The Day the Falls Stood Still (19 page)

When he finally lets go, he says, “It was awful over there.”

I wipe away the tear clinging to his chin. “I know, Tom. I know.”

“You don’t,” he says, “and it’s a blessing.”

I remember another letter, different from the rest, late last summer, a short while after the newspapers were full of the good news of Amiens.

August 24, 1918

My Dear Bess,

I am sorry I’ve taken so long to write, but I have been putting it off, waiting for my mood to change. I am not sick in any way, but I am feeling beaten down—by the smell, the smashed men twitching like squashed, charred insects, the upright corpses mistaken for living men, the landscape of barren earth without so much as a blade of grass. I am feeling alone, lost, and I can’t figure out how to feel like myself again.

I decided to write anyway because you will know I was at Amiens, and I do not want you worrying about me.

I’ll end now with love to you and Jesse.

Tom

He takes off his cap, and I want him to toss it into the air without a second thought to it being trampled or lost beneath the planks of the platform. But he only shoves it into the pocket of his tunic, as though he does not quite believe he is through with the war.

19

Building Niagara’s Toronto powerhouse

Photo courtesy of Ontario Power Generation.

I
lie on my side, cheek in hand, elbow propped on a pillow, watching Tom sleep as I have most mornings for the six weeks since his return. He is still handsome, though not so youthful as before the war. There are dusky hollows beneath his eyes and, on his chin, stubble that did not used to appear overnight. At the uppermost edge of his cheekbone, there is a small, ragged scar where a bit of shrapnel missed his eye. His hair has yet to grow long enough for waves, and, having met only winter sun, it is dark in color, more like earth than like beach. I cannot see the river on him the way I once thought I could, in the feral locks, in the underside of a chin bronzed by reflected light, in the green of his eyes. The color has seemed muted, diluted by the bleak wasteland of a battlefield.

Again he slept only fitfully, calling out
no,
sweating profusely with tangled linens wrapped about his legs. Three times, I woke him and saw relief flood his face as his eyes fluttered open to discover my hands on his shoulders, shaking him from the nightmares he mostly keeps to himself. The fourth time, it was early morning, and in the dim light I could see his eyes, open but wide with fear. His mouth was twisted with effort, and his hands were reaching, desperately. When he was truly awake I asked what he had seen. “A hand,” he said, “a hand in the mud. A soldier was being swallowed up by it. Only the hand was left.”

“It was a dream. It’s gone.” I stroked his cheek.

“At Passchendaele I was told to keep advancing. I was told I’d only imagined the fingers were reaching for help. “Might even belong to a Hun,’ is what my officer said.”

A
short while later the three of us are eating toast in the kitchen. I lift the coffeepot in Tom’s direction. “More?” He nods, and I fill his raised mug. As I push myself back from the table to tend to the bacon sizzling on the stove, Jesse breaks the quiet. “Daddy, play outside?”

It is the question he asks most mornings. And Tom usually says yes and they put on their coats and boots, and Jesse marches in the snow and calls it quicksand. Every now and then he topples over and hollers until he is saved. I have watched through the kitchen window and seen Tom leaning against the pump, aloof. Yesterday I saw him startle, caught off guard, when Jesse aimed a stick and shrieked that Tom was a Hun.

“What about setting a snare or two?” I say. “I could make a rabbit stew.” He used to take such pleasure in the river, and Foster’s Flats, the lowermost terrace of the glen, was once his preferred spot for snaring small game. I have thought an outing there might help, an idea that has grown as the days pass with Tom never setting out for the rapids, whirlpool, or falls. I remember, too, an early letter from overseas: “I guess by the time I meet our son he’ll be old enough to learn all about the river. Until then, daydreams will have to do.”

“I told Mrs. Andrews I’d bring in some wood,” Tom says. It is how he spends his days—mending a latch, straightening the woodpile, sanding and staining the windowsills. But soon there will be nothing left of the tasks Mrs. Andrews and I had put off for so long.

“Jesse should be taught how to trap,” I say.

“All right. All right. I’ll show him how it’s done.”

For a moment I feel the beginnings of hope, a warm ember set to spark. He will make his way to the river, and, better yet, Jesse will accompany him. It is not the first time I have chucked prudence aside and let myself think he was turning a corner of sorts. But then he says, “There used to be rabbits just to the west of the rail yards,” and hope fizzles to ash.

As I lift a strip of bacon from the pan and wait for the fat to drip away, it seems to me the odor is slightly off. I hold the pan out to Tom. “It smells like it should,” he says. Then he and Jesse devour nearly a half pound. But the idea of putting a forkful into my mouth is so unpleasant that I let two strips grow cold on my plate. With Jesse, I lost my taste for bacon early, months before my belly swelled.

My immediate reaction is disbelief. Our intimacy has been sporadic at best, with only three instances since his return, and the first was an abysmal failure, with Tom pumping and pumping until I felt rubbed raw and then, when I was very nearly at my wits’ end, rolling away from me onto his back and saying, “I’m sorry, Bess.” Even so, disbelief shifts to panic as I calculate that my period is late. Yes, I want a playmate for Jesse, a baby for Tom to know from birth, another child to love. Eventually. But not just now. We have not yet figured out how to be a family of three, and, as a baby, Jesse took every ounce of stamina I could muster and then some. And I can only imagine what Mrs. Andrews will say. At first it was just me and a wardrobe full of clothes. Then came the baby, who howled in the night and peed on her favorite carpet and cut a ragged triangle from the sheers hanging in the dining room. And now, there is Tom, who sometimes calls out in the night and flinches if a door swings shut too abruptly and leaves whiskers in the sink and eats enough so that a roasting chicken no longer does for two meals. Oh, she would never put us out the door, but it hardly seems right to stay. Even with a family of three, the bustle of the house has become a strain by the end of the day. When it was just the two of us, she sat in the kitchen in the evenings playing solitaire or crocheting lace collars and cuffs. But she has begun heading up to her bedroom ever earlier and quietly closing the door. I count out nine months and tell myself I have got until the fall to coax Tom from his stupor, to figure out how we will manage with a second child.

Tom heads out to the shed after breakfast, likely to dig up a few snares. As I wipe the table and tuck in the chairs, it occurs to me the timing of Jesse’s arrival had seemed far from idyllic at first, with Tom away. Yet I have no doubt it was Jesse’s tiny hand in my own that forced me to keep my chin up and my eyes mostly dry. And there was comfort in holding him in my arms, in feeling Tom was with me though he was not. So maybe there is reason to be pleased. Maybe a second child will be the magic that turns the three of us into a family. Surely Tom will rise to the occasion. Surely he will place his hands on my belly and marvel at the tiny heel kicking beneath. I lift my sweater from the peg at the back door.

I am in the shed doorway with my sweater pulled tight around my waist when Tom turns toward me, his arms full of snares. He juts his chin in my direction. “What’s the smile about?” he says.

“I think I’m pregnant.”

“Oh.”

“The bacon seemed off. It’s what happened with Jesse.” I wrap my sweater tighter still around my waist.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m late, too.”

“Wow,” he says. He smiles, but it is not the same lopsided smile I had imagined a thousand times while he was overseas, and he hangs on to the snares, rather than returning them to the crate and putting his arms around me.

“I know it’s a shock.”

He sighs and says, “What about money, Bess?”

“We’ll manage.”

“I need to look for work.”

A week earlier Mother and Father had come to welcome Tom home, and knowing Mother would relish a visit with Mrs. Coulson, I had scheduled a fitting—a jacket and skirt cut from charcoal gray wool crepe—to coincide. While I marked the hem, the talk turned to the Queenston-Chippawa power project, and Mrs. Coulson told Mother and me how Mr. Coulson was run off his feet trying to make sure all the men the Hydro had hired were put to good use. And then she said, “I’m sure Bess has told you I’ve been after her to send Tom along to Mr. Coulson,” and I marveled at her audacity. She would see to it Tom worked at the Hydro, as she had decided was best, even if it meant prompting Mother to harp at me as well.

Both women turned to me, waiting, Mother’s lifted eyebrows questioning that I had withheld this bit of news from her. “Well?” Mother said.

“He’s barely home.”

“Best send him to Mr. Coulson while he still needs men,” Mother said.

“He isn’t adjusted to being back. He’s still restless at night.” I wouldn’t say more than that, not within earshot of Mrs. Coulson. At any rate, Mother knew my worries. I had had to explain why I put off their visit by more than a month and ended up saying more than I thought I would—the calling out in the night, the failed intimacy, the way Jesse was overlooked. But she had been dismissive. “Remember the trouble your father had over all that aluminum business? He was over it the minute he set foot in the tannery.”

“There’s nothing like a good day’s work to tire a fellow out,” Mrs. Coulson said.

I did my best to appear sidetracked by a particularly stubborn pin. “I’m just not sure the Hydro is for Tom, even once he’s rested up,” I finally said. Immediately I was regretful. Might my apparent indifference have cost Tom his only chance for work? And what was more, I had seen nothing to hint his allegiance to the river had even survived the war, nothing to hint he had not altogether forgotten the writhing, bucking water, shattering to mist and spray and thunder at the brink of the falls.

“Not sure?” Mrs. Coulson said, a furrow coming to her brow.

Another stubborn pin was more than Mother could endure, and she said, “Tom isn’t much for progress. He wants all the water left going over the falls,” causing me to cringe.

“There’s plenty of water,” Mrs. Coulson said. “Plenty of water and almost no work. Has Tom made the rounds?”

I shook my head.

“He should,” Mrs. Coulson said. “There isn’t any other work. He should see for himself.”

I could see she was put out. I nodded, a little sheepishly, and Mrs. Coulson relented, shifting the conversation to the plans of the Great War Veterans’ Association for a cenotaph. “You should come out to a meeting, Bess,” she said. I had been lonely for ages, and with Tom home I was no longer able to bolster myself with thoughts of
Once the war ends…, Once Tom’s back…
Being in the company of other women, especially women with husbands just home from overseas, seemed like an evening well spent. But Mrs. Coulson did not mention a date or a place, and it seemed she would have if the invitation were sincere. I supposed there was the problem of how she would introduce me. Her dressmaker? Daughter of the disgraced Mr. and Mrs. Heath? Wife of a layabout?

I
take a snare from the bundle in Tom’s arms and fiddle with the lock. Should I mention the Hydro? Might Mother and Mrs. Coulson, with their pronouncements of work as a cure, be right? “What you need is to rest up a little longer,” I finally say. “We’ve got the money from my parents.” I had hoped to one day put the three hundred dollars toward a home of our own, a home that has surely become all the more pressing now that we are to be a family of four.

Eventually Tom and Jesse set out for the rail yards, and I stand at the front door, watching as they wade through drifted snow, Jesse with his small, mittened hand held in Tom’s. But when the wind gusts and snow swirls around their legs, Tom reaches to turn up the collar of his coat and in doing so drops Jesse’s hand. My last glimpse, as they round the corner, is of Jesse padding behind, his forgotten hand held aloft, straining for Tom’s.

With the war and then the Spanish flu and now Tom, I feel more than ever that I lack whatever it is that brings others serenity. For ages, since well before Tom’s return, I have found myself thinking longingly of my Loretto days: wake-up bell, morning chapel, breakfast, classes, lunch, sewing, more classes, recreation, supper, music practice, study hall, evening prayers, lights out. Always the same. It occurred to me that by following the rules, by behaving in a certain way, we had strewn our daily life with rituals, rituals that had given me peace.

With Tom still away, I had gone to Morrison Street Methodist in search of that peace. The Order of Service, and the words of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer and the Benediction, remained unchanged from week to week. There was the same odor of old hymnals, the sun warming the third pew each Sunday at ten o’clock. I suppose there was comfort in the predictability of it all. And sometimes I was encouraged by the reading of a particular scripture or roused by the beauty of the stained glass. I attended regularly enough that when I missed, I would be stopped on Bridge Street or Erie Avenue. “Are you well, Bess?” one or another of the Methodists would say. Still, I was not soothed in the way I had hoped, and it seemed as unlikely as ever there was a being up there, keeping watch. Soon enough I was mouthing the words to the Creed—I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth—rather than speaking them aloud. Eventually church without belief seemed a foolhardy pursuit, and Sunday mornings again became lazy breakfasts and walks in the woods of the glen with Jesse.

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.