The Day the Falls Stood Still

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  “Mr. Coulson would keep an eye on him,” she said. “He’d make sure he was treated well.”

  I ran a bit of chalk along the length of a newly marked dart. “I really appreciate it, both Mr. Coulson’s help and all the orders you send my way.”

  “Your father was always looking out for Mr. Coulson, and Mr. Coulson doesn’t forget very much.” She glanced in the mirror, sliding her hands from ribs to hips.

  I remembered Isabel saying Mr. Coulson was as ambitious as they come, and Mrs. Coulson, too, and the thought sent me back to her tirade in the Oldsmobile. She was a woman used to doling out orders, a woman used to having everything work out just as she had planned. She turned, suddenly, to admire her profile, causing me to stick myself with a pin.

  Mother knew I was sewing for Mrs. Coulson and was always wanting to hear about whatever pretty frock I had on the go for her. Given the dearth of new frocks in Mother’s life, I tended to gloss over the imported lace, mohair soutache, and underskirts cut from the finest of silks. I kept Mr. Coulson’s workplace advancement to myself. Doing otherwise would have seemed rather like pouring salt into an open wound. Even so, it appeared news traveled to Buffalo, and one Sunday telephone call, Mother said, “You might mention to Mrs. Coulson that Tom will be looking for work once he’s home.”

  “I can’t see Tom working for the Hydro,” I said, though I still clung to Mrs. Coulson’s offer to help.

  “He might not have a choice.”

  “As far as I know, conscription ended with the war.” My tone was unfair. She was only saying the obvious. I had thought the same thought.

  “I meant it might be the only work to be had,” she said.

  “We could get by on what I make.” It was not true, not unless the three of us stayed on with Mrs. Andrews for the rest of our days.

  “I admire Tom’s attachment to the river, Bess. I really do. But I’m all for give-and-take, and there’s an awful lot of water tumbling over the brink.”

  “I’m to drag him off to the Hydro, then?”

  “You won’t need to drag him anywhere. You only need to pave the way.”

  M arried soldiers are being shipped home in advance of the others, and so the gathering on the platform is mostly women and children, none quite as young as Jesse. We are the lucky ones, and it seems immensely wrong of me to be waiting on the platform feeling nearly as much anxiety as joy. Our dreams have come true. The train pulling into the station, its windows full of cap-waving, cap-tossing soldiers, is about to deliver our men, the ones who have come home.

  I see Tom before he sees me and watch as he disembarks in a khaki tunic and puttees, like the others, except that his cap is solemnly upon his head, causing him to look subdued among the melee of soldiers lifting children, embracing wives, clapping backs. “Tom,” I call out, raising my arm. He stands three or four inches taller than the rest of the crowd, and somehow the size of him takes me by surprise. I can see even from a distance that he is thin, that his hair has been shorn, likely to rid him of lice before his return. I lift Jesse so that he might see his father approach, so that his father might see him. Then Tom’s arms are around the both of us, pulling us close. Jesse wriggles an arm free and wraps it around Tom’s neck. “Daddy,” he says.

  When Tom loosens his embrace, I pull back slightly, but he keeps his face buried in my scarf, and I hear a gasp and feel his chest heave. Sobbing is distinct from weeping, and he is sobbing. The other fellows, with wet cheeks and smiles, they are weeping, joyfully, even the one who hobbled off the train, the leg of one pant tucked up beneath his thigh.

  A length of muslin painted with the words “Welcome Home” is strung across Mrs. Andrews’s kitchen cupboards. There is a ham stuck with cloves ready for the oven and peeled potatoes ready for the pot, also the lemon squares he used to love, set on a plate. And a month ago, Mrs. Andrews insisted on giving Jesse, for no additional rent, the spare room next to the larger one he and I had shared while Tom was away. “It’s unnatural,” she said, “a two-and-a-half-year-old sharing his mother’s bed.” I scrubbed both rooms floor to ceiling, cut new liners for the drawers, and replaced the lavender in the sachet I keep with my underclothes. Our bed is made up with freshly laundered sheets, the best from my trousseau. But as I stand with Tom sobbing into my scarf, the efforts seem misguided, a foolish attempt at merriment. At least I had the good sense to put Mother and Father off when they proposed coming to welcome Tom home.

  When he finally lets go, he says, “It was awful over there.” I wipe away the tear clinging to his chin. “I know, Tom. I know.”

  “You don’t,” he says, “and it’s a blessing.”

  I remember another letter, different from the rest, late last summer, a short while after the newspapers were full of the good news of Amiens.

  August 24, 1918

  My Dear Bess,

  I am sorry I’ve taken so long to write, but I have been putting it off, waiting for my mood to change. I am not sick in any way, but I am feeling beaten down—by the smell, the smashed men twitching like squashed, charred insects, the upright corpses mistaken for living men, the landscape of barren earth without so much as a blade of grass. I am feeling alone, lost, and I can’t figure out how to feel like myself again.

  I decided to write anyway because you will know I was at Amiens, and I do not want you worrying about me.

  I’ll end now with love to you and Jesse.

  Tom

  He takes off his cap, and I want him to toss it into the air without a second thought to it being trampled or lost beneath the planks of the platform. But he only shoves it into the pocket of his tunic, as though he does not quite believe he is through with the war.

  19

  Building Niagara’s Toronto powerhouse

  I lie on my side, cheek in hand, elbow propped on a pillow, watching Tom sleep as I have most mornings for the six weeks since his return. He is still handsome, though not so youthful as before the war. There are dusky hollows beneath his eyes and, on his chin, stubble that did not used to appear overnight. At the uppermost edge of his cheekbone, there is a small, ragged scar where a bit of shrapnel missed his eye. His hair has yet to grow long enough for waves, and, having met only winter sun, it is dark in color, more like earth than like beach. I cannot see the river on him the way I once thought I could, in the feral locks, in the underside of a chin bronzed by reflected light, in the green of his eyes. The color has seemed muted, diluted by the bleak wasteland of a battlefield.

  Again he slept only fitfully, calling out no, sweating profusely with tangled linens wrapped about his legs. Three times, I woke him and saw relief flood his face as his eyes fluttered open to discover my hands on his shoulders, shaking him from the nightmares he mostly keeps to himself. The fourth time, it was early morning, and in the dim light I could see his eyes, open but wide with fear. His mouth was twisted with effort, and his hands were reaching, desperately. When he was truly awake I asked what he had seen. “A hand,” he said, “a hand in the mud. A soldier was being swallowed up by it. Only the hand was left.”

  “It was a dream. It’s gone.” I stroked his cheek.

  “At Passchendaele I was told to keep advancing. I was told I’d only imagined the fingers were reaching for help. ‘Might even belong to a Hun,’ is what my officer said.”

  A short while later the three of us are eating toast in the kitchen. I lift the coffeepot in Tom’s direction. “More?” He nods, and I fill his raised mug. As I push myself back from the table to tend to the bacon sizzling on the stove, Jesse breaks the quiet. “Daddy, play outside?”

  It is the question he asks most mornings. And Tom usually says yes and they put on their coats and boots, and Jesse marches in the snow and calls it quicksand. Every now and then he topples over and hollers until he is saved. I have watched through the kitchen window and seen Tom leaning against the pump, aloof. Yesterday I saw him startle, caught off guard, when Jesse aimed a stick and shrieked that Tom was a Hun.

  “What abou
t setting a snare or two?” I say. “I could make a rabbit stew.” He used to take such pleasure in the river, and Foster’s Flats, the lowermost terrace of the glen, was once his preferred spot for snaring small game. I have thought an outing there might help, an idea that has grown as the days pass with Tom never setting out for the rapids, whirlpool, or falls. I remember, too, an early letter from overseas: “I guess by the time I meet our son he’ll be old enough to learn all about the river. Until then, daydreams will have to do.”

  “I told Mrs. Andrews I’d bring in some wood,” Tom says. It is how he spends his days—mending a latch, straightening the woodpile, sanding and staining the windowsills. But soon there will be nothing left of the tasks Mrs. Andrews and I had put off for so long.

  “Jesse should be taught how to trap,” I say.

  “All right. All right. I’ll show him how it’s done.”

  For a moment I feel the beginnings of hope, a warm ember set to spark. He will make his way to the river, and, better yet, Jesse will accompany him. It is not the first time I have chucked prudence aside and let myself think he was turning a corner of sorts. But then he says, “There used to be rabbits just to the west of the rail yards,” and hope fizzles to ash.

  As I lift a strip of bacon from the pan and wait for the fat to drip away, it seems to me the odor is slightly off. I hold the pan out to Tom. “It smells like it should,” he says. Then he and Jesse devour nearly a half pound. But the idea of putting a forkful into my mouth is so unpleasant that I let two strips grow cold on my plate. With Jesse, I lost my taste for bacon early, months before my belly swelled.

  My immediate reaction is disbelief. Our intimacy has been sporadic at best, with only three instances since his return, and the first was an abysmal failure, with Tom pumping and pumping until I felt rubbed raw and then, when I was very nearly at my wits’ end, rolling away from me onto his back and saying, “I’m sorry, Bess.” Even so, disbelief shifts to panic as I calculate that my period is late. Yes, I want a playmate for Jesse, a baby for Tom to know from birth, another child to love. Eventually. But not just now. We have not yet figured out how to be a family of three, and, as a baby, Jesse took every ounce of stamina I could muster and then some. And I can only imagine what Mrs. Andrews will say. At first it was just me and a wardrobe full of clothes. Then came the baby, who howled in the night and peed on her favorite carpet and cut a ragged triangle from the sheers hanging in the dining room. And now, there is Tom, who sometimes calls out in the night and flinches if a door swings shut too abruptly and leaves whiskers in the sink and eats enough so that a roasting chicken no longer does for two meals. Oh, she would never put us out the door, but it hardly seems right to stay. Even with a family of three, the bustle of the house has become a strain by the end of the day. When it was just the two of us, she sat in the kitchen in the evenings playing solitaire or crocheting lace collars and cuffs. But she has begun heading up to her bedroom ever earlier and quietly closing the door. I count out nine months and tell myself I have got until the fall to coax Tom from his stupor, to figure out how we will manage with a second child.

  Tom heads out to the shed after breakfast, likely to dig up a few snares. As I wipe the table and tuck in the chairs, it occurs to me the timing of Jesse’s arrival had seemed far from idyllic at first, with Tom away. Yet I have no doubt it was Jesse’s tiny hand in my own that forced me to keep my chin up and my eyes mostly dry. And there was comfort in holding him in my arms, in feeling Tom was with me though he was not. So maybe there is reason to be pleased. Maybe a second child will be the magic that turns the three of us into a family. Surely Tom will rise to the occasion. Surely he will place his hands on my belly and marvel at the tiny heel kicking beneath. I lift my sweater from the peg at the back door.

  I am in the shed doorway with my sweater pulled tight around my waist when Tom turns toward me, his arms full of snares. He juts his chin in my direction. “What’s the smile about?” he says.

  “I think I’m pregnant.”

  “Oh.”

  “The bacon seemed off. It’s what happened with Jesse.” I wrap my sweater tighter still around my waist. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m late, too.”

  “Wow,” he says. He smiles, but it is not the same lopsided smile I had imagined a thousand times while he was overseas, and he hangs on to the snares, rather than returning them to the crate and putting his arms around me.

  “I know it’s a shock.”

  He sighs and says, “What about money, Bess?”

  “We’ll manage.”

  “I need to look for work.”

  A week earlier Mother and Father had come to welcome Tom home, and knowing Mother would relish a visit with Mrs. Coulson, I had scheduled a fitting—a jacket and skirt cut from charcoal gray wool crepe—to coincide. While I marked the hem, the talk turned to the Queenston-Chippawa power project, and Mrs. Coulson told Mother and me how Mr. Coulson was run off his feet trying to make sure all the men the Hydro had hired were put to good use. And then she said, “I’m sure Bess has told you I’ve been after her to send Tom along to Mr. Coulson,” and I marveled at her audacity. She would see to it Tom worked at the Hydro, as she had decided was best, even if it meant prompting Mother to harp at me as well.

  Both women turned to me, waiting, Mother’s lifted eyebrows questioning that I had withheld this bit of news from her. “Well?” Mother said.

  “He’s barely home.”

  “Best send him to Mr. Coulson while he still needs men,” Mother said.

  “He isn’t adjusted to being back. He’s still restless at night.” I wouldn’t say more than that, not within earshot of Mrs. Coulson. At any rate, Mother knew my worries. I had had to explain why I put off their visit by more than a month and ended up saying more than I thought I would—the calling out in the night, the failed intimacy, the way Jesse was overlooked. But she had been dismissive. “Remember the trouble your father had over all that aluminum business? He was over it the minute he set foot in the tannery.”

  “There’s nothing like a good day’s work to tire a fellow out,” Mrs. Coulson said.

  I did my best to appear sidetracked by a particularly stubborn pin. “I’m just not sure the Hydro is for Tom, even once he’s rested up,” I finally said. Immediately I was regretful. Might my apparent indifference have cost Tom his only chance for work? And what was more, I had seen nothing to hint his allegiance to the river had even survived the war, nothing to hint he had not altogether forgotten the writhing, bucking water, shattering to mist and spray and thunder at the brink of the falls.

  “Not sure?” Mrs. Coulson said, a furrow coming to her brow.

  Another stubborn pin was more than Mother could endure, and she said, “Tom isn’t much for progress. He wants all the water left going over the falls,” causing me to cringe.

  “There’s plenty of water,” Mrs. Coulson said. “Plenty of water and almost no work. Has Tom made the rounds?”

  I shook my head.

  “He should,” Mrs. Coulson said. “There isn’t any other work. He should see for himself.”

  I could see she was put out. I nodded, a little sheepishly, and Mrs. Coulson relented, shifting the conversation to the plans of the Great War Veterans’ Association for a cenotaph. “You should come out to a meeting, Bess,” she said. I had been lonely for ages, and with Tom home I was no longer able to bolster myself with thoughts of Once the war ends …, Once Tom’s back … Being in the company of other women, especially women with husbands just home from overseas, seemed like an evening well spent. But Mrs. Coulson did not mention a date or a place, and it seemed she would have if the invitation were sincere. I supposed there was the problem of how she would introduce me. Her dressmaker? Daughter of the disgraced Mr. and Mrs. Heath? Wife of a layabout?

  I take a snare from the bundle in Tom’s arms and fiddle with the lock. Should I mention the Hydro? Might Mother and Mrs. Coulson, with their pronouncements of work as a cure, be right? “What you need is
to rest up a little longer,” I finally say. “We’ve got the money from my parents.” I had hoped to one day put the three hundred dollars toward a home of our own, a home that has surely become all the more pressing now that we are to be a family of four.

  Eventually Tom and Jesse set out for the rail yards, and I stand at the front door, watching as they wade through drifted snow, Jesse with his small, mittened hand held in Tom’s. But when the wind gusts and snow swirls around their legs, Tom reaches to turn up the collar of his coat and in doing so drops Jesse’s hand. My last glimpse, as they round the corner, is of Jesse padding behind, his forgotten hand held aloft, straining for Tom’s.

  With the war and then the Spanish flu and now Tom, I feel more than ever that I lack whatever it is that brings others serenity. For ages, since well before Tom’s return, I have found myself thinking longingly of my Loretto days: wake-up bell, morning chapel, breakfast, classes, lunch, sewing, more classes, recreation, supper, music practice, study hall, evening prayers, lights out. Always the same. It occurred to me that by following the rules, by behaving in a certain way, we had strewn our daily life with rituals, rituals that had given me peace.

  With Tom still away, I had gone to Morrison Street Methodist in search of that peace. The Order of Service, and the words of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer and the Benediction, remained unchanged from week to week. There was the same odor of old hymnals, the sun warming the third pew each Sunday at ten o’clock. I suppose there was comfort in the predictability of it all. And sometimes I was encouraged by the reading of a particular scripture or roused by the beauty of the stained glass. I attended regularly enough that when I missed, I would be stopped on Bridge Street or Erie Avenue. “Are you well, Bess?” one or another of the Methodists would say. Still, I was not soothed in the way I had hoped, and it seemed as unlikely as ever there was a being up there, keeping watch. Soon enough I was mouthing the words to the Creed—I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth—rather than speaking them aloud. Eventually church without belief seemed a foolhardy pursuit, and Sunday mornings again became lazy breakfasts and walks in the woods of the glen with Jesse.