The Whirlpool (18 page)

G
eneral Brock’s hat had disturbed the major for years. How could a man, even such a man, have a head that large? It suggested weird tumours or water on the brain. It suggested to Major David McDougal that Brock had a swelled head. Moreover there was something else absurd about it. It had not arrived in time.

It had not arrived in time to be on the general’s head when he either foolishly or, as David would have it, heroically, rushed up Queenston Heights, shouting, “‘Push on, brave York Volunteers!’” It was still somewhere in transit, having been ordered from England. Neither the hat nor its impressive box showed any sign of battle. Its plume shot up, like a tiny fountain, from a black and red surface. A perfect target, but one that had never been used.

Now the coat… the coat was worn, dirty, and contained the fatal bullet hole. Dead centre in the chest. No one could possibly survive that. Tiny perfect death hole, blood camouflaged by red worsted material, brass buttons shuddering in the final throes.

He had seen the coat in Ottawa, but here they had only the hat.

David was standing in front of a mahogany case which was one of many crowded into a third-storey room above the courthouse. The historical room. Masses of objects crammed
into a closed space. The hat shared a case with a Roman battle axe that had been found in an Ayrshire bog, and any number of Indian arrowheads, and Miss Wilmot’s grandmother’s collection of pressed flowers from Wales.

David desperately wanted a pure museum… one where he could place the relics of the thin history of the country where he lived. In his rooms he had a small pile of cannonballs given to him by the woman in the funeral home. She had found bullets too, she said, and buttons, but had no idea where they were. Part of the battlefield was now her garden, the other part the graveyard and the orchard. She had been kind, had allowed him to wander out in the garden as long as he liked, searching the grass for signs.

He heard his wife move at the end of the room, somewhere near the needlework section. He could hear her skirts moving across the planked floor. Suddenly she was speaking to him.

“David, come with me for a moment.” They walked to the opposite side of the room. “Have you seen this?” She was using the tone of voice, low, almost frightened, that people adopt in museums and picture galleries.

She was pointing to a small appliquéd quilt which hung on the wall above the marine exhibit. Although the silk and velvet which had been pieced together were beginning to shred, the colours were still vibrant enough to play against each other. Embroidery surrounded the various shapes, and at the bottom was worked into a date… 1813. Of a strange size, it was meant to hang on the wall, unlikely to have ever been used as a coverlet.

“It’s lovely,” David said to his wife.

“But don’t you see what it is?”

He looked again, into the decorative geometric design, a pattern moving towards a centre.

“A quilt,” he announced. “There are several others near the door, if you are interested.”

“But David, look at the graveyard.” She pointed to a square area in the centre surrounded by a fabric fence. “And here -”
she swept her hand around the edge – “here is a border of coffins, each with a name.”

David leaned forward a little. “In some spots they are missing.”

“That’s because they have been taken to the graveyard.”

David moved even closer to the object until he could see evidence of missing stitches in the spot where the coffins had been removed, had been taken into the velvet graveyard.

“My God,” he whispered, “Why on earth… ?”

“Why not?” Fleda turned to look directly at him. “Why not? How could all this sewing be any worse than the reality of -”

“But it’s so calculated, as if this woman knew that everybody was going to die.”

“Everybody is going to die.”

“But it’s almost as if she caused it.”

“No, David, the war caused it; she recorded it.”

He watched her walk back across the room and then looked down into the case that held the marine exhibit. How stupid it was… all those dried-up sea horses and starfish, dusty and crumbling, deader than the Roman battle axe. In his museum there would be no natural history; no stuffed birds, dried lizards, dead fish, pinned butterflies, pickled fetuses, animals worked over by the taxidermist. None of the death that pretends to imitate life.

Brock’s coat. Bullets and buttons and cannon-balls. The cannons themselves, if he could find them. And endless scarlet uniforms, empty, no dummies propping them up. Maps, autographs, commissions signed by famous generals. He would like to have a special section given over entirely to the art of oratory, though he couldn’t decide quite how to manage it – copies of great speeches given by men approaching battle.

His wife called him again, this time to a case which purported to hold the first poem written in Canada… the first of a never-ending series of responses to Niagara Falls.

He couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to save this anonymous, none too enlightening, piece of verse. It told him absolutely nothing.

His wife, however, was looking at the fragment with great intensity… as though she could see the pen, the ink, the expression of a human being bothered by a waterfall that had made its home inside the brain.

“I am wondering,” she said, almost to herself, “if it is this that Patrick wants from the whirlpool. Perhaps he wants to carry some of it away with him in words.”

From deep inside the fixed idea of the poet, Fleda looked out at her husband. David hadn’t heard her. He was trying to solve the puzzle of Brock’s hat.

She sighed and sunk a little deeper into her thoughts of Patrick, allowing them to cushion her now, to protect her from the sordid, the ordinary, the real.

14 August 1889

T
his is how it is now. There are days when he does watch me and days when-he doesn’t. I am looking for a pattern. Last week I thought I had it; I thought it was every second afternoon. But this week he hasn’t appeared for three days running… except in the evenings when David is here. But then it’s as if he is someone else. This should not be, but is a disappointment to me
.

At times today I have been sure that I felt him moving through the woods towards me, towards the tent. But he doesn’t arrive. Strange how I search the woods for him, look down the bank towards the whirlpool
.

He is out there somewhere, hidden. Now, without even a glimpse, without even the faintest rustle of branches, I can feel his scrutiny
.

I’ve even begun to dress for him. I have a new skirt – pale blue silk with white braid. David says that it’s ridiculous that I should want to wear it here in the woods. How I love it, though, and the way the sun touches it. Nothing is ever military enough for David or illusive enough for Patrick
.

How do I know this? I know absolutely nothing really
.

It seems he has a wife in Ottawa and some sort of government employment. All of this is beyond the powers of my imagination
.

I
want him to come out of the forest; to speak to me and I want him to continue to watch me
.

Sometimes I want him to touch me
.

Is this the responsibility of the whirlpool? Has it become a whirlwind, scraping the earth with the back of its hand until we are all caught in it?

No, you have to enter the whirlpool by choice. You have to walk towards it and step into it. Or you have to be pushed
.

It’s only the ocean’s maelstrom that you slip into by chance, moving in a straight line from this to that
.

Perhaps I’ve always waited for the demon lover to leave the maelstrom and enter my house, through some window while I slept on… innocent and unaware
.

One moment you are dreaming, the next terrifyingly awake, on board a ghost ship bound for God knows where… away from home
.

Away from home… it is the open sea, the damp, a storm approaching and the inevitable shipwreck
.

Would it not also be true that at this moment of disaster you would know exactly who you were? Not necessarily who you had been, but who you were right then?

Interesting that the demon attacks only architecture. In the woods it is knights, dragons, and ladies who are eventually set free
.

Perhaps you have to be lodged in order to be dislodged
.

Dislodge: to remove, turn out from position
.

Perhaps the knowledge comes at the moment of departure
.

“T
he whirlpool is not only down there,” Patrick moved his head towards the bank, “it’s also up here.” He waved his other hand vaguely somewhere above his head. “I’ve been to the observatory in Ottawa and I’ve seen it. Now the whole idea makes me dizzy, interferes with my sense of gravity.”

Fleda looked at him and waited for him to continue. She could hear the rapids in the silence. They were louder today; something to do with wind and a low covering of clouds.

“You see,” he said, “there are stars in a spiral pattern up there… nebulae… the question is… are they moving?”

“Probably,” said Fleda. “They couldn’t just be standing still.”

“Why not,” he wanted to know, “why couldn’t they just be standing still?”

“Because nothing does, nothing ever, ever does.”

“There is air around me all the time,” Patrick continued, “and gravity… it’s like being continually immersed.”

Fleda was becoming uncomfortable. They had never spoken together like this. Still she moved forward.

“You move through it, though,” she said. “You come here and you go away. It doesn’t stop you.”

“One pulls me down and the other slows me down.”

“You want to live weightless…”

“Yes, one wants to live weightless, but just can’t. Everything moves around but gravity pulls you down and the air sticks to the body like a shroud.”

Fleda tried to imagine the air as some other kind of substance, heavier. It would be like water, then, like trying to walk through water. But air wasn’t like that… not for her.

“But for you, it wouldn’t be like that,” he said, reading her thoughts.

Fleda was aware of fear hovering somewhere close to her consciousness. But she couldn’t place it, couldn’t give it an exact location. They hadn’t walked farther than forty yards away from the tent, where David was writing. But the forest was thick here, seemed to isolate them somehow, close them in together in an accidental intimacy. Except in her imagination, she had never talked to Patrick like this before. She began to speak quickly, the first things that came into her mind.

“About gravity,” she said, “the oddest thing happened last winter.”

Patrick backed up a step.

“David and I had been to a party at Prospect House. A sort of late New Year’s. It was very stormy, windy… I almost froze going down there in the cutter. Anyway, when we left, around one a.m., when we left and went outside, we looked at the Suspension Bridge in the wind. It was actually heaving, moving up and down in the wind like a whip. Just as I was about to point this out to David, it snapped… broke in two and fell into the gorge.”

“You
saw
that?”

“Yes, and I thought, I have been back and forth on that bridge a hundred times. David not so often – he doesn’t like to go over there. I enjoyed crossing it, just to look down at the rapids. And suddenly… the connection is broken, forever. But then,” she added, laughing, “David said that the connection should be broken… with the Americans, I mean.”

Patrick’s emotions were suddenly and inexplicably meshing with this arbitrary topic. Involuntarily, he moved closer and reached towards the woman’s sleeve with his open palm. A gesture which, when he interrupted it, looked like one of caution. “But, Fleda,” he said, “think! That first bridge, the one you crossed over and over, that bridge is
gone
. It won’t ever come back.”

“In a way, it was like a broken habit,” Fleda remarked. “I could have crossed it blindfolded, I knew it that well. And one storm and it’s gone! I guess it surprised me to discover that something can disappear like that so irrevocably from your life.”

“Things can and do.” Patrick leaned casually against a tree, pretending to be relaxed. “You let yourself get too close to the bridge,” he said. “You couldn’t see it, any more. That’s what happened. You didn’t know it was dangerous… it took a violent storm to show you that it was weak. Weak and dangerous. You had to see it in completely altered circumstances. It had to be flapping in a shrieking wind before you could see it as it really was. Weak and dangerous.”

“Yes, but if I had looked that carefully… if I had known… I never would have crossed at all. I never would have seen the rapids from above.”

“Precisely… you allowed yourself to get too close to the bridge and then you couldn’t see it properly. You trusted it, when, in fact, it was completely untrustworthy.”

They were deep in the woods though not at all far from the tent.

They began to gather the kindling they had gone there to collect. A short shower earlier in the day had left the wood in the open areas drenched. In here, though, there was such a mesh of overhead green that the rain had been unable to break through and the twigs which lay on the ground were completely dry.

“You have gotten close to the whirlpool,” Fleda said suddenly, after breaking a long stick in two with her foot. “I’ve
seen you. You have looked right at it from the very edge of the shore.”

“I haven’t,” said Patrick, “been anywhere near its centre. That I can only see from a distance… or through the glasses, which is merely an illusion. What do you think exists at the centre?” Once again Patrick was unsure if it was the whirlpool or the woman he was talking of.

As if she had travelled at great speeds over an endless space, Fleda felt herself for the first time close to Patrick. As if he had touched her on the shoulder or placed his hand, momentarily, on her hair. She thought she might be able to ask him now, about his approach… and about his avoidance.

“But, you haven’t allowed me… you would never allow me…” she began.

“No, I haven’t, have I,” said Patrick, interrupting her.

“I would try to talk to you… and you would stop me… I can’t even say how… but you would do it and I would be stopped.”

“I was afraid.”

“Why were you afraid?”

“It has to do with untrustworthy connections.”

“I am untrustworthy, then, even to speak to?”

“I spoke…”

“Not really … you would want me to talk and then silence me.”

“Yes,” he admitted.

It began to rain again, this time an even, steady curtain of water. They were protected in the thicket of green – shut in together, a closeness concocted by nature. Fleda searched her mind for something else to say. She wanted to keep Patrick there, in the green cocoon, with the rain eliminating the rest of the world. She wanted him to speak and come nearer.

“And if you had swum the whirlpool already, you wouldn’t be afraid?”

“Not of the whirlpool.”

Fleda was silent. She looked upward at the top branches, wondering when the rain would break through, how long they would be protected. She thought about the fear, how he felt it too; whether, when he described it, it was his fear or hers he was referring to. If it belonged to both of them it would be like a third person, then, always with them, so that they would never be close or alone together.

“I would have hoped …” she said to Patrick, aware that she might never have another chance. “I would have hoped that we might have been able to get close to each other… that we might have been friends.”

They stood and looked at each other, each with their arms full of sticks for some future fire. A blanket of rain all over the forest and this one clearing a bubble of open air. Then the rain broke through and the fear in Patrick snapped into focus.

He dropped his bundle of kindling on the ground and moved swiftly towards Fleda. Grabbing her shoulders he thrust his face into hers, so close she could feel the hot breath of his words on her face.

“Learn this,” he hissed, “I don’t
want
to be this close to you. Not now, not ever. Look what happens… when we’re this close we can’t see each other at all… not even each other’s eyes. This close, you’re a blur… and I’m nothing… completely nothing… nothing but a voice. You can’t see me. My voice is so close it could be inside your own head. I don’t
want
to be this close, Fleda, I want the distance.”

She shook him off and moved back several feet, clutching her own bundle of wood to her heart, frightened and hurt. Rain all over her face.

“You
DO
!” She turned on him, her voice rising. “You
DO!
I’ve seen you… I
KNOW
how you are thinking. I know,” she finally blurted out, “that you have been watching me… wanting something. Why else would you watch me like that? You
WANT
to be close to me!”

Patrick began to shake. He felt that his privacy, his self, had been completely invaded. He was like a walled village that
had been sacked and burned, just when it was feeling most secure, when it was full of provisions and all the people and livestock were safe behind the drawbridge. How
dare
she? he thought, as if she, not he, had been the voyeur.

“You’re wrong,” he said coldly. “I’ve never watched you.”

“But Patrick,” she said, her voice softer now, “it’s all right. I don’t mind. I’m glad that you watched me.” She saw herself, momentarily, through his eyes… a legend in a forest.

He was furious. It was as if this ordinary woman, this housewife, had turned his brain inside out so that she could examine it scientifically. His fantasy became a smear on a glass under a lens in a laboratory.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said, trying to control his trembling voice, “but whatever it is, I think we should stop discussing it.”

Fleda was silent, shocked. She stared hard at his face.

Patrick did not look at her, would never look at her again. She was not supposed to be aware of the focus of the lens he had fixed on her. She was never meant to answer his attentions. She had now pulled his fantasy into the mundane architecture of fact.

He left her there, alone in the woods, and made his way, angrily, through the storm, back to his uncle’s farm.