The Day the Falls Stood Still

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  After Morrison Street Methodist, I began to wonder if what I really needed was to pray, if with all the hymns and scripture readings and homilies, the time left over for quiet reflection had been inadequate. And I wanted to pray for Tom at the front. I remembered a feeling of warmth and love coming to me in the academy chapel, a feeling of being a part of something much greater than myself. I remembered moments of consolation, certainty that the way things turned out was anything but sheer luck.

  Every evening for three months, I sat cross-legged on my bed before turning in, hands folded in prayer, and resolved to stay on track this time. But always it was the same, my mind drifting to Tom overseas, to Jesse in his bed, to whether Isabel’s child might have resembled him in some way, to a frock I had yet to complete, even to a grocery list. I tried to remember mist dappled with bits of shimmering silver, making its way heavenward. But in the end all that seemed certain was that I had not made the future any more sure.

  Maybe I need to take my cue from Jesse, who simply offers his hand again and again, who seems entirely oblivious to any difference between this father and the daddy I promised for so long. When I asked Mrs. Andrews what she thought, she only lifted a shoulder, as though she had not noticed a thing. But she knows that Tom has not yet felt the full weight of Jesse tugging at his heartstrings, that certain doors are flung shut even to me. It is why she shoos Tom and me out the door in the evening, why she is bleary-eyed from sewing for Mrs. Usher and Mrs. Cox and all three Leonard girls, while I sew for only Miss Bingley and Mrs. Coulson. It is why I hear her shushing Jesse most mornings as she leads him past our closed bedroom door, why she made me a nightdress of sheer silk, causing me to sneak into bed earlier in the week and lay there shivering, cold silk against my breasts, far too self-conscious to coax Tom to the middle of the bed. Admittedly, it was almost a relief, not to persuade, not to hope, not to feign pleasure, not to stroke his hair afterward. But I am afraid that I might lack the fortitude to reach for him again.

  One evening a while back, when Mrs. Andrews was insistent that I needed a bit of fresh air, Tom and I left the house. With Tom leading the way, we headed west on Bridge Street, in the direction opposite the river, which hardly came as a surprise. We ended up at Fairview Cemetery, and I followed him under the arch at the entranceway and along the rutted path to his family plot, where both Fergus and Sadie were buried. As he brushed the snow from their headstones, he looked so broken that I was unnerved. I said, “Tell me, Tom. I think it might help to tell.”

  “It’s just that …” He looked away from me, to the trampled snow at his feet. “I lost my nerve over there. I felt really alone, more than I ever have, and then my nerves went.”

  I remembered the letter. “I am feeling alone, lost, and I can’t figure out how to feel like myself again.”

  “I’d lie awake, in the trench, staring up at nothing, thinking up ways to get away from the front.” He said more, of how he hoped for a blighty, a generous bit of shrapnel in the thigh, a wound just serious enough to mean his removal from the battlefield. “I thought about shooting myself in the foot. But shooting yourself was a capital offense, and even if other fellows said it was true, I wasn’t sure a sandbag between my boot and the gun would stop the powder marks. And then there was the chance of gangrene setting in.”

  “I wouldn’t think much of a man who wasn’t fazed by war.”

  “I thought about claiming shell shock. But I’d heard the troops sent to Queens Square Hospital in London were treated with jolts of current, not enough to kill a man, just enough to deaden his mind before sending him back.” He laughed then, a short, mocking huff. “I wouldn’t have had to fake much.” After a particularly long night of shelling, he said he had caught himself stuttering. But Queens Square Hospital in mind, he had simply pressed his lips shut. And when he trembled and tea slopped over the rim of the cup clenched in his hands, he emptied it into the slick beneath the duckboards.

  “Tom,” I said, stooping so that I might meet his down-turned gaze. “Thinking about how to save yourself isn’t a crime. Plenty of the fellows were doing more than just daydreaming about it. Why else would the rules about self-inflicted wounds even exist? Why else would anyone even know about sandbags and powder marks?”

  “Sadie used to say I had the eyes of a hawk,” he said. “I could pick out a mole in a thicket or spy a grouse too far off for anyone else to see.”

  “You’ve always noticed what others don’t.”

  He lifted a shoulder, dismissively. “Even when I was running across no-man’s-land, I could pick out the nose of a rifle in the sandbags or figure out the range of a machine gun in a pillbox. Not at Amiens though. By the time I got to Amiens, I couldn’t make sense of anything.”

  In my mind’s eye, Tom runs through smoke, kicked-up dust, barbed wire, a deafening cacophony of exploding shells. It was the sort of image I had pushed away during the years he was gone. “No one should have to endure what you did, Tom.”

  “Let me tell you something,” he said, folding his arms over his ribs. “At Amiens I couldn’t make out where the bullets were coming from. At first I thought I only had to stay quiet, to pay attention, that, like every other time, what to do would come to me. I waited until I couldn’t wait anymore. Then I climbed out of the trench and hightailed it toward the enemy line. They called the fellows who didn’t shirkers and degenerates, and shot by firing squad. One morning we were made to roll out and fall in at dawn. They sat a kid called Bobby Marshall on a crate in front of us. He was handcuffed to a post behind his back. They pinned a round piece of white paper over his heart. We were made to watch. That’s why I ran.”

  “It’s all over now.” My fingers grazed the sleeve of his coat.

  “The fellow in front of me took a bullet in the head.”

  “You came back.”

  He touched Fergus’s headstone. Then he took my hand and led me home and said nothing more.

  Istand at the window long after Jesse and Tom have disappeared, watching whirlwinds of snow flit from hemlock to oak, then dither a moment before moving on. What can I do to help him regain his old self? When Isabel died, like Tom, I had lost any sense of sure-footedness in the world. Yet my fear was certainly only a sliver of what he had known at the front. And by the time I had completely given up on God, Tom was there beside me—my solace, my antidote to an out-of-kilter world.

  When I went to him at the Windsor Hotel, he had said he could feel Fergus with him, especially on the river. It was the place where our realities differed. Even in death, Fergus had remained close to him, while for me Isabel was gone, a precious memory, a sister who was no longer able to love me as she once had.

  It hits me now that while my own feelings about the river are at least somewhat ambivalent, it is of the utmost importance to him. He once went to the river. He watched. He listened. It fed his sense of awe and wonder and mystery, some notion of order in the world. And now he has spent too much time away from the place he loved most, too much time away from all that kept Fergus close. I know it with a certainty that is like a cold slap. I must take him by the hand, or the scruff of the neck if it comes to that, and help him find what is lost.

  Niagara Falls Review, September 21, 1888

  FERGUS COLE PULLS DAREDEVIL FROM THE WHIRLPOOL

  More than a thousand spectators turned out to witness twenty-year-old Youngstown native Walter Campbell navigate the whirlpool rapids in a small rowboat on Saturday afternoon. Luckily for him, Fergus Cole was in their midst.

  Mr. Campbell set out from the Maid of the Mist landing wearing red trunks and a suit constructed of sixteen pieces of one-inch-thick cork. At the outset he rode the heavy swells, standing upright in the boat like a Venetian gondolier, using his single oar as a rudder. On meeting the first breakers of the rapids, he lost his oar and dropped to his knees, holding fast to the sides of the boat as it pitched wildly in the water. Just opposite Buttrey’s elevator, a vicious wave lifted him high on its crest, capsized his boat, and s
mashed it to pieces. He was swept into the whirlpool where five years earlier Captain Matthew Webb met his untimely death.

  On the shore Mr. Cole was ready with a coil of rope lashed to a pine log. He hurled the makeshift device out over the whirlpool, some estimating the magnificent throw at more than fifty feet. It met the water short of Mr. Campbell, but as Mr. Cole had surely planned, the current whisked it within easy reach. Once landed, Mr. Campbell lay flat on his stomach a minute or two before getting to his feet and swallowing a mouthful of the rye whiskey offered him.

  Asked to comment, Mr. Cole had this to say: “Another couple of seconds and he would’ve been flung to the spot where the water leaving the whirlpool is sucked under the incoming flow. I’ve watched logs hit that spot. I’ve seen them disappear.”

  Mr. Campbell has been offered a thousand dollars for a four-week appearance at the old Wonderland in Buffalo, New York.

  20

  CITY OF TORONTO ARCHIVES, FONDS 1868, ITEM 1 76

  Two days later, ready to act on my plan, Jesse and I lean over the limestone wall and peer into the gorge just downriver from the brink of the falls. The landscape below is otherworldly—a massive clot of white-blue ice extending from shore to shore, frozen mounds of accumulated spray nearly sixty feet in height, sections of cliff face transformed by stalactites of ice as thick as the trunk of any tree. Yet there are children sledding on the hillocks, adults milling about, a path crossing the ice from shore to shore, also shanties with hand-painted signs advertising beef tea and sandwiches, coffee and cake.

  He asks where the river is, and I tell him it is still there, just underneath all the ice. “It’s why this is called the ice bridge.”

  “Let’s go see.”

  “Only if Daddy goes with us,” I say. “Not without Daddy.”

  “Please.” He tugs the sleeve of my coat.

  “Guess what,” I say.

  “What?”

  “On Sunday mornings lots of boys get up early and hurry across the ice. They all want to be the first to get to the other side.”

  “Me too,” he says, his gaze back on the ice bridge.

  “Maybe,” I say. “Guess what else.”

  “What?”

  “When Daddy was little, he would get up really early with Great-grandpa Fergus and be the first across.”

  “I go with Daddy.”

  Jesse talks nonstop about the ice bridge for three days, about being the first across. Then at breakfast Thursday morning Tom finally says, “We’ll see,” rather than “When you’re older” or “Maybe next year,” and Jesse throws his arms around Tom’s neck as though he has already agreed. And it seems that Jesse knows better than I, because the next thing out of Tom’s mouth is “We’ll go on Sunday.”

  Eventually Jesse untangles himself and Tom returns to stoking the fire.

  “Where does all that ice come from, anyway?” I ask, wanting Tom to go on, as he once would have, as though there is nothing quite so fascinating in all the world as the river.

  “Lake Erie,” he says.

  “We didn’t get much of a bridge last year.”

  “If it stays below freezing more than six weeks, the ice is too thick and stays put until spring.”

  “What’s best, thickness-wise?”

  “Ten inches or so,” he says and goes back to nudging the logs.

  “Then what?” I get up from the table, where I have been finishing buttonholes, and stand facing him with my back to the stove.

  “Why so interested?”

  “Because I got used to you telling me about the river and now I miss it.”

  He smiles at me then, his lopsided smile. “All right,” he says. “If it warms up and the wind is strong, the ice’ll get ripped off the shore and pushed out into the lake. In the upper river, blocks of it are mashed into a soup of ice and slush. That’s what goes over the brink and gets slammed into the ice that the eddies have collected on either side of the gorge. Some of it sticks, and pretty soon you’ve got a solid bridge of ice linking Canada and the U.S.”

  While he speaks, the stove’s heat radiates through to my bones. I tell myself I am putting too much weight on a single outing. I warn myself to stop. But it does not matter a bit. I will dust and sew and scrub the knees of trousers, and hum while I work, ticking off the hours until Sunday.

  Sunday morning is bitterly cold. I can hear it in the rattling windows and feel it in the kitchen not yet warmed by the stove. Jesse, Tom, and I eat oatmeal, because it will stick to our ribs, and sip hot cocoa because it is a special day.

  At the falls the trees and lampposts and limestone wall are shrouded in a layer of frozen mist. Branches bend under the weight. Brittle ice snaps and clatters to the ground. In biting cold and gusting wind, mist has turned to sleet. It is not at all the scene I had imagined for Tom’s return to the river. Still, he stops in his tracks. He listens. He swallows. His gaze sweeps the gorge, lingers on the spot several hundred feet downriver where the Niagara emerges from beneath the ice bridge.

  We make our way down the steep road leading to the wooden landing used for the Maid of the Mist steamboats in the summertime. Jesse is between Tom and me, tugging our arms, leading the charge.

  “I hear the new conduit’s still running full steam,” Tom says, looking toward the powerhouse at the foot of the falls. It continues to be fed by the conduit Beck had once called temporary.

  “It’s true,” I say. “Father says no one will be telling the powerhouses to cut off the factories that have switched from munitions to silverware and ladies’ shoes. There’s pent-up demand.”

  He shakes his head at the sham of it, and I take it as a good sign, Tom irked on the river’s behalf.

  The path across the ice bridge is empty but well-trodden and easy for us to follow as it snakes its way around hillocks and between fissures. Jesse plods forward, doggedly, and Tom matches his pace. I walk a step or two behind, close enough to listen, far away enough to make it seem they are out on their own, father and son. Tom points to the Bridal Veil Falls wedged between the Horseshoe and American falls. “There’s a cave behind the water,” he says to Jesse. “I’ll show you in the spring.” Jesse smiles up at Tom.

  Midway across the ice, I glance back, toward the Canadian shore. There are no challengers, only a lone couple taking in the view from the Maid of the Mist landing, not yet out on the ice, and a group of boys with a sled making their way down the bank.

  As Jesse climbs up onto the boat landing on the American side, Tom and I clap and yell, “Hooray.” I slip my hand into Tom’s pocket and lace my gloved fingers with his. I put my lips almost against his ear. “Someday he’ll bring his own son.”

  We pick our way back, not on the path but by way of a route chosen by Jesse while Tom knelt beside him, pointing out the fissures too wide to be traversed. They scale the handful of hillocks we come to and slide down the opposite sides on their seats. I do not join in; my warmest coat is also my best. And then there is the child I am carrying to think of as well. Never mind though. I am happy just to watch.

  Eventually Tom whisks Jesse back to the main path and begins to hurry him along. The sleet, driven nearly horizontal by the wind now, feels like pins and needles on my skin, and I say, “I could use a cup of beef tea.” But the morning crowd, just beginning to wend its way over the ice, is smaller than usual, and it seems the shanty keepers have had the good sense to stay put in their cozy beds. When we finally come to a shanty with a thin line of blue smoke seeping from the stovepipe stuck through its roof, I hesitate. But Tom only says, “This wind,” and gathers Jesse into his arms and picks up the pace.

  I want to dig my heels in. Yes, money is tight, but not so tight that we cannot afford a celebratory cup of tea on a freezing day. Still, I want the day to be exactly right, and to insist on tea when Tom is already striding away, his hand firmly tugging my arm, can only lead to one of us feeling put out.

  By the time we reach the Canadian shore, I am out of breath from the pace but relieved to
be somewhat sheltered from the wind. Tom sets Jesse on the landing and looks over his shoulder to the ice. And then I hear what Tom already has: a faint rumble growing louder. Then there is a loud bang, almost like the shot of a gun. “Stay put,” he says, with such forcefulness that I reach for Jesse and pull him against my coat. “Get off the ice,” he yells, leaping over a newly formed fissure between the landing and the ice bridge.

  I watch as I might a play, captivated, but at the same time keenly aware that the drama before me is not the product of actors and sets. The ice bridge has broken free from the moorings anchoring it to shore and become a slow-moving mass. “Let go,” Jesse says. I loosen my grip, but as he darts toward the ice, I yank him back by the collar of his coat.

  The fissure between the landing and the bridge has grown to a foot-wide gap of water and slush. Tom is near the center of the mass gesturing toward the Canadian shore, his voice lost in the wind. My gaze flits to the wide, dark channel of water formed at the opposite bank, and I see what he already knows.

  As men, women, and children flee, he stoops to help a woman kneeling on the ice, pounding her fists. He unstraps her ice creepers, which had become twisted sideways on her boots, hauls her up by the arm, and all but drags her ungainly body toward the shore. Alarms sound on each side of the river, and onlookers begin to gather at the rim of the gorge. Men arrive with coils of rope and spread out along the banks. The landing becomes crowded with those who have escaped the ice, also with gawkers from above. I am ruthless in keeping the position Jesse and I hold.