
She’d always wanted to see Niagara Falls. When she was little, she’d had a paperweight that their Uncle Roger had sent to her one Christmas: if she shook it, little flakes of white fell over the miniature Falls. There was some looping white script on the top of the paperweight: Niagara Falls, Canada. Because she liked it so much, more things had arrived from their uncle, in mailing tubes, until she had posters of the Horseshoe Falls in Icy Glory, An Aerial View of the Falls, the Maid of the Mist Near the American Falls, the Spanish Aero Car Offers Thrills Over the Whirlpool, the Spectacular Blossom Festival, and Roger Hockridge Challenges the Falls Again. The poster of Roger Hockridge, Canada’s Number One Daredevil With His Bomb Barrel, had been put up on the ceiling of her room. She liked looking at the round barrel, decorated with red maple leaves, bobbing at the edge of the Falls – a barrel that held Uncle Roger, the uncle they’d never met. It was the very poster Damian had ripped down and put up in his own room, because he didn’t get the same one. He’d got one of his uncle being carried on the shoulders of some grinning men, but not one of the Bomb Barrel.
Lisa also had pens with Niagara Falls scrolled along the sides in silver lettering. There was one made with clear plastic: when it was turned upside down, a spurt of blue-green liquid descended. When the pen was turned the other way, the blue-green waterfall drew back, up, and over the edge. Lisa took it to school when she was in grade seven and promptly lost it. Another pen was sent, but it didn’t work as well as the first, because the liquid representing the Falls merely dripped when the pen was turned.
She knew the history of the Falls. She knew who had lived and who had died among the daredevils; she could rhyme off the names and death dates of the ones who hadn’t made it. She’d read about how the Falls had been before the Europeans came, and after they’d arrived, when Father Hennepin knelt at the sight, his portable altar strapped to his back. She told Damian how the Iroquois had seen wolverines reaching out to snag carcasses of dead elk from the river, how rattlesnakes had sunned themselves on Table Rock when it hadn’t been named Table Rock, back when it had been a huge, unbroken shelf, and how eagles had wheeled over the water in great flocks, lost in mist, almost as if she saw it exactly as it had been hundreds of years before. A sacred place – wild, fearsome, untouched.
Damian turned away from the railing, steadying himself by putting a hand on the top of a Hi-Spy Viewmaster II. It cost fifty cents for a minute, so he dug a couple of quarters out of his pocket and dropped them into the slot. He looked through the viewer into darkness. Nothing. He stayed where he was, listening intently, aware of the roaring that filled his ears. The sound of the nearer current was layered over the rush of water farther away, combined with the noise of the Falls themselves, a heavy curtain of sound.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to be there at all. He had no idea why he’d brought it up with his mother. Wanting to scatter his sister’s ashes in a place she’d hoped to visit had only been a half-baked idea he’d had, but his mother had fastened upon it. She’d made arrangements. She’d phoned her brother, though Damian knew that relations between them were cool. The next thing Damian knew, they were going to be spending several weeks with his Uncle Roger and his cousin Elvis, neither of whom he’d ever met. His mother had put off all her massage appointments for a month; it was the first time in years she’d taken so many weeks away from work. She had pulled down the blinds in the little house in the backyard – the Studio, as she called it. She had locked it up.
And, she added, a pencil poised above a list she was making in the kitchen, the Motel au Vieux Piloteux had been booked in Trois-Rivières, because they could make it there from Halifax on the first day – a long day, but it would break up the trip nicely.
It really was a good idea, his mother told him. Lisa would have wanted her ashes scattered on the Niagara River.
But as soon as she said it, they both knew it wasn’t something Lisa would have wanted. If Lisa had been able to want anything, she’d have wanted to stay alive. They’d stood in the kitchen looking at each other. His mother was stricken, but Damian didn’t put his arms around her; he simply turned and went out of the room.
Nevertheless, they had made the trip to Niagara Falls. It had been ten months almost to the day since it happened.
I’d like to see, piped a voice, and Damian looked down to see a girl with tight brown braids staring up at him. There was a small cap on her head. Please, she added.
Sure, he said. But it ate my money – you can’t see anything.
A plump Mennonite woman reached out, putting a large, tanned hand on the child’s shoulder. Damian dropped his eyes, making his way past a cluster of little girls, all wearing long dresses and sensible shoes.
You shouldn’t speak to strangers, Leah.
He has hair like the angel Gabriel.
He’s not the angel Gabriel.
Damian walked along the path by the river, feeling the force of the current moving toward him as he went against it. It gave him a sense of vertigo. Near the intake pool for the power plant was a smooth lawn that ended in a jumble of rock.
A man and woman were sitting there, and the man had his fingers tucked into one of the belt loops on the back of the woman’s white jeans. He leaned over and kissed her on the ear, and she half-turned to him and murmured something. They got up and left: the woman brushing at a grass stain, the man chucking a paper coffee cup into the water. Damian watched as the cup was caught on the surface of the green water, light and buoyant, spinning comically before it vanished over the edge. He could feel the power of the water, yet at the same time it didn’t seem so very powerful; it was close enough for him to dip his feet int
o the river.
The waterfall was shot through, here and there, with sunlight. Laughter. His father netted by shadows, by dappled lights, swimming strongly away from them, toward the waterfall, where he dunked under and came up – Holy Christ, it’s cold – always moving away from them.
Come on, you two, his father had called. Damian, hop out of your clothes and jump in.
Lisa stripped down to her pink-and-green bathing suit and jumped in.
There! You did it!
How strange her small legs looked as she frog-kicked frantically toward her father.
It’s cold, darling, he said as Lisa threw her arms around his neck.
Damian sat down on a flat rock by the Niagara River, and it occurred to him that he could go back to the car and get the box with the urn in it. He could throw handfuls of Lisa’s ashes into the water, since it was what he had come here to do, after all – toss up handfuls of that remarkable dust that had once been a human being and watch it drift away.
Sometimes he thought the urn of ashes lived inside him. Lisa, the memory of Lisa, the ashes of Lisa, boxed in and taped shut. She could have been in her bedroom there, inside her little urn. She could have been sitting on her miniature bed, in her miniature room with the miniature posters all around her, the one of the Spanish Aero Car and the one of Uncle Roger’s Bomb Barrel. There she was, sitting on the bed inside the box that was inside his brain. Her smile was fixed in the immovable smile of the dead. She was gently smiling or not quite smiling, a bit like Buddha. He carried her everywhere he went, but soon he’d have to let go. His eyes stung with tears. It always happened like this. Things went away, leaving him behind. Here we are, said Ingrid as Damian parked the car under the shade of a chestnut tree in front of a rambling white house. Now don’t worry when you meet Elvis. He’s harmless.