The Day the Falls Stood Still (28 page)
Read The Day the Falls Stood Still Online
Authors: Cathy Marie Buchanan
Tags: #Rich people, #Domestic fiction, #World War; 1914-1918, #Hydroelectric power plants, #Niagara Falls (Ont.)
WHIRLPOOL
September 1923- October 1923
Whirlpool
Library of Congress, ppmsca 18039.
I
am stooped in the garden, picking tomatoes, thinking the crop will be the last we harvest at our May Avenue house, now that we have asked Mr. Brimley to come out later in the week and tell us what we might expect to get for it. With Tom making the rounds and as yet no luck, and me sewing like the dickens and only just managing to keep us afloat, we have got our eyes on a smaller place in Silvertown, which he assures me will heat up just fine with the wood he is being given as payment for clearing a lot adjacent Colt’s Point.
As Tom and Jesse come into the yard, Jesse is the picture of unbridled vigor, his arms flapping this way and that, his feet kicking up as he trots backward, facing Tom.
When I say, “You’re home,” Jesse turns toward me and runs.
I open my arms, and a split second later he is in them saying, “Guess what.”
He has half-knocked the wind from me. Though he is not quite seven, nothing of the toddler he once was remains. He is as tall as the nine-year-olds on the street and well-muscled, almost like a young man. This summer is the last I will catch him in my arms. “What?” I say.
“Muddy is going to take a barrel through the rapids on Labor Day and we’re going to help.” Muddy Sloane does little other than smoke and fish and talk about the barrel he has been reinforcing and waterproofing for the last umpteen years. Though a good decade Tom’s senior, he lives with his mother and the dozen cats he claims keep him busy with their fondness for pike.
I fix my eyes on Tom, a few steps away. “Muddy was fishing at the whirlpool,” he says.
“You’re not serious,” I say. The river was not something to be conquered. It was not something to be trivialized. I had heard him express the sentiment a hundred times. And only the summer before he had warned a Mr. Stephens his barrel would not survive a plunge over the Horseshoe Falls. Stephens went ahead and strapped his arms to the inside of his barrel. As ballast, he tied an anvil to his feet. Tom came home from the upper river dismayed. “He hasn’t got a hope in hell, and I won’t be a part of it,” he said. When Stephens’s barrel hit the plunge pool at the base of the waterfall, the anvil ripped through the floor of the barrel, taking him to his death. Tom recovered only an arm, tattooed with a message for Stephens’s wife: “Forget me not Annie.”
“Muddy’s a friend,” Tom says. “He should make out okay.”
“What about Captain Webb?”
“He didn’t have a barrel.”
“Robert Flack was killed, and he had a boat,” I say.
“Carlisle Graham made it through in a barrel five times and Bobby Leach, four. It’s a whole lot different than going over the falls.”
“Maud Willard suffocated,” I say. Cozy in their beds, the boys had heard Tom tell the story time and again. Maud Willard, an actress from Canton, Ohio, came to the Niagara seeking fame as the first woman to shoot the Whirlpool Rapids. A Tuesday afternoon at a quarter past four, she climbed into her barrel, along with her dog, a fox terrier. By four thirty she was through the rapids, but her barrel was trapped in the whirlpool. Six hours later the barrel was finally cast to shore and the lid pried open. The fox terrier scrambled out, but Maud Willard lay battered and bruised, suffocated.
“But how can that be?” Jesse once asked. “Dogs breathe, too.”
“There was an airhole in the barrel and the terrier blocked it with its snout.”
“No one can know that,” Jesse said, a dismissive pout coming to his lips.
“The dog’s snout was a pulpy mess from being pressed up against the hole,” Tom said.
“Was the dog hurt?” Francis asked, worry on his brow.
“His snout healed up, lickety-split.”
“Not such a good idea, bringing a dog,” Jesse said.
“Not such a good idea, shooting the rapids,” Tom said.
I
slip the tomato I am holding into the pocket of my apron and say to Tom, “Even if she hadn’t suffocated, I don’t think Jesse should be involved.”
“Someone should have pulled her barrel out,” Tom says.
Jesse is crouching within earshot, inspecting the garden, though it is rivers and rapids and water that interest him, not vegetables and soil. I ought to have sent him away, and now it is too late. I put my index finger to my lips, gesturing for Tom to shush. I take him by the shirtsleeve and lead him around the corner of the house. “You’ve always thought the stunters were fools,” I say.
“It doesn’t mean they deserve to die.”
“You think Muddy will need help?”
“If he gets sucked into the whirlpool, yes.”
“Not with Jesse,” I say.
“There’ll be things he could learn.”
“He’ll come away thinking of Muddy as a hero, like everyone else.”
“We’ve talked about stunters,” he says. “He knows what I think.”
“It’ll confuse him, you helping out.”
He rocks back on his heels a moment, looking pensive. “All right,” he says. “You’re right. Not Jesse.”
When I turn back to the garden, I nearly walk into Jesse, who has crept around the corner of the house. He raises his fists, begins pummeling my ribs. “I’m going,” he says. “I’m going. I’m going. I’m going.”
Tom scoops him up and throws him over his shoulder, and Jesse says, “Tell her I can go,” and struggles to free himself. Tom is up the back stoop in a single step. Then, through the open kitchen window, I hear three thwacks and stifled sniffling and Tom saying, “Your mother is right, and if you treat her like that again, you won’t fish for a month.”
At supper Jesse is sullen, even when Tom says, “I’ve got something to show you, Jesse,” and produces a piece of paper from his shirt pocket.
REINSTATE NIAGARA FALLS PARK COMMISSION’S MANDATE
PRESERVE NIAGARA FALLS
In 1887 the Ontario legislature passed the Niagara Falls Park Act, vesting the Niagara Falls Park Commission with wide powers to restore and preserve the area around Niagara Falls. Despite the mandate, recent years have seen the Commission authorize unprecedented hydroelectric development with little concern for the harm done to the Niagara River and its environs. With the appointment of Philip William Ellis, former chairman of the Toronto Hydro-Electric Commission and longtime advocate of hydroelectric development at Niagara Falls, as chair of the Commission, all pretense of efficacy in fulfilling its preservation mandate has been lost.
WRITE TO
your Member of Provincial Parliament
and Premier Ferguson.
Insist on a renewed commitment
to the preservation of Niagara Falls
by the Niagara Falls Park Commission.
Friends of Niagara, c/o Mr. J. H. Bennett, River Rd., Niagara Falls, Ontario
“There’ll be five hundred copies ready the week after Labor Day,” Tom says, “all printed with the editorial from the newspaper on the back.”
“It’s wonderful,” I say, patting his hand.
He puts the circular in front of Jesse and goes over the gist of it with him. Jesse does his best to feign indifference, though his gaze drops several times to the circular. “We’ll be handing them out, and we’ve come up with a list of influential men and newspaper editors who’ll be getting one in the post along with a personalized letter.”
I pick up the circular. “It’s a start.”
“Mr. Bennett says that back in 1880, when folks were first lobbying for what turned out to be the Niagara Falls Park Act in Canada and the Act to Preserve the Scenery of the Falls of Niagara in the U.S., there was a petition signed by seven hundred men. It was addressed to both governments, and the list included members of parliament and Supreme Court justices and cabinet ministers and university presidents and bigwig businessmen like Molson and Redpath and Massey, and a long list of literary types—Emerson, Longfellow, Ruskin, a bunch of others I bet you’d know. Even the vice president of the United States signed his name.”
E
arly morning on Labor Day, I feel Tom’s lips on my cheek. Even though Muddy’s run through the rapids is set for ten o’clock, we had agreed he would leave early, before Jesse was up. I roll onto my back and smile up at him. He takes my hand and gives it a squeeze, and then he is gone. I lie awake a long while, wondering exactly how far Tom would have gone to get Maud Willard’s barrel out of the whirlpool. He had gone in after Isabel, already drowned. He was wet all the way through when he came to fetch me from Glenview. And no one can toss a grappling hook to the middle of the whirlpool, not even him. It has got to be three hundred yards across. What gamble would he make for Muddy Sloane, circling in the whirlpool, asking himself just how long his oxygen will hold out?
A while later I hear the boys stir. For three days, Jesse has moped around the house, with only the occasional slipup, once laughing at some funny thing I said, and another time returning my embrace before remembering I was the enemy. Such resolve seems out of place in a child his age, and I have had moments of worry, when I stop whatever it is I am doing and ask myself if I have made a mistake. Tom says it is only that he is reminded of what he will miss at every turn; there are broadsheets pasted up all over Niagara Falls, and “Muddy Sloane” is on the lips of every boy in town.
But this morning Jesse flies down the stairs and delivers the bacon and toast to the kitchen table without being asked. He steps out onto the back stoop when his breakfast is done and looks to the west, then comes back into the kitchen and cheerfully says, “It’s not going to rain and there’s only a bit of wind, so the river won’t be all that wild.” He helps me wash up, chatting amiably as he often does about lures and bait and fishing holes.
I am upstairs opening windows and gathering coverlets to air on the clothesline when the strangeness of his behavior hits me full force. I call out, “Jesse,” and, when there is no answer, I feel panic rise. I move to the top of the stairs and call out again. Still, there is no reply. I rush down the stairs, strewing bedding as I go.
Francis is in the kitchen, on top of the table, startled by my sudden appearance. His fingers are poised over the sugar bowl. “Where’s Jesse?” I say.
“Outside,” he says, snatching his fingers away from the bowl.
“Outside where?” My voice is stern, and he looks as though he could cry.
“He went to see Muddy.”
“What?”
“Not with Daddy,” he says, hopefully, as though that might make everything all right.
“Tell me what he said.”
“He went to see the barrel.”
“When did he go?”
“Today,” he says, pleased with himself. We have been working on the concepts of yesterday, today, and tomorrow for quite some time.
I glance at the clock in the hallway and see it is ten minutes before ten o’clock. A barrel will make it from the
Maid of the Mist
landing through the rapids to the whirlpool in only a few minutes if it stays clear of all the boulders and eddies along the way. Jesse is likely at the whirlpool, away from Tom, who will be at the landing, preparing to send Muddy off.
From the kitchen window, I can see Mrs. Mancuso on her knees in the garden, digging up the first of her potatoes. I scoop Francis up and dash across the empty lot between our houses. “Jesse went to the whirlpool by himself,” I say.
She begins to cross herself but thinks better of it and says, “There is crowd today.” She takes Francis from me with a single stout arm and with the other shoos me away. “You, go,” she says.
A few minutes later I am loping along River Road, avoiding the curious stares of the spectators gathered along the rim of the gorge. At Colt’s Point, I take a moment to scan the stone beach far below. As Mrs. Mancuso predicted, there is a small crowd, locals who know how to access the passable parts of the riverbank. A neighbor might even be watching Jesse. And he knows to be careful. He has heard the stories: Captain Matthew Webb. Robert Flack. Maud Willard. Charles Stephens. He has seen the mangled bodies in the grappling hooks.
As I scramble down the ties of the old incline railway, my beating heart echoing in my ears, familiarity sweeps through me. The panic and pounding are the same, as is the derelict track. The only difference is the other time I was escaping the whirlpool after finding Isabel’s lifeless body there. And now I am stumbling forward, into the gorge, toward endlessly swirling water, rather than out.
Eventually, I do not catch myself. I fall to my hands and knees, and pain shoots though my wrist. It is Tom’s fault Jesse craves the river. I push myself up and wince as my wrist gives out. It is my fault, too, for not keeping a closer watch.
When I am nearly to the stone beach, I see a barrel, like a black coffin, trapped in the whirlpool, circling round and round, and I guess Tom is not far behind, making his way along the shoreline to the whirlpool. I see a man hurl a grappling hook. The throw is useless, pointless; the barrel is at least a hundred yards from the shore. The beach is shaped like a crescent, and at its downriver point, to my horror, I see Jesse stripped to his underwear and running headlong into the whirlpool. There is a rope tied around his waist and a second rope clenched in his fist. A moment later I notice two men on the beach, one letting out the rope tied to Jesse’s waist, the other letting out the rope held in Jesse’s fist. I try to call out, but his name is lodged in my throat.