The Day the Falls Stood Still (25 page)

More men recognize Tom and lift their flasks in offering. He holds out his tumbler, then points to mine and I am poured a bit of rye. They want to hear about the ice bridge, and he tells the story as I have heard it told before, with modesty, as though anyone in the room would have done exactly as he did. And then they want to hear about Fergus and the workers knocked from Ellet’s bridge and the fellows rescued from the riverbed the day the falls stood still. He is laughing and at ease, and they offer their flasks again. Their wives compliment my dress and ask where I got it. When I tell them I made it myself, several take down my details and tuck the scraps of paper into their tiny drawstring bags. Eventually Mrs. Harriman finds me in the crowd and asks me to call her by her first name and says, “You really are a marvel,” and looks longingly at my frock. Mrs. Harriman, or rather Mabel, looks longingly at Tom as well. Mrs. Coulson only waves from across the room and then later, as she passes by, points to my dress, smirks, and says, “Best of the lot.”

I am standing among a small gathering of women, keeping an eye out for Kit, when a woman called Mrs. Jenkins turns to me and says, “How did you and Tom meet?”

“I was on my way home from Loretto, on the electric trolley. I had a trunk with me and he offered to help.”

“I’m a Loretto girl, too,” she says, patting my arm now that we have been identified as kin of sorts. “Class of 1906.” She waits, ear cocked, for me to say my class.

“I left in 1915.” Then, before I am cornered into confessing that I did not graduate, I say, “I lived at Glenview, and my sister and I spent half the summer reading on the veranda, but really waiting for Tom to pass by on River Road.”

“And it seems he did,” says another woman, Mrs. Henderson, clasping tiny, lily-white hands together in feigned delight.

“He came by with a pike one day, and then he kept it up, coming every day, always with a fish.”

“Just imagine,” Mrs. Henderson says.

The rosy picture I have painted does not include Isabel convalescing on the veranda, half-starved, pregnant, and unwed. I wonder for a moment at my seeming desire to fit in.

I check over my shoulder for Tom, and there he is, looking in my direction, smiling his lopsided smile, raising his glass to me. I lift my own in return. And then I feel the light touch of a hand on my forearm, and I turn to see Kit. She stands silent, breezily elegant with her simple gray silk tunic and hastily pinned up flaxen locks. I cannot help but notice that her fingernails, while no longer chewed to the quick, are clipped as short as a man’s.

“I was hoping you’d be here,” I say.

“Leslie told me your husband was on the guest list.”

We both laugh, nervously, and then we step away from the other women. “When I’m on Erie Avenue, I’m always looking into your shops.”

“I saw you once,” she says.

“I’ve wanted to go in and tell you I was sorry about Edward. I’ve promised myself a hundred times I’d call you the next day, but I never worked up the nerve.”

She hugs her arms around her waist, as though she were cold.

“That time in Queen Victoria Park with the Niagara Falls Citizens Band,” I say. “I’d remember that and it’d seem hopeless, speaking to you.”

“I told myself Edward wouldn’t have enlisted if you hadn’t broken off with him. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t true. I wasn’t in my right head.”

“If I’d been thinking straight I wouldn’t have gone to Tom without explaining myself to Edward first.” Though her gaze is as intense as always, I do not shy away. “It just didn’t register that I had no business burying a choker he’d given me.”

We stand in awkward silence a moment or two, until she finally says, “I still have the note you sent after he was killed. It took me ages to open it, but when I did, I could see you knew how I felt. You’d spelled out my bewilderment; you know firsthand about someone becoming nothing at all. You understand.”

“I don’t understand, not really,” I say.

“But that’s exactly it. You didn’t say he’d gone to a better place or died gloriously. You didn’t give me some pat answer.” Her gaze falls to the floor, and her shoulders creep up, her palms opening toward the ceiling. “It was wrong of me to miss Isabel’s burial. I’ve been to her grave a dozen times, not that it makes up for anything.”

“Did you leave irises?”

“No,” she says, a rare flash of confusion coming to her face.

“Someone left irises.”

She shrugs, and I ask about Edward. “Is he buried somewhere?”

“He’s outside of Mons. Someday I’ll go.” She shakes her head. “But enough of that sort of talk. Just look at your frock. It’s stunning. It really is, but then everyone says you’re the best dressmaker in town.”

I think better than to say that any credit should be shared with Mother, that she beaded the overskirt, for Isabel, for her wedding gown. “That shade of gray is lovely on you.”

She gathers a bit of skirt in her hand. “I’m sure everyone here is deathly tired of it. You could make me a new one?”

“We could catch up properly.”

“Let’s have supper, with my Leslie and your Tom, the boys, too.”

Our dining room is without a table and in our kitchen we sit on benches Tom rigged up, not that the old Kit would mind in the least. She was one of the few at Loretto who had not bothered with trinkets—a pair of bookends, a framed painting—to mark her room as her own. “We barely have a stick of furniture,” I say.

“Throw a picnic blanket on the floor or come to our place first. That’ll put you at ease. Furniture store or not, I’m not much for decorating.”

We linger, though the waiters are ushering everyone to their tables. Eventually Leslie and Tom come, and there are handshakes all around, and Leslie says he knows a hundred wonderful stories about me, and Tom says, “I know at least as many about Kit.” Then the two of us are wedged apart and escorted to our seats.

The guests are assigned to tables of eight for dinner, and I am alarmed to find my place card between Premier Drury’s and Tom’s. “I won’t be able to swallow a bite,” I say to Tom.

“He was a farmer a lot longer than he’s been the premier.”

As it turns out, Premier Drury is keenly interested in the grievances of the town’s workers. And because I live in Silvertown, where the men walk to International Silver each morning, or travel by trolley to T. G. Bright, Norton, and Cyanamid, I often hear over the clothesline just how fed up the labor force is. Whether it is silver, wine, abrasives, fertilizer, or hydroelectricity, the workers want better wages and an eight-hour day. I tell him, too, that there is a hopelessness among the men that was not there a year or two ago, before the high unemployment made it so easy to replace anyone who suggested the workers organize. I do not suppose for a minute I have told him something he has not heard a hundred times before. But he is attentive and kind enough to say he is glad to find himself beside a sympathetic ear.

The Coulsons are at our table as well, Mrs. Coulson ignoring me, Mr. Coulson monopolizing Tom, so I am surprised, on my return from the powder room, to find Premier Drury in my seat, his arm draped over Tom’s shoulder. Then I see the camera pointed at the two of them. A split second after the flash, Tom’s eyes are on the camera and he is pulling out from under Premier Drury’s arm. But it is too late.

T
he picture, which appears on the front page of the
Evening Review
and page three of Toronto’s
Globe,
shows Tom and the premier, mid-laugh, glasses raised. The headline in the
Evening Review
reads
RIVERMAN CELEBRATES THE OPENING OF THE QUEENSTON POWERHOUSE WITH PREMIER DRURY.
The
Globe
headline is innocuous enough:
PREMIER DRURY TOASTS QUEENSTON POWERHOUSE.
But the body of the article is not: “In his opening remarks Premier Drury praised the contributions of the laborers at great length. Niagara riverman Thomas Cole (of ice bridge tragedy fame) was among the workers enjoying the evening’s festivities.”

Tom thwacks the
Evening Review
with the back sides of his fingers. “Drury planned that photo. He thinks I’ve got clout with the workingman.”

“It’ll blow over.”

“He’s all for siphoning off half the river, and it looks like I am, too.”

“I don’t know what to say. I know that it matters. I know that it matters a whole lot to you.” As far as he is concerned, it is all there in black and white; Tom Cole is a hypocrite.

27

Scow rescue

Niagara Falls (Ontario) Public Library.

F
rancis is barking like a seal. It is what everyone says about the cough that accompanies croup, and now that I have heard it, the description seems exactly right. My heart is pounding, and I am pulling up his undershirt again and saying to Tom, “His lips don’t look blue.” Same as a moment ago, Francis’s midriff is smooth, without the tugged-in valleys between the ribs that come with strangled breath. Still, I recall a hole cut through a girl’s throat into her windpipe and a length of hollow wood jammed into the opening. It is only something I overheard as a child, a memory belonging to someone else. Yet I can imagine the low whistle of breath sucked through a tube.

“Maybe you should sing,” Tom says. His voice is steady, barely above a whisper, soothing. Without saying so, he has told me that I must calm myself, that Francis, who is wild-eyed in my arms, needs me to be calm. It is a difference between Tom and me. He does not panic. He needs me to calm down, and he accomplishes it by giving me something to do.

I sit down at the kitchen table with Francis on my lap and begin to hum a nameless tune, which is easily drowned out by the barks. Tom places a basin of hot water on the table, and I put my face into the steam to see that it will not scald.

“It’s like the mist at the falls,” I say to Francis. He continues to bark and wail, and pulls back from the steam.

“I’m going to make a tent for you and Mommy,” Tom says.

He drapes a tablecloth over Francis and me and the basin. A few minutes later the barking stops.

“Night air is supposed to help, too,” I say, pushing the tent aside.

After Tom checks on Jesse, still soundly sleeping, we sit on the back stoop with Francis curled up in my arms, though he is heavy at three and a half. Tom’s arm is around me, and the three of us are snug, wrapped in wool. The night is warm for March; still, the air has a nip to it that is surely good for the croup. Francis relaxes against me and drifts off, mumbling about sleeping in a tent.

When I notice Tom’s gaze on the stars, I lift my chin. The night is clear, and the hour is well past when all but the most hardened night owls turn off their electric lights. The stars shine rather than twinkle. Bold, brazen, true.

How did I ever manage without Tom? Forget that he spends hours with his boys, more so than any man I know. Forget that he puts up with my parents, has even charmed them a little, that the last time they came to May Avenue for the weekend, Mother went as far as to say Jesse was becoming quite the gentleman, that he had a good role model in Tom. Forget the wages he brings home every week. Forget that with his aptitude for fixing what is broken, our house has become a refuge for cast-off lamps and broken piano stools and chairs missing their seats, each mended and polished and given its own special charm. Forget, too, our quiet tête-à-têtes, our whispered endearments, our lovemaking. How did I manage without a helpmate whose happiness is so intrinsically aligned with my own? Tonight there was great comfort in his gaze lifting to meet mine when the barking began, in knowing his fear and later his relief matched my own. Yes, sorrow, misfortune, or worry split in two is more easily borne. I say all of this aloud to Tom as we look up at the stars.

“It isn’t the same for joy,” he says, “when it’s divided up.”

I lean my temple against his shoulder to show him I have understood. Joy shared with another is so much larger than joy felt alone.

We sit a little longer, until the telephone rings, splintering the quiet. It happens every three or four weeks, our telephone ringing late in the night. Once it was a group of boys who had been making mischief at the whirlpool when they snagged a burlap sack with a rotting torso inside. Another time it was a drunkard, who was convinced he had seen fairies swimming in the plunge pool at the base of the falls. Sometimes a woman is on the line; her husband is late. Other times it is the police. And Tom always goes.

Through the screen door I hear him say, “Where, exactly?” and “How many are onboard?” and “Has anyone called the coast guard at Fort Niagara? They’ve got a lifeline gun.”

He is back a moment later with his waders and the packsack he keeps by the kitchen door. “There’s a boat grounded in the upper rapids,” he says. “Two men are onboard.”

I nod, though I do not want him to go, not tonight, not with the warmth between the two of us, not with the worry that will surely take its place.

He kisses me on the forehead and touches his fingertips to Francis’s cheek. Then he lopes off with his waders and packsack of grappling hooks and rope.

He knows my fears. I have told him, once when we were lying together. He laughed when I first began and said that I had forgotten about the caul, that he could never drown. When he saw my seriousness, he pulled me close. “I’m careful, Bess. I know what the river can do.”

I wish I could pray. I wish I thought it would do a bit of good.

I wait with sleeping Francis on the back stoop for what must be the better part of an hour. His brow is smooth and his lips pucker now and then as though he is nursing in his dreams. There is something wistful about this child sleeping in my arms when he mostly spends his days venturing ever farther away from me, or stamping his feet and saying, “I’m a big boy,” when I hand him some toy Jesse long ago gave up. I do my best to focus on these thoughts, rather than on Tom, the river, and the ropes.

Maybe I will become pregnant again, now that Francis manages so much on his own, though the timing is hardly right. I am earning less than I was a year ago, when I could barely manage to fit in a new coat. High unemployment has led to thrift, and what is more, women’s fashions have become a whole lot less painstaking to make. Waistlines have dropped and in some cases altogether disappeared. Fabrics are soft, pliable, comfortable to wear. Hemlines have stayed at the ankle or midcalf, out of the way. A dress is no longer a second skin, close-fitting when a figure is good, even more so when flesh must be cajoled into place. And then there is Mrs. Coulson, who has curtailed her orders since the opening of the powerhouse. She came the Monday afterward but left in a snit when I said, “It just isn’t possible,” to her demand that I piece together a dress for her with what was left of Isabel’s wedding gown and the dress I had made from it for myself. Still, I am managing all right. Quite a few of the women who come to me are from households with buffer enough to ignore the economic woes. They still want a bit of glitz appliquéd to their formless frocks. And then there is Kit, who had never put much thought into clothes, suddenly needing a suit, a frock, a gown. I am glad for the work. I need it, but more than that, I am glad for the evenings together in my sewing room.

The last time she came, I was marking darts when she reminded me of the stray cat Isabel had charmed with bits of meat smuggled from the dining hall. Eventually, there was a basket attached to a rope, lowered from her window and pulled up once Puss was inside. But Puss was restless in her dorm room, meowing, rubbing up against bed and chair legs, leaping from bookshelf to windowsill to desk, eventually knocking over a vase of lilacs onto an unfinished prose composition. The ink ran. The paper rippled. Isabel snickered and complained furiously to the sisters: “I won’t start again, not when the sanitation here is so lax we’ve got wild beasts in our rooms.” She produced a soggy essay with a scattering of paw prints as proof. Kit mimicked Isabel’s outrage in the sewing room, and we laughed, great quaking snorts.

W
hen I hear footsteps coming around the side of the house toward the back stoop, I assume it is Tom and let out a sigh. But the man who comes into the backyard is not him. Even in the dim light, I can see he is not nearly so tall. There is a moment of fear when I think, If I am quick, I might manage to get Francis into the house, but then I see the man is wearing a constable’s uniform. Fresh fear comes. I want to say “Where is Tom?” but press my lips closed.

“Mrs. Cole?” says the constable.

“Yes.” I get up from the stoop.

“Tom asked me to come.”

“He’s all right, then?”

“He’ll be a while. He wanted me to tell you that.”

I suppose I ought to be thankful. Yet I am not. “What’s happening?” I say.

“The Hydro was dredging around the intake gates, and the scow they were filling up with the sediment broke free from its tugboat and got pulled into the middle of the river. The men opened the hatches and dropped the anchor, and now they’re caught on a ledge a short ways back from the brink.”

I imagine Tom wading out to the scow, certain his legs will not be swept from beneath him. He will give me some nonsense about knowing it was safe, some hogwash about reading the current and working out the stability of the riverbed footholds beneath. “I can’t explain it,” he will say, “but sometimes I just know.”

“The coast guard shot a line out to the scow,” the constable says, “and rigged up a pulley and sling to cart the men back, but the lines got tangled up in the current. Tom was out, untangling the lines, when I left.”

“He went into the river?” I ask. Francis stirs in my arms.

“He went out in a second sling, pulling himself hand over hand.”

“I see,” I say, but I do not. A scow is held back from the brink by a bit of rocky ledge and yet it serves as anchor to the lines Tom is dangling from. Should that scow shift in the torrent of the upper rapids, should the bit of rock give way, the scow along with the tangled lines, the pulley and sling, and Tom will be pitched over the falls.

A long while after the constable goes, I put Francis in his bed, and, with the first light of day, I walk across the empty lot to fetch Mrs. Mancuso from her house to watch the boys. She will be up, baking the
ciab-atta
Mr. Mancuso prefers to eat warm.

F
rom a ways off I see several lines strung from the roof of the Toronto powerhouse to a scow lodged midway between Goat Island and the Canadian shore. Ten yards from the scow, a man hangs from the lines, the torrent beneath him lashing at his feet. By the time I reach the crowd gathered at the powerhouse, the man has been hauled close enough to the shore for me to know he is not Tom but rather one of the rescued men. Beyond the man the scow is now an empty hull.

The crowd is whooping it up with far too much glee for anyone to have been lost, yet Tom is nowhere to be seen. Eventually the constable who came into our yard taps my shoulder from behind. “Tom is up top,” he says, pointing to the roof of the powerhouse. “I can take you up.”

As we walk, I catch words spoken in the crowd: “It’s the wife, the riverman’s wife.”

The interior of the powerhouse is vast, empty except for a half dozen large drums housing the magnets and copper-clad rotors that make electricity. It is quiet, only the whir coming from the generators and our footsteps bouncing off the polished floor, echoing in the hollow space. Midway up the stairs the constable says, “He was out there a good two hours the first time, but the lines were a mess. He had to wait for daylight and go back. Shame you missed it, Mrs. Cole. You would’ve been bursting with pride.”

I am alone in my disapproval. The others all sigh a great communal sigh and applaud when Tom Cole shows up with his waders and grappling hooks and rope. Everything will be all right. The riverman is here.

When we pass from the stairwell out onto the roof, one of the men from the scow is being helped from a sling attached to the line. He kisses the powerhouse beneath his feet, which I suppose seems as good as solid earth. Then he throws his arms around Tom, who is huddled in a blanket, looking cold and tired.

When he sees me, he lets the blanket fall from his shoulders. Then his arms are around me, squeezing me until my feet leave the roof. “Francis?” he says into my ear. “He’s fine,” I say back. Then, he makes a show of kissing me, and the dozen or so men on the roof applaud.

Is it glory he seeks, dangling above the falls, leaping from one cake of ice to the next? I am almost convinced of it, but when I say I would like to go home, he says he wants to wait on the roof awhile, until the crowd below thins out. And when a photographer from the
Evening Review
wants to come out onto the roof, the constable checks with Tom and then tells the photographer he cannot.

Tom speaks with the rescued men awhile, until a handful of the others on the roof work up the nerve to join the group. I pay little attention to the conversation that follows, talk of lifeline guns and pulleys and a riverbed just rough enough to snag a scow. Still, I manage to smile dutifully when it seems I should.

On the walk home I notice my pace is brisk. I notice myself ready to pounce. But my anger feels petty when Tom has been heroic, when lives have been saved. I reach for his hand, wondering if I should tell him yet again how it is for me when he is on the river, anesthetized to the risks, fueled by some notion of invincibility.

“Jesse would’ve been interested in all this,” he says.