The Day the Falls Stood Still (26 page)

It is more than I can bear, his suggestion that I should have brought Jesse. “I’m not much interested in having him watch his father drown.”

“Bess, that wasn’t going to happen.”

“Another line could have been shot out. Another pulley and sling could’ve been rigged up. You didn’t need to go out.”

“God, you’re pretty when you’re worked up,” he says with a careful smile.

It is an effort to charm me from my mood, and any other day I would be pleased. Not today though. Today I fold my arms.

“We would have had to send for new lines,” he says. “All that takes time.”

“You’re saying that there wasn’t time, that the scow was set to go over the brink?”

“I knew what I was doing,” he says. “I was sure.”

I want to yell, to fall to my knees. Instead I breathe deeply, steadying myself. “But the lines holding you up were tied to the scow.”

“That scow wasn’t going anywhere. It’ll be there until the bottom rusts out.”

“But if you were sure it’d stay put, all the more reason to wait for new lines. Why didn’t you just wait?” I keep up the pace though I am becoming short of breath.

“Those men had been out there half the night, and they were scared to death.”

“You have a family,” I say. “And I feel like an afterthought. Do you think I wasn’t afraid? Think of me. Think of your sons, instead of two men you don’t even know.”

“Bess, I could just tell. I just knew.”

“Fergus isn’t out there with you, keeping an eye on things, if that’s what you think.” There is a mocking lilt in my voice.

He stops, waits for me to do the same. He looks me in the eye. “There’s something.”

“There isn’t. You’re alone.” I spit the words, feel my throat constrict. “Fergus is gone. Dead. Dust.” My voice breaks as I say, “Like Isabel,” and Tom reaches for my hand but stops short as I jerk it away.

“Way back you told me you’d seen bits of silver—prayers—in the mist,” he says.

“I was wrong,” I say, resuming the march home.

We walk on in silence, his gait sluggish now, lagging my own furious stride.

M
idmorning, I am alone in the kitchen, giving the final pressing to the pleated skirt of a dress for Mrs. Ross. The boys are with Mrs. Mancuso, and Tom has gone off to work. If we had been speaking, I might have told him not to go. He was shivering, despite a flannel shirt and knitted vest, despite a bowl of oatmeal and a mug of tea. The room is silent, except for a clunk when I roughly set the flatiron on the trivet, annoyed with myself for the sloppy job I am making of the pleats.

I pace the main-floor rooms, mulling over the morning, my argument with Tom. I hesitate in the dining room, empty except for a pine sideboard delivered just the other day. Tom’s notebook is facedown, spread open on the sideboard, the way he left it last night. I leaf through pages of tables, columns of carefully printed numbers and dates, margins filled with notes, some underlined so heavily that the paper is nearly worn through.

As I close the cover, I am clear-eyed about what Tom saw when he stepped into our May Avenue house for the first time. He saw more house than he thought necessary. He saw a costly mantelpiece. He saw empty rooms, a kitchen without so much as a table, three bedrooms without so much as a single bed. He saw yet another tether strung between himself and the Hydro-Electric Power Commission.

He has said more than once that much of the Queenston-Chippawa power project is complete, that already men are being laid off. It seems he had said it clinging to the possibility he would one day finally be free from the place. But I had not wanted to hear. “Mr. Coulson’s watching out for you,” I had said, and Tom had stayed on.

So now there is the notebook full of tables, and I think I understand the rationale behind measurements better than he does himself. His penance for contributing to the Queenston-Chippawa power project would include making himself acutely aware of just how much damage was done, just how much he had caused his river to suffer.

I am back in the kitchen, taking another stab at the pleats, when Tom comes in the door. “Everyone’s heard about the scow, and I was told to go home and get some sleep,” he says. “I won’t get docked for the time off.”

“I know you go to work for me, for the boys,” I tell him. “I know we’re not an afterthought. I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

“I don’t want you to be afraid,” he says. He slips his arms around my waist, gently kisses my brow.

Mrs. Ross will not come by for another hour, and I have only a small section of skirt left to iron. I would like nothing better than to set the flatiron on the trivet, gently this time, and follow Tom upstairs, but there is the hollow rap of the door knocker.

I open the door to Mr. Coulson on the veranda, grinning, shaking his head, and then, a moment later, clapping Tom on the back. I offer tea, usher him into the kitchen—there is not yet seating for three in the living room—and thank my lucky stars the breakfast dishes are washed, even if the ironing board is set up in the middle of the room.

“Quite a feat this morning,” Mr. Coulson says, taking a seat.

“I guess,” Tom says, sitting down opposite him.

And then the conversation continues with Mr. Coulson asking questions and Tom offering precious few words in response, until Mr. Coulson says, “I expect those two fellows told you they were under contract with us.”

“Those men, they had no business out in that scow,” Tom says. “The only dredging they’d ever done was in some creek up in Alaska, looking for gold.”

“We put the work to tender. We explained exactly what our requirement was. The specifics were laid out.”

“Men are desperate. Men will say they know about tugs and scows and the river if it means a few dollars.”

“Drury’s got a commission investigating cost overruns, and they’re breathing down my neck.”

“Still,” Tom says, hardening his gaze. “For the sake of a few dollars the Hydro could have lost a couple of men.”

Mr. Coulson pushes himself back from the table, from Tom. “You might want to take it up with Leslie Scott. He signed off on the work order. Dredging is his bailiwick.”

For a split second Tom looks perplexed, but then he says, “I see.” It would have been Mrs. Coulson who told him my family spends more than the occasional evening with Kit and Leslie. Only last Saturday I had looked at the two of them—Leslie with his spectacles and hollow chest, Tom with his height and rolled-up shirtsleeves—and thought what an unlikely pair they were. Even so, they were talking up plans for a campout in the glen.

Mr. Coulson takes off his spectacles, rubs them with a handkerchief. He glances at his watch. “I’m due at the office,” he says, standing up. Then he produces a stack of notes and holds it out to Tom.

He shakes his head. “No.”

“You risked your life. You had the wherewithal to send for a lifeline gun and then the courage to go out to the men.”

Tom’s hands remain folded on the table.

“Take it,” Mr. Coulson says. “Think of it as pay for a job well done. You’ve saved the Hydro a great deal of trouble. You saved the lives of two men.”

Mr. Coulson sets the notes on the table, nudges them toward Tom.

After Mr. Coulson leaves, with only me escorting him to the door, Tom sits still a long while, and I pick up the flatiron and do my best to turn my attention to the pleats. Eventually he picks up the notes, counts them, and then counts them again. “A hundred dollars,” he says.

“A hundred dollars?”

“Three weeks’ pay. Six weeks’, if Mr. Coulson hadn’t decided I’m worth more to the Hydro than any other workingman.”

“It’s generous.”

“I’m being paid to keep my mouth shut.”

“You don’t know that,” I say, setting the flatiron on the trivet, giving up on the pleats.

“He practically came right out and said the Hydro would make a show of doing the right thing and sack Leslie if anyone kicked up a fuss.”

“I think that’s a bit of a leap.”

It has not escaped me that Tom had dangled above the Niagara River just upriver from the brink, that he had done it to save the lives of two men who had ended up there because prudence had been swept aside for the sake of profit. Still, it seems Tom, with Leslie in mind, will not publicly lay blame, and among the sensations churning in my gut there is relief. Also, there is fear, even shame, that Tom spoke so harshly to the man I have grown used to assuming would catch us if we fell. And there is something new. Doubt. Has it always been that Mr. Coulson is really only looking out for himself?

28

A
t 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.

T
he 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.”

F
or 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 kiss 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.

I
am 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.

K
it 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.