The Day the Falls Stood Still (23 page)

23

T
om is in the kitchen washing up after breakfast when the telephone rings. I am in the sewing room, an ear cocked, wondering about the likelihood of Mr. Coulson calling so soon. It was only yesterday that Mrs. Coulson had been in for a fitting. As usual she inquired about Tom, and when I said, “No, he hasn’t found anything, not yet,” she said, “Bess, do you think he’d mind very much if Mr. Coulson gave him a call?”

I hear Tom say, “Hello,” and “Yes, of course, I know who you are,” and then after a long pause, “The newspaper lays it on pretty thick, but thanks anyway,” and after a longer pause still, “Yes, it’s a lot of money. I need a bit of time though. I want to talk it over with Bess.”

Then he is on the stairs and, a moment later, in the doorway of the sewing room. I look up from the lapel I am turning right side out.

“It was Mr. Coulson,” he says. “The Queenston-Chippawa power project still needs a foreman, and the job pays thirty-five dollars a week.”

“Thirty-five dollars.”

“It’s a lot,” he says. I hear uncertainty rather than delight.

“He’s grateful to my father.”

“There’s more to it than that,” he says.

And he is right. There are telephone calls when the river rises, stranding a fisherman on a rock, and more calls when migrating whistling swans, having settled on the upper river for rest, find themselves swept over the brink and then, moments later, maimed and exhausted below. When an empty rowboat turns up in the river, when a boy does not show up for a meal, when someone other than Tom spots a body, the telephone rings, and he and Jesse head out the door. Cecil Randal reports the rescued swans and fishermen in the
Evening Review,
and it makes sense that Mr. Coulson would see the articles and be just as impressed as everyone else. “Everyone loves a hero, Tom,” I say.

He runs his fingers through his hair, momentarily clearing his forehead. “It could be that he thinks putting me on the payroll means less trouble for the power companies. You remember those men I met at the Windsor, the ones who are against Beck. I bumped into one of them the other day and we got to talking about the ice bridge and he was interested in the idea of the bridge being weakened by the intake gates and the river bobbing up and down all the time.”

I swallow, working to keep the distress from my voice. “You said it was just a guess.”

“It is,” he says. “There isn’t proof. I told him that. Still, word could have got around to Mr. Coulson. You said Mrs. Coulson’s been badgering you nonstop. They’d both know folks around here take pretty much anything I say about the river as fact.”

“Mr. Coulson was talking about hiring you way before the ice bridge broke up. Mrs. Coulson brought it up before you even got home,” I say, becoming more and more certain Tom’s imagination has run amok. “Maybe he is persistent, but I overheard the telephone call. He’s a little awestruck, is all. Like everyone else.”

Tom mutters something about thinking the offer over for a bit and then disappears down the hall. Before I have decided whether I should follow him, he is back in the doorway of the sewing room wearing his best waistcoat and a clean shirt. “You’re going to see Mr. Coulson,” I say, setting down my work, a lead-up to throwing my arms around his neck.

“I’m off to International Silver,” he says, smoothing his waistcoat. “I thought I should see about my options.”

In the nine months since his return, he has made the rounds more times than I can count—Cyanamid and Norton, Oneida and International Silver, American Can and Shredded Wheat—and always been told they were not hiring. I sit silent, hand on my hard mound of a belly. “You’ll have a hard time matching thirty-five dollars a week,” I finally say.

I am in the yard, hanging bed linens on the line, when Tom returns. The day is tranquil and warm, one of those unusually still autumn days when the temperature seems at odds with the brittle leaves drifting to the earth. The air, too, is strange, without the haze and humidity that almost always accompany such warmth.

“Can you believe this weather?” I say, though what I really want to know is where he stands on Mr. Coulson’s offer.

“There’s nothing,” he says.

I nod and take a pillowcase from my basket.

He’s halfway up the back stoop when I call out to him. “Tom.” Mrs. Andrews never minds me skipping out for a few hours, not so long as my work gets done on time, and I need to say my piece before it is too late. “How about a picnic at the whirlpool? We won’t have many more days like this.”

J
esse and Tom are at the edge of the whirlpool, trousers cuffed to their knees. I lie stretched out on my side, comfortable despite my cumbersome belly and the stones carpeting the beach. Before spreading the blanket, Tom had put down a thick bed of leaves, as though I were the type to notice a pea under twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds.

I am glad we have come. Despite my belly, the descent was easy, with him holding my upper arm as though I were a china doll and pointing out each root and stone in my path. And he is in good spirits. My chance will come after lunch, once Jesse has fallen asleep.

From the edge of the whirlpool, Jesse calls out, “Mommy, watch,” and drops a twig into an eddy. He drops another and another, and then Tom holds Jesse’s hand still and asks him to guess what will happen to the next twig. They move to another eddy and repeat the process, then another and another, until Jesse can accurately point out the path a twig will take. It almost feels as though I have been transported back through time, as though I have been handed a chance to glimpse my husband as he was with Fergus, and I feel a rush of gratitude.

When I next glance toward the whirlpool, Tom is holding Jesse by the upper arms, lowering him knee deep into the water. Once his feet are settled, Jesse begins to plod against the current. Tom continues to hold his arms, and I know it is a lesson in gauging the power of the river. Still, I am alarmed. I press my lips closed to stop myself from calling out. Even so, as Jesse’s feet are swept from beneath him and Tom lifts him from the water without missing a beat, I holler, “Tom!”

Father and son look in my direction. Jesse waves.

Eventually the three of us are settled on the blanket, and Jesse begins to rub his eyes, still chattering about the pike and muskie and walleye he will catch. I stroke his back until his eyelids droop and he curls up in the folds of my skirt.

“The two of you make a pretty scene,” Tom says. His son like a cherub, his wife the picture of motherhood, one hand on her swollen belly and the other on her sleeping son’s brow.

He sits, watching us, studying us, until I say, “I love you, Tom.”

“I know. You love me even though you’ve worked yourself to the bone ever since you became my wife.”

“Tom, I’ve worked myself to the bone ever since my father lost his fortune and his job.”

“I want to provide for you and Jesse. The baby, too.”

“You will,” I say, smiling my confidence in him but all the while thinking his words are measured, surely a prelude to news I do not want to hear.

“The whirlpool’s spectacular today.”

“Yes.”

“It won’t always be,” he says.

I think of Lord Kelvin, who came up with the absolute temperature scale and knew everything there was to know about magnetism and electricity, and his hope that the falls would one day exist only inside penstocks, hidden from view. “I do not hope our children’s children will ever see Niagara’s cataract,” he had said. The sentiment had always struck me as brutally harsh. Yet just now I find myself swayed. “The Queenston-Chippawa project is happening whether or not you accept Mr. Coulson’s offer,” I say.

“I’ve told myself that a hundred times.”

“And?”

“What’ll I tell Jesse in twenty years when there isn’t a whirlpool at all, not unless some big shot orders the intake gates shut every now and then so the tourists can get a look at the real thing?”

He picks up another pebble and tosses it into the whirlpool, and I do the same. I want him to consider that just possibly hydroelectricity is a good and wondrous thing. But more than that, I want him to put his family first, and I am through with waiting for the perfect moment, a moment that may never come. “There is lots you’ll have to explain before you get to the whirlpool,” I say. “For starters, you can tell Jesse why he’s being raised in a house that isn’t even our own. You can tell him why he can’t invite friends over and why we say ‘shush’ a hundred times a day. You can tell him why his mother rarely has an afternoon just for him. Put us first, Tom. Put your family first.”

Suddenly I feel a tightening in the underside of my belly, a radiating hardness. My hands move to the place.

“What?” he says.

“I’m not sure.”

“Labor?”

“The baby isn’t due for a month.”

By the time we have woken Jesse and packed up the blanket, and gathered the fishing tackle and the several stones he wanted to keep, my belly has grown hard a second and third time.

Midway up the old incline railway tracks, the intensity of a contraction causes me to pause, my fingers curled into my palms. My lips part and then close as I consider the pointlessness of saying that I am afraid. Tom drops the fishing rods and blanket. He lifts Jesse from his shoulders and sets him on the ground. “Show me how fast you can run,” he says. As Jesse sets off, Tom sweeps me up into his arms. He takes the railway ties several at a time, all the while calling out encouragement to Jesse.

I can see his face in profile, the slight curve at the bridge of his nose. His brow is furrowed, his lips pressed into a line. When my body tenses with another contraction and a small moan escapes, he says, “Relax, Bess. Just try to relax.”

“I can’t make it stop.”

“I’ll take the job,” he says. “Everything will be okay.”

Though we are still a good five minutes from River Road and then a further mile from Mrs. Andrews’s house, I feel a fresh sort of calm. The child will be born, probably in our bed, and if I cannot hang on then elsewhere, maybe in the kitchen of some house along the way. The child will be fat and pink and nurse well from the start. We will find a house of our own, and I will sew curtains sheer enough to let the sun shine in. Jesse will scamper around, wild and fast, as noisy as he pleases. And Tom and I will make love early in the morning, before he sets off to work for the day.

24

T
he day after Francis was born, Tom called Mr. Coulson. Within fifteen minutes arrangements had been made for Tom to start at the Hydro-Electric Power Commission the next day. He had not mentioned the new baby, which would likely have meant a bit of grace. His sudden rush had not struck me as odd. It only seemed he had linked providing for his family, as he had said he would, with tiny Francis putting on a bit of weight.

He was born in our bed, with Tom just outside the door. By the time Dr. Galveston arrived, Mrs. Andrews had proven herself capable in midwifery. She left him only the placenta to deliver and the umbilical cord to cut, and told him he ought to be ashamed of himself when he charged us full price. There was no caul, which somehow felt a disappointment and a relief at the same time. With his early arrival, Francis was small and disturbingly thin. The skin on his cheeks was slack, and his eyes appeared large in fleshless sockets, causing him to look like a wise and elderly man. Small or not, his cry was piercing, and it seemed he meant to fill out lickety-split. But after a minute or two at each breast his strength would give way. He would catnap, no more than ten minutes, and then, hungry again, he would startle me from my stupor in the rocking chair. The intensity of his wails had surprised even Dr. Galveston. “Generally,” he said, “the early ones sound more like bleating lambs.” Surely it was a good sign.

We were still living with Mrs. Andrews, but with her own dressmaking commitments as well as the work I had abandoned midstream, she was fully occupied and seldom able to help out. And Tom had begun setting off each morning to a not-yet-dug section of the hydroelectric canal. Though it meant I was left alone to manage a toddler with stamina enough to climb in and out of the gorge several times each week, and an infant who napped only for ten-minute intervals and hollered in between, I did not for a moment wish circumstances were otherwise. At long last, Tom was employed.

He came home from the canal happy and tired, and said his crew was the best of the lot. “I never have to tell any of them off,” he said. “I just get down to work. They’re all decent, not the sort to sit around while other men sweat.” Mr. Coulson went to see Tom from time to time, at first with Tom’s weekly foreman’s report clutched in his hand. He would take Tom aside. “No one was late? No one is slacking off? No one is giving you any guff? It doesn’t reflect badly on you to write it down.” After six weeks the questioning let up. Tom’s crew was managing to clear as much blasted rock as any crew on the canal.

He did his best in the evenings, cooking sausage and bacon and toast, or beef stew. He made a list before he went to work in the morning and stopped in at the market on the way home. After supper he and Jesse romped outdoors, seldom straying from the yard. They went to the river only twice in those first months, once for a body—I had begun to argue Jesse was not old enough but relented when I remembered Isabel’s body laid out on the stone beach—and, a second time, when a boy’s tackle box was found abandoned on a boulder near the Devil’s Hole Rapids. In the nighttime Tom often got to Francis first, and lifted him from the cradle and placed him at my breast. He would watch, the corner of his mouth lifted, his face filled with wonder. His eyes would take on a sheen as he slid a finger into the curl of Francis’s fist. “It’s a miracle,” he would say, and though I sometimes felt the truth in it and tried my best to cultivate the sentiment when I did, it was never quite enough to tilt me toward believing in the miraculous once the moment had passed.

Several times, in those first few months, Mother managed to cajole train fare from Father and came alone to Niagara Falls to stay for a few days. A hotel room out of the question, she would put her travel case under the narrow cot Mrs. Andrews had set up for her in a corner of the sewing room, and I would sigh a great sigh of relief as she got down to the business of putting things right. I expect, though, that Tom had not anticipated her visits in quite the same way.

No sooner had she joined Tom and me at supper one evening than she plopped a catalog onto the table. “Take a look,” she said.

It took me a moment of flipping through pages to figure out the catalog was advertising a line of kits for homes put out by Sears, Roebuck and Company.

“Some of them are just lovely.” She turned to a model called the Westly. “There’s a balcony off the front bedroom, and it’s got a center hall plan.” I was only just beginning to wonder what Father would make of her fascination with the Westly and whether she even had the nerve to broach the topic of a catalog home with him when she said, “It’s got three bedrooms, just perfect for you.”

“For us?” I said.

She looked up and smiled. “You’re saving.” It was true; still, it would be a good while before we had enough for a down payment.

“It’s more house than we’ll ever need,” Tom said.

“Oh, dream a little.” She patted his hand. “You’re spoiling your wife’s fun.”

“He isn’t,” I said, but already he was pushing back from the table and saying he was going out to the shed.

Mother took in my folded arms and with him still in earshot said, “Come on, Bess. You want a house with a center hall plan. I know you do.”

And one morning she came into the kitchen while he was packing his lunch and told him he should think about wearing a collar to work, that if he dressed like a laborer it was what he would always be. “Mr. Coulson wants to help,” she said. “You might as well make it easy for him.”

Tom snapped his lunch pail closed and met Mother’s gaze. Without a hint of malice, he said, “I prefer a neckcloth to a collar. It comes in handy when I’m using a pickax, which is most of the time.”

Then Francis was awake and hollering upstairs, and Mother said she would go and left the two of us.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“She wants the best for you, is all.”

“I can’t believe her, spouting off, when she can’t work up the nerve to ask my father for fifteen cents.”

“It’s got nothing to do with nerve, Bess. It’s got to do with knowing your father, and knowing what’s possible and what’s not.” He buttoned up his jacket.

I wondered whether he was right, also whether the same cleverness that kept her from badgering Father suggested that she keep pestering Tom, that one day the effort would be worthwhile. “Thirty-five dollars a week is more than enough for me. I don’t care if you ever make a penny more.”

I had meant to reassure, and he smiled, but then when it seemed he was about to speak, he pressed his lips closed.

“What?” I said.

“The first generators at the powerhouse will be switched on in a little over a year. Men are already getting laid off.” He lifted his lunch pail from the countertop.

“Mr. Coulson’s watching out for you,” I said. “He’s already said your crew is moving on to the forebay once you’re through with the canal.”

“And once the forebay’s dug?”

“There are eight more generators scheduled for the powerhouse,” I said. “It’s all going to take a long time.”

B
y the time Francis was a year old we had almost saved enough for a down payment and I had begun looking in earnest for a house. It was during the house hunting that Mrs. Andrews called me into the parlor one evening. She sat down on the chesterfield across from the chair where she had gestured for me to sit and said, “There are things I’d like to do before I’m six feet under. I want to see my sister in San Francisco and then keeping going west. I want to stand on the Great Wall of China. I want to see the white marble of the Taj Mahal, maybe tick off a few more of the Seven Wonders of the World.”

I must have looked doubtful, because she laughed and went on. “I inherited this house and have put away most of what I’ve made. I’m no spendthrift. And I have an uncle, a well-connected uncle, who put my savings in the Steel Company of Canada. With automobiles and then the war, I’ve done pretty well.”

I sat with my hands folded in my lap, thinking of the postcard collection tacked to the window casing in the sewing room. “Your postcards,” I said.

“Most of them were Everett’s. He’d been collecting since before we were married, and then after he died people kept bringing them to me. He used to say we’d see all those places.” She paused a moment, then patted her thighs and said, “Back to the reason I called you in here. You’re a fine seamstress. And the new styles? Well, you’re more comfortable with them than I’ll ever be. You’ve got a head for numbers, too.”

I nodded, uncertain. I knew she thought I was a capable seamstress, though it was not the sort of thing she ever said. And then to pay me a second compliment, she was not a bit herself.

“You know all the regulars, and I’ve been showing off your work. Half the customers you aren’t already sewing for wish that you were. They just can’t figure out how to say so.” She pushed her glasses upward, to the bridge of her nose. “The news that I’m handing over the business to you will come as a relief.”

“I don’t know,” I said. I had imagined I would continue to spend my mornings and afternoons alongside her, chatting away the hours, laughing at her commentary on Mrs. So-and-So’s abysmal taste or ever-expanding rear end. It had occurred to me that someday I would like a business of my own, but that someday had always been in the far-off future, when Mrs. Andrews was tired, when she had taught me all that she could.

“What’s not to know?”

It was true that I had become competent with needle and thread, and that over the years she had persisted in explaining the business side of dressmaking to me. Maybe she was right. Maybe there was no reason to be anything but pleased. “You have been so kind, from the start,” I said. “You have given me so much. Tom and the boys, too.”

She glanced away, but not before I noticed her eyes were damp. “I haven’t given you anything,” she said, “that you haven’t given me.” With that she stood up and turned away to adjust the position of a vase on the windowsill.

T
om’s only requirement for our house was that it be an easy walk from the whirlpool and lower rapids. I wanted three bedrooms—one for Tom and me, and one for the boys, and one for sewing. I wanted a veranda, even if it was small, a place to lounge with a book and remember the days when I read to Isabel. I wanted a living room with a chesterfield where I could sit alongside Tom on winter evenings, our stocking feet extending beyond a blanket and resting on a hearth before a simmering fire. I wanted closets, those modern tiny rooms for housing linens and clothing and other bits best kept tucked away. I wanted an up-to-date bathroom, with a basin, toilet, and bath. I wanted electric light, so commonplace now that putting it on the list hardly made sense. But I had heard Tom say he preferred the soft glow of a kerosene lamp to the brightness of an electric bulb, and I needed to make sure I did not end up the only woman in town still scrubbing away soot.

The houses closest to the whirlpool and lower rapids, on River Road, were large, with wraparound verandas and leaded glass and three chimneys, the sorts of places we could not afford. That left only Silvertown. And because I did not much like the greedy view of myself apparent in my own long list, I agreed. We would live just beneath the bluff on which Glenview sits, a neighborhood where I was sure to catch the odd summertime whiff of the privies that still existed there though almost nowhere else in Niagara Falls.

I found a near perfect house on May Avenue and for a price we were able to pay, though there would not be a penny left for a rainy day, let alone furniture. The ceilings were lower than I had hoped and the rooms only moderate in size. The only real disappointment, though, was the stove, an antiquated wood-burning affair. The cast iron was freshly blackened, but that did little to disguise the fact that it would need to be polished again and again. In Mrs. Andrews’s kitchen, I had grown used to enamel that wiped clean with just a cloth and become a competent cook, an accomplishment surely tied to the electric burners of her stove.

When Tom first saw the house, he looked around uneasily. “What’ll we put in all the rooms?” he said.

“We’ll have it furnished in a couple of years.”

“It’ll cost a fortune to heat.”

“We’ll manage.”

As he became ever more quiet, it struck me that while our anxiety over such a large purchase was evenly matched, only mine was offset by glee. It was I who spun in the kitchen and threw my arms around his neck in the bedroom I wanted to share with him and I, again, who smoothed my palms over the oak of the mantelpiece. He began scrutinizing the walls, pressing his fingertips against them to test the give. He examined the wooden siding and cedar shingles of the exterior, looking for rot. When he said he wondered if he felt a bit of spring in the dining room floor, he returned to the cellar to take another look at the joists. He stayed down there a long while, long enough for me to know he was through with the joists. When he emerged, he said, “They’re number one yellow pine, spaced sixteen inches apart.”

“And?”

“It’s good.”

“Then there’s no reason not to take it,” I said.