The Day the Falls Stood Still

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  I could see his methods were suspect, but to my mind the end—the landslide victory he won—justified the means. After I cast my ballot, my heart was light. It took at least half the walk back to Mrs. Andrews’s house to work out the reason why: At long last I had made Tom’s future more certain, if only by a single vote.

  His letters arrived in fits and starts, though seldom did more than a fortnight pass without some news from him. But then in the autumn of 1917, the newspaper confirmed the rumors we had been hearing for weeks and his correspondence altogether stopped. Our boys had moved on to Passchendaele.

  The battlefield of Passchendaele was a dreary wasteland, a swampy marsh of mud and water even without the rain that had not let up all fall. There was no relic of civilization, only shell holes and charred trees and decomposing bodies, or so said Mrs. Mitchell at the post office one Thursday afternoon. She had heard it from a cousin, who was back from the front by way of Wandsworth Hospital in London, where he had a piece of shrapnel the size of peach pit wrenched from his eye and caught an earful from an Aussie fresh from Passchendaele. “The boys use duckboards—something like ladders but laid on the ground—to keep themselves from drowning in the mud,” she said. “If a fellow takes a hit and goes off balance, well, that’s pretty much it. He’ll get swallowed up.”

  Hearsay abounded; the worst of it, too disheartening to be allowed in the newspapers, arrived in Niagara Falls via some route just as circuitous as Mrs. Mitchell’s. Plenty of it reported the near annihilation of the British, Australian, and New Zealand divisions our boys were meant to replace. And there was a retired colonel in Queenston who insisted the high ground of the town of Passchendaele was in no way worth the bloodbath capturing it would mean.

  Still, on a Monday in early November the Evening Review headline read OUR BOYS TAKE PASSCHENDAELE. The account that followed trumpeted the victory of the Third and Fourth divisions, which had captured the town of Passchendaele and hung on to it by the skin of their teeth, and the First and Second divisions, which had come to their aid, finally forcing the Germans ringing the area into retreat.

  Other versions came quick on the heels, littering the glory of the newspaper account like an ash bin emptied onto newly fallen snow. Our dead were three deep in places, many sunk too deep in the mud to ever be found. As for how many Canadian soldiers were lost, there were the old-timers who endlessly plotted the war on the maps laid out in the rear of Clark’s Hardware, and a few had made extrapolations using the list of casualties from the newspaper and estimated it at fifteen thousand or more. I made the mistake of speaking to milky-eyed Mr. Chapman one afternoon while waiting for Mr. Clark to package up another round of heating coils for Tom. Once I had confirmed that, yes, Tom was in fact an infantryman in the Third Division, he shook his head. His calculations pointed to as many as four-fifths of the fellows in Tom’s boots having fallen by the time the reinforcements arrived. As I stood there, numb, he misjudged me for someone eager for more. “Near as I can figure Passchendaele cost the Allies half a million in casualties, including upwards of a hundred thousand dead. With the five miles the boys pushed back the front, works out to three inches for every man lost.”

  All this, and not a word from Tom for forty-one days, twenty-nine since the headline in the Evening Review.

  Home from Clark’s Hardware, I put Jesse in his high chair and set a dish of cold macaroni from the supper before on the tray. When I noticed my hands shaking, I lifted the teapot from the cupboard, thinking a cup of chamomile might calm my nerves. It was then that I saw the boy who delivered the telegrams pause at the far end of the front walk. He flipped through the papers in his hands, looked up at the house and then down again. I closed my eyes, pressed my face against my palms, and with every ounce of will I could muster wished away the boy and the telegram addressed to me.

  When I looked up again, he had wandered on, to some other address, some other widowed wife, some other fatherless child. I touched my fingertips to the teapot and circled them twice around the lid. Then I lifted that teapot and hurled it with all my might. I moved on, to a wool skirt for Miss Bingley, pressed for a final time earlier in the day and folded on the ironing board, and tried, unsuccessfully, to tear it from the waistband clear through to the hem. Jesse watched from his high chair, eyes wide, a spoon clenched in his tiny fist. When he threw that spoon toward the cupboard beneath which the rubble of the teapot lay, I was immediately upon him. “How dare you!” I spat the words, my arm jerking upward in preparation. Then Mrs. Andrews was there, her fingers tightly wrapping my raised arm, her body pushing mine from the kitchen as Jesse began to wail.

  Once I regained my composure, which took the better part of the afternoon, even with the rocking chair Mrs. Andrews insisted upon, even with the milky tea she brought, even with the wool blanket she smoothed over my thighs, I told her about the boy pausing at the end of the walk, but her jaw was firmly set and did not change.

  “Your father will be arriving on the ten o’clock tomorrow,” she said. “He’ll be taking you back to Buffalo for two weeks.”

  She laid a hand firmly on the wool blanket and did not shift her gaze from mine, even as tears welled in my eyes at the idea of having to explain myself to Mother and Father, even as it occurred to me there was nothing left to tell. “Jesse?”

  “It’s just a bit of a holiday, for the both of you.” She smiled then, her eyes as soft as I had ever seen them, the backs of her fingers stroking my cheek with a tenderness I had guessed at but never seen.

  I thought then of Mrs. Doherty, with her six children and livelihood of folding boxes and husband already shot full of holes. “I’m so ashamed.”

  “It’s dances and pretty dresses that girls your age ought to be worrying about,” Mrs. Andrews said.

  Waiting for Father at the train station with Jesse good as gold on my knees, I thought about my raised arm, whether given another moment I would have followed through. The odd passerby noticed my wet cheeks and smiled kindheartedly, lingeringly, and a gentleman with a cane even patted my arm. The kindnesses were not the standard fare from before the war, the usual “Sorry for your troubles, miss.” No, those concerned folk assumed the boy at the end of the walk had not ambled on after checking Mrs. Andrews’s address against that of the telegram in his hands.

  The three rooms Mother and Father let in Buffalo were on Jewett Avenue, an address that implied the prestigious neighborhood of Parkside, though they were in fact a good mile from Delaware Park. The bedroom, parlor, and dining room, where they ate whatever Mother rustled up on a hot plate, were crowded with the best pieces from Glenview: three bureaus; a four-poster bed; two chesterfields; a club chair; a mahogany table with matching china cabinet and sideboard, crammed with the usual silver and crystal but also with books. With six carpets, all overlapping, and Mother’s cleverness for decorating, the rooms appeared studiously disheveled, pleasingly so.

  By the time Father, Jesse, and I arrived, the dining room table had been pushed into a corner and two cots set up in its place. On the train there had been no mention of the episode behind my visit, only delight that he and Mother would have Jesse and me to themselves. Mother followed suit, though she smoothed my hair, put a hand on my shoulder, stroked my forearm, every chance she got. I told myself the tenderness was only concern over my fragile state, but with each touch there came an awful moment when it seemed she was convinced of my widowhood.

  The first evening Father talked about an order the tannery had been given for ammunition pouches, fifty thousand of them all told, and the expansion he had had the good sense to undertake in just the nick of time. Mother said, “It’s all working out wonderfully well,” and I thought better than to ask why, then, was she wearing the same lovely dress she had had on when she last came to Niagara Falls, why then, had Father decided on a trolley rather than a hack from the train station to Jewett Avenue when there was a fair-size valise to be carried, also Jesse, who was sound asleep.

  Two days later I woke to Mother
scrubbing away at handkerchiefs and stockings and underclothes a few feet from my cot. “Rise and shine,” she said, with enough vigor to make it clear she did not consider languor a cure for losing heart. “Your father’s long gone, and Jesse got up an hour ago.”

  “You don’t send the laundry out?” I said, once I was awake enough to be sure of what I was seeing.

  “It’s only a few things.”

  “But where do you hang the clothes to dry?” Bewildered as I was, the question had somehow risen to the top of the list.

  “I’ve attached a few lines to the underside of the dining table.” She looked up from the laundry tub and smiled as though I ought to be impressed with her ingenuity.

  I shifted to sitting on the cot. “I thought Father was as good as running the tannery?”

  “He’s earning plenty,” she said, “more than enough.”

  I nudged the laundry tub with my toe and turned up my palms.

  She handed me a basket of wrung-out bloomers and camisoles, and a tin of clothespins. “Would you mind?” she said, pointing toward the table. “It’s his latest mania. Saving.”

  “Mania?” I said, no less confused than a minute earlier.

  “First it was aluminum. Then it was rye whiskey, and now it’s saving up enough to buy the tannery.” She tossed another pair of bloomers into the basket beside me. “He doesn’t have it in him to do anything halfway. Never has.”

  I knew what she meant. Always, it had struck me that he loved her, and not in an everyday sort of way but with a rapt, enviable intensity. Even so, he was not giving her enough money to run the household.

  “I prefer penny-pinching to rye whiskey,” she said, clearing a stray lock from her forehead with the back of her hand.

  In the evening Father came through the doorway with Sir Charles Lyell’s Travels in North America in his hand. “I’m sending it over to Tom,” he said. “There’s a chapter where he uses the distance between the edge of the escarpment and the falls, and the rate they’re eroding back to calculate the age of the Niagara Gorge.”

  I knew the book. Kit had complained bitterly when Mother Febronie pitched a copy that had snuck its way onto the shelves of the library at the academy. If Lyell were right, the date of creation set by Saint Bede using the Bible as a guide was entirely wrong.

  I slipped my arms around Father’s neck and glimpsed an approving smile come to Mother’s lips. “He’ll love it,” I said, squeezing him like I had not since I was a child. A book was an extravagance, something my penny-pinching father would surely not have bought if he thought Tom had drowned in the mud.

  It was the next morning when Mrs. Andrews called, breathlessly hollering into the telephone that a whole slew of letters from Tom had arrived, that she had opened all of them, that the most recent was dated November 17. “He survived Passchendaele,” she said, her voice beginning to crack. And then it was some nonsense about someone at her door. She would make me wait until she had pulled herself together to hear another word.

  T here are plenty of fellows who will not step onto the railway station platform at Niagara Falls today, plenty of fellows who had not survived Ypres and the Somme, Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele: Fred and George Anderson, whom I knew from Morrison Street Methodist; Walter Canfield and Frank Romea, who worked for Father at the Niagara Power Company; James Muir and Clement Swan and Thomas Wood, who visited their sisters at the academy; Gordon Dobbie, who delivered the flowers from his father’s shop; William Hewson, who courted Isabel for a while; 124 others, including Edward Atwell, who was once my betrothed.

  His death was reported in the Evening Review. “Killed in action,” it said. I cried balled up on my bed until Mrs. Andrews brought me a cup of tea with brandy and said that Jesse was waiting in the hall, but in another five minutes she was sending him in and that it was not right for a child to see his mother carrying on so.

  I sent a heartfelt condolence to Kit and did not receive a reply. I thought about dropping in on her at one of the Erie Avenue shops she now ran on her family’s behalf and had very nearly worked up the nerve when I saw her, lounging on a blanket in Queen Victoria Park, listening to the Niagara Falls Citizens Band. She was leaning against a fellow fifteen years her senior and tall with a hollow chest and a dusting of freckles and sparse, tan hair. Surely he was Leslie Scott, her husband, who had been sent home from the war early with chlorine gas–damaged lungs and then come to Niagara Falls from Toronto as the Hydro-Electric Power Commission’s chief hydraulic engineer. Midconcert I caught her eye. There was a moment of recognition, and then pursed lips and her hard gaze lingering too long before shifting from mine. Edward was not going to come home from the war and marry a pretty girl and set to work on a brood of his own. He was not coming home, not at all, and there was no hope of me becoming a mere hiccup along the way to a full life.

  Boyce Cruickshank had survived the war; at least his name had not appeared in the death notices of The Buffalo Evening News, which my parents watched as closely as I did those of the Evening Review. We knew he had enlisted early on with the American Expeditionary Forces because Father had seen him in uniform a short while after the United States finally joined the Allies and began shipping ten thousand men a day to France.

  “Your father ran into Boyce the other day,” Mother had said.

  “Boyce Cruickshank?” As far as I knew it was the first they had seen of him since he left Isabel high and dry.

  “He said Boyce cut clear across the street to speak to him. He’s got more backbone than his father. I’ll give him that.”

  “Was he rude?” The more senior Mr. Cruickshank had looked the other way when he met Mother on the street and turned his back when he came upon Father at the bank.

  “He hung his head and said he was sorry, that he had been a great disappointment to Isabel, that she deserved better. Apparently he was wearing a soldier’s uniform.”

  A mid influenza and the ballot for the power commission, amid worry and grief over men too far away or ruined or altogether lost, there has been pleasure, often short-lived, sometimes persisting for an hour or a day or a week. There is Jesse, who is happy, who claps his hands in delight when I step into a room. At two years old he is clever enough to know limestone from shale, agile enough to have scaled a handful of the boulders in the glen, spirited enough to have thrown himself into a pool at Dufferin Islands, certain that he could swim, which turned out to be right.

  There is the work that has kept the two of us afloat, the needle between my fingers like a tiny magic wand. There are the dresses that cause women to marvel, the really special ones that cause me to marvel as well. I have a handful of clients who are my very own, rather than Mrs. Andrews’s with me as assistant. It began one morning with Mrs. Andrews answering the door and me in the sewing room, my foot stock-still on the treadle once I recognized Mrs. Coulson’s precise enunciation, almost British though she was born in Niagara Falls. “I’ve heard you’ve taken on Bess Cole as an apprentice,” she said. Of course Mrs. Coulson knew, her ear all but pressed to the ground. Of course she had come. She needed to see for herself what had become of the girl who had discarded the bit of advice hurled at her in the backseat of an Oldsmobile and married the likes of Tom Cole.

  “I have.” I could picture Mrs. Andrews—her spectacles perched low on her nose, her chin indiscreetly inching upward as she took in Mrs. Coulson’s full height.

  “I’m an old friend, a benefactor, some might say.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m not sure it’s any of your business.”

  “You brought it up.”

  “I was wondering whether I might order a skirt,” Mrs. Coulson said. “I’d want Bess to do more than run up the seams.”

  “Why not just say you’d rather her make the skirt than me?”

  Mrs. Coulson cleared her throat. “All right,” she said. “I’d rather Bess made the skirt.”

  Was I wrong about her? Was it possible Mrs. Coulson was extending the favor she had shown
Mother to me? To have a client of my own would be a streak of good luck. And that it was Mrs. Coulson, who had the height and curves to be the perfect model for a perfect dress, also the social connections to bring news of my old world at a time when the cocoon of just Mrs. Andrews, Jesse, and me was sometimes too snug, at least partially offset my dislike of her busybody ways.

  I made the skirt, a straightforward affair, six panels, a yoke. She was pleased and ordered a blouse, no pleats, no ruffles, nothing for me to mess up. That was before I showed her a design I had come up with for an evening gown. She settled on pale blue-green silk for the main body and an ivory shadow lace for the neckline and sleeves. After that more women came to the door, saying, “I heard you sew for Mrs. Coulson.”

  With Mrs. Coulson ordering an evening gown or a dinner dress nearly every month, it seemed there was no shortage of funds in the Coulson household, and it was hardly a surprise. Mr. Coulson had been hired away from the Niagara Power Company for what everyone said was a top-brass position with the Hydro-Electric Power Commission. And then, a few days after the Armistice, Mrs. Coulson confirmed he was in fact senior enough to hire anyone he pleased. I was fitting her for a velvet evening coat and had just finished adjusting the bodice darts to fit her ample bust when she said, “You should send Tom to see Mr. Coulson about work once he’s home.”

  It had occurred to me that Mr. Coulson might have the clout to add another man to the payroll, and I had thought how simple it would be to ask Mrs. Coulson to put in a word on Tom’s behalf, even if it meant handing her on a silver platter the opportunity to gloat. Until that moment in the fitting room, though, I had always reminded myself that the Hydro-Electric Power Commission was not for Tom, at least not until necessity made it so, and pressed my lips shut until the notion passed. “He’ll need to find something,” I said, aiming for just enough enthusiasm to keep the Hydro-Electric Power Commission as an option. “I’ll tell him when he gets home.”