The Day the Falls Stood Still

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  After the requisite chitchat on the veranda, I say to Kit, “Come help me with the tea,” and we go inside, leaving Edward in my rocking chair and Isabel on the chaise. In the privacy of the kitchen, my mind stumbles from Father’s late nights to Isabel’s poor appetite to Mother’s dressmaking, and then to Tom and my trunk and the pike. Yet I am unable to begin. “How was Stoney Lake?” I finally say.

  “Restful. Quiet. Boring, in a pleasant way. All the days were the same, nothing to make one different from the next. Edward was good company, though. He always is. The time flew by.”

  What if Dickens is right? What if I can exist only inside my own head? Spurred on by the bleakness of the thought, I say, “These two weeks have been the longest of my life.”

  Her shoulders slump. “Is everything still awful?”

  “So much has happened.”

  “For instance?”

  “For instance, this morning, I picked raspberries, made biscuits, finished twenty-three buttonholes—there are still seven more—combed Isabel’s hair, pleaded with her to eat a handful of raspberries, read to her, and gutted a fish.”

  “She’s so thin. Too thin.”

  “She doesn’t eat,” I say, throwing up my palms. “Boyce Cruickshank?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. She’s hardly mentioned him.”

  “So much has gone wrong and all at once.”

  “There’s something she isn’t telling me,” I say. “Mother says it’s only that she’s used to having her own way. But you’ve seen her. She’s half-starved. She isn’t the same. She never laughs.” I feel a lump rise in my throat, and I know I must stop. Another word and my voice will break, setting loose a flood. Kit must know it, too, because she stoops to fiddle with the hem of her skirt, and she is not the sort to care whether it has come fully loose, let alone whether there is a stray thread.

  When I return from fetching a handkerchief and blowing my nose, she says, “I can’t believe you gutted a fish.”

  It is my chance to tell her about Tom, but is there anything to say? He and I have spoken politely, only about practical things—scaling a fish, westerly winds pushing water over the falls. I learned his name just this morning. And I know little other than that he spends a great deal of time on the river and can easily shoulder the weight of a trunk. We have simply exchanged a fish for some berries as neighbors might, and only after I stood and waved from the veranda, giving him little choice other than to make the climb to Glenview. But I come back to one thought, as I have all afternoon: He said he would bring me a second fish. “I met a fellow on the trolley,” I say. “He brought me a pike.”

  “What?”

  “He helped Mother and me with my trunk when I left the academy. He was heading to his camp at the whirlpool.”

  “You’re interested?”

  I do my best to hide a smile. “I don’t know.”

  “And the pike?” I had anticipated excitement, speculation, maybe even a bit of scheming about how the three of us might meet. She is listening closely, yet I cannot help but think that she seems more put out than anything else.

  “He caught six or seven fish this morning and gave me one.”

  “Is he a student?”

  “I expect he’s through with school.”

  “Some sort of naturalist, then?”

  I set a stack of saucers on a tray. “I don’t think so.”

  “Bess, does he sell fish?” She is clever enough to question what a fellow who catches a half dozen fish at a time does with his haul. She watches me, dubious.

  “Maybe. Sometimes.”

  “If he’s wasting his days loafing, he should enlist. Even Edward’s talking about it, and he’s about run off his feet with two of Father’s clerks already overseas.”

  “Let’s join the others,” I say.

  On the veranda I pour the tea without making a mess, which is more difficult than it sounds, given that Isabel’s head is thrown back in laughter, apparently in response to the story Edward is telling, a story both of us have heard many times. It involves a hunting excursion, a ruined boot, and a bullet-grazed foot. Then, as we sit chatting, she gobbles up three rye flour gingersnaps and pours herself a second cup of tea. Still, I am most flabbergasted when the conversation turns to dressmaking and she praises the gown Mother is making for Mrs. Atwell. “Gorgeous,” she says. “And you should see the tea dress Bess made me. We’ll have all the ladies in town clamoring at our door.”

  A moment later, when Edward is out of earshot fetching the hat he forgot in the Runabout, Kit says, “He’s doing a first-rate job running the furniture store,” which is not surprising news. He is too patient to rush a decision, too well-mannered to offend, too decent to have anything but his customers’ best interests at heart.

  “Has he got a sweetheart?” Isabel asks.

  “Not yet,” Kit says. “He’d make a great catch.”

  As he crosses the garden, returning in his Panama hat, it occurs to me that he is handsome, not like Tom, certainly not like Boyce Cruickshank, and I wonder if Isabel, with her gaze trained on him, is thinking the same thought. Maybe she is through with boys like Boyce Cruickshank, boys teeming with wit and charm. Maybe Edward’s simplicity has its own appeal. His lack of shrewdness might matter a whole lot less to her than it would if he were not already financially set.

  I have known Edward since I can remember and have spent many a summer day with him happily shepherding Kit and me around Queen Victoria Park or Goat Island or Chippawa Creek, excursions we would never have been allowed to make on our own. And to put it bluntly, Isabel could outsmart him at every turn. So much worse, though, he seems remarkably immune to her. And I do not know that she can manage another blow, not so soon, not now.

  After Edward has cranked the Runabout, and he and Kit leave, I wait for Isabel to return to her sullen self. But instead she suggests we pick raspberries to serve for dessert with the biscuits I made earlier. As we walk toward the fence in the far corner of the yard where the raspberries grow, she says, “I know I’ve been a great curmudgeon.”

  “Or worse.”

  She stops and turns toward me, taking both my hands in hers. “You are the kindest sister in the world and deserve better than me.”

  “I want you to eat.”

  “Tonight I will eat your pike.”

  In the warm glow of late afternoon sun, it seems it is the old Isabel arranging herself on a spread shawl and picking the raspberries within easy reach. I want the shadows to remain long and the sun to remain low. I want the day to remain golden and muted and rich. I want time to slow, but the raspberries must be picked and the pike has got to be stuffed and there are potatoes to peel. Mother is due home in just over an hour.

  When I catch the murmur of Isabel’s voice, I prick up my ears. “Edward is kind of sweet, don’t you think?”

  “As sweet as they come.”

  “He’s got a nice build.”

  “He spends entire weekends chopping wood.”

  “Really?” she says. “That’s the sort of thing I’d rather not know.” She winks then, the way she used to, inclusively, like you are her very best friend.

  As the screen door closes behind Mother, she drops two large bundles onto the floor. “At last,” she says, setting her hat on the hall table. She stands still for a moment. “Is that fish I smell?”

  “Stuffed pike,” I say. “Pike?”

  “The fellow who helped with the trunk came by with it.”

  She eyes me carefully, then picks up the bundles and signals for me to follow her up the stairs. “How much did you pay?” Her voice is restrained, careful not to chide good intentions but anxious nevertheless.

  “I gave him some raspberries.”

  She turns to face me in the hallway and stands stock-still, searching my face. I do not look away. “Well done,” she says, at last. “You have no idea how nice it is to come home starved and find supper under way.”

  I curtsy, lifting imaginary skirts. “Supper wil
l be served in a half hour.”

  She unties the string from one of the bundles, spreads the wrappings, and shakes open a folded length of sheer, cream-colored fabric. “Silk georgette,” she says. “It’s for the bodice of Miss O’Leary’s wedding gown. There is a lighter-weight georgette for the skirt, also silk lining, and organza to support the beadwork.” She slides a box the size of a small loaf from the middle of the stacked fabric and holds it out to me. “Take a look.”

  I lift the lid and unfold tissue paper. The pool of smooth, creamy beads glistens and then glitters as I run a finger through it. Some are shaped like rice, others like tears. There are spheres of three sizes, the largest like a pea, the smallest, a quarter the size.

  “The entire bodice will be beaded, the neckline and a band around the hips most heavily,” she says. “I’ve worked out a pattern, all flowers and vines.”

  She produces a wrinkled sheet of paper on which tear-and rice-shape beads radiate from spheres, forming an assortment of flowers, each amid a tangle of gracefully curved vine shaped from more of the rice-shape beads linked end to end. “Oh, Mother,” I say.

  “It’s more than a month’s work.”

  “I can follow the pattern exactly.”

  “I’ll need your help,” she says, refolding the georgette. “I’ll just go see Isabel a minute, and then I’ll be down to set the table.”

  “She said she’d have supper with us, and the table is set,” I say.

  Mother hesitates, the georgette motionless in her hands. She smiles and says, “It’s your lovely pike.”

  I shrug and smile back.

  5

  Tightrope walking

  Eight consecutive evenings, from seven o’clock until half past nine, I have poked my needle through the organza of Miss O’Leary’s wedding gown, wrong side to right, and strung a bead onto the thread, then poked my needle back though the organza and secured the thread with a knot. The pattern committed to memory, I beaded diligently, and Mother said my work was at least as good as her own. But tonight, rather than contentedly beading alongside her, I toil behind my closed bedroom door. “The light is better,” I said.

  I work, untroubled by the tear-shape petals lying slightly askew or the curved vines severed by eighth-inch gaps. Nor am I careful to pull the slack from the thread before making a knot. Without the ambition of perfection, the work is mindless, an empty passage of time. My only satisfaction will come later, when Mother examines the evening’s progress.

  Yesterday, as I carefully knotted the final bead of the evening into place, Mother’s foot came off the treadle and she looked up from her work. “Tomorrow you can tell the young man who brings the fish we don’t need any more,” she said.

  “I don’t see why I should, not when we’re being told to save the bacon and beef for the troops.”

  “I think you do.” She gave me a few seconds to respond, and, when I did not, her foot settled back on the treadle. “Good night,” she said over the rhythmic whir of the sewing machine.

  The first pike Tom brought was flaky and moist, not a bit dry, the way Mother said poorly cooked pike tends to be. He had come again the next day with a half dozen fish strung on his line. As I crossed the yard to the gate, I glanced over my shoulder and saw Mother at the window of the sewing room.

  “Fine day,” he said.

  “Yes, so still.”

  His eyes flitted to the window twice as we stood there, at the gate, pretending to inspect the fish on his line. “Your mother is watching.”

  “I know,” I said and felt my cheeks grow hot.

  After an awkward gap, he said, “The pike turn out okay?”

  “Delicious. My mother and Isabel thought so, too.”

  “I’ve only got sturgeon today.” He nudged a fish. “This one’s about four pounds, a good size for baking.”

  “I have your raspberries.” I lifted a brown paper sack. “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “I picked them for you,” I said.

  He left, and I stood at the gate for a long while thinking that my imagination had run amok, that I was a silly girl with my head in the clouds. What did I want from him? Maybe only the chance to dream, a brief pause in the hard work life had become. Even so, the moment he became a shadowy figure disappearing in the distance, I began to await his return, hardly able to bear the idea of an entire day until then.

  At suppertime, I watched on tenterhooks as Mother tasted her first forkful of the sturgeon. “Just lovely,” she said. I had half-expected her disapproval to have made its way to the fish.

  Another day, it rained and I was afraid he would not come. When he arrived at the gate, I called him to the veranda. I could hardly be criticized. I was wearing a white embroidered dress I had borrowed from Isabel and would have been scandalous soaked to the bone. “Was my mother watching?”

  “I didn’t see her.”

  “Have a seat, then,” I said, “until the rain lets up.” The rain was coming down in sheets, leaving the veranda a small, private room curtained from the world. “You’re soaked.” I wanted to offer him a towel but did not think I should risk going inside.

  “This one’s the best of the lot,” he said, tapping a pike.

  Once I finished describing how I had cooked the fish from the day before, we sat for several more minutes, each of us at a loss for words, until he finally said, “What do you think the average fellow sees when he looks at the falls?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Loveliness?”

  “Way back, people talked about its ‘awful grandeur’ and ‘frightful beauty.’”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you think people still see it?” He wiped a droplet of rain from his cheek. “The majesty?”

  “Sometimes it seems like the river is being made into a measly thing.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

  He smoothes his palms over his thighs. “It started way back, when a ladder was dropped over the gorge wall so that Governor Simcoe’s wife could get a better look. After that there were the covered stairs and the incline railways.”

  “And the bridges went up,” I said.

  “The river’s been bound up with cables and concrete and steel, like a turkey at Christmastime.”

  It was the most I had ever heard him say, and his seeming idea that the river ought to be left alone took me by surprise. It was contrary to anything I had ever heard, particularly from Father, who surely thought the river was ours to use as we saw fit. “Go on,” I said, curious, though I was not a bit sure I agreed with him.

  He spoke next of the parade of stunters who came to Niagara, of Blondin on his tightrope leading the way. He said onlookers crowded the riverbanks and gawked into the gorge from above. Men swam in the river and navigated it in boats, sometimes without getting themselves killed.

  “And pretty soon there were barrels in the rapids and the whirlpool. And then, when that wasn’t enough, the stunters got into their barrels above the falls.”

  “Annie Taylor,” I said, naming the first to survive the plunge. I had seen the old schoolmarm more than once, in a shabby skirt at the top of Clifton Hill, hawking the autographed postcards that commemorated her feat.

  “It’s more than just the bridges and the stunters.”

  “How so?” I asked, wondering if the rain had let up enough that its drumming no longer kept our voices from Mother’s ears.

  “Way back all the water from the Great Lakes got to the Atlantic by going over the falls,” he said. “Not anymore, though. The Erie and Welland canals take a bunch of it. At Chicago water is siphoned off to float the city’s sewage to the Mississippi. A half dozen syndicates are clamoring for canals, all draining away water before it reaches the Niagara. They all want a shorter route to the Atlantic, with Georgian Bay hooked up with the Ottawa River, and five hundred miles cut out of the trip.”

  “There’s an awful lot of water going over the brink.”

  “Someone’s got to say, ‘enough is enough.’
The river’s being bled dry.” His fingers curled into his palms. “First it was just the gristmills on the rim of the gorge. An eyesore but harmless enough. But then the power companies came and dug their canals and tunnels, and started siphoning off water to spin their turbines and make electricity.”

  “My father worked for the Niagara Power Company,” I said, because it seemed unfair to let him go on without knowing. A crack of thunder caused me to jump, and the most wonderful smile, a little lopsided, came to his face. We both laughed, and I said, “Angels bowling,” and thought the thunder was a stroke of luck, a perfect chance to steer the conversation away from the power companies.

  Still, when he next spoke he said that the Toronto Power Company, the last of the power companies to build on the Canadian side, was the worst of the bunch, that they built their powerhouse right on the riverbed, where the upper river’s wildest rapids used to be. “Metal rods were sent down to gauge the river’s depth,” he said, “and when they came up bent, they just dumped rock and more rock, until the river was held back.”

  “A Mr. Lennox designed the powerhouse,” I said in another attempt to shift the conversation. “It’s the prettiest of the lot, with its Indiana limestone and colonnade.” He looked at me queerly, and I knew he considered the aesthetics of a powerhouse unworthy of second thought.

  “The tunnel for the tailrace is underneath the river,” he said, “blasted straight through to the cliff face behind the falls. Mounds of rubble were shoved through the opening, just dumped into the cavern it’d taken the river hundreds of years to gnaw out.”