The Whirlpool

by Jane Urquhart

  Late in the afternoon, Maud Grady decided to take the child out for a stroll in the garden. Downstairs, at the back of the house, the workshops were silent, the men having left over an hour ago to preside over a procession and interment.

  She had spent the better part of the afternoon with the child, this being the housekeeper’s day off, and had tried repeatedly to capture his attention. It was no use, however. Regardless of her actions, of the brightly coloured objects that she dangled before him, he remained bent over a small toy rabbit, now almost lacking in woollen fur, stroking it rhythmically. Finally, emotionally drained by the effort, she collapsed in the armchair with the Ladies’ Home Journal and grimly waited out the rest of the afternoon. Until this moment when she decided that they both might benefit from some fresh air.

  They left the building by a side door situated closer to the street than to the garden and began to walk along the edge of the house. The child, still clutching the rabbit in his free hand, walked in a stiff-legged fashion like one whose limbs have been confined to braces for a great deal of time and who is only now beginning, once again, to be mobile. His eyes remained lowered as though he were concentrating on each footstep. But a closer examination of his line of vision would have revealed a fixed scrutiny of the ground before him, rather than his shoes.

  Everything about him was locked into a stiff, unbreakable pose: the unchanging angle of his stare, his straight knees, the hand which his mother held, the fingers which refused to grasp. Only the area of his body directly surrounding the toy rabbit was soft and unmechanical. There, his fingers curled into the remaining plush and his elbow and shoulder bent to harbour and protect.

  Halfway along the outer wall of the building they passed a screen door, the wooden frame of which was painted white to match the trim of the rest of the building. Partially blinded by the sun in front of her, Maud was able to make out only a single gas light behind it and the odd hulking form of a partially constructed coffin. Before he had been called into duty, the carpenter had obviously been at work on yet another casket. Maud’s exertions with the child earlier in the afternoon had left her so exhausted that she could not now muster curiosity enough to wonder whether or not there had been a purchaser for this item. Business, for once, was not occupying her thoughts.

  Still holding the child’s hand, she entered the garden and looked past the grass and rockery and flowers, down to the end of the property where several tall beech trees threw shadows so long they almost reached her feet. Between these, and trapped in their early summer leaves, was an intense, copper wealth of sunlight which had so transformed the contents of the garden that each shrub, each flower, appeared to be illuminated from within. Even the wire and wooden fence at the back stood altered; magnificent, its surfaces etched and clear, while in the vegetable patch directly in front of it, humble early lettuce assumed the grace of great sculpture. Beyond her own property, Maud could see the stones of Drummond Hill Cemetery glowing like white teeth on the horizon.

  Unexpectedly, she was filled with awe for this small world which included only that which she could see – this landscape of garden and graveyard where no streetcar trespassed; filled with wonder that she had created some of it herself, caused, for instance, the grape arbour to exist on the left side of the garden, the roses to decorate the centre. Even the grass, each blade of which was now standing as sharp as the cutting instrument for which it was named, had been coaxed into lushness by her diligence concerning the removal of weeds.

  The child had removed his hand from hers and was, once again, engaged in stroking the rabbit, over and over, as he stood silently at her side. Maud looked down at the top of his head which almost reached her waist. She noticed he was beginning to rock slightly as he caressed his toy.

  “Gar-den,” she said to him slowly, moving her hand at the end of her arm with the palm turned upwards, back and forth across the lot behind the house. “Ga-a-a-r-den.”

  The child gave no indication that he was aware she was speaking to him.

  Maud sighed and, taking the child’s hand again, she led him over to the area of the garden which was filled with rocks and the small plants that people habitually place in such a locality – miniature shrubs of unnatural shades and textures, tiny rubbery leaves of grey or white, or scratchy purplish growths that seemed to be formed of sands and gravels. The rocks themselves looked as if they had been magically transported from another planet, formed out of substances quite foreign to the earth. Or as if they had been frozen in the process of a strange evolution which left them filled with holes and bubbles. In order to break the odd moon-like surface of this portion of the garden, Maud had planted some tulip bulbs the previous fall and now at the end of their season, they had dropped some of their petals into the rockery. The intense, raking light caused these small pools of colour to blaze there and the rock garden, in contrast, to appear even more ominous than before. Maud had a brief childish fantasy about being an insect in such a landscape. She multiplied the size of each plant while walking through a jungle of them towards the still sea of the fish pond. This was to remain empty offish, filled with leaves and algae, until the end of June.

  The child, she knew, would respond to the fish, if she were to take him into the heated carriage house where they were kept for all but two months of the year. He would stand stiff-legged with his hands against the glass tank. He would watch them move around and around in the gloom.

  She remembered the time he had disappeared for an afternoon, how the entire household had been raised into a frantic search, how it had been she, herself, who had finally found him, standing perfectly still in the carriage house, watching the fish in their long tank, the only light in the place coming from one small, dirty window. The coffins stored all around the tank made it seem to be just another model of the species, its rectangular shape as regular as the others. As she approached him, she realized that the child could see the reflection of his own face on the wall of glass in front of him. The fish, the bubbles, were like the thoughts that moved back and forth through the liquid of his untouchable mind.

  Now she scraped her boot over the stone in front of her. “Rock,” she said, half-heartedly, not really expecting a reaction. She reached forward and gently pulled the dying blossom of a red tulip closer to the child’s face. “Flower,” she said.

  This absurd naming of objects had become one of the rituals of the day. When Maud ate breakfast with the child while he was being fed by the housekeeper, she found that she automatically identified each object that she held in her hand. “Spoon,” she would say, just before she placed it in her mouth. “Coffee, cup, bread, jam, butter, milk….”Then it was a calm methodical exercise, requiring little effort, something that had entered the realm of habit. But now, no longer confined by walls where the number of objects to name is finite, the enormity of the task confounded her.

  “Tree,” she said loudly, to no one in particular, as if the child were not there at all. “Fence, sky, cloud, grass, watering can, spade.” Then, reckless in the face of the futility of it all, she began to shout in anger the names of objects and entities that were not there. “Snow, train, desert, ocean, dog, shopping bag, roast beef, plum pudding, mop, lamp!”

  The child had returned to the rabbit and was now focused on one of its ears, which he rubbed softly with two of his stiff fingers.

  For a brief moment, Maud stood outside herself and witnessed her own performance – a young woman standing in a garden with a totally unresponsive child, shouting nonsense into the air. Her first inclination was to be amused. But the heat of the sun on her back reminded her of the heat of her anger… directed now towards the child, his unwillingness, his refusals, his total withdrawal. He was like an invisible wall that she ran into daily, bruising herself with each contact, until the very knowledge of its existence brought her only a memory of pain. And anger in the presence of pain.

  Suddenly this anger spilled out of Maud’s heart and into her body, adrenalin rushing like fire
through her veins. Turning around with one whirling gesture, she grabbed the child by the hair. Now they were facing directly into the sun and Maud became blinded, both by its strength and the strength of her own emotion. With her fist in his hair and her other hand under his chin, she jerked the child’s face up from its downcast attitude. As he began to struggle, he dropped the toy rabbit into the grim landscape of the rock garden. Maud pulled his small body closer to her, firmly securing his hips between her knees, keeping a strong grip on his hair, his face, as he squirmed and his stiff arms flailed in a struggle to escape. With her elbows she pinned his upper arms to his body. She could feel the fear in his chest, practically hear the thrashing of his heart. Amazed at her own strength, she moved two of her fingers down from his scalp and peeled back one of his eyelids. Then she screamed the word “SUN!” directly into his left ear.

  Everything about the small creature that she held was in a state of explosive, violent withdrawal. “SUN!” she screamed again, looking, herself, right into the centre of the burning orb, allowing the pain of this vision to penetrate behind her eyes. She forced the child’s eyelid further open, noticing that the other eye was completely, stubbornly sealed. She roughly adjusted once again the angle of his face.

  “SUN!” she shrieked. “SUN, SUN, SUN, SUN!!”

  A desperate, rusty sound began to issue from the child’s mouth, which, until this moment, had been frozen into the shape of a silent howl. The noise was that of a hoarse cry to which, at first, Maud paid no attention. Then slowly, her fury subsiding, she perceived that his small body had relaxed in her grip and was now convulsing. From his lips came an almost unidentifiable sound, more like the moan or low growl of a terrified cornered animal than anything human.

  “S-a-a-a-w-n,” he groaned, followed by a long, slow, sob. “Sa-a-a-w-n!”

  In astonishment, Maud let go of him and as she did, the other eye opened and the child took in all of the light. The sobs shook his entire body. Still he did not remove his eyes from the horizon which was filled with an agonizing radiance.

  “S-a-a-awn!” he roared, unlocked now, stamping his feet on the grass, pounding his hips with his small fists. “S-a-a-w-n, s-a-a-a-w-n!”

  Maud placed her hands on his shaking shoulders and turned him gently away from the blinding fire.

  That was his first word.

  Those were his first tears.

  His uncle’s farm was prosperous – a kind of miniature empire with large cathedral-like barns, and board and batten sheds, and even a gazebo in the landscaped backyard. It consisted of land that had been forced into submission by several generations of large, heavy-muscled men with strong, obstinate wills. The house had been replaced three times in a century and now, at the farm’s centre, and at the end of an impressive double row of sugar maples, there stood a seemingly indestructible fortress of red brick, entirely symmetrical, with windows and chimneys mirrored on either side of a Georgian door. Stretching out from this, in all directions, were acres and acres of fruit trees, each one pruned to size and irregular only in the grotesque gestures of their branches which were, in this season, disguised by a thick covering of leaves.

  Patrick, arriving in this neat, well-ordered landscape, had felt, as always, his own sense of inadequacy and that of his father who, instead of taming the new land, had attempted to tame its inhabitants by preaching fire and brimstone sermons in poverty-stricken parishes. He taught his son how to read Latin instead of how to make a split rail fence and later spent the few dollars he was able to save having him properly educated, hoping that, when the process was complete, Patrick might decide to enter the ministry. The call had never come, however, and Patrick, unable to deal effectively with either the body or the soul of the new country, had found himself, at thirty-three, eking out a subsistence salary as a clerk in the capitol city, grasping desperately for bits of unstructured time in order to pursue his obsession with the art of poetry. And there was the disappointed wife who hovered in his mind as a constant reminder of his inability to provide, either physically or emotionally. Reading, always reading, she complained as night after night he disappeared into the old-world landscape with Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Browning.

  In the beginning, his wife had accompanied him on his Sunday outings in the Gatineau Hills where he went in search of the often elusive inspiration. But eventually the cold and the boredom overcame her and the apparent futility of his quest. With the unexpected, practical intelligence that sometimes springs from those of uncomplicated mind, she had said to him one winter day as they stood surrounded by unvaried spruce, up to their hips in snow, “You’re never going to find Wordsworth’s daffodils here.” After that, Patrick went into the woods alone.

  He hated the cold, but clung to the concept of landscape and so he stubbornly persisted. With numb fingers he recorded his observations in his notebooks, waiting sometimes months until he moulded them into poems. Some of these had been published in one small magazine or another south of the border, and finally in a slim collection he had paid for himself. Just enough reinforcement to feed the disease, the desire; enough to make him believe that he was different from the men he worked with. Enough to ensure that he would stumble through each work day in a fog of utter loneliness.

  During the past winter he had suffered an attack of pneumonia which had left him weaker physically and in a state of perpetual despair. He began to believe that there were forces beyond his control conspiring to erase all words from his mind. Finally, he found it difficult to speak at all. The idea of people gathered together, the noise, the maddening hum of conversation, caused him panic. His doctor, genuinely alarmed, suggested a twelve-week vacation away from his work, the family, preferably in a rural setting. The uncle was contacted and generously opened the doors of his healthy world – a world that Patrick would feel, initially, overwhelmed by.

  Within a few weeks, however, he would discover that his uncle was not particularly interested in whether or not his young nephew could build a barn or plough a furrow. In fact, he was much too busy to be concerned with him at all. And so Patrick was left alone to wander around the woods, bird-watching, collecting plant specimens, or simply allowing his mind to digest the scenery. He wrote no poems, having lost touch, somewhere during the illness, with that part of himself, but he slept a great deal and began to recover some of his lost weight.

  He had visited this Niagara County farm often as a boy and so now he was able to behave there as one does with familiar people and places. He was able to choose either privacy or participation, depending on his mood. Most often he chose a combination of both, wanting the comfort of company without the responsibility for conversation or action attached to that comfort. He liked to listen to the mild, safe words which passed, in the evenings, between his uncle and aunt.

  Two evenings before as he sat making notes in the parlour, thereby avoiding conversation, he had found himself listening to the old couple arguing a point. He could barely believe the coincidence.

  “If I were interested in history,” his uncle was saying, “I’d have no time for progress. I don’t want to remember the way it was. All stumps and mud was the way that it was. What kind of a fool would want to remember that?”

  “Well, the major’s talks are learned,” argued his aunt, “and he prints them up so that you can read afterwards what you don’t understand.”

  “Don’t tell me I don’t understand. Any cow in the field understands stumps and mud.”

  “But this is the 1812 war he’ll be talking about.”

  Patrick’s uncle was unimpressed. “My grandfather fought in that war, lost the use of one arm, and was never given a stipend. It’s nothing you’d want to remember. Let it go, that’s my opinion.”

  “I’m going to the talk,” his aunt insisted.

  “Well, I’m not surprised. All the women for miles around will be filling up the hall because his own wife won’t be there, and that’s for sure.”

  “It’s shameful,” agreed Patrick’s aunt
, “her living in the woods out there, like a gypsy.”

  Patrick felt as if everything around him had suddenly jerked into focus.

  “She should be having babies and minding house,” his aunt continued.

  “I’ve heard that the major’s going to build her a house,” said the uncle, “all made out of windows with -”

  “I’ll go with you, Aunt,” Patrick interrupted from the other side of the room. His voice sounded unusually loud to him and oddly distant, as if someone else had shouted the sentence from a far corner of the house.

  His aunt was pleased and surprised and began at once to direct her conversation towards her nephew: what she would wear; her friends and enemies who were likely to be there; the likelihood of the talk being too long; the suitability of the refreshments afterwards.

  Patrick wasn’t listening. He was trying to absorb the information that the woman in his mind had a flesh and blood husband. Something a little more tangible than the ring he had seen resting on the cover of the book.

  Tonight he dressed for the lecture at the Historical Society with a certain sense of unease; more because of the anticipated crowd than because of the historian who fascinated him purely because he was married to the woman. History. Like his uncle, Patrick was confused by the word. History, his story, whose story? Collections of facts that were really only documented rumours. When he thought hard about them, thought hard about facts, they evaporated under his scrutiny. Crowds of men rushing towards each other with gleaming weapons. Fires. Large, hot, man-made fires. And the repetition. As if by speaking it over and over this collection of past facts might liquefy again, change from vapour into rain, become a large, touchable body of water.

  He put on the same costume that he had worn in Ottawa, daily, to his place of employment. Dark jacket and pants. Dark vest, white shirt. He placed his pocket-watch, a silver circle with a locomotive etched on it, inside his vest pocket. That way, if necessary, he would be able to occupy himself by watching the progression of time.