The Whirlpool (21 page)

O
rder attacked the child as suddenly, as unpredictably as any other form of disease, and he began to sort, to classify.

Maud was surprised one morning to find her haphazardly arranged dresser drawers immaculate; gloves placed together in one location, stockings in another. The housekeeper could not have done this. Maud kept her own room, had always done so.

At first she could not imagine what had happened, and tried to remember whether she, herself, in a distracted, preoccupied way, had actually performed the task while thinking about something else. She had lost objects in this manner, moving them unconsciously around the house while her mind arranged an important funeral, but never in her experience had she organized drawers… consciously or otherwise.

Then she guessed it. The child; the child had done this, slipping through the house like a shadow. Vaguely pleased with this new facet of his behaviour, she decided to let it rest. No harm done, no harm.

She closed the window in her room as she did each morning after a night filled with the perils of vapours, and walked through the doorway down the hall to the sunroom, the light of which burst easily over her as she reached her desk. Settling in, she opened the drawer to remove the
accounts book. There, also, order surprised her. Seven lead pencils were arranged according to size in descending scale at the front. Beside them, two erasers, their pink tips and bottoms not a fraction out of line. Adjacent to these lay her gum-backed labels in a pile so regular it resembled a tiny block of wood painted red and white. Her several notebooks were piled, one on top of the other, at the rear of the drawer, like a miniature ziggurat, beginning with the largest account book at the bottom and finishing with the smallest (her collection of drowned individuals) at the top. Now she was beginning to become perplexed. An isolated incident was one thing, but what else had he been into besides drawers?

She was staring into the many cubbyholes directly above the surface of the desk when she realized that the familiar irregularity of the papers she stashed there had also changed. All the envelopes (mostly containing IOUs) had been filed, again according to size, with the smaller ones occupying smaller spaces, the larger, larger spaces and the unclassifiable nowhere to be seen. The child had clearly taken it upon himself to dispose of these irregularities. If they couldn’t be sorted, then they shouldn’t exist.

Maud looked around the room and noted, as she now feared, that its profusion of bric-a-brac was undeniably altered. Objects had been grouped together, classified somehow, though it was difficult for Maud to determine the criteria for these new configurations. Her domestic geography had been tampered with, her home had become a puzzle. The size classification that the child had so neatly applied to the desk was not in evidence anywhere else in the room. Instead, there were these innumerable clusters of small connected objects, some that had been in the room previously, some that had been brought from other rooms to complete a bizarre design determined by the child.

The mantel, she discovered, was covered with cutting, shining things: her letter opener, a pen-knife, three needles from her sewing basket, scissors, a razor blade, which had
somehow remained in the house since Charles’ death, and a piece of broken glass. A cherry sidetable, which normally held Charles’ photo, appeared to be empty. But as Maud looked again, it revealed itself to be covered with various forms of detritus: a dust ball, lint from a cotton pocket, a small amount of sand apparently from the driveway, and, most strange, a dirty, soot-filled spider web, found in some corner, no doubt, that she was unaware of, or perhaps from the workshops downstairs. There were ashes, too, probably from the cook stove in the kitchen.

The photograph of Charles? She found it, after searching for some time, situated under the curving arm of the sofa, along with others of her parents, his parents, herself. These were combined with a variety of other flat human images; a paper doll, a steel engraving from
Ladies’ Home Journal
, and a framed lithograph, from the parlour, of a little girl staring out to sea.

On the windowsill, the presence of a clear paperweight, the magnifying glass her mother-in-law had used to read, her father-in-law’s spectacles, and a pressed glass goblet confounded Maud until she realized that what they had in common was transparency and an innate ability to shatter.

She wondered which had come to the child first: the fairly simple method of classification according to size, or the more complex method of classification by physical property. There were groups of objects, moreover, whose common denominator she couldn’t, for the life of her, identify: the thimble, pearl necklace, and spoon, for instance, or the playing card, chestnut, and emery board.

Maud moved around the room in a bemused manner, taking stock of the situation. The appearance of objects from further rooms caused her to suppose that the whole house had been disturbed as much as it might have been had vandals ransacked it during the night. It would be weeks before her own concept of order was restored. Still, she could not yet become angry. Every time she tried, her curiosity got in the way. These strange little assemblings might be the key to the child’s
mind; a garden she’d been denied access to for years. In her heart, she felt like letting him continue. Rearrange it, she would say, it might be better.

On the bookshelf, in front of
Great Expectations
and
Little Dorrit
, was a collection of tickets of various sizes… just that, no more; a colourful collection of tickets. Nothing complex here. These came from the ferry boat, or the streetcar, or the opera house… a few from the Terrapin Tower of other amusements near the Falls. One was from a horse race. Maud shuffled them in her fingers, pondering their significance in the child’s mind.

It came to her slowly, the origin of these tickets, very slowly at first. Then, the knowledge exploding in her head like fireworks, she turned and ran from the room, down the long hall. The child, she suddenly knew, had invaded her cupboard, her museum.

T
his morning being Sunday, and none of them at church, they were sitting on three camp stools near the bank. Patrick had arrived early, his trousers soaked with the dew that had covered the orchards he had to cross on his route from the farm to the Heights. He had helped himself to the coffee that bubbled over the fire and had accepted an offer of bacon and eggs. He and David discussed and then rejected the idea of church, looking as pleased as schoolboys taking a day off.

All of this is so innocent, Fleda thought to herself angrily. The men had a secret pact. They knew what they should do and they knew how to be gleefully guilty when they weren’t doing it. Never a thought that desire and duty could possibly mesh. Never a thought that the deepest desires were a duty in themselves. Somehow she felt that the men would either snicker or turn away in horror from her intensest wishes, even though they had some, not unlike hers, locked away in some corner of their heads – in a place where she couldn’t get at them, and they couldn’t either.

She began to hum hymns, quietly, and then with increasing volume, when she realized that neither man was paying any attention. They were discussing the war.

“Did I ever show you the garden in Queenston where Brock paused to draw his breath, just before he scaled the
Heights?” David was asking. “Just imagine him there, alive one minute in a
flower garden
, and the next hour completely dead.”

Fleda decided to add words to the tune she was humming:

“Why did he do it, do you think?” Patrick opened his hands earnestly. “Was it for the sake of a magnificent death? He must have known. Wouldn’t he have known?”

“You have to remember,” David continued didactically, “that Brock would have had Nelson as a model and General Wolfe. These men were happy to use their bodies as targets.”

“Targets?”

“Um-hmm, a wonderful thing to do. After all, to aim at the leader distracts the enemy, if only briefly.”

“Soldiers of Christ arise, and put your armour on”
Fleda sang. And then:

As a child she had memorized practically the whole Canadian Hymnal, it being the closest thing to poetry that graced the shelves of her father’s house. She remembered the shape of the book… its cover was oddly square and coloured an unpleasant shade of green.

“But isn’t that rather self-defeating?” Patrick was saying. “I mean, once the target is hit, as it inevitably has to be, then there is no more leader.”

“Oh, but the men respond to that with increased fervour, better fighting. ‘Revenge the General!’ they cry.”

“So, what did Brock’s men do, after he died?”

“Well, they ran about shouting, ‘Revenge the General!’ for a while… a few attempted to rush up the Heights. Then they retreated, took Brock’s body back to the flower garden. It’s at the old Hamilton house – the garden, I mean. I really must take you there some time.”

“They took him back to the flower garden?”

“Yes, and then they made one last valiant attempt to capture Queenston Heights.”

“And?”

“Complete chaos, severed limbs, death, the usual.”

Fleda searched her memory for another verse.

“But don’t you see,” David continued, “the whole thing was so wonderful. A young country like ours needs dead heroes. Someone to mourn. Someone to make a monument for.”

“Yes, but he was English.”

“Only while he was alive. After that, he became entirely Canadian. Not that he ever wanted to be, Lord knows… but that’s of little consequence. Canada claimed him and nothing will ever change that. ‘Push on, brave York Volunteers!’”

David held his clenched fist in the air for a moment, and then laughed, finding himself in a ridiculous posture.

Fleda sang, her voice becoming gradually louder:

David finally looked in her direction. “Fleda, for heaven’s sake, what… ?”

But Patrick interrupted. “I believe I am a pacifist,” he said. “I believe that nothing could induce me to place my body in the direct line of fire.”

“It depends,” said David, “on what you are fighting for.” Actually, he didn’t care at all what they were fighting for as long
as he could write about it afterwards, but he knew it was important to have something to be fighting for.

“What
were
they fighting for?” Patrick wondered out loud. “Were they fighting against the Americans, for Canada, against Napoleon, for the Empire… I could never figure it out. I mean, either way we lose, right? We’re either the property of one nation or another. We’re either Americans or we’re British, the only difference being that, after these conflicts, some of us are dead.”

“I believe that they were fighting for their own country, the Canadian militia, the Indians,” David’s voice was beginning to rise. “They may not have known this at the beginning of the conflict, but by the time it was over they knew. They knew they had a country. It was all vague before that, but after… after, they became a race!”

Fleda began to march around, slowly circling the men. She remembered having felt like this when she was a child, annoyed by adults in rooms and their serious conversations, their orderly behaviour. It occurred to her that her activities were childish, but nothing in her wanted to stop. David was noticing, was beginning to become distracted, but Patrick was lost, out there somewhere, imagining battlefields.

“Battlefields are beautiful,” said Patrick, “when the grass comes back. You can see the marks of fighting but they are so benign… like scars… no… smoother than scars. More like memories. Battlefields are so soft, after the grass comes back.”

He was really speaking to himself, but David responded. “They should be preserved. We never preserve anything. I want to make a museum… a better museum. Can’t get anyone to preserve anything. There is Brock’s monument, of course, but even it has been blown up once.”

“There are these wounds in the earth and then the grass comes and covers it all up, like skin, without scars.”

“On the other hand, you could hardly blame the Fenians,” said David, not listening at all to Patrick. “The Irish certainly have suffered, have been the victims of an overbearing
aggressive imperialistic neighbour. The Irish and the Canadians have much in common and will have a great deal more unless we are very careful.”

Lord, thought Fleda, these theories… no humans there at all. No actual people in these landscapes. What about the pain?

“There is that tower at Lundy’s Lane,” David continued. “But what, tell me, do you see from it? Butcher shops, funeral establishments, greengrocers. And the part of the battlefield that
is
visible isn’t even properly marked. It’s scandalous!”

The child in Fleda, meanwhile, had decided to take a slightly different tack. She wanted a response from Patrick and now knew she would have to address him directly in order to receive it. Moving closer to that place where he sat, she sang softly, confidentially, wickedly:

This was a verse she had whispered to herself as a child before going to sleep, so that she could enjoy, in the dark, the wonderful pictures it brought into her imagination: sheep stained bright red, the sinful, bloody scarlet hearts depicted in Papist lithographs, a pair of bright red mittens lying in a snowdrift, white sheep sinfully butchered, stained this time irregularly with their own blood. All this and more … images of red-hot coals and of scarlet flowers opening, of mouths moistening and of arteries pumping. As a child, she had loved this verse.

The effect on Patrick was instant, though subtle. She saw him wince and then send a brief, chilling glance in her direction. He turned back to David, hoping, she suspected, that if he shut her out entirely, she would stop. She should stop. At another moment she might have even tried to stop. But it was out of her hands now. These crazy hymns she had memorized
as a child were taking over. She sang the verse again louder now, but still directed towards Patrick. He was not looking at David any more. His gaze was fixed instead on his hands, his face and neck beginning to colour.

“Though your sins be like scarlet,”
she began again. She was unwilling to give it up, the anger she suddenly felt, once again, towards him, towards his own vain masculine will.

Then, inexplicably, in mid-verse, she relaxed, became composed, uncaring. She shrugged and turned away from both men, the neutrality of the word
wool
still hanging in the air and finally entering her mind.

She stopped, at that moment, responding to either one of them.