The Day the Falls Stood Still (27 page)

29

A
t nine o’clock in the evening I put down the socks I am darning and follow Tom up the stairs. I climb into bed beside him without properly washing my face, with only the most cursory combing of my hair. Any delay and he would have been asleep.

He is on his back, and I snuggle up, my shoulder under his arm, my head resting on his chest, cheek against skin. He wraps an arm around me, and it gives me the courage I need. “You should resign,” I say.

“Resign?”

“From the Hydro.”

“It’s work,” he says, “and there isn’t anything else.” A flood of laborers was let go once the canal and forebay were excavated, and then a second round, once the concrete was poured, and a third, once the first of the generators was up and running. There are cutbacks everywhere, and when a job does come up, there are a hundred applicants, all willing to work for a third of what he makes at the Hydro-Electric Power Commission.

“We managed on just my dressmaking when you first got back from the war.”

“We were living with Mrs. Andrews, and it was just the three of us.”

“We’ll put the house up for sale,” I say. “You could get back to fishing and trapping, and sell what you caught. Jesse, too. It’s what you did as a boy.”

“Bess, you’d be miserable.”

“Sadie managed all right.”

“Sadie looked after herself from the age of thirteen. She ate nothing but apples and walnuts for weeks at a time. She wore the same buckskin dress every day, and she’d scraped it herself. When Fergus came along with a cabin and a rabbit twice a week and fish every other night, it was more than she’d ever had.”

It hurts to be compared with Sadie and come up short, and I am on the verge of listing the hundred ways I have left my Glenview days behind. But how can I when, just three years ago, I had convinced the both of us I could not do without the May Avenue house?

“Remember that day at the whirlpool,” he says, “the day Francis was born?”

I nod, thinking of myself in labor in his arms as he scrambled out of the gorge. I had been afraid until the moment he had promised to take the job at the Hydro.

“You said I should put my family first.” He lifts my hand from his chest and kisses the base of my thumb. “You were right, Bess. A man needs to do what’s best for his family.”

“But you’re not yourself anymore.” I prop myself up beside him. “You’re hardly here, and Jesse and Francis miss you so much. Me too. Listen to me, Tom. You’re wearing yourself out with all the measuring, all the climbing in and out of the gorge.”

“I know I haven’t been pulling my weight,” he says. “I’ll figure something out for the boys.”

“That notebook. You’re tormenting yourself. And what for, Tom?”

He tilts his head back on the pillow, his eyes following suit, rolling upward so that he is looking at the ceiling. “I don’t know,” he finally says. “It’s not like anything in that book will ever see the light of day.”

Cheek back against his chest, I lie there listening to his heart, thinking about all those columns printed with dates and measurements, and margins scrawled with notes. Had keeping them to himself made his misery a whole lot worse? “I don’t see why not.”

“No one could care less,” he says. “That’s why not.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“I’m supposed to set myself up a soapbox on Clifton Hill and holler at the tourists walking by?”

“There are ways,” I say.

“I’m dead tired, Bess. I just want to go to sleep.”

“I could help.”

“Just let me sleep,” he says and lets go of my hand.

E
arly morning I open my eyes to blank sheet, to the hollow where Tom slept until he roused himself with time enough for all the measuring before setting off to work. I lie awake for a good hour, wondering what I could have said, waiting for the sound of the boys’ feet on the floor. I think of him coming home earlier in the week, a dollar’s reward money in his hand. He had gone into the upper river, after a dog this time. He stood there dripping on the kitchen floor, and when he finally spoke his voice quavered as though he were afraid. “There are two eddies between the spot where I went in after the dog and where we would have been sucked into the Toronto powerhouse. Either would have been enough to swing the two of us to shore. I missed the first one altogether and barely caught the second. I didn’t get the current right.”

A second later I am out of bed and in the boys’ room. And there is Francis, curled into a ball, his thumb in his mouth. But there is no Jesse, only more blank sheet, another hollow, the place where he slept until Tom woke him with the news he had been craving for six weeks: They were going for a long hike. Twelve miles beginning in Chippawa, ending at Queenston Heights. Three times in and out of the gorge. And then a long trudge back to the house.

O
nce Tom is off to work and exhausted Jesse tucked back into bed and Francis sent to Mrs. Mancuso’s, where he will not wake his brother, I telephone Cecil Randal at the
Evening Review.
“We’re on May Avenue,” I say, after he has agreed to come, “the house with all the fishing rods out front.”

A half hour later I am sitting with Mr. Randal at the kitchen table, Tom’s notebook open between us. “Tom’s been keeping track for nearly three years, then?” he says.

I nod. “He says the river will have dropped six or more feet by the time all the generators are switched on.”

“The hotel owners and the tour operators won’t like it,” he says. “They might even kick up a bit of a fuss, but I can’t see that anything will change. We’ve lived with blackouts and coal shortages and ever higher prices for electricity. People want the powerhouse. They voted for it. The money’s been spent.”

“You saw the picture of Premier Drury and Tom at the opening?”

“I did,” he says.

“Tom was so humiliated,” I say. “He can’t stand everyone thinking he doesn’t mind about all the water being siphoned off.”

“But he works for the Hydro,” Mr. Randal says. “There’ll be trouble if we put all this in the newspaper.”

“I expect you’re right.”

“You’re sure.”

“I am.” And it is true. I am content to live in rented rooms, if it comes to that, and to eat whatever Tom is able to trap or catch on his line. I will sew, and when I have an idle moment, I will study the book where Sadie kept her recipes for groundnut root and wild leeks.

“And what about Tom? Is he sure?”

“He’s been keeping track so he’d have proof,” I say. It is almost not a lie.

B
y midafternoon the following day, I have been to the office of the
Evening Review
to collect one of the first papers off the press from Cecil Randal, and fairly well galloped back to May Avenue. Newspaper spread open on the kitchen table, I find the editorial, on page 2 no less.

30

Niagara’s Toronto powerhouse

Photo courtesy of Ontario Power Generation.

B
efore I have managed to pace the kitchen twice, the telephone rings. When I pick up, I am thankful it is Kit on the line and say, “I was about to start calling around to your shops.”

“Have you seen the newspaper?” It is typical Kit, cutting to the chase.

“It was me that spoke to Cecil Randal, not Tom.”

“But, Bess, he’ll be sacked.” And then, always quick on the uptake, she adds, “You want him sacked.”

I tell her that Tom was let go, that I had tried to convince him to resign before I went to Cecil Randal, that he would not budge.

“You went to the newspaper behind Tom’s back. Wow. What’d he say?”

“Nothing.” I sink into the chair beside the telephone. “He’s furious. He left.”

“I’ll be over in a minute,” she says.

I go back to wandering in the kitchen, keeping it up until the telephone rings again. This time it is Father on the line. “Is it true?” he says.

“What?”

“That Tom put a piece in the newspaper blasting the power companies?”

“It was me.”

There is silence and then: “Good God, Bess. Mr. Coulson won’t keep him on.”

“It isn’t right, someone like Tom, helping them siphon off half the river. It’s ruining him.” And then I am weeping because Kit is treating the situation like an emergency and Father is sounding alarmed.

“Ah, Bess. Don’t cry. Things just have a way of working themselves out.”

“But he left. Mr. Coulson sacked him, and when he got home I showed him the newspaper and he left.” I do not attempt to keep my voice from breaking, to keep the sobs at bay.

“Bess. Bess. No need for tears. That Tom, he loves you like every father only wishes his daughter could be loved. There’s no chance he’s gone for good. He’ll be back all right, sooner than you think, too.”

And then Kit is at the door, so I say good-bye to Father and he says, “I’m telling you, Bess, I know what I know, not a speck of doubt.”

The minute she takes in my tear-streaked face, her arms are around me. “I’ve been thinking about everything and, well, I think it’ll all work out.” She leans away from me. “It just isn’t what anyone expects from you. He’s going to need a bit of time.”

We talk a long while, until the boys are back from Mrs. Mancuso’s and supper is under way, and we have run out of angles and considerations, and repeated the most cogent of our thoughts a handful of times, and I am very nearly as certain as Father that Tom will come around. Then Kit steps back from the kitchen sink, where she is peeling potatoes, and says, “Know what, Bess?”

“What?”

“Promise you’ll take this the right way.”

“Promise.”

“You’re getting more and more like Isabel,” she says.

I feel myself smile. “Tom always says she’s still with me.”

She stills, half-peeled potato in hand, then nods and turns back to the sink.

T
om comes home early in the evening, after Kit is gone, and the boys run from the kitchen to the front door with me following once I have dealt with a pot of milk warming on the stove. Any scrap of trepidation melts away the moment I see the three of them in the hallway, laughing and jostling. With Jesse draped over one shoulder, Tom scoops up Francis and holds him prisoner in the opposite arm. “You won’t believe what happened,” Tom says.

I lift my palms.

“I stopped in at the Windsor and Sean Garvey was working and he said one of the men from that group, a Mr. Bennett, was in a little earlier. You remember those lawyers and businessmen who were complaining about the Niagara Falls Park Commission kowtowing to the Hydro?”

“Go on. Of course I do.” My fingernails are set to rupture the skin of my palms.

“Well, Mr. Bennett was asking around about how to get in touch with me. He had a copy of the story and he told Sean he wanted to talk to me about using it for their cause. And then a little later, when I showed up, Sean insisted on calling Mr. Bennett right then and there, and next thing I knew there were three of them from the group clapping me in the back at the Windsor Hotel. They want to see my notebook.”

Then the boys are set down. I touch his chest and he does not flinch. I put my arms around his neck, pull him against me, and after a moment he hugs me back. We laugh and my feet leave the ground and I feel lightheaded as he swings me around.

B
y eleven o’clock I have packed a small tin of lemon squares and a thermos of tea, and applied a bit of lipstick and decided on a cloche, and laughed aloud at my giddiness. I have settled on a pretty crepe de chine blouse and tapered skirt, though I imagine neither is suitable for a midnight row across the upper river. It is how we have decided to celebrate his freedom from the Hydro-Electric Power Commission, just the two of us, with the boys at Mrs. Mancuso’s, finally tucked into bed for the night.

On the trolley heading toward the upper river, Tom and I sit very close, and I am reminded of the first time I snuck away with him on the Great Gorge Route, my first glimpse of the Devil’s Hole and Whirlpool Rapids from the banks of the river. He had kissed me afterward, in the shadows of the Lower Steel Arch Bridge. My lips had parted to the warm wet of his mouth, and afterward, I was filled with a longing I was unable to shake. And here I am, eight years later, like a schoolgirl all over again.

By the time we reach Slater’s Dock, on the far side of Chippawa, the river has widened to more than a mile across and the current has grown sluggish. We walk twenty minutes farther, hand in hand, along the riverbank. Tom points out Greater Bear and Lesser Bear high in the nighttime sky. “They were once a pretty maid and her son, or so the story goes,” he says, “but Zeus had a jealous wife.” He explains that, unlike the other constellations, Greater Bear and Lesser Bear never slip below the horizon, never sink into the cool water waiting there. It was Zeus’s wife who came up with the punishment. As far as she was concerned, to be imprisoned in the body of a bear and flung high into the sky was not enough. No, Greater Bear and Lesser Bear were to spend all eternity wandering well above the horizon, pining for the water just out of their reach.

We come to a marshy bit of shoreline, and he drags a rowboat I had not noticed from the reeds. He had told me that it would be there, that he expected it belonged to a rumrunner, one of the men who rowed crates of bootleg gin and rye whiskey over to the American side.

Waves lap against the boat as we cross the river, and the sky is moonlit and full of stars. Tom rows masterfully, letting the current do much of the work.

“Remember the picnics in the athletic field?” he says.

“I do.”

“You always brought me lemon squares.”

“Remember the early days in the glen?” I say.

His head bobs in the darkness.

“You were always apologizing,” I say.

“It was so soon after Isabel. I wasn’t sure you were in your right head.”

“You were the reason I got up in the morning.”

“You’re still the reason I do.”

There are moments when it feels like my heart is not large enough to hold what I feel. Love wells in my eyes and I do not blink it away. I let it roll onto my cheeks.

He is a faded silhouette against his glittering river. Still, I can see the sheen that has come to his eyes.

A while later, we reach Grand Island, and he heaves the boat up onto the shore. We sit for a bit, sipping tea from the thermos, eating lemon squares. I watch him, gazing out at the river, at glittering crests and slick troughs, silver and black. And because it seems he is filled up, lost in the wonder of the river at night, I do not speak.

Eventually he comes back to me, to the grassy patch just beyond the riverbank, and spreads a blanket. He undoes the buttons of my blouse, the clasp of my skirt.

Afterward I lie with my hand on his belly, rising and falling with each of his breaths. Though his eyes are closed, the corner of his mouth is lifted in a soft smile that tells me that he has not drifted off, that he is wallowing in the pleasures of a few moments earlier. He moves a hand to his belly, threads his fingers with mine. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. The corner of his mouth lifts infinitesimally more.

I close my eyes, feel memory dissolve and slip away. I am in that place just before one forgets everything: who one is, even that one has a name. But he stirs, says, “Bess,” just loud enough to call me back.

“Um.”

“Why didn’t you tell me what you were up to, with Mr. Randal, I mean?”

“You would’ve told me I shouldn’t,” I say.

He is quiet, long enough that I begin to wonder if he has fallen asleep, but then he says, “Suppose you’re right.”