The Day the Falls Stood Still

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  Niagara Falls Review, February 16, 1906

  ICE BRIDGE READY FOR ADVENTURERS

  Adventurers from far and wide are expected to descend on Niagara Falls this weekend. Last week’s weather proved just right for the formation of the ice bridge that townsfolk and excursionists anticipate all season. Expect coasting on the ice mound at Prospect Point, sleigh rides, and the usual shanties selling light fare, liquor, photographs, and curiosities.

  Once again a path between the Canadian and American shores has been laid out, carefully avoiding hidden or impassable fissures and unstable portions of the bridge. For the first time in a half century the task of selecting the route fell to other than Fergus Cole. “I’ll turn eighty soon enough, and Tom is more than ready for the job,” said Mr. Cole, referring to his thirteen-year-old grandson. Fergus Cole went on to explain that his grandson had risen early Tuesday morning and announced the bridge had been frozen through overnight. “I listened hard, trying to hear the changed growl of the river for myself,” the more senior Mr. Cole said. “No use in it, though, not with these old ears. It was time.”

  The shore-to-shore race for boys fourteen years and younger is scheduled for noon sharp on Sunday at the Maid of the Mist landing. Local favorites include Jack Gowland, Charles Standing, and William Hobson, along with last year’s champion, the aforementioned Tom Cole.

  28

  At the market I moved a half dozen lemons from my shopping basket back into the crate. The day was sweltering and I was parched, and a glass of lemonade would have been just the thing once I reached home, but the lemons were not on sale and the price of sugar was still high at a dollar for ten pounds. It occurred to me I had become adept at scrimping, at planning meals around the cheapest cuts of meat, at saying no to a candy stick when the boys accompanied me to town.

  I began the trudge home, wondering about Mrs. Reynolds, whether she had stopped by the house to pay for a gown as she had promised she would more than two weeks ago. Then my mind went to the money jar, empty in the cupboard, and I was not sure there was enough left in my change purse to pay for the block of ice we would need when the ice cart made the rounds. There was still the hundred dollars Mr. Coulson had given Tom, but it was in a sealed envelope, tucked behind Mrs. Beeton’s All-About Cookery, exactly as Tom had left it the morning after rescuing the two men from the scow.

  A walk home was as good a time as any to think about Miss Honey’s wedding gown. The problem was, with ever more women buying ready-made, I had begun taking on projects I once would have passed up—alterations and housedresses and choir gowns, twenty-three of them, all exactly the same. Much of it had become drudgery, and my weariness was showing in even the most pleasurable of my work. I had said as much to Mother on the telephone a while ago, and she came back with, “Laundry, and pork and beans twice a week for supper are drudgery, too, but I’ve made a game of coming up with some new way of saving a few cents at least every week.”

  “It still sounds like drudgery,” I said, and we both laughed. Inside I was filling with admiration. When Father lost his job, she had returned to dressmaking to keep our family afloat, and when that had not worked out as intended, she had come up with a new plan. Quietly she urged Father to restart in Buffalo, where she would adapt yet again, taking on the role of penny-pinching wife.

  The scheme for Miss Honey’s wedding gown still as vague as ever, I came to the spot on River Road where Tom and I once left each other pretty stones and beads, ferns and charmeuse, and finally the notes setting out how we would meet. I could have wept as I thought of that early love, so childlike, so pure, so ready to blossom into something I was no longer able to imagine being without.

  From a ways off I saw Tom in the garden, directing Francis and Jesse in cutting a few stalks of rhubarb. Nothing appeared unusual about the boys’ clothes, not from a distance. But their trousers were made from silk twill, which was durable and cool, and of low enough sheen to almost pass as cotton. And Francis’s shirt was satin, sewn with the wrong side facing out and the more lustrous side hidden against his skin. The Cole children tumble and roughhouse not in cotton broadcloth and gabardine but in the leftovers from what I have made. Both were tanned and lean, and Jesse’s shoulders were broad, likely because he swam like the dickens, even if he was only six years old. I could not look upon them without seeing Tom in their green eyes, in their watchfulness, their habit of looking west to see the weather the moment they set foot out of doors.

  From time to time I passed the furniture shop Edward Atwell had once run, and I sometimes imagined what a life with him might have been like. There would have been kindness and consideration. There would have been plenty of sugar for the tea and eggs for breakfast each morning, and afternoons in the garden with the children, and never a moment given over to the dress I should be sewing if we were to make ends meet. I would not have known hardship. But I would not have known love.

  I called out, “Hello,” and then said to Tom, “Did Mrs. Reynolds finally pay up? I’m not sure there’s anything left for ice.”

  And maybe those were the words that caused him to do what he did. I cannot say for sure, but in the evening, I was putting the salt cellar in the cupboard when the money jar caught my eye. It had been empty and now, curled inside, was a wad of notes, far too thick for Tom to have earned selling fish or even delivering a body to Morse and Son, far too thick even if Mrs. Reynolds had finally paid up. I stood there not fully convinced, until I had counted out one hundred dollars. I did not need to slide Mrs. Beeton’s All-About Cookery from the shelf to know the envelope was no longer there.

  I opened the back door and called out, “Tom,” and he appeared from around the side of the house holding a giggling Francis upside down by his ankles. Tom set Francis on his feet and told him to go dig up a couple of worms. “The money from Mr. Coulson?” I said.

  He placed a foot on the bottom step of the stoop and nodded.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’ve had a long while to decide about it,” he said. “And I’m sure.”

  For the six weeks since, Tom has been steadfastly mourning his river. With three generators operating, the river has dropped two feet. Standing waves and eddies have disappeared, dry riverbed is exposed, and boulders that were once islands have become part of the shore. It would be easy enough to say the ruin is the cause of his mood, except that the generators have been up and running for well over a year.

  He began to walk the section of river between the Queenston powerhouse and Chippawa, where the water is first diverted, one autumn afternoon more than a year before any of the generators were switched on. It is a significant trek, and he makes it all the more so by climbing in and out of the gorge at the Devil’s Hole Rapids, the whirlpool, and the Maid of the Mist landing. Etched into the cliff face at each point is a horizontal notch marking the height of the river on the day he began keeping track. For the longest time after the notches were first cut, he measured the drop in the river’s height and recorded it in his small notebook once a month. But ever since he moved the hundred dollars to the money jar, the trek has become a daily event.

  Now, when he manages a bit of time at home, he is exhausted on the chesterfield or sighing over the notebook at the kitchen table, oblivious to the boys, to me. He comes in for supper, late, and says, “The river will be down six feet or more once the rest of the generators are switched on,” rather than “Hello.” And if I tell him Jesse kicked Francis in the shins and made him fall down, he hardly seems to hear. “There won’t be any wild strawberries or grapes along the shoreline in a year or two,” he will say.

  I miss the husband who practically sprinted home from work, the man who threw open the back door and announced he was home. As often as not I would be peeling carrots or potatoes, or washing up by the sink. He would put a hand on my cheek or thwack my bottom or pull a bouquet of wildflowers from behind his back, and I would smile and put my arms around his neck. There would be a kiss, never the perfunctory sort, always a k
iss that said there was no place in the world he would rather be. The boys would come running, and he would gather them up into his arms and tickle them and jostle them until their laughter filled our house. Now it is I, on my own, kissing them good night and telling them stories that are not nearly as interesting as Tom’s tales of Blondin and his tightrope, Annie Taylor and her barrel, Fergus and the day the falls stood still.

  Iam putting away the last of the supper dishes when I glance out the window and see Tom entering the yard. The boys, ever-hopeful, come running in their pajamas as Tom steps into the kitchen, looking hot and tired and not at all ready for the onslaught. “Daddy. Daddy’s home,” they call out.

  “There’s a roast chicken in the oven,” I say, “overdone by now.”

  “The river’s down another inch.”

  “Are we going for a hike on Sunday?” Jesse asks. “You said we would.”

  “I have three worms,” Francis says, raising his fingers to show the count.

  “Two are mine,” Jesse says.

  “Are not.”

  “You took them from beside the pump and it’s my spot. It’s my spot, Mommy. You said it was.”

  “Can you tuck them in?” I ask. “I’ve had enough.”

  “You can tell us the story about Great-grandpa and the gondolier with the cork suit,” Jesse says, already halfway up the stairs.

  “No. I want the one about when Captain Webb drowned,” Francis says.

  “Get a move on,” Tom says to Francis, and then Tom is on the stairs with Francis on his heels, doing his best to keep up. As they round the landing, my last glimpse is of Francis, his hand held aloft, straining for Tom’s. And I know the scene. I saw it once before, except Tom was just home from the war and it was Jesse trailing behind in the snow, his mittened hand reaching for Tom’s.

  Kit and I are in my sewing room with the door closed behind our backs, though there is no gown to fit, no darts to nip and tuck, no hem to mark. She is here because, unable to bear another day as wretched as the last, I asked her to come and help me sort out what to do. “I’m at my wits’ end,” I say. “He’s up at the crack of dawn with twelve miles to walk and three trips in and out of the gorge to make, all before he goes to work. And on the mornings he cannot rouse himself early enough for the whole ordeal, he stays in bed, getting up just in time to make it to work. On those days he makes the trek afterward, wandering in at God only knows what hour. He used to take such pleasure in the river, in us, too, and now he’s just so miserable. It’s heartbreaking.”

  “Has he said what all the record keeping is for?” Kit asks. “He says it’s for himself. When I first saw the book, though, he said it bothered him that he couldn’t say why the ice bridge broke up when it did. I know he’d been wondering about the intake gates opening and closing, and the river bobbing up and down, whether it might have weakened the moorings.”

  “I remember Leslie saying a couple of the directors were worried about the power companies being blamed. I don’t think anyone thought it’d be justified, but truth be told there was some hand-wringing, mostly over what Tom might say. He’s got a lot of clout.”

  I am silent, putting off by a moment the question that might finally settle my way of thinking about Mr. Coulson. “Do you think it’s why Mr. Coulson offered him a job?” I finally say.

  “It wouldn’t have hurt.”

  “Is it the reason the reward was so large?”

  Her shoulders rise as she sucks in a long breath, then fall as she exhales. “Mr. Coulson was on the telephone with Leslie even before Tom had the two men rescued from the scow,” she says. “He wanted to know about their credentials, and then he tore a strip off Leslie for hiring a couple of buffoons even though it was Mr. Coulson who’d ordered him to take the lowest offer on tendered business. He said that Leslie had given Tom every right to accuse the Hydro of negligence, that he’d better hope no one drowned, or no amount of money would keep Tom quiet.”

  “Tom said he was being paid to keep his mouth shut. He said it when he was hired, and he said it again after the scow. I told him Mr. Coulson was indebted to my family, that he loved a hero, like everyone else.” With that I stand up from the sewing bench and begin to pace.

  “I thought about telling you what I knew,” she says, “but it seemed disloyal to Leslie and I couldn’t really see the point.”

  “After the ice bridge Mrs. Coulson wouldn’t let up about Tom going to see Mr. Coulson. And there was that picture of Drury and Tom in the newspaper. He’s a pawn, and it started way back.”

  “It seemed like saying something would belittle what he did. It was a mistake, not saying anything,” she says, but I hardly hear. I am thinking about Isabel, about her pallor in the morning, about the tea dress that fit one day but not the next. It had been easier to shrug, to move the tea biscuits to the windowsill, than to piece together what I knew and face the facts.

  “Tom’s got to quit the Hydro,” I say, knowing I will do whatever it takes to make it happen.

  29

  At nine o’clock in the evening I put down the socks I am darning and follow Tom up the stairs. I climb into bed beside him without properly washing my face, with only the most cursory combing of my hair. Any delay and he would have been asleep.

  He is on his back, and I snuggle up, my shoulder under his arm, my head resting on his chest, cheek against skin. He wraps an arm around me, and it gives me the courage I need. “You should resign,” I say.

  “Resign?”

  “From the Hydro.”

  “It’s work,” he says, “and there isn’t anything else.” A flood of laborers was let go once the canal and forebay were excavated, and then a second round, once the concrete was poured, and a third, once the first of the generators was up and running. There are cutbacks everywhere, and when a job does come up, there are a hundred applicants, all willing to work for a third of what he makes at the Hydro-Electric Power Commission.

  “We managed on just my dressmaking when you first got back from the war.”

  “We were living with Mrs. Andrews, and it was just the three of us.”

  “We’ll put the house up for sale,” I say. “You could get back to fishing and trapping, and sell what you caught. Jesse, too. It’s what you did as a boy.”

  “Bess, you’d be miserable.”

  “Sadie managed all right.”

  “Sadie looked after herself from the age of thirteen. She ate nothing but apples and walnuts for weeks at a time. She wore the same buckskin dress every day, and she’d scraped it herself. When Fergus came along with a cabin and a rabbit twice a week and fish every other night, it was more than she’d ever had.”

  It hurts to be compared with Sadie and come up short, and I am on the verge of listing the hundred ways I have left my Glenview days behind. But how can I when, just three years ago, I had convinced the both of us I could not do without the May Avenue house?

  “Remember that day at the whirlpool,” he says, “the day Francis was born?”

  I nod, thinking of myself in labor in his arms as he scrambled out of the gorge. I had been afraid until the moment he had promised to take the job at the Hydro.

  “You said I should put my family first.” He lifts my hand from his chest and kisses the base of my thumb. “You were right, Bess. A man needs to do what’s best for his family.”

  “But you’re not yourself anymore.” I prop myself up beside him. “You’re hardly here, and Jesse and Francis miss you so much. Me too. Listen to me, Tom. You’re wearing yourself out with all the measuring, all the climbing in and out of the gorge.”

  “I know I haven’t been pulling my weight,” he says. “I’ll figure something out for the boys.”

  “That notebook. You’re tormenting yourself. And what for, Tom?”

  He tilts his head back on the pillow, his eyes following suit, rolling upward so that he is looking at the ceiling. “I don’t know,” he finally says. “It’s not like anything in that book will ever see the light of day.�
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  Cheek back against his chest, I lie there listening to his heart, thinking about all those columns printed with dates and measurements, and margins scrawled with notes. Had keeping them to himself made his misery a whole lot worse? “I don’t see why not.”

  “No one could care less,” he says. “That’s why not.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “I’m supposed to set myself up a soapbox on Clifton Hill and holler at the tourists walking by?”

  “There are ways,” I say.

  “I’m dead tired, Bess. I just want to go to sleep.”

  “I could help.”

  “Just let me sleep,” he says and lets go of my hand.

  Early morning I open my eyes to blank sheet, to the hollow where Tom slept until he roused himself with time enough for all the measuring before setting off to work. I lie awake for a good hour, wondering what I could have said, waiting for the sound of the boys’ feet on the floor. I think of him coming home earlier in the week, a dollar’s reward money in his hand. He had gone into the upper river, after a dog this time. He stood there dripping on the kitchen floor, and when he finally spoke his voice quavered as though he were afraid. “There are two eddies between the spot where I went in after the dog and where we would have been sucked into the Toronto powerhouse. Either would have been enough to swing the two of us to shore. I missed the first one altogether and barely caught the second. I didn’t get the current right.”

  A second later I am out of bed and in the boys’ room. And there is Francis, curled into a ball, his thumb in his mouth. But there is no Jesse, only more blank sheet, another hollow, the place where he slept until Tom woke him with the news he had been craving for six weeks: They were going for a long hike. Twelve miles beginning in Chippawa, ending at Queenston Heights. Three times in and out of the gorge. And then a long trudge back to the house.