The Day the Falls Stood Still (17 page)

September 15, 1917

My Dear Bess,

There’s more misery over here, but I won’t write about it, not today. I got your letter just now, and the mailman is waiting for me to finish up with mine.

I guess I shouldn’t have expected much better from Beck. The new conduit will be buried one day, but not until everyone has long forgotten he once promised it would be temporary. The water siphoned off from the river has never been cut. No one’s ever said, “Let’s just take what we need.” The power companies on the Canadian side are already making more than we can use. Ask your father. He’ll tell you we’re shipping the extra to the U.S.

We are out of the trenches for a few days’ rest so expect a longer letter soon.

Give Jesse a kiss for me.

All my love to you both,
Tom

After reading the letter, I sat thinking about my last months at Glenview, the months after Hilde and Bride had been let go. There were hours lugging coal from the basement, loading it into the stove, coaxing it to the right heat. And then there was the soot, the ashes, the scorched biscuits, the hours in an endlessly heated kitchen on a summer’s day, all to be erased by the magic of a waterfall.

M
rs. Andrews and I had grown into a habit of reading each other bits from the newspaper. Not long after the armistice, it was a piece arguing Canada was changed forevermore by the war. I read, both of us nodding our agreement with the claim that our country had outgrown the nest of the British Empire and become a nation in its own right on the battlefields of Belgium and France. Our troops had proven themselves, fighting valiantly at the Somme, Vimy Ridge, and Passchendaele, and like everyone else at home, Mrs. Andrews and I had heard stories of the Allies leaking it to the Huns that they would be meeting up with the Canadians at such and such a battle, even when it was not true. “Puts the fear of God in them,” Tom had written, “the idea of coming face-to-face with a man who’d once spent his days chopping down the wilderness and wrestling grizzly bears to the ground.”

When I got to the bit about the outrage the entire country felt when Canada was not offered a seat at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the war, Mrs. Andrews said, “The Brits couldn’t bring themselves to cut the apron strings, even with Canada all grown up.” According to the essay, Prime Minister Borden saw his chance and pounced, arguing vehemently, playing his trump card—the fact that we had lost a far greater chunk of our population than the United States. In the end Britain relented. The United States finally gave in. And Canada sent a delegation to the talks.

Finished with the essay, I set down the newspaper and began threading my sewing machine. “That’s it?” Mrs. Andrews said, flicking the newspaper hard enough to send it careering to the floor. “All this talk of nationhood, but what about French and English Canada hating each other like never before?”

She had a point, and I nodded, my face growing hot as I remembered a comment I had made about French Canada not pulling its weight when it came to sending men overseas. I had used the term
shirking Frenchie frogs,
and it had caused Mrs. Andrews to lift her foot from the treadle of her sewing machine. Enough days had passed since Vimy Ridge to lessen the odds of a dreaded telegram; still, I was agitated to the point of having bitten the inside of a cheek raw. “I suppose you’d march off to fight for some country your ancestors didn’t come from,” she said, “especially if that country spoke a language that wasn’t your own and you were told by the higher-ups they had no intention of setting up a company of men you could exchange a few words with. You’d be taking orders in a new language, too, the one all the officers spoke.”

The sentiment seemed dangerous, a way of thinking that could undermine Borden’s efforts to steamroll ahead with an act allowing the conscription of men countrywide, and a new wave of men to replace those fallen at Vimy Ridge was the surest bet of Tom ever coming home. I shrugged, and she said,
“Faut se mettre dans la peau de quelqu’un,”
before returning her foot to the treadle.

I remembered her maiden name then—Lambert—written on the backside of an old photograph, and I knew the correct pronunciation was
lambair
, rather than as I had assumed. Even so, I got up from my sewing machine and stood over her with my hands on my hips. “If you had someone over there, you wouldn’t think any differently than the rest of us.” Then I strode off, slamming the door as I went.

I was facedown on my bed, weeping into a wet pillow, when Mrs. Andrews put her hand on my back. “He’s fine, Bess,” she said. “I know he is.” Her kindness made me bawl all the harder. I was tired and ashamed and sick to death of the war, wreaking havoc from four thousand miles away.

Conscription became the issue on which Borden’s reelection hinged, and, never mind that French Canada teetered on the brink of mutiny, he was doing whatever he could to make sure it went his way. He gave the vote to the overseas soldiers, who could only see conscription as boosting their odds, and mandated that their votes could be scattered among the electoral districts as he saw fit. He abolished the notion that all women were unfit for the broils and excitements of a federal election and replaced it with legislation that gave those with husbands or sons or brothers fighting in the war the right to vote. As final assurance, conscientious objectors and immigrants from enemy countries were told they no longer had a say.

I could see his methods were suspect, but to my mind the end—the landslide victory he won—justified the means. After I cast my ballot, my heart was light. It took at least half the walk back to Mrs. Andrews’s house to work out the reason why: At long last I had made Tom’s future more certain, if only by a single vote.

His letters arrived in fits and starts, though seldom did more than a fortnight pass without some news from him. But then in the autumn of 1917, the newspaper confirmed the rumors we had been hearing for weeks and his correspondence altogether stopped. Our boys had moved on to Passchendaele.

The battlefield of Passchendaele was a dreary wasteland, a swampy marsh of mud and water even without the rain that had not let up all fall. There was no relic of civilization, only shell holes and charred trees and decomposing bodies, or so said Mrs. Mitchell at the post office one Thursday afternoon. She had heard it from a cousin, who was back from the front by way of Wandsworth Hospital in London, where he had a piece of shrapnel the size of peach pit wrenched from his eye and caught an earful from an Aussie fresh from Passchendaele. “The boys use duckboards—something like ladders but laid on the ground—to keep themselves from drowning in the mud,” she said. “If a fellow takes a hit and goes off balance, well, that’s pretty much it. He’ll get swallowed up.”

Hearsay abounded; the worst of it, too disheartening to be allowed in the newspapers, arrived in Niagara Falls via some route just as circuitous as Mrs. Mitchell’s. Plenty of it reported the near annihilation of the British, Australian, and New Zealand divisions our boys were meant to replace. And there was a retired colonel in Queenston who insisted the high ground of the town of Passchendaele was in no way worth the bloodbath capturing it would mean.

Still, on a Monday in early November the
Evening Review
headline read
OUR BOYS TAKE PASSCHENDAELE
. The account that followed trumpeted the victory of the Third and Fourth divisions, which had captured the town of Passchendaele and hung on to it by the skin of their teeth, and the First and Second divisions, which had come to their aid, finally forcing the Germans ringing the area into retreat.

Other versions came quick on the heels, littering the glory of the newspaper account like an ash bin emptied onto newly fallen snow. Our dead were three deep in places, many sunk too deep in the mud to ever be found. As for how many Canadian soldiers were lost, there were the old-timers who endlessly plotted the war on the maps laid out in the rear of Clark’s Hardware, and a few had made extrapolations using the list of casualties from the newspaper and estimated it at fifteen thousand or more. I made the mistake of speaking to milky-eyed Mr. Chapman one afternoon while waiting for Mr. Clark to package up another round of heating coils for Tom. Once I had confirmed that, yes, Tom was in fact an infantryman in the Third Division, he shook his head. His calculations pointed to as many as four-fifths of the fellows in Tom’s boots having fallen by the time the reinforcements arrived. As I stood there, numb, he misjudged me for someone eager for more. “Near as I can figure Passchendaele cost the Allies half a million in casualties, including upwards of a hundred thousand dead. With the five miles the boys pushed back the front, works out to three inches for every man lost.”

All this, and not a word from Tom for forty-one days, twenty-nine since the headline in the
Evening Review.

Home from Clark’s Hardware, I put Jesse in his high chair and set a dish of cold macaroni from the supper before on the tray. When I noticed my hands shaking, I lifted the teapot from the cupboard, thinking a cup of chamomile might calm my nerves. It was then that I saw the boy who delivered the telegrams pause at the far end of the front walk. He flipped through the papers in his hands, looked up at the house and then down again. I closed my eyes, pressed my face against my palms, and with every ounce of will I could muster wished away the boy and the telegram addressed to me.

When I looked up again, he had wandered on, to some other address, some other widowed wife, some other fatherless child. I touched my fingertips to the teapot and circled them twice around the lid. Then I lifted that teapot and hurled it with all my might. I moved on, to a wool skirt for Miss Bingley, pressed for a final time earlier in the day and folded on the ironing board, and tried, unsuccessfully, to tear it from the waistband clear through to the hem. Jesse watched from his high chair, eyes wide, a spoon clenched in his tiny fist. When he threw that spoon toward the cupboard beneath which the rubble of the teapot lay, I was immediately upon him. “How dare you!” I spat the words, my arm jerking upward in preparation. Then Mrs. Andrews was there, her fingers tightly wrapping my raised arm, her body pushing mine from the kitchen as Jesse began to wail.

Once I regained my composure, which took the better part of the afternoon, even with the rocking chair Mrs. Andrews insisted upon, even with the milky tea she brought, even with the wool blanket she smoothed over my thighs, I told her about the boy pausing at the end of the walk, but her jaw was firmly set and did not change.

“Your father will be arriving on the ten o’clock tomorrow,” she said. “He’ll be taking you back to Buffalo for two weeks.”

She laid a hand firmly on the wool blanket and did not shift her gaze from mine, even as tears welled in my eyes at the idea of having to explain myself to Mother and Father, even as it occurred to me there was nothing left to tell. “Jesse?”

“It’s just a bit of a holiday, for the both of you.” She smiled then, her eyes as soft as I had ever seen them, the backs of her fingers stroking my cheek with a tenderness I had guessed at but never seen.

I thought then of Mrs. Doherty, with her six children and livelihood of folding boxes and husband already shot full of holes. “I’m so ashamed.”

“It’s dances and pretty dresses that girls your age ought to be worrying about,” Mrs. Andrews said.

Waiting for Father at the train station with Jesse good as gold on my knees, I thought about my raised arm, whether given another moment I would have followed through. The odd passerby noticed my wet cheeks and smiled kindheartedly, lingeringly, and a gentleman with a cane even patted my arm. The kindnesses were not the standard fare from before the war, the usual “Sorry for your troubles, miss.” No, those concerned folk assumed the boy at the end of the walk had not ambled on after checking Mrs. Andrews’s address against that of the telegram in his hands.

The three rooms Mother and Father let in Buffalo were on Jewett Avenue, an address that implied the prestigious neighborhood of Parkside, though they were in fact a good mile from Delaware Park. The bedroom, parlor, and dining room, where they ate whatever Mother rustled up on a hot plate, were crowded with the best pieces from Glenview: three bureaus; a four-poster bed; two chesterfields; a club chair; a mahogany table with matching china cabinet and sideboard, crammed with the usual silver and crystal but also with books. With six carpets, all overlapping, and Mother’s cleverness for decorating, the rooms appeared studiously disheveled, pleasingly so.

By the time Father, Jesse, and I arrived, the dining room table had been pushed into a corner and two cots set up in its place. On the train there had been no mention of the episode behind my visit, only delight that he and Mother would have Jesse and me to themselves. Mother followed suit, though she smoothed my hair, put a hand on my shoulder, stroked my forearm, every chance she got. I told myself the tenderness was only concern over my fragile state, but with each touch there came an awful moment when it seemed she was convinced of my widowhood.

The first evening Father talked about an order the tannery had been given for ammunition pouches, fifty thousand of them all told, and the expansion he had had the good sense to undertake in just the nick of time. Mother said, “It’s all working out wonderfully well,” and I thought better than to ask why, then, was she wearing the same lovely dress she had had on when she last came to Niagara Falls, why then, had Father decided on a trolley rather than a hack from the train station to Jewett Avenue when there was a fair-size valise to be carried, also Jesse, who was sound asleep.

Two days later I woke to Mother scrubbing away at handkerchiefs and stockings and underclothes a few feet from my cot. “Rise and shine,” she said, with enough vigor to make it clear she did not consider languor a cure for losing heart. “Your father’s long gone, and Jesse got up an hour ago.”