The Day the Falls Stood Still

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  Once Tom is off to work and exhausted Jesse tucked back into bed and Francis sent to Mrs. Mancuso’s, where he will not wake his brother, I telephone Cecil Randal at the Evening Review. “We’re on May Avenue,” I say, after he has agreed to come, “the house with all the fishing rods out front.”

  A half hour later I am sitting with Mr. Randal at the kitchen table, Tom’s notebook open between us. “Tom’s been keeping track for nearly three years, then?” he says.

  I nod. “He says the river will have dropped six or more feet by the time all the generators are switched on.”

  “The hotel owners and the tour operators won’t like it,” he says. “They might even kick up a bit of a fuss, but I can’t see that anything will change. We’ve lived with blackouts and coal shortages and ever higher prices for electricity. People want the powerhouse. They voted for it. The money’s been spent.”

  “You saw the picture of Premier Drury and Tom at the opening?”

  “I did,” he says.

  “Tom was so humiliated,” I say. “He can’t stand everyone thinking he doesn’t mind about all the water being siphoned off.”

  “But he works for the Hydro,” Mr. Randal says. “There’ll be trouble if we put all this in the newspaper.”

  “I expect you’re right.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “I am.” And it is true. I am content to live in rented rooms, if it comes to that, and to eat whatever Tom is able to trap or catch on his line. I will sew, and when I have an idle moment, I will study the book where Sadie kept her recipes for groundnut root and wild leeks.

  “And what about Tom? Is he sure?”

  “He’s been keeping track so he’d have proof,” I say. It is almost not a lie.

  By mid afternoon the following day, I have been to the office of the Evening Review to collect one of the first papers off the press from Cecil Randal, and fairly well galloped back to May Avenue. Newspaper spread open on the kitchen table, I find the editorial, on page 2 no less.

  Evening Review

  BLEEDING THE RIVER DRY

  According to Niagara riverman Tom Cole, the power companies are bleeding the river dry. And it is mighty hard to dismiss the warning when he has got a whole notebook full of facts and figures as proof.

  A year before any of the generators were switched on at the Hydro’s Queenston powerhouse, Mr. Cole cut notches marking the height of the river into the gorge wall at the Devil’s Hole Rapids, the whirlpool, and the Maid of the Mist landing. At least once a month ever since, he has used the notches to track the river’s height and recorded the results. His calculations show the river dropped nine inches with the first of the generators and just over two feet once all three generators were switched on. He expects the river will be down a full six feet with the other generators slated to begin operation in the next two years.

  Alongside the figures, the margins of the notebook are crammed full of notes: “Heron gone from shallows at Hubbard Point.” “No second eddy at Lower Steel Arch Bridge.” “No standing wave at Colt’s Point.” “Seven more feet of dry riverbed at western flank of Horseshoe Falls.” “Wild grapes missing from the northern shore of the whirlpool.” “Six island boulders joined to shoreline at Foster’s Flats.” “Cliff face behind American Falls visible through veil of water.” All this, plenty more, too, and the Queenston powerhouse is only a year and a half old, and operating at a third of the planned capacity.

  Maybe it is time we reexamine the notion that says the river is ours to use as we see fit. It would be a mistake to wait until the falls are a mere trickle, a measly shadow of their former selves.

  The editorial is just as Mr. Randal and I had discussed. Still, seeing it in black and white causes my hands to fly to my mouth. There is nothing to do but wait for Tom to come in from work.

  I am bent over the sewing machine when I hear footsteps in the kitchen. I lift my foot from the treadle, listening, thinking that it is much too early for Tom, that the boys must have persuaded Mrs. Mancuso to fetch some particular toy. But Tom calls, “Bess?” up the stairs.

  “In the sewing room,” I call back down.

  A moment later he is in the doorway, looking guilty with his head hung and his cap twisted in his hands. Even before he says so, I know he has been sacked, and I marvel at the speed with which Mr. Coulson got wind of the story. The first of the newspaper boys would barely have set foot on the street. I set down needle and thread, sorting out how to begin explaining what I must.

  “Mr. Coulson told me I was finished at the Hydro,” he says. “He called me to his office and said after all he’d done for me, I should be more grateful. He said I’d made him look like a fool.”

  “I showed Cecil Randal your notebook. He wrote an editorial.” I pick up the newspaper from beside my sewing stool and hold it out to him. “Page two.”

  “You did what?”

  “He copied out some of your tables and a whole lot of your notes,” I say. “We worked out what he’d write.”

  With the newspaper still held aloft in my hand, Tom shuts his eyes and presses the heels of his palms against his closed lids. “What did you expect?”

  “I expected the story to be printed in the newspaper,” I say. “Then, I expected you to be sacked.”

  “Bess, you don’t earn enough.” His hands fall from his face to his sides, leaving his bewilderment plain to see. “You expected me to be sacked and you went ahead?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m relieved.”

  He cocks his head, furrows his brow.

  “I really am,” I say.

  He sinks into a chair in the corner of the room and sits there a moment, very still. As silence swells in the sewing room, I begin to wonder if I have misjudged and press my lips between my teeth. “I’m going for a walk,” he says, standing up and beginning to turn away. Then, thinking better of it, he swivels back toward me. He snatches the newspaper and strides through the doorway.

  “Tom?”

  “Leave me be for a bit,” he says, not quite under his breath. “Just leave me be.”

  30

  Niagara’s Toronto powerhouse

  Before I have managed to pace the kitchen twice, the telephone rings. When I pick up, I am thankful it is Kit on the line and say, “I was about to start calling around to your shops.”

  “Have you seen the newspaper?” It is typical Kit, cutting to the chase.

  “It was me that spoke to Cecil Randal, not Tom.”

  “But, Bess, he’ll be sacked.” And then, always quick on the uptake, she adds, “You want him sacked.”

  I tell her that Tom was let go, that I had tried to convince him to resign before I went to Cecil Randal, that he would not budge.

  “You went to the newspaper behind Tom’s back. Wow. What’d he say?”

  “Nothing.” I sink into the chair beside the telephone. “He’s furious. He left.”

  “I’ll be over in a minute,” she says.

  I go back to wandering in the kitchen, keeping it up until the telephone rings again. This time it is Father on the line. “Is it true?” he says.

  “What?”

  “That Tom put a piece in the newspaper blasting the power companies?”

  “It was me.”

  There is silence and then: “Good God, Bess. Mr. Coulson won’t keep him on.”

  “It isn’t right, someone like Tom, helping them siphon off half the river. It’s ruining him.” And then I am weeping because Kit is treating the situation like an emergency and Father is sounding alarmed.

  “Ah, Bess. Don’t cry. Things just have a way of working themselves out.”

  “But he left. Mr. Coulson sacked him, and when he got home I showed him the newspaper and he left.” I do not attempt to keep my voice from breaking, to keep the sobs at bay.

  “Bess. Bess. No need for tears. That Tom, he loves you like every father only wishes his daughter could be loved. There’s no chance he’s gone for good. He’ll be back all right, sooner than you th
ink, too.”

  And then Kit is at the door, so I say good-bye to Father and he says, “I’m telling you, Bess, I know what I know, not a speck of doubt.”

  The minute she takes in my tear-streaked face, her arms are around me. “I’ve been thinking about everything and, well, I think it’ll all work out.” She leans away from me. “It just isn’t what anyone expects from you. He’s going to need a bit of time.”

  We talk a long while, until the boys are back from Mrs. Mancuso’s and supper is under way, and we have run out of angles and considerations, and repeated the most cogent of our thoughts a handful of times, and I am very nearly as certain as Father that Tom will come around. Then Kit steps back from the kitchen sink, where she is peeling potatoes, and says, “Know what, Bess?”

  “What?”

  “Promise you’ll take this the right way.”

  “Promise.”

  “You’re getting more and more like Isabel,” she says. I feel myself smile. “Tom always says she’s still with me.”

  She stills, half-peeled potato in hand, then nods and turns back to the sink.

  Tom comes home early in the evening, after Kit is gone, and the boys run from the kitchen to the front door with me following once I have dealt with a pot of milk warming on the stove. Any scrap of trepidation melts away the moment I see the three of them in the hallway, laughing and jostling. With Jesse draped over one shoulder, Tom scoops up Francis and holds him prisoner in the opposite arm. “You won’t believe what happened,” Tom says.

  I lift my palms.

  “I stopped in at the Windsor and Sean Garvey was working and he said one of the men from that group, a Mr. Bennett, was in a little earlier. You remember those lawyers and businessmen who were complaining about the Niagara Falls Park Commission kowtowing to the Hydro?”

  “Go on. Of course I do.” My fingernails are set to rupture the skin of my palms.

  “Well, Mr. Bennett was asking around about how to get in touch with me. He had a copy of the story and he told Sean he wanted to talk to me about using it for their cause. And then a little later, when I showed up, Sean insisted on calling Mr. Bennett right then and there, and next thing I knew there were three of them from the group clapping me in the back at the Windsor Hotel. They want to see my notebook.”

  Then the boys are set down. I touch his chest and he does not flinch. I put my arms around his neck, pull him against me, and after a moment he hugs me back. We laugh and my feet leave the ground and I feel light-headed as he swings me around.

  By eleven o’clock I have packed a small tin of lemon squares and a thermos of tea, and applied a bit of lipstick and decided on a cloche, and laughed aloud at my giddiness. I have settled on a pretty crepe de chine blouse and tapered skirt, though I imagine neither is suitable for a midnight row across the upper river. It is how we have decided to celebrate his freedom from the Hydro-Electric Power Commission, just the two of us, with the boys at Mrs. Mancuso’s, finally tucked into bed for the night.

  On the trolley heading toward the upper river, Tom and I sit very close, and I am reminded of the first time I snuck away with him on the Great Gorge Route, my first glimpse of the Devil’s Hole and Whirlpool Rapids from the banks of the river. He had kissed me afterward, in the shadows of the Lower Steel Arch Bridge. My lips had parted to the warm wet of his mouth, and afterward, I was filled with a longing I was unable to shake. And here I am, eight years later, like a schoolgirl all over again.

  By the time we reach Slater’s Dock, on the far side of Chippawa, the river has widened to more than a mile across and the current has grown sluggish. We walk twenty minutes farther, hand in hand, along the riverbank. Tom points out Greater Bear and Lesser Bear high in the nighttime sky. “They were once a pretty maid and her son, or so the story goes,” he says, “but Zeus had a jealous wife.” He explains that, unlike the other constellations, Greater Bear and Lesser Bear never slip below the horizon, never sink into the cool water waiting there. It was Zeus’s wife who came up with the punishment. As far as she was concerned, to be imprisoned in the body of a bear and flung high into the sky was not enough. No, Greater Bear and Lesser Bear were to spend all eternity wandering well above the horizon, pining for the water just out of their reach.

  We come to a marshy bit of shoreline, and he drags a rowboat I had not noticed from the reeds. He had told me that it would be there, that he expected it belonged to a rumrunner, one of the men who rowed crates of bootleg gin and rye whiskey over to the American side.

  Waves lap against the boat as we cross the river, and the sky is moonlit and full of stars. Tom rows masterfully, letting the current do much of the work.

  “Remember the picnics in the athletic field?” he says. “I do.”

  “You always brought me lemon squares.”

  “Remember the early days in the glen?” I say. His head bobs in the darkness. “You were always apologizing,” I say. “It was so soon after Isabel. I wasn’t sure you were in your right head.”

  “You were the reason I got up in the morning.”

  “You’re still the reason I do.”

  There are moments when it feels like my heart is not large enough to hold what I feel. Love wells in my eyes and I do not blink it away. I let it roll onto my cheeks.

  He is a faded silhouette against his glittering river. Still, I can see the sheen that has come to his eyes.

  A while later, we reach Grand Island, and he heaves the boat up onto the shore. We sit for a bit, sipping tea from the thermos, eating lemon squares. I watch him, gazing out at the river, at glittering crests and slick troughs, silver and black. And because it seems he is filled up, lost in the wonder of the river at night, I do not speak.

  Eventually he comes back to me, to the grassy patch just beyond the riverbank, and spreads a blanket. He undoes the buttons of my blouse, the clasp of my skirt.

  Afterward I lie with my hand on his belly, rising and falling with each of his breaths. Though his eyes are closed, the corner of his mouth is lifted in a soft smile that tells me that he has not drifted off, that he is wallowing in the pleasures of a few moments earlier. He moves a hand to his belly, threads his fingers with mine. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. The corner of his mouth lifts infinitesimally more.

  I close my eyes, feel memory dissolve and slip away. I am in that place just before one forgets everything: who one is, even that one has a name. But he stirs, says, “Bess,” just loud enough to call me back.

  “Um.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me what you were up to, with Mr. Randal, I mean?”

  “You would’ve told me I shouldn’t,” I say.

  He is quiet, long enough that I begin to wonder if he has fallen asleep, but then he says, “Suppose you’re right.”

  WHIRLPOOL

  September 1923–October 1923

  31

  I am stooped in the garden, picking tomatoes, thinking the crop will be the last we harvest at our May Avenue house, now that we have asked Mr. Brimley to come out later in the week and tell us what we might expect to get for it. With Tom making the rounds and as yet no luck, and me sewing like the dickens and only just managing to keep us afloat, we have got our eyes on a smaller place in Silvertown, which he assures me will heat up just fine with the wood he is being given as payment for clearing a lot adjacent Colt’s Point.

  As Tom and Jesse come into the yard, Jesse is the picture of unbridled vigor, his arms flapping this way and that, his feet kicking up as he trots backward, facing Tom.

  When I say, “You’re home,” Jesse turns toward me and runs.

  I open my arms, and a split second later he is in them saying, “Guess what.”

  He has half-knocked the wind from me. Though he is not quite seven, nothing of the toddler he once was remains. He is as tall as the nine-year-olds on the street and well-muscled, almost like a young man. This summer is the last I will catch him in my arms. “What?” I say.

  “Muddy is going to take a barrel through the rapids
on Labor Day and we’re going to help.” Muddy Sloane does little other than smoke and fish and talk about the barrel he has been reinforcing and waterproofing for the last umpteen years. Though a good decade Tom’s senior, he lives with his mother and the dozen cats he claims keep him busy with their fondness for pike.

  I fix my eyes on Tom, a few steps away. “Muddy was fishing at the whirlpool,” he says.

  “You’re not serious,” I say. The river was not something to be conquered. It was not something to be trivialized. I had heard him express the sentiment a hundred times. And only the summer before he had warned a Mr. Stephens his barrel would not survive a plunge over the Horseshoe Falls. Stephens went ahead and strapped his arms to the inside of his barrel. As ballast, he tied an anvil to his feet. Tom came home from the upper river dismayed. “He hasn’t got a hope in hell, and I won’t be a part of it,” he said. When Stephens’s barrel hit the plunge pool at the base of the waterfall, the anvil ripped through the floor of the barrel, taking him to his death. Tom recovered only an arm, tattooed with a message for Stephens’s wife: “Forget me not Annie.”

  “Muddy’s a friend,” Tom says. “He should make out okay.”

  “What about Captain Webb?”

  “He didn’t have a barrel.”

  “Robert Flack was killed, and he had a boat,” I say.

  “Carlisle Graham made it through in a barrel five times and Bobby Leach, four. It’s a whole lot different than going over the falls.”

  “Maud Willard suffocated,” I say. Cozy in their beds, the boys had heard Tom tell the story time and again. Maud Willard, an actress from Canton, Ohio, came to the Niagara seeking fame as the first woman to shoot the Whirlpool Rapids. A Tuesday afternoon at a quarter past four, she climbed into her barrel, along with her dog, a fox terrier. By four thirty she was through the rapids, but her barrel was trapped in the whirlpool. Six hours later the barrel was finally cast to shore and the lid pried open. The fox terrier scrambled out, but Maud Willard lay battered and bruised, suffocated.