The Whirlpool (15 page)

A
t first, Fleda recalled, it hadn’t been quite so easy to let go of the familiar articles of domesticity. The carpet-sweeper she had owned in the old house, for instance, sometimes, even now, entered her mind like an old acquaintance – one she hadn’t seen for a long time and whose face she could barely remember. And occasionally she was surprised to find earth, instead of carpets, under her feet for most of the day. True, she owned a broom, had morning chores to perform, had to sweep the tent each day, had to fill the galvanized tub with water from the barrel in order to warm it over the fire for dishes and laundry. But there was nothing here like the insistent pressure of a house that wanted putting in order. There was hardly any call to order at all.

The carpet-sweeper, she remembered, had been called “Mother’s Helper,” a name she found mildly ironic since she had never been, and somehow knew she would never be, a mother.

Sometimes when it was damp or cold she felt a faint sense of mourning for the old house (though never for the rooms in town), felt a sense of loss for its calm, quiet, predictable rooms, and the furniture that filled them. Then she would wander through her old home in her imagination, taking note of its eccentricities, its bric-a-brac, the piano, the view from
the window over the sink, until at last she came to the spot she had called The Poet’s Corner, the location of much pleasure and much disquietude.

There she had placed engraved portraits of her favourite writers on the wall, and copies of their books on a table beneath, a kind of shrine where, in true religious form, she could leave behind the perceived world. As David spent more and more time in his study untangling the mysteries of his battles, she spent more and more time with these other men, until the hallucination of their language, the strength of their fantasies became, at times, more real to her than the man whose meals she cooked, whose socks she darned.

Then the house became a kind of fortress where she sequestered herself with these companions, with their visions, their dark landscapes, until she knew the geography of Venice, of Florence, of the English Lake District, better than the streets of Fort Erie, the hotels of Niagara Falls. No church bazaar, no meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary could pull her from their influence. The women of the area became suspicious and, as she became more aloof from them, finally angry and cruel. The men were simply frightened. In another era she might have been burned at the stake.

Then came her husband’s posting to Niagara, the sale of the house, the storage of the furniture, and the removal to temporary quarters in Kick’s Hotel. The second that Fleda had closed the door for the last time, had heard the latch drop and the lock click, she knew it was the end of a period, a cycle. She took her books with her into the real landscape of her own country.

From then on, except in those rare moments when she mourned the old place, her home became a dream, a piece of imaginary architecture whose walls and windows existed in the mind and therefore could be rearranged at will. A house where the functions of rooms changed constantly, where a wing could be added or a staircase demolished, where furniture could re-upholster itself, change shape, size, period.

Today, gazing past David’s socks, which she had hung on a branch to dry, she watched the ribbons on the survey stakes move in the summer breeze, still cool at this hour, and knew, for her, there would be no actual house, not soon, not ever. The stakes marked out a dream, an illusion, which if laboured into permanence, would produce a similar fortress and the feeling of caged torpor she was now beginning to associate with her last dwelling. She walked over to the space that she and David had carefully paced out and, on impulse, swung her arm right through the spot where the library windows ought to have been, feeling the cold, free air on her wrist as she did so. Then, stepping lightly over the string which connected the stakes, she began to walk right through the non-existent walls.

She had broken out of the world of corners and into the organic in a way that even her beloved poets in their cottages and villas hadn’t the power to do, and the acre had become her house. The acre and the whirlpool. Predictable flux, entry and exit of animals, birds, cloud formations, phases of the moon. The arrival and departure of men, returning to their rooms, to rectangles and corners, while she breathed whirlpool and kept her place there and her fire. The tent functioned for her merely as a shelter. And, unlike a real house, it was capable of motion and response; sagging a bit after a storm, billowing and flapping in the wind.

She was standing where the kitchen should have been, her body immersed in a transparent pantry cupboard, when Patrick took up a final, permanent residence in her mind. The poet. Released from boundaries, from rectangles, basements, attics, floors and doors, she felt free to allow him access, whatever form that access might take. Every cell in her body, every synapse in her brain, demanded the presence of the poet in her life. As if all the reading, all the dreaming, had been one long preparation for his arrival.

His arrival, which coincided so neatly with her departure. Departure from everything she had assumed she would be;
from the keeping of various houses, from the sameness of days lived out inside the blueprint of artificially heated rooms, from pre-planned, rigidly timed events – when this happened in the morning and that happened in the afternoon, just because it always had and always would.

Fleda walked over to the tent and opened its soft door easily with the back of her hand. The mosquito netting clung for a moment to one of her shoulders then dropped comfortably back into place. Then, moving her fingers through skeins of wool and spools of thread in her sewing basket, she soon grasped cold steel. Holding the blades downwards for safety, she took the scissors with her to the outdoors and placed them on a stump in the sunlight where they shone with an unusual, almost foreign, brilliance. Then she began to pull the pins out of the bun at the back of her neck.

As she cut her long, long hair to a spot just below her shoulders, she remembered the years it had taken her to grow it; how, since she had been an adult, there had always been the morning problem of doing up her hair and how that problem would exist no longer. The act of cutting her hair now was difficult and required strength as it was thick and often resisted the blades. She managed, however, by separating it into six parts as her mother always had when she braided it for school. The severed portions Fleda paid no attention to whatsoever, merely flung them to the wind or onto the ground. Finishing, she brushed off her skirt, and the part of her back she could reach, and decided to walk down the path to the whirlpool.

She hadn’t gone more than twenty steps down the bank when she remembered the scissors and, wanting to return them to her work basket, she changed her direction.

Then she saw Patrick and stopped.

The poet, darkly dressed, his back bent, collecting her discarded hair; stuffing first the pockets of his trousers and then his jacket with it, moving from place to place, chasing the strands that were beginning to be carried away by the wind.

Gradually Fleda understood that he had watched her before, and often, and the knowledge both frightened and delighted her. “How wonderful this is,” she whispered to herself as she moved quietly away so that he would not see her. “To think that he looks at me.”

As she was returning from the whirlpool later that afternoon, she thought about her husband’s gifts to her. Books and books and now, finally, the poet himself in the flesh. Patrick, with the long sensitive hands and pale skin, his reddish hair surrounding his head like a burning aura. The weak, long, listless body. To think that he had crept through the woods like an intruder, a ghost, a witness, responding, and now he had crept right up to the hearth rug of a dream which had spilled through walls and into the landscape.

Fleda sighed and unconsciously walked right through the spot where the front door of the house was to be, heading back, once again, to the tent. Inside she picked up a plaid blanket and reached towards Patrick’s small book which David had brought only a few days before to the forest. Then, disturbed by the emotions that the sight of the little collection aroused in her, she changed her mind, felt that examining its contents, at this moment, would be an invasion of privacy, though whose she was not entirely sure. She glanced at the bed where she and David had spent the night, noticing the jumble of an unsmoothed blanket which looked as if it might have concealed an oddly shaped beast. Then, after running her fingers once over the embossed book cover, she left the poems unopened on the pine table.

Outside again, she walked over to the section of the bank where the whirlpool was visible, despite thick foliage. There she placed herself in the hammock which David had strung between two cedars. For a minute or two she looked down, watching the few seagulls who had ventured this far inland
from the lake move around and around, following the pattern of the current. For the first time she felt the several parts of her world interlock… felt herself a part of the whirlpool, a part of the art of poetry.

E
very weekday morning, around eleven o’clock, Sam O joined Maud in the kitchen to drink coffee, discuss business, and gossip. Nowadays, the child was usually present at these meetings, listening intently, as if he were consciously building his vocabulary.

As the kitchen did not face south like the sunroom, it was not filled with the same kind of overpowering light. Still, there was a warm feeling to it, pine being the predominant material used in the chairs, tables, and cupboards in the room. Maud, herself, lightened the atmosphere now that she was no longer in full mourning. She had changed her entire wardrobe to mauves, and light mauves at that, moving as close as she could to the edge of half-mourning while still maintaining her respectability. Today, she looked almost pretty, dressed in a lavender calico cotton print with a bit of white lace at the throat and the sleeves. The brooch containing Charles’ hair looked decorative rather than sombre when pinned on this costume.

Sam was concerned about Jesus Christ, his favourite of the two horses.

“She just doesn’t seem to have much pep,” he said to Maud. “Nothing like the way she used to be. I remember two or three years back you’d dress her up for a funeral and she’d just know she was going on parade.”

“Parade, par-ade,” the child echoed.

“She’d hold her head up like a queen, shake her feathers. Now she’s just listless, like she just doesn’t care any more. I think she is depressed about something.”

“Something,” the child announced.

“Remember,” said Maud, “she’s not as young as she used to be. She’s been here a long, long time. Maybe we should be looking for a new horse.”

“God Almighty would go into conniptions if we replaced her,” said Sam, alarmed. “I don’t think he could work with anyone else.”

“Conniptions,” the child repeated, and then, because it was such a strange, new word, he repeated it again.

“Used to be,” Sam continued, “you’d put her in a military funeral and she’d just fire right up. She likes music, you know, especially marching bands. She likes those drums and she was never frightened of the salute like some horses might be. God Almighty, now, he would sometimes get a little nervous, but never Jesus. She’d just stand there at attention, like the soldiers.”

“Gun!” exclaimed the child, and Maud smiled at him, pleased that he had made the connection.

“How was it?” she asked Sam, referring to the funeral a few days earlier of the last 1812 veteran in the neighbourhood.

“Just fine,” said Sam. “That historian went on and on with his address, but apart from that it was just fine. Except for Jesus being listless.”

“Listless,” said the child, and this time his little face mirrored Sam’s worried expression.

Sam and Maud drank their coffee silently for a while, mindful of the child’s seeming ability to totally digest their conversations. The child got down from his stool and walked over to the sink where he discovered an empty cup. Soon, he was back at the table, pretending to drink coffee along with the adults.

“That was the strangest thing,” Sam eventually said.

“You mean the horse?” asked Maud.

“No, no, that other funeral.”

“Oh… the stunt man’s.”

“No, remember last week when Peter and I took the casket to Chippewa?”

Maud nodded. The child nodded.

“Well, we get there, and here is this young girl, lying in bed, dead as a doornail from
TB.”
Sam stood up, walked over to the stove, poured himself a second cup of coffee, and returned to the table. “There she was,” he continued, “and pretty too. You know how some of them aren’t if they’ve been sick too long, even if they were to begin with.”

Maud crossed her arms and nodded again.

“Well, this one has a wedding dress laid out over her, on top of the blankets, with the veil on her head, partly covering her face.”

“What… why?” asked Maud.

“Seems she was engaged to the grocer’s son when she took sick and her dress and all was all made up and then when they knew for certain she was going to die, her mother decides she’d better get married first.” Sam looked thoughtfully down into his coffee cup.

Maud waited for him to continue.

“So they called in the parson and, because by then the girl was too weak to put on the gown, they just laid it on top of her on the bed and put the veil on her and married her up.”

“Oh no…” said Maud.

“And then she just immediately died. Just like that, right under her wedding dress.”

Maud shook her head. “Oh no…” said the child.

“It is strange to be dying and getting married at exactly the same time,” said Sam. “The mother even decides that she has to wear the wedding dress in the casket. And now, because she’s dead and not just weak, she can put her right inside it.”

“Married,” said the child. “Dying.”

“So then, when Peter and I go back there three days later for the funeral, to take her to church, you know, the mother’s got all these pretty dresses… all different colours, all laid out like, all over the furniture in the parlour. Seems they belonged to the bride. And what does the mother do but start rolling them up and stuffing as many as she can into the coffin with the girl. ‘She’ll need her trousseau,’ she kept on saying, ‘She’ll need her trousseau.’”

“Trou-sseau,” said the child.

Sam was silent for several moments. Then he spoke. “Not much upsets me, but that bride did. And maybe that’s what upset Jesus Christ too. Her pulling that bride with all her clothes packed around her, down to the church and then over to the graveyard. Horses have feelings, you know. Maybe that bride upset her.”

“Bride,” the child whispered to himself, liking the sound of the word. “Bride, bride.”

Maud carried Sam’s story around with her for the rest of the day, thinking about costumes. Lord, she thought, they are always dressing you up as something and then you are not yourself anymore. This young girl, the frozen, immobilized bride, coerced into it and then dead and unable to ever grow beyond it. No one now would even remember her name. Anecdotally, she would always be the bride, the one who was married and buried in the same breath.

Just as Maud in her costume of violet cotton would still be “the widow,” were she to stop now.

Bride, wife, widow. She would not stop now.