The Day the Falls Stood Still
Page 21
By the time Tom and the woman reach the gap between the floating ice and the landing, it is six feet in width. I know that she will not make the leap, also that he will not leave her on the ice. I imagine myself on the mass, giving the woman a mighty shove. Then in one fell swoop he gathers her in his arms and hurtles the gap for the both of them.
Fear gives way to pride, and I remember the trolley ride in the gorge, the way we all deferred to him. But then, after glancing over his shoulder toward Jesse and me, he again jumps the gap and is back on the floating ice.
Leaping fissures and rounding hillocks, he races toward a young couple and two teenage boys, the lone group still out on the ice. As he makes his way toward them, a massive chunk of ice breaks off the tail end and the ice floe picks up speed.
“It’s got to be moving at least five miles an hour,” says a voice from behind.
“More like ten.”
They agree on one point: The floe is heading toward the Whirlpool Rapids, where it will be smashed to smithereens.
Once Tom reaches the group, he points toward the Canadian shore, but the group heads off in the opposite direction with the man leading the way. Tom follows a few steps and then grabs the man by the shoulder. The man pushes his hand away, shakes his head no. As Tom takes a single step backward, in our direction, one of the boys, the shorter one, does the same. The taller boy looks from Tom to the man, trying to decide. When the woman takes the man’s hand, the boy sides with the couple and the three rush off. From the landing, it is obvious they have made a poor choice. The channel on the American side is twenty feet wide. Yet I hardly care. Tom is heading for the Canadian shore.
He races a step or two ahead of the shorter boy, the one who chose to go with him, and slows to look over his shoulder only when the ice splits in two. The new fissure runs parallel to the shores and puts to an end any hope of the threesome undoing their mistake. Tom crosses the ice on a diagonal, heading toward the footing of the Upper Steel Arch Bridge, where the gap is at its narrowest, nine or ten feet.
New fissures are forming at an alarming rate. Smaller cakes of ice break away and pick up speed in the current. The threesome’s cake is no more than ten paces across, as it passes under the bridge and disappears from view.
Tom turns often now, his pace slower as he urges the boy to jump from one cake to the next. The bridge looms near, and my gaze is fixed on Tom, willing him not to miss his chance. His leap is graceful and ample, and I can see from the beginning that he will safely reach the bank. But even as the crowd cheers his success, the boy stops in his tracks, on the far side of the channel.
In my arms, Jesse has not buried his face against my shoulder as might be expected. Rather he watches, cheering on Tom with the crowd, yelling “Jump” to the boy as though he would attempt the feat himself.
“Who’s that fellow, anyway?” Again, it is the voice from behind.
“Don’t know.”
“I used to see him on the river. I think he fished the floaters out a while back.”
If the boy leaps, Tom might follow him into the channel. If he does not, Tom might attempt a return to the ice. I want Tom to look our way and be reminded of all he has to lose. But no, his gaze is locked on the boy.
Tom’s arms fly up in front, palms facing the boy. Stay put.
A moment later he is snatching a coiled rope from one of the men on the bank and then running along the shoreline, scrambling over the rocky fragments of the talus slope, avoiding boulders too large to leap, keeping pace with the ice cake floating the boy down the river. When the cake is swung from the main current toward shore by an eddy, I know Tom was as sure of the position of the eddy as I am of the position of the maple tree in Mrs. Andrews’s backyard. He tosses the rope, which the boy catches and ties around his waist. He leaps into the river, and Tom pulls him to shore and up onto the bank. He strips the boy of his coat and wraps him in his own.
The cheers of the crowd lining the rim, crammed onto the landing, dotting the riverbanks reverberate in the gorge. I stand, mute, caught somewhere between awe and an as yet unidentified emotion, which rises like bile in my throat. How could Tom be so reckless? How could he have forgotten Jesse and me, waiting on pins and needles for three years? How could he not think of us, watching, dreading that his cake of ice might overturn?
“Daddy,” Jesse says, wriggling from my arms to the landing.
“Stop.”
He squeezes between the throng of legs, calling out, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” as he goes. I grab the sleeve of his coat and stay on his heels as the crowd parts. Almost everyone is headed in the opposite direction, likely hoping to be out of the gorge in time to catch a glimpse of the threesome farther downriver, floating their way to certain death.
Jesse keeps up his “Daddy, Daddy” chant as we pick our way along the riverbank, and soon men are tipping their caps. “He’s your husband? Quite a daredevil you got yourself.” Women are smiling. “Bet you’re awfully proud.” A man with a notepad and a pencil says, “Mind if I ask a few questions?” Though I have not yet answered, he falls in line with Jesse and me. “His name, for instance?”
The man keeps pace with us with us, his pencil poised. “Tom Cole,” I say.
“Local fellow?”
“Yes.”
“Born and raised here?”
“Yes.”
“Canadian side?”
“Yes.”
He taps his temple with the end of this pencil. “Any relation to Fergus Cole?”
“Grandson.”
“Beauty,” he says, shaking his head. “Occupation?”
“He only just got back from overseas.”
He lets out a soft whistle. “A real hero, then.”
When we meet Tom, he scoops up Jesse and hugs the both of us at the same time, and I cling to him and he to me, until it is impossible to think he had forgotten us on the riverbank and my anger seems irrational. Eventually a man holds out Tom’s returned coat, and Tom lets go of me and sets Jesse on the ground.
The man with the notepad and pencil introduces himself as Cecil Randal from the Evening Review and asks Tom for his version of the events. In the story he tells, there is no mention that the woman was in his arms when he leapt the gap, or of the way the boy slowed him down. As for the man who led the others astray, Tom just says, “It was hard to tell what was right out there on the ice.” I knew from the start Tom would not boast, but it strikes me now that he is entirely oblivious to the fact he has earned the right. I find myself leaning closer, my hand seeking his.
“Any guess as to why the bridge broke up?” Mr. Randal asks. “It’s always been safe until the spring thaw.”
“It’s the wind,” Tom says. “It’s blowing hard from the west, pushing the water to the end of the lake where the river is.”
“Like tea pooling at the side of a cup when you blow?”
“Pretty much,” Tom says, putting an arm around me.
“Too much water in the river, then?”
“There wasn’t space enough for all of it under the bridge. The water level went up and snapped the bridge from the banks.” Tom’s free hand moves to Jesse’s shoulder.
“We’ve had wind like this before?”
“The ice keeping the bridge in place couldn’t have been as solid as it usually is. Maybe it’s the river bobbing up or down every time one of the power companies closes or opens an intake gate.”
“You’re saying, with the power companies, the bridge isn’t safe anymore?” I bite my lip. It is a question that could end up with Tom quoted in the newspaper, and then trouble for the power companies.
“It’s just a guess,” Tom says. “I haven’t been out on the ice much for a while.”
Mr. Randal scribbles, indecipherably, then looks up from his notepad. “Any chance the others made it to shore?”
Tom looks away.
Mr. Randal closes his notepad. “Off the record, what are the odds?”
“I’d like to get my family home. W
e’re cold and tired and wet.”
River Road is swarming with spectators. Some point at Tom. Some stare, not quite sure. Some call out: “You’re the one who was on the ice.”
“Never seen anybody jump like that.”
“Hope that kid appreciates what you done for him.”
“Heard he promised you a thousand bucks.”
There are more somberly spoken words, too. Workmen dropped ropes to the threesome from the Lower Steel Arch Bridge. The boy managed to grab hold of one but was dangling forty feet above the river when his strength gave out. The man caught a makeshift line made from three coils of insulated telephone wire, but it came apart as he was tying it around his wife’s waist. They were on their knees, praying in each other’s arms, some said, when their bit of ice overturned.
Just past the Upper Steel Arch Bridge we leave River Road, preferring to walk home on less traveled streets. When Jesse is out of earshot up ahead, I ask the question I have been unable to shake: “What if you didn’t clear the channel?”
“If I wasn’t going to make it, I wouldn’t have jumped.”
“And then what?”
“I’d have waited for the eddy, the one that pushed the boy toward the shore.”
“You were sure?” My pace slows, and Tom follows suit. “I was,” he says.
“But the river’s unpredictable. You’ve said so yourself.”
“Not today. I knew something was up, even when the three of us were still out on the bridge.”
This much I can swallow. I was out of breath from keeping up by the time we reached the shore. He felt a tremor, heard a rumbling, noticed the sleet being driven horizontal in the wind. It is not a stretch to think he knew the ice bridge would come unhinged. “The wind?” I say.
“There was more to it than that.”
A few steps farther, I say, “Go on.”
“I could see what had to be done. That’s all.”
“For example …” I halt a moment. “It’s like pulling teeth with you.”
He takes my upper arm, coaxes me along. “I knew how much time I had. I could feel it when the ice would split and knew where to be standing when it did. I knew where the eddies were. I saw the men with the rope.”
Maybe he did know where the eddies were. Quite possibly the positions of the men with the ropes did register in his mind. Still, predicting when a cake of ice would split and knowing where to be standing when it did? It is difficult, even impossible, to accept. I had schemed to get him to the river. I had schemed with his best interests at heart. I had thought that with finding the river a sort of faith would come to Tom, a lessening of fear, but I am unprepared for this notion of invincibility.
When he puts his arm around my waist and pulls me close, I know he has read my thoughts. “I can’t explain it,” he says.
As we walk the falling snow softens from twinkling shards to downy flakes the size of a dime. Eventually we catch up with Jesse, who has stopped to tilt his face upward, toward the falling snow. Tom sweeps him up and sets him on his shoulders. But Jesse wants down. He wants to pretend we are on the ice. He leaps cracks and fissures, rescues Tom from a snowbank that is a bit of ice-choked river as far as he is concerned. Only then does he want Tom’s shoulders, the glory due a hero, the dizzying heights of being held aloft.
Once Tom is off galloping with Jesse bouncing on his shoulders and hooting with delight, happiness wells inside of me like the spreading warmth of a hot drink. Despite the trials of the day, my scheme seems to have been a success. I catch up with Tom and elbow him in the ribs, hard. With Jesse still balanced on his shoulders, Tom knocks me into the piled snow at the side of the road. I stay put a moment, until he extends a hand. Then I throw a handful of snow in his face and say, “I wanted to push that woman with the ice creepers into the gap.”
He laughs, and I laugh with him, and then he pulls me up and we walk home.
Iwake in the nighttime and tell myself that it was only a dream, that no harm will come to Jesse. His bravado on the way home from the river was only a game. Eyes wide open, I look to the bureau and see the familiar outline of my comb, brush, and mirror. So how is it that the image from my dream, the one I want to leave behind, stays firmly put?
On a pristinely white sheet in a pool of dark blood, newborn Jesse lies between my naked legs. My thighs are smeared with afterbirth, and my pubic hair is wet. My arms have lost function, and I cannot lift the section of amnion covering his face. With each breath, he sucks the caul into his mouth, forming a taut, membranous basin over his parted lips. With each breath, the basin becomes more shallow and his skin more gray.
His eyes are open. Pleading.
21
Ice bridge
The following day the Evening Review ran a detailed account of the tragedy and the rescue, also a shorter article eulogizing the dead and an editorial saying the ice bridge should be made off limits, all on the front page. There was nothing about intake gates and weakened moorings, nothing implying that the power companies were at fault, and it was a relief. Mrs. Coulson was still after me to send Tom along to Mr. Coulson, and to have lost the chance of his assistance before I had even told Tom would have been a bitter pill. When I flipped to page two,I saw a fourth piece, by Cecil Randel:
Evening Review
NIAGARA’S OWN RIVERMAN
Tom Cole knows the Niagara River and Gorge like most folks know the backs of their hands. He can point out the exact locations of eddies and undercurrents and standing waves, but then he is the grandson of the late Fergus Cole, and his extraordinary knowledge of the river hardly comes as a surprise.
Fergus Cole arrived in Niagara Falls on March 30, 1848, the day the falls stood still. He made the first of his rescues that same day, and then went on to save the four workmen left dangling from Ellet’s bridge, Walter Campbell when his boat splintered to bits in the whirlpool, and at least a dozen others—naïve tourists, careless fishermen, heedless boys. He predicted the fall of Table Rock, the demise of Captain Matthew Webb, and a handful of rockslides in the Niagara Gorge.
And now we have his grandson as our riverman. As a boy he was taught how to rescue dogs and waterfowl, how to clear a body from the river, how to pin down the exact location where one would turn up. He inherited his grandfather’s ability to say where the fish were biting on any given day, also his knack for reading the river with an eerie accuracy. They say Tom Cole wakes in the morning knowing whether he will find a body in the river that day. They say he can forecast the weather just by listening to the roar of the falls and that he predicted a rockslide that nearly struck a trolley in the gorge. Yesterday he knew before anyone the ice bridge was breaking up, and then cleared the ice and masterfully rescued a boy when it seemed to everyone else the two of them were doomed.
Like his grandfather before him Tom Cole has a gift, and the citizens of Niagara Falls should heed what he says.
When he finished the article, Tom said, “A bit of an overstatement.”
“I don’t think so.” I was bursting with pride. Oh, I would have preferred that the reference to the bodies be left out. Though I had seen firsthand the care he took with Isabel and knew better than anyone the nobility in the work, I was well aware of the lifted eyebrows the mention of the task usually aroused.
“I can’t say where the fish are biting.”
“Where on earth did Mr. Randal dig it all up?” I asked.
“I guess I’ve said quite a bit over the years at the Windsor. A couple of fellows there were always pestering me about stuff they’d heard.”
Ever since “Niagara’s Own Riverman,” people approach Tom on the street, wanting to know whether it will rain a week from Sunday. They are planning a family picnic and thought it best to run it by him first. Men with fishing tackle stop if he is in the yard and want an opinion on their latest lure. A week ago I answered the telephone to find a frantic woman on the other end of the line. “He slipped,” she said, between sobs. “My baby slipped out of my arms.”
“He was crying and crying,” the woman said. “He wouldn’t stop.”
Tom had told me of another infant, another mother too tired, too overwhelmed, too desperate to resist the lure of the falls. I covered the mouthpiece and called for Tom.
“I only meant to loosen the blanket,” the woman said, her final words before the line went dead.
“A baby,” I said to Tom. “She said he slipped out of her arms.”
“I’ll go.” He reached for the packsack he kept by the back door.
Four months since the ice bridge, four months since Tom’s nighttime terrors began to abate, a full three weeks since he last called out in his sleep, and still, I wake, eyes fluttering open, consciousness creeping in, panic rising as I take stock. I turn quickly, but he is there, on his side, his face toward me, unlined, his brow smooth like a child’s. I search out the rise and fall of his chest, a practice once reserved for Jesse. Draped linen becomes taut and then slack as breath is exhaled. My anxiety is misplaced, even ludicrous. He is merely sleeping peacefully, as should any man who spent the day before splitting wood and tilling the earth for a vegetable patch. I am still not used to it, to his easy sleep.
His eyes open and I am caught watching and he smiles. He says, “I was dreaming about you,” and pulls me to him, and I feel the hardness between his legs. His hands are innocent just now, one on the small of my back, atop my nightdress—flannel—and the other, propping his head. Still, desire comes. His hand moves from my back to my front, slides upward, over my ribs.