The Whirlpool (9 page)

P
atrick was standing ankle deep in the mallows at the shore watching, trying to understand the current of the whirlpool, throwing branches into the water, watching them move out into the width of the river, losing them, then finding them again, with the fieldglasses. The thing that confused him was the size, the breadth of the river here, so large that the bend in the current was practically invisible. Still the most complete stranger would be aware of the giant eddy, would speak the word “whirlpool.” He knew that.

That morning he had begun a letter to his wife, attempting to describe this geography which she had never seen, attempting to describe his walks. He had surprised even himself by mentioning cliffs, waterfalls, orchards, woods, vineyards and whirlpools all in the same paragraph and he suspected that she would believe him to be romanticizing his surroundings. He told her he had stayed up until dawn after the lecture at the Historical Society thinking about the Battle of Lundy’s Lane – the first time he had approached such a subject. Then, realizing that she would have little interest in either the landscape or the fighting, he had crumpled the paper in his fist.

He sat down on a rock near the shore and stared out over the water not wishing, as yet, to climb back up the bank. An
otter appeared and slid into the water like a ghost without a backbone or a fish with fur.

This river was not the ocean, but it was staggering in the way he believed that the ocean might be. Its size, endless movement, shocked and moved him in a way that was basically silent. He had brought his notebook there, had the title “Maelstrom” on his mind, but no further words would come to him. It was like a conversation he couldn’t begin, never mind finish, in some crazy way like talking to his wife in the moments of her silent anger when she seemed so much larger than him.

He remembered the smaller, more accessible lake where he had spent his childhood, remembered its details. He could, in fact, recall the bulrushes near the shore, how they bent in the wind and changed colour with the season. He knew how a slight shift of weather could change the surface of the lake, break apart its reflections. This water was untouchable, inexplicable. He felt he could really only see it from a distance, through a telescope, from another planet.

And then the sound of the rapids, camouflaging all danger. His childhood lake had magnified noise; in the winter or on still summer evenings you could hear coyotes move on the opposite shore, or the flap of a blackbird’s wing sailing over the water to the forest.

Rice Lake, where the wild rice grew along the edges. Spook Island crouching offshore.

Once Patrick had been a swimmer in that shallow, gentle body of water. He would bathe with the Indian children from the reservation, gliding under water while they scrambled and splashed and pushed their bodies, churning through the surface, his fine hair trailing, reed-like behind him. Theirs pushed into irregular shapes by a fiercer combat with the water.

Submerge. To place oneself below and lose character, identity, inside another element. It was this quiet diving that attracted him, holding his breath for long periods, his eyes
open, finally surprising himself when the weird landscape of Spook Island burst out at him when he surfaced.

There was never anything to see under there, the fine soil of the bottom clouding the water. Never anything to see but soft brown and shafts of sunlight penetrating this from the world above.

The world above. That’s where he lived all the time now. Patrick had not swum for years. He remembered the liquid envelope, the feeling of total caress. Nothing but water and certain winds could touch him like that, all over.

It began to rain, large drops of water that were instantly swallowed by the whirlpool’s restless surface. He collected some of them in the palm of his hand before the downpour thickened. When it did, he decided to begin the ascent to the top of the bank. After five minutes of hard climbing, he looked through the grey sheet of rain towards the summit. He was astonished to see the woman standing there under a black umbrella, apparently watching him. He began, once again, to climb, slipping now and then on the steep path which had become, almost immediately, unreliable with the change in the weather. He took his time reaching the top, and when he did, it was with a combination of disappointment and relief that he discovered she had disappeared.

Patrick, standing alone at the top of the bank, made a decision. He would swim again somehow. He looked out over the difficult whirlpool. He would swim there and take the world above with him, if necessary. This would be his battle and his strength.

This was Friday, the day he had promised to meet the major at the hotel. Patrick would be gathering his own evidence, doing his own research while he listened to the historian’s incontestable proof. Learning the woman.

At the edge of the forest he stood for nearly thirty minutes, waiting for the streetcar which would take him up to Main Street. The fog in the air and the slow wind made
the whole landscape appear as if it were growing under water.

Later, he could never decide whether the woman had been close enough to see his face.

Approaching the white clapboard of Kick’s Hotel, Patrick did not concern himself with thoughts of blood soaking into the soil he walked on. Still, after the lecture, he had discovered that a part of his intellect had become interested in the concept of ownership as it applies to military events. McDougal clearly felt the battle was all his, right down to the last death throes in the dawn hours. The Americans were dismissed, sent back to their own side of the river, giving up, at the moment of retreat, not only their interest in Canada but, if the major had his way, any real participation in the battle. After the lecture, Patrick was able to imagine the American troops, able to visualize them, but always with their backs turned, running away into the morning.

He climbed three wooden steps, crossed the planked verandah, and entered the hotel. Before he could make inquiries he heard McDougal call him from the top of the staircase. The major had obviously been waiting for him, watching his approach from an upper window. In the interior darkness, Patrick could only see the other man as a vague, featureless silhouette. Then he felt the lens in his brain creak open, ready, for the moment, to take in history.

“Let me tell you all about Laura Secord.” McDougal broached the subject as he poured the younger man a third cup of tea. “Laura Secord is almost entirely responsible for my career as a military historian.”

“What… did you know her, then?” Patrick began to employ mental arithmetic to determine if this was chronologically possible.

“Only by reputation.”

The two men were sitting by the window in McDougal’s rooms. They had an excellent view of the funeral home from there.

“Built right on the Lundy’s Lane battlefield, and not much later,” McDougal had said, shaking his head at the travesty.

The major’s living quarters were not up to much; two rooms filled with books and papers, a few overstuffed chairs, a huge elaborate oak bed and McDougal’s desk… apparently the site of much activity. Out the window, the undertaker’s establishment and Drummond Hill Cemetery rising up behind its roof.

“Laura’s buried there, you know,” McDougal said, turning in his chair so that he could see the spot. “Not that anyone cares or anything like that. All of this really should be sacred land.” The sweep of his arm took in most of Main Street: the greengrocer, the barbershop, the blacksmith near the corner. “Look what the Americans have done with Gettysburg! This country buries its history so fast people with memories are considered insane. The Americans still think they won the 1812 war, which I assure you they did not, and nobody up here gives a damn one way or another.”

“About Laura Secord,” Patrick nudged the other man gently back to the original subject.

“Ah yes,… she came to me in a dream, you see, saying,
Remind them, remind them
. I was in college at the time studying anything but Canadian history. I was dreaming a lot too. Don’t dream any more for some reason.”

“You’re joking, of course… about her talking to you in the dream.”

“No, I certainly am not joking, and under the circumstances, I’d say she had a point. Why
wasn’t
I studying Canadian history? Did you know there are no less than three hundred and forty-two books in print in the United States on the subject of the War of 1812?”

No, Patrick didn’t know.

“All from their point of view, of course.”

“What
is
their point of view?”

“Total victory! They never lost a battle, a skirmish, a cockfight. Arrogant bastards!”

“But some British historians…”

“Ah yes, the celebrated British historians. But they were never here, you see.” McDougal pointed through the floor, two storeys down to the ground. “According to them, the whole goddam war was fought by gallant sailors, all of British birth, on the briny deep.” He threw his hands up in despair. “No credit given to men like Captain Drummond -” he nodded vaguely in the direction of the cemetery – “who was a Canadian by birth. No credit given to Laura Secord. The truth is the Brits dressed some of us up in red uniforms, let some of us fight with pitchforks in our overalls, and then they promptly forgot about all of us. God Save the Fat Unattractive Queen! That’s all they care about.”

“So, am I to assume that you are going to write a book?”

“Yes, you may assume that. But since no one has given a damn up until now, compiling the information, the papers, may take me the rest of my life. I may never finish it… never. And now, this summer, I have to have a house built. My wife wants a house.”

Patrick’s palms began to sweat. Looking around the rooms, he agreed it was no place for a woman. He imagined his own wife’s reaction to this setting which screamed of a lack of domesticity. But even so, it would be too confining for the woman in the woods.

“Did you know that she wore a brown cotton dress with little orange flowers printed on it?” McDougal walked across the room and began to straighten some of the papers on his desk. “And she had nothing on her feet but a pair of little leather slippers.”

“Your wife?” asked Patrick, eagerly leaning forward in his chair.

“No, no… Laura Secord.”

Patrick fell back, disappointed but patient. McDougal was looking for something now, something buried beneath the mounds of paper on the desk. “By the time she reached Fitzgibbon’s headquarters,” the major continued, “the little shoes were lost, her feet were bare. And she had crossed Twelve Mile Creek not once, but twice!” McDougal reached for something situated under a huge pile of documents. “Aha, I’ve found it!” he announced triumphantly.

In his hand he held a small bronze paperweight fashioned in the shape of a cow. “This,” he cried, “is Laura Secord’s cow!”

Patrick, thoroughly convinced now that he had lost the thread of conversation, merely stared stupidly at the object in the other man’s hand.

“Imagine it,” McDougal continued, “the young, slim woman alone, walking through the enemy-infested, beast-ridden woods, and she has the presence of mind to bring a cow along to fool the enemy sentries. Twelve miles over a rough terrain….” McDougal began to walk the bronze cow over the mountains and valleys of his paperwork. “And then…” he paused and wedged the cow between two portfolios… “and then she arrives at her destination only to find her path blocked by a company of Indians… reinforcements, working for our side, but how was she to know? Indians in the moonlight… awesome! They let her pass, however. They escorted her, in fact, to Fitzgibbon, whereupon she gave him the message and we surprised them before they could surprise us. SURPRISE!!!” he shouted at Patrick, who jumped nervously in his chair.

Silence filled the room as the two men pondered the dead woman’s heroic deed. Patrick looked across the cemetery on the hill. “What happened to the cow?” he asked, for want of anything better to say.

“Oh, it’s right here,” replied McDougal, turning again towards his desk. “I always keep it right here to remind me of Laura… to remind me of my mission. Remind them, remind them,” he quoted from his dream.

Patrick decided to let the matter pass.

McDougal returned to his chair by the window. “May I confess something to you?” he asked with a serious air.

“Of course,” replied Patrick.

“My wife is very much like Laura Secord. I think that may be one of the reasons I married her, though God forbid she know that. It’s not that she has the pioneering spirit or anything like that, but physically she resembles the Laura that came to me in my dream.”

“Remind them, remind them,” muttered Patrick. And then, “Where is she now, your wife, I mean?” This last question uttered casually, as if he were merely making polite conversation.

“Now she doesn’t even come back here to sleep. I join her in the evenings.” McDougal scratched his beard. “She hates it here.” He looked around the untidy room. “Can’t say as I blame her.”

“Where does she go?” Patrick’s pulse was beginning to race. “Do you have relatives hereabouts?”

McDougal laughed. “She goes to the woods. We have a piece of property there called Whirlpool Heights. The whirlpool is all ours, you know, the only part of the river that is entirely Canadian. Don’t tell the Yankees, though, they’ll probably try to conquer it. I’ve got a tent out there for the summer while the house is being built… already we’ve spent a few weeks… quite pleasant really. You must come out some time. It’s a marvellous spot.”

“What does she do out there all day?” Patrick asked the question very slowly. He hardly dared to look at the other man while he waited for him to answer.

“She reads books,” said McDougal. And then, almost to himself, “She’s the closest thing to a compulsive reader I’ve ever met. Burns them up like fire.”

“What kind of books?” asked Patrick, trying to keep the note of urgency out of his voice, but already knowing the answer.

“Now there’s a coincidence,” said the major. “It’s poetry she mostly reads… the Brits… Wordsworth, Coleridge, that sort of stuff. And Browning. She’s mad about Browning. She reads far too much Browning, if you ask me. It’s unhealthy. Why, I ask, now that I think about it, isn’t she reading
you?
Why not something Canadian? Of course, why didn’t I think of it, she’ll have to meet you. You’ll have to meet her.” McDougal paused for a moment or two, running the following week’s appointments through his mind. “Wednesday evening,” he said finally. “You must come Wednesday evening.”