The Day the Falls Stood Still

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  Inside the powerhouse a crowd of men in bowlers and overcoats has gathered around a single enormous drum. There is no rope guarding it, yet the men maintain a gap of several feet between themselves and the gleaming generator, as though it were a shrine of sorts. I survey the crowd and find Leslie Scott. With my tendency to ask about him and to perk up my ears at the mention of his name, Tom has accused me of a schoolgirl crush. He chuckles as he says it, knowing full well I am only trying to glean what I can about Kit. She is not among the men at the powerhouse, which is hardly a surprise given it is four o’clock in the afternoon, not yet closing time for the businesses on Erie Avenue. The other wives, it seems, have mostly opted to stay home and make their entrances at the Clifton House, but I am glad I have come. There is excitement in the air, and Tom is holding my arm, and men nod in our direction, tentatively, as though their greetings might not be returned. Eventually one of the younger fellows comes over and introduces himself. “I’m Gerald Wolfrey,” he says, “and everyone knows you’re Tom Cole.” A colleague of Mr. Wolfrey wanders over and joins our small circle, then another and another. I had not expected it, but even the administrators and engineers charged with overseeing the workers digging the forebay and canal are deferential to my riverman.

  It is easy to pick out Sir Adam Beck, with his high starched collar, regal profile, and tired eyes. Surely it has been a grueling few months. True, his dream is finally more than blueprints and excavated dirt, but his wife died several months ago, and the mudslinging is at an all-time high. The cost overruns are staggering, and his pat answers—conditions that could not have been foreseen, results that could not have been anticipated, wartime inflation, and shortages of men—no longer seem to suffice. His daughter is at his side, looking defiant and bored, as though she had accompanied her father against her will. I cannot yet see what she has on underneath, but my coat is not out of place alongside hers. Premier Drury’s suit is finely tailored, yet he looks every bit the farmer that he is, with his hair disheveled and his tie askew. Though he has been feuding with Beck in the newspapers, here they seem on friendly enough terms. I suppose it is only a premier’s job to scold when the books have been so sloppily kept and budgets so easily ignored.

  Beck moves to the podium, clears his throat, waits for the crowd to hush. Then he begins:

  Dona naturae pro populo sunt. The gifts of nature are for the people.

  These are the words I spoke to Premier Whitney back in 1905, the very words with which the Hydro-Electric Power Commission was born, the very words with which the triumph of public power over private greed began. No longer would private industry be allowed to gouge manufacturers and citizens alike when a publicly owned company could provide cheaper electricity more efficiently. And surely those words, spoken to Premier Whitney in 1905, are as fitting as ever when considering the Queenston-Chippawa power project. At long last the bounty of Niagara Falls truly belongs to the people.

  He goes on to thank the citizens of Ontario for having had the foresight to vote for the hydroelectric generating station five years ago. He says they have rid themselves of coal embargos and blackouts, and will pay less for electricity than anyone else in the world. With their source of abundant, cheap power, they will brighten their homes and places of work, and lighten the burden of farm and household chores, and more cost-efficiently run the factories and thus ensure more jobs and lower prices, placing more goods than ever before within reach of the common man. He thanks the administrators and the laborers, but most particularly he thanks the engineers, whom he says designed the most efficient power plant yet built.

  While the others in the room applaud, Tom’s hands remain at his sides. I clap, tentatively, and wonder whether anyone else has noticed Sir Adam Beck’s adeptness at recognizing others while, at the same time, patting himself on the back. And when Premier Drury speaks, he is just as shrewd. Though the room is filled with businessmen, his words focus on the contributions of the laborers, the men who elected his party. He had correctly guessed there would be reporters scribbling. He had expected the flashes of the newspaper cameras in the crowd.

  At the close of his speech, he flicks a switch, and a sign behind him reading the largest hydro-electric plant in the world lights up. The crowd applauds on cue, and I strain to pick out a sudden mechanical whir. But the room was loud with conversation when we arrived and is louder now with whoops and applause. I scrutinize the generator, looking for some hint of activity, but nothing has changed. Tom leans toward me and says into my ear, “It’s been on since last Wednesday.”

  But the crowd is filing from the room, seemingly satisfied. “You’re sure?”

  “The river dropped a half foot.”

  The Clifton House ballroom is as I remember, with polished hardwood, Corinthian columns, giant ferns, and tasseled chandeliers, yet it seems grander, too, maybe because I am no longer used to opulence. The first strains of a fox-trot fill the room, confirming the thought I had just begun to think: I do not belong at the Clifton House, not anymore. The only steps I know are from before the war, learned at Loretto, practiced in the cozy little clubroom of the Gamma Kappa fraternity, one hand on Kit’s shoulder, the other on her waist. Fortunately the next song is an older one-step, and Tom’s hand is reassuring on my arm.

  As we make our way around the ballroom, the odd flask is pulled from a pocket, tipped against the rim of a half-full glass. It seems a badge of honor, so grandly is the liquor offered, so openly is it poured. The Ontario Temperance Act has surely failed in the eyes of the legislators, unless, as some suggest, the laws are deliberately lax, meant only to shush the debate for a while. Whatever the case, just now I would like nothing more than a splash of rye whiskey in my ginger ale.

  The women in the ballroom are glittering in beads and sequins, diamonds and pearls. I point out my handiwork to Tom, and he says it is the best in the room. Only Marion Beck’s dress is in the same league, and she is hiding it behind her crossly folded arms.

  More men recognize Tom and lift their flasks in offering. He holds out his tumbler, then points to mine and I am poured a bit of rye. They want to hear about the ice bridge, and he tells the story as I have heard it told before, with modesty, as though anyone in the room would have done exactly as he did. And then they want to hear about Fergus and the workers knocked from Ellet’s bridge and the fellows rescued from the riverbed the day the falls stood still. He is laughing and at ease, and they offer their flasks again. Their wives compliment my dress and ask where I got it. When I tell them I made it myself, several take down my details and tuck the scraps of paper into their tiny drawstring bags. Eventually Mrs. Harriman finds me in the crowd and asks me to call her by her first name and says, “You really are a marvel,” and looks longingly at my frock. Mrs. Harriman, or rather Mabel, looks longingly at Tom as well. Mrs. Coulson only waves from across the room and then later, as she passes by, points to my dress, smirks, and says, “Best of the lot.”

  I am standing among a small gathering of women, keeping an eye out for Kit, when a woman called Mrs. Jenkins turns to me and says, “How did you and Tom meet?”

  “I was on my way home from Loretto, on the electric trolley. I had a trunk with me and he offered to help.”

  “I’m a Loretto girl, too,” she says, patting my arm now that we have been identified as kin of sorts. “Class of 1906.” She waits, ear cocked, for me to say my class.

  “I left in 1915.” Then, before I am cornered into confessing that I did not graduate, I say, “I lived at Glenview, and my sister and I spent half the summer reading on the veranda, but really waiting for Tom to pass by on River Road.”

  “And it seems he did,” says another woman, Mrs. Henderson, clasping tiny, lily-white hands together in feigned delight.

  “He came by with a pike one day, and then he kept it up, coming every day, always with a fish.”

  “Just imagine,” Mrs. Henderson says.

  The rosy picture I have painted does not include Isabel convalescing on th
e veranda, half-starved, pregnant, and unwed. I wonder for a moment at my seeming desire to fit in.

  I check over my shoulder for Tom, and there he is, looking in my direction, smiling his lopsided smile, raising his glass to me. I lift my own in return. And then I feel the light touch of a hand on my forearm, and I turn to see Kit. She stands silent, breezily elegant with her simple gray silk tunic and hastily pinned up flaxen locks. I cannot help but notice that her fingernails, while no longer chewed to the quick, are clipped as short as a man’s.

  “I was hoping you’d be here,” I say.

  “Leslie told me your husband was on the guest list.”

  We both laugh, nervously, and then we step away from the other women. “When I’m on Erie Avenue, I’m always looking into your shops.”

  “I saw you once,” she says.

  “I’ve wanted to go in and tell you I was sorry about Edward. I’ve promised myself a hundred times I’d call you the next day, but I never worked up the nerve.”

  She hugs her arms around her waist, as though she were cold.

  “That time in Queen Victoria Park with the Niagara Falls Citizens Band,” I say. “I’d remember that and it’d seem hopeless, speaking to you.”

  “I told myself Edward wouldn’t have enlisted if you hadn’t broken off with him. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t true. I wasn’t in my right head.”

  “If I’d been thinking straight I wouldn’t have gone to Tom without explaining myself to Edward first.” Though her gaze is as intense as always, I do not shy away. “It just didn’t register that I had no business burying a choker he’d given me.”

  We stand in awkward silence a moment or two, until she finally says, “I still have the note you sent after he was killed. It took me ages to open it, but when I did, I could see you knew how I felt. You’d spelled out my bewilderment; you know firsthand about someone becoming nothing at all. You understand.”

  “I don’t understand, not really,” I say.

  “But that’s exactly it. You didn’t say he’d gone to a better place or died gloriously. You didn’t give me some pat answer.” Her gaze falls to the floor, and her shoulders creep up, her palms opening toward the ceiling. “It was wrong of me to miss Isabel’s burial. I’ve been to her grave a dozen times, not that it makes up for anything.”

  “Did you leave irises?”

  “No,” she says, a rare flash of confusion coming to her face. “Someone left irises.”

  She shrugs, and I ask about Edward. “Is he buried somewhere?”

  “He’s outside of Mons. Someday I’ll go.” She shakes her head. “But enough of that sort of talk. Just look at your frock. It’s stunning. It really is, but then everyone says you’re the best dressmaker in town.”

  I think better than to say that any credit should be shared with Mother, that she beaded the overskirt, for Isabel, for her wedding gown. “That shade of gray is lovely on you.”

  She gathers a bit of skirt in her hand. “I’m sure everyone here is deathly tired of it. You could make me a new one?”

  “We could catch up properly.”

  “Let’s have supper, with my Leslie and your Tom, the boys, too.”

  Our dining room is without a table and in our kitchen we sit on benches Tom rigged up, not that the old Kit would mind in the least. She was one of the few at Loretto who had not bothered with trinkets—a pair of bookends, a framed painting—to mark her room as her own. “We barely have a stick of furniture,” I say.

  “Throw a picnic blanket on the floor or come to our place first. That’ll put you at ease. Furniture store or not, I’m not much for decorating.”

  We linger, though the waiters are ushering everyone to their tables. Eventually Leslie and Tom come, and there are handshakes all around, and Leslie says he knows a hundred wonderful stories about me, and Tom says, “I know at least as many about Kit.” Then the two of us are wedged apart and escorted to our seats.

  The guests are assigned to tables of eight for dinner, and I am alarmed to find my place card between Premier Drury’s and Tom’s. “I won’t be able to swallow a bite,” I say to Tom.

  “He was a farmer a lot longer than he’s been the premier.”

  As it turns out, Premier Drury is keenly interested in the grievances of the town’s workers. And because I live in Silvertown, where the men walk to International Silver each morning, or travel by trolley to T. G. Bright, Norton, and Cyanamid, I often hear over the clothesline just how fed up the labor force is. Whether it is silver, wine, abrasives, fertilizer, or hydroelectricity, the workers want better wages and an eight-hour day. I tell him, too, that there is a hopelessness among the men that was not there a year or two ago, before the high unemployment made it so easy to replace anyone who suggested the workers organize. I do not suppose for a minute I have told him something he has not heard a hundred times before. But he is attentive and kind enough to say he is glad to find himself beside a sympathetic ear.

  The Coulsons are at our table as well, Mrs. Coulson ignoring me, Mr. Coulson monopolizing Tom, so I am surprised, on my return from the powder room, to find Premier Drury in my seat, his arm draped over Tom’s shoulder. Then I see the camera pointed at the two of them. A split second after the flash, Tom’s eyes are on the camera and he is pulling out from under Premier Drury’s arm. But it is too late.

  The picture, which appears on the front page of the Evening Review and page three of Toronto’s Globe, shows Tom and the premier, midlaugh, glasses raised. The headline in the Evening Review reads riverman celebrates the opening of the queenston powerhouse with premier drury. The Globe headline is innocuous enough: premier drury toasts queenston powerhouse. But the body of the article is not: “In his opening remarks Premier Drury praised the contributions of the laborers at great length. Niagara riverman Thomas Cole (of ice bridge tragedy fame) was among the workers enjoying the evening’s festivities.”

  Tom thwacks the Evening Review with the back sides of his fingers. “Drury planned that photo. He thinks I’ve got clout with the workingman.”

  “It’ll blow over.”

  “He’s all for siphoning off half the river, and it looks like I am, too.”

  “I don’t know what to say. I know that it matters. I know that it matters a whole lot to you.” As far as he is concerned, it is all there in black and white; Tom Cole is a hypocrite.

  27

  Scow rescue

  Francis is barking like a seal. It is what everyone says about the cough that accompanies croup, and now that I have heard it, the description seems exactly right. My heart is pounding, and I am pulling up his undershirt again and saying to Tom, “His lips don’t look blue.” Same as a moment ago, Francis’s midriff is smooth, without the tugged-in valleys between the ribs that come with strangled breath. Still, I recall a hole cut through a girl’s throat into her windpipe and a length of hollow wood jammed into the opening. It is only something I overheard as a child, a memory belonging to someone else. Yet I can imagine the low whistle of breath sucked through a tube.

  “Maybe you should sing,” Tom says. His voice is steady, barely above a whisper, soothing. Without saying so, he has told me that I must calm myself, that Francis, who is wild-eyed in my arms, needs me to be calm. It is a difference between Tom and me. He does not panic. He needs me to calm down, and he accomplishes it by giving me something to do.

  I sit down at the kitchen table with Francis on my lap and begin to hum a nameless tune, which is easily drowned out by the barks. Tom places a basin of hot water on the table, and I put my face into the steam to see that it will not scald.

  “It’s like the mist at the falls,” I say to Francis. He continues to bark and wail, and pulls back from the steam.

  “I’m going to make a tent for you and Mommy,” Tom says.

  He drapes a tablecloth over Francis and me and the basin. A few minutes later the barking stops.

  “Night air is supposed to help, too,” I say, pushing the tent aside.

  After Tom c
hecks on Jesse, still soundly sleeping, we sit on the back stoop with Francis curled up in my arms, though he is heavy at three and a half. Tom’s arm is around me, and the three of us are snug, wrapped in wool. The night is warm for March; still, the air has a nip to it that is surely good for the croup. Francis relaxes against me and drifts off, mumbling about sleeping in a tent.

  When I notice Tom’s gaze on the stars, I lift my chin. The night is clear, and the hour is well past when all but the most hardened night owls turn off their electric lights. The stars shine rather than twinkle. Bold, brazen, true.

  How did I ever manage without Tom? Forget that he spends hours with his boys, more so than any man I know. Forget that he puts up with my parents, has even charmed them a little, that the last time they came to May Avenue for the weekend, Mother went as far as to say Jesse was becoming quite the gentleman, that he had a good role model in Tom. Forget the wages he brings home every week. Forget that with his aptitude for fixing what is broken, our house has become a refuge for cast-off lamps and broken piano stools and chairs missing their seats, each mended and polished and given its own special charm. Forget, too, our quiet tête-à-têtes, our whispered endearments, our lovemaking. How did I manage without a helpmate whose happiness is so intrinsically aligned with my own? Tonight there was great comfort in his gaze lifting to meet mine when the barking began, in knowing his fear and later his relief matched my own. Yes, sorrow, misfortune, or worry split in two is more easily borne. I say all of this aloud to Tom as we look up at the stars.