The Whirlpool (12 page)

N
ow Patrick understood that, like a child at play, observed, but not conscious of observation, the woman would reveal sides of herself to him that she had revealed to no one else. He would experience her when she was whole, not fragmented into considerations of self and other. Part of this process would involve his already skilful hidden observations, his ability to camouflage himself in forests, his cunning conversations with her husband, his almost magical talent for abrupt departures.

But he needed more. He wanted her past as well; her recent history, the seasons she had lived through before the tent, the architecture she had abandoned. It seemed to him that what she had left behind might be as significant as what she had subsequently chosen. He wanted an utter comprehension of the forces that had moved her into the forest, what she had seen and listened to on winter mornings, which chair she most often occupied, her favourite window. He wanted to know how she had managed her apparently fearless letting go – of domestic architecture, of closed spaces – how she had been able to turn away in order to embrace the open. He wanted to discover the exact moment when the whirlpool had taken hold of her life.

In the mornings, when he crouched in the woods watching her read, tend flowers, wash china, keep the fire, he saw
the woman as she was now. When her chores were completed, he visited the whirlpool with her, watched her launch tiny boats, listened to her singing, memorized the tunes.

In the afternoons, he visited the world she had left behind. He boarded the streetcar and rode it into town, certain that his arrival would follow McDougal’s departure for the camp, avoiding Fridays when the major worked in his rooms all day. He strolled casually up and down the wooden sidewalk that bordered the street outside the hotel, attempting to reconstruct
her
walking there, picturing her boots on the planks when they were covered with snow, or darkened by rain, or blanketed with maple leaves. He thought about the rocking chairs on the verandah. Had she ever sat in them? Did her mind slip down to the whirlpool as the furniture rocked under her weight? Had she read there? Who, if anyone, had she spoken to?

Mostly, however, his attempts to find even a trace of her there were unsuccessful. She was chained, in his mind, to the whirlpool, to the woods. To the tent and to the fire. But certainly he believed that his repeated exposure to this abandoned geography
must
result in some form of understanding about the lure of the whirlpool, its organic pull. What he was trying to discover was what had made her select that part of the forest, which he had merely stumbled across by chance.

Today, he decided he would examine the opposite side of the street, the places which, in the course of the ordinary events which made up the other seasons of her life, she must have visited on shopping errands. The grocer’s, the butcher’s, the post office. He mailed a postcard of the waterfall to his wife, saying that he missed her, lying. He could not, for the life of him, imagine the woman in the forest buying stamps. Who would she be writing to, about what? Still he went through the motions attempting to become her in the act of pushing mail across the counter.

Back on the sidewalk once again – he stood directly across from the hotel and looked up to the windows which he knew
were McDougal’s, knowing she would never have done this but curious nonetheless. A tree grew directly in front of one of the windows but the views from the other three were unobstructed. Now he was part of that view, a thin young man in dark clothes leaning against a white picket fence, looking into a spot that she at one time must have looked out of. But what could he learn from this? Nothing more than the fact that he was on the wrong side. He tried to remember something about the windows from his visit with the major. Had the sills been painted, were they dusty, was the glass clean? He recalled the view, the landscape he was now briefly part of, but nothing of the opposite side of the windows – could not even say with certainty whether or not there were curtains. Perhaps these details were unimportant. It was the woman’s enclosure there and her looking out that mattered.

As he stood there, looking up, his mind filled with glass and leaves as he believed hers must have been at one time or another, a word caught him unawares. Barely a whisper, it fluttered somewhere near the back part of his brain so that he thought that what he was listening to was wind in the trees, or even the small noises his starched shirt made against his jacket when he shifted position. The word was “Nothing.”

Patrick was not, at first, distracted by it, attributing it to air currents. He wanted to picture how raindrops on the opposite side of the glass might appear to a woman looking out and was concentrating upon that. But when he caught it a second and then a third time, he was forced to turn and seek its source which, he was surprised to discover, was the mouth of the small boy he had seen standing in this yard before. “Nothing,” the boy was saying, pointing to the window which had until now held Patrick’s attention.

“Nothing?” Patrick asked, confused.

“Nothing,” the boy replied conclusively.

Patrick stared at the child who stood directly behind the picket fence which surrounded the undertaking establishment. He was dressed in a marine-blue waistcoat and knee
britches and had a small, worn, featureless toy tucked under one elbow. He might have been any age between three and six.

“Nothing,” he said again, still not looking at the man he apparently addressed.

“What’s nothing?” asked Patrick.

“Nothing,” said the child, carefully enunciating both syllables.

“Yes, but where?”

“Be-reavement,” said the child.

“Whose bereavement?” asked Patrick, surprised.

“Sorrow,” replied the child with a bored sigh, something close to a yawn. “Wheelbarrow.”

“Have you lost your wheelbarrow?”

The child stroked his toy and looked absently around the yard. “Floater,” he said vaguely.

Patrick attempted to recall how one was supposed to behave in the presence of small children. Lollipops and storybooks sprang into his mind along with other, more improvisational possibilities – string games and shadowy animals made upon walls by wringing your hands in the path of a coal-oil lamp. He did not, however, have the former objects on his person and he had never mastered the skills of the latter performances.

“What’s your name?” he asked the child.

“Parlour,” said the boy, moving his free arm back and forth across the flower garden immediately in front of him. “Aug-ust,” he continued.

“No,” said Patrick, “July now, August next.”

The child gazed down the street at an approaching trolley. “Sofa,” he announced and nodded wisely.

Intrigued, Patrick searched his pockets for something to give to the boy. He finally decided upon a nickel, which he placed in the flat centre of his palm as he reached over the fence.

“Onion,” said the boy.

“Nickel,” said Patrick.

The child was not to be moved. He retaliated with the word “shovel.”

“No,” said Patrick patiently, “nickel… this is a nickel… for you.”

The child stroked his toy and ignored the coin. “Salad fork!” he sang as the trolley, making a great deal of noise, rolled by. “Ri-ver.”

Patrick looked back towards the windows of the hotel. He wondered what it would be like to be a man on the inside, watching a woman walk over to the window, pause, draw the curtain aside, and look down into the street. For a single instant he saw her figure, darkly dressed and surrounded by the light that moved in from the outside, through glass, to the room. And in that instant he knew everything that would have been in her mind. She would not merely be a woman looking out, she would be a woman wanting out.

“River!” The child’s word rang in Patrick’s daydream like an awakening angelus, forcing him out of the cool dark of the imagined room, back onto the street. He glanced at the trolley as it moved into the distance and said the word “streetcar,” slowly and distinctly, turning, as he enunciated it, back towards the boy.

“Ri-ver,” the child said again, stubbornly but without his original exuberance, and then, pointing to the fence, “blossom.”

This child, these words, disconnected from their sources, began to astound Patrick, to set up ridiculous yet poetic associations. All at once he was certain that, when he visited the river in the future, he would be unable to do so without conjuring streetcars in his imagination. Likewise, from this day on, he supposed that journeys on streetcars would include water moving behind his forehead. Finally, this idea delighted him. The child’s uttered nonsense was a revelation, not unlike the intoxicating leaps he had known himself to take, only once or twice, in the manipulation of language. Suddenly Patrick
wanted to experiment with the child, to lay his own obsessions out in front of him like clothes on a bed, just to experience the words this boy might attach to them. He wanted to expose all. Suddenly, by virtue of its very randomness, the child’s speech became profound.

“Woman,” Patrick began, tentatively, almost with embarrassment.

“Thunder,” the child replied immediately.

“Forest,” said Patrick.

“Cellar door.” The boy pointed up to the sky.

“Swimming.” Patrick held his breath, waiting for a response.

“Keeping,” said the boy, and then, as if sensing the importance of the subject, he added the word “collar.”

“Whirlpool,” Patrick ventured, looking directly, and with emotion, into the little face.

“Oh,” said the boy, reaching with his free arm across the barrier, the fence, catching Patrick’s cuff in his small hand. “Oh, oh, oh,” he sighed, rubbing his chest against the fabric that he found there. Then he looked up at the man who had been talking to him and repeated every word they had spoken, quite tenderly and carefully.

I
nside Grady and Son, Maud Grady climbed the stairs holding the child’s fist firmly in her hand.

“Thunder woman,” he whispered.

“What do you mean by that?” she asked quickly and with the slight twitch that visited the left side of her face when she was annoyed. “What on earth….” She checked herself and, after searching the boy’s face for a moment, she laughed, remembering that he would have no idea what he was saying.

She had just finished giving instructions to the men downstairs where they had been preparing for the summer’s inevitable Stuntman.

They were working mostly in secret, for preparation in an undertaking establishment was not something the community approved of, even in circumstances such as these. In fact, when sixty years before, the first Drummondville Grady had decided to stockpile coffins before they were ordered, no one spoke to him on the street for a fortnight. This was considered, among other things, to be both highly immoral and bad luck. In the outlying concessions it was rumoured that you could predict the number of infant deaths over the winter by counting the number of coffins in Jim Grady’s stable, as if he were the grim reaper himself. Years later, when he had purchased a second hearse, the Methodist minister of the time had preached a pointed sermon which he titled “The Wages of Death.”

It would not be proper for Maud to be present at the time of the performance. “Looking for business,” the town matrons would whisper as they had the first, and last, time she attempted to visit an ailing friend. Maud had been shaken then, deeply hurt, knowing that business would come to her whether she looked for it or not. Now she knew which clubs to avoid, which social events to stay away from. The Historical Society, dedicated to facts and personalities already buried, was almost safe. But even there she made it a habit never to be seen in the company of someone whose relative might have taken a turn for the worse.

In the back room, on the ground floor, the three men who worked for Maud scrubbed up their equipment like housewives expecting an important guest. Laying down their money beside the sink, they bet on the outcome. Jas the carpenter, almost reluctantly, in favour of success; Sam the embalmer, and the second carpenter Peter, for failure.

Sam was speaking now. “The last one was a mess. The River Man was fishing him out for days!” He scratched his balding head. “What’s a man supposed to do with something like that? Certainly couldn’t have recommended an open coffin.”

“A couple
have
made it,” Jas interjected.

“Yes, but the damned fools feel they have to do it again.” He patted a nearby coffin. “Sooner or later they all end up right here.”

“Pretty in the cradle, ugly on the table,” Peter mumbled. The other two men laughed.

On the wall beside the window a calendar, topped by a chromo litho of the Falls, announced the month of April. The embalmer walked across the room and tore off three successive sheets of paper.

“It’s a form of suicide, I suppose,” he said, crumpling April in his slim hands. “But at least we know it’s happening. I like these fellas a damn sight better than the ones who spend the winter locked in the ice -” he disposed of the month of May –
“or the ones who don’t surface for a month or two… God!” He threw June into the garbage in disgust.

The other two men were silent. All of them knew about the ugliness of floaters.

“Lord,” he went on, “give me train wrecks, carriage accidents, murder victims, disasters of war, but spare me from floaters!”

The smell, the men knew, lingered for days.

“Now take your tightrope walkers,” Peter began, changing the subject. “Your average tightrope walker hereabouts is just not the suicidal type. He could be walking that rope in a tent or over the Grand Canyon… chances are just the same that he’ll make it to the other side and he
knows
it. But these fellas in their rapid-shooting contraptions, what in Sam Hill do they think is going to happen to them?”

The embalmer was looking far off into space. “Remember that Italian girl, the one who went across with buckets on her feet and a skirt way up to here?” He gestured to his thighs, vaguely at crotch level.

The image of that lady’s pink thighs appeared simultaneously in all three men’s imaginations.

“Wasn’t she something?” Sam continued dreamily. “I’d like to have her next to the wall on a Saturday night… buckets and all!”

Now she appeared to them once again, this time flat on her back with her buckets sticking straight up in the air.

“They say Blondin took a stove out there and fried an egg,” said Jas, who liked a fantasy as much as any man but believed, as a result of a strict upbringing, that you should never discuss such things.

But the embalmer wasn’t listening. “Some said she wore pink stockings but I could swear those thighs were as bare as God made them.” He walked over to the window. “And her arms too… you know, that girl hardly had any clothes on at all.”

All up and down Main Street, as far as Sam could see from the window, families were beginning their trek down the hill
towards the river. Some were clustered around the place where the streetcar stopped; others had obviously decided to go it on foot. All carried provisions: picnic baskets, blankets, umbrellas, folding chairs, fieldglasses, spy glasses, handkerchiefs (in case of an overwhelmingly moving disaster), megaphones (to cheer on or curse at the stunt man), babies wrapped in tight bundles with bonnets twice the size of their tiny bodies. It was a restless crowd whose emotions were torn between a feigned concern for the safety of the daredevil and a more honest desire for blood. All those over the age of five were discussing the outcome of similar exploits, savouring the goriest details while shaking their heads at the impetuosity of the human spirit.

Today, a young man named Buck O’Connor, who came from no farther away than Grimsby, was to shoot the whirlpool rapids in a vehicle he had constructed himself from the antlers and the tanned hides of several moose he had killed on hunting trips over the years. “Durned fool!” Sam had said. “He won’t look nearly as good as a dead moose when he’s finished.”

The young man claimed, however, that the tanned hide of a moose is stronger than steel, and less dangerous since it gives, rather than breaks, under pressure. Moreover, he contended, moose antlers were known to be almost entirely unbreakable. His contraption, labelled “The Mighty Moose,” had been on display for a week now, at a quarter a peek, down at the Maid of the Mist Landing. Even the children who went down there to look at it came away believing Buck hadn’t a prayer.

“Goddam!” Peter the carpenter had said, returning to Grady and Son after viewing the rig. “That thing’ll be torn to pieces faster than you can say knife.”

“Guess I’d better thread my needle,” sighed Sam the embalmer.

The three men locked the workshop door and let themselves out by the back. They walked across the garden to the stables, Jas pointing out the pansies as they passed.

“Larger than usual, I’d say.”

The two horses, whom Sam had named Jesus Christ and God Almighty, were bridled, ready to go, hitched up to a wagon with a seat in the front which could accommodate all three men. They walked past it and climbed the open wooden stairs to the stable’s attic.

“The question is,” said Sam, pushing back the straw hat he always wore on special occasions, “will it be wicker or tin?”

“Wicker,” said Peter, moving towards the coffin-shaped basket. “If he doesn’t make it he won’t be in the river long enough to smell.”