The Whirlpool

by Jane Urquhart

  “So, am I to assume that you are going to write a book?”

  “Yes, you may assume that. But since no one has given a damn up until now, compiling the information, the papers, may take me the rest of my life. I may never finish it… never. And now, this summer, I have to have a house built. My wife wants a house.”

  Patrick’s palms began to sweat. Looking around the rooms, he agreed it was no place for a woman. He imagined his own wife’s reaction to this setting which screamed of a lack of domesticity. But even so, it would be too confining for the woman in the woods.

  “Did you know that she wore a brown cotton dress with little orange flowers printed on it?” McDougal walked across the room and began to straighten some of the papers on his desk. “And she had nothing on her feet but a pair of little leather slippers.”

  “Your wife?” asked Patrick, eagerly leaning forward in his chair.

  “No, no… Laura Secord.”

  Patrick fell back, disappointed but patient. McDougal was looking for something now, something buried beneath the mounds of paper on the desk. “By the time she reached Fitzgibbon’s headquarters,” the major continued, “the little shoes were lost, her feet were bare. And she had crossed Twelve Mile Creek not once, but twice!” McDougal reached for something situated under a huge pile of documents. “Aha, I’ve found it!” he announced triumphantly.

  In his hand he held a small bronze paperweight fashioned in the shape of a cow. “This,” he cried, “is Laura Secord’s cow!”

  Patrick, thoroughly convinced now that he had lost the thread of conversation, merely stared stupidly at the object in the other man’s hand.

  “Imagine it,” McDougal continued, “the young, slim woman alone, walking through the enemy-infested, beast-ridden woods, and she has the presence of mind to bring a cow along to fool the enemy sentries. Twelve miles over a rough terrain….” McDougal began to walk the bronze cow over the mountains and valleys of his paperwork. “And then…” he paused and wedged the cow between two portfolios… “and then she arrives at her destination only to find her path blocked by a company of Indians… reinforcements, working for our side, but how was she to know? Indians in the moonlight… awesome! They let her pass, however. They escorted her, in fact, to Fitzgibbon, whereupon she gave him the message and we surprised them before they could surprise us. SURPRISE!!!” he shouted at Patrick, who jumped nervously in his chair.

  Silence filled the room as the two men pondered the dead woman’s heroic deed. Patrick looked across the cemetery on the hill. “What happened to the cow?” he asked, for want of anything better to say.

  “Oh, it’s right here,” replied McDougal, turning again towards his desk. “I always keep it right here to remind me of Laura… to remind me of my mission. Remind them, remind them,” he quoted from his dream.

  Patrick decided to let the matter pass.

  McDougal returned to his chair by the window. “May I confess something to you?” he asked with a serious air.

  “Of course,” replied Patrick.

  “My wife is very much like Laura Secord. I think that may be one of the reasons I married her, though God forbid she know that. It’s not that she has the pioneering spirit or anything like that, but physically she resembles the Laura that came to me in my dream.”

  “Remind them, remind them,” muttered Patrick. And then, “Where is she now, your wife, I mean?” This last question uttered casually, as if he were merely making polite conversation.

  “Now she doesn’t even come back here to sleep. I join her in the evenings.” McDougal scratched his beard. “She hates it here.” He looked around the untidy room. “Can’t say as I blame her.”

  “Where does she go?” Patrick’s pulse was beginning to race. “Do you have relatives hereabouts?”

  McDougal laughed. “She goes to the woods. We have a piece of property there called Whirlpool Heights. The whirlpool is all ours, you know, the only part of the river that is entirely Canadian. Don’t tell the Yankees, though, they’ll probably try to conquer it. I’ve got a tent out there for the summer while the house is being built… already we’ve spent a few weeks… quite pleasant really. You must come out some time. It’s a marvellous spot.”

  “What does she do out there all day?” Patrick asked the question very slowly. He hardly dared to look at the other man while he waited for him to answer.

  “She reads books,” said McDougal. And then, almost to himself, “She’s the closest thing to a compulsive reader I’ve ever met. Burns them up like fire.”

  “What kind of books?” asked Patrick, trying to keep the note of urgency out of his voice, but already knowing the answer.

  “Now there’s a coincidence,” said the major. “It’s poetry she mostly reads… the Brits… Wordsworth, Coleridge, that sort of stuff. And Browning. She’s mad about Browning. She reads far too much Browning, if you ask me. It’s unhealthy. Why, I ask, now that I think about it, isn’t she reading you? Why not something Canadian? Of course, why didn’t I think of it, she’ll have to meet you. You’ll have to meet her.” McDougal paused for a moment or two, running the following week’s appointments through his mind. “Wednesday evening,” he said finally. “You must come Wednesday evening.”

  Patrick looked uncomfortably at the floor. “I should like that,” he said, “very much.”

  Half an hour later, when he stood to leave, Patrick found that he could look directly into the clothes cupboard on the opposite side of the room. And he was absolutely certain that, hanging there among the more ordinary clothes belonging to the couple, he could see a rather old-fashioned dress of brown cotton. One that had orange flowers printed all over its surface. He quickly took note of the fact that the hem appeared to be ragged and muddy – as if someone had walked in it for a great distance over a wild and rugged terrain.

  Once he was outside of the hotel, Patrick looked up at McDougal’s window. He had intended to wave but, as the older man was not to be seen, he interrupted the gesture halfway and turned towards the street.

  At the funeral home opposite he noticed a small boy standing absolutely still upon the lawn. This was not, Patrick realized as he stared at the child, motion briefly halted. This lack of movement was so complete it conveyed the same disturbing messages as drastic, inexplicable activity.

  Patrick himself stood utterly still for some moments watching the boy in amazement. A breeze touched the hair on their heads at exactly the same time. It shook the ribbon around the boy’s collar and moved one of the poet’s coattails to the left.

  Patrick broke his pose, and, beginning, once again, to think about the woman, he walked half a block down Main Street to wait for the trolley.

  In the evenings of the past, Maud and her husband Charles had agreed never to discuss funerals.

  Instead, they discussed spiders.

  Not that Maud had particularly wanted to discuss spiders, but when it was a choice between funerals or spiders, what alternative did she have?

  “If you wish to grow and thrive,” her mother-in-law had always chanted, “let the spiders go alive.”

  This seemed to Maud to have been a particularly apt piece of advice when applied to her own domestic situation. Charles adored spiders. He admired them. He considered them a superior species and he was determined that they should “Go alive.”

  The spiders in his collection had been silenced and stilled in the most humane way possible and not, even then, without a generous amount of guilt on the young undertaker’s part.

  Maud could always tell when Charles had made an addition to his collection. He would be grim and silent for days, cheered only by the fact that he had never allowed the housekeeper to remove a single cobweb from the upper storey of Grady and Son. Downstairs was different. He was not so impractical that he did not understand that, down there, the ceilings should be swept clean. He simply avoided looking up while he was working, as if it had never crossed his mind that a spider might have ever entered the premises.

 
; One night, as Maud sat crocheting in the upstairs parlour underneath a ceiling which, over the years, had become a complete mesh of aged webs, many of them soiled, broken and deserted, she had decided to broach the subject of house cleaning with her husband, who was reading near the potbellied stove. She was intelligent enough to approach the issue from a spider’s point of view.

  “It would seem unlikely,” she had begun, “that we shall have any new spiders in this room. There is just not enough space. Surely a young spider wouldn’t want to move in up there… among all those wrecks?”

  “If they don’t like it, let them do something about it,” Charles replied. “I’m certainly not going to disturb anything.”

  Maud was not this easily put off the track. “Perhaps,” she continued, “they are simply not strong enough to do anything about it… maybe the situation has gotten out of hand and they need help. Then, wouldn’t it be a Christian act to remove the webs they don’t need… the old ones?”

  “Spiders never need help,” Charles had replied, astonished that she had even considered the possibility. “They always know exactly what they are doing.”

  “Supposing the house suddenly filled up with black widows?” Maud was testing. “Surely you’d kill them.”

  “Black widows have a completely unfair, undeserved reputation. They do not bite unless they are threatened, and even then only if they are protecting an egg mass. No, I would not kill them. We could live side by side with them quite easily, happily in fact. Anyway, there aren’t any around here. Or, at least, not very many.”

  Charles had managed to find one though, in an abandoned out-house and, because they were so rare, he was forced to add it to his collection. A particularly depressing day. He had recounted in detail how the spider had made no effort to escape when he had trapped it in a little box and how, later, it had accepted the chloroform as if it had always known its fate. (Like an Irish patriot going to the gallows, his mother had sighed, sentimentally.) A particularly brave and dignified spider for whom Charles had felt nothing but affection and respect.

  Maud secretly admired the black widow. She knew that the female ate the male after mating which seemed only fair since there existed male spiders who actually wrapped females up and tied them down before impregnating them. A shocking variety of insect rape!

  “Which spider is it that wraps up his mate?” she asked her husband.

  “The thrice-banded crab spider.”

  “Why does he do that to her?”

  “Why not?”

  Maud let it go. She had learned early on that she should never criticize a spider, but even more important, she should never touch one. One of their most loquacious marital quarrels had concerned the removal of a daddy-long-legs from their bedroom. Charles had told her repeatedly the daddy-long-legs was not a spider; that spiders had waists and daddy-long-legs did not. It took her no time at all, therefore, to dispose of one once it had foolishly entered their bedchamber. What she didn’t know was that Charles had spotted it there earlier in the day.

  Before climbing into bed that night he had begun to search the floors and windows.

  “Where is the daddy-long-legs?”

  “It wasn’t a spider.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “It didn’t have a waist.” And then, when the tension seemed unbearable, “it wouldn’t have made a web.”

  “What did you do with him?”

  Maud had looked heavenward, up to a ceiling like gauze. “What could it possibly matter? Besides, they bite.”

  Charles had turned white with fury. “Where did you put him!?” he had shouted, moving ominously closer.

  “They mate without courtship,” she had thrown out hopefully, showing off how much she had learned, even in the few short years of their marriage.

  He had turned to look directly at her and in a calm, terrifying voice, he had said, “You killed him. I can’t believe it, you actually killed him.”

  “Yes,” she confessed.

  “Murderer!” he yelled.

  Cornered, she turned on him. “You were the one… you told me they weren’t spiders. I can’t be expected to preserve every insect in the world. I demand the right to kill every bug I want to.” Prudent even in anger, she added, “Everything except spiders.”

  “Spiders are not bugs! Neither was the daddy-long-legs, and you killed him!” He looked at her with hatred. “You wanted to kill him. You enjoyed killing him.” And then, after a long furious silence, “Find him!”

  “Charles, he’s squashed, you wouldn’t want to…”

  “FIND HIM!!”

  Weeping, Maud had spent an hour picking through the trash in the kitchen looking for the crumpled body of the daddy-long-legs. She sorted through coffee grounds, orange peels, mouldy peas, broken crockery, and soggy newspapers. When, at last, she appeared in the bedroom doorway with the small bundle in her outstretched hand, Charles had simply waved it aside with a gesture of despair so complete Maud’s anger almost turned to compassion.

  She occasionally surprised herself by becoming immersed in memories like this. In some she played an active role, in others her function was passive. These private dramas acted themselves out in her inner theatre just when she was certain she had forgotten Charles altogether. Then an anecdote he had told her would, inexplicably, assert itself in her mind; the stories he had recounted about events that took place when she was not present becoming, for the moment, stronger than her own personal past, more intensely visual, until, at times, she thought of herself as the keeper of his memories rather than the keeper of his memory.

  Today, she was once again at her desk in the sunroom, notebook open on the oak wood, a scrap of paper to the left of it containing the information she should have been recording. She had slipped away, however, from the activity and the pen lay discarded in the spine of the book. Her arms were crossed and her head hung slightly downwards. She was having a memory of one of Charles’ memories.

  He had been walking in the Niagara Glen on a spring morning, quite early, examining the webs of shamrock spiders while they were still covered with dew, shining in the sun. A completely safe activity since he had captured both a male and a female shamrock spider years ago when he had first begun to collect. They were very common and in this memory Maud could see hundreds of their glimmering webs decorating the edges of the path on which Charles walked. She could see Charles, too, bending down, now and then, to study them more closely.

  He had told her that this particular kind of spider ate its daily web. Maud had responded to this with “Give us this day our daily web.” Charles had liked that. Then he told her that each night the spider constructed a new web, in complete darkness, by touch alone. This was one of the things about spiders that truly astonished Maud… the idea of them there in the pitch black, their delicate legs working on webs while the rest of the world slept on. She thought that was remarkable.

  There had been trilliums everywhere that morning, thousands of them if she were to believe Charles, and although he was not much interested in flowers, unless they guaranteed special spiders, even he had been amazed by their variety, particularly by the odd, normally white, flower with a splash of red at its heart. Painted trilliums, she had told him; quite rare.

  Satisfied that all was well in the world of the shamrock spider, Charles had been about to turn back when he saw someone approaching him on the path; a tall man with a moustache, one who wore military boots and carried a walking stick.

  The two men had begun a conversation about the glories of the morning and the beauty of nature in general until Charles had heard a strange rattling sound coming from the man’s stick.

  He had hardly believed his eyes. Tied to the other man’s walking stick was an enormous rattlesnake. Maud, immersed in the memory, could see the man, the stick, the snake. She could hear the frightening noise. The man had prudently tied the head of the rattler to the bottom of the stick, away from his hands. A leather thong kept the head firmly in pla
ce while the body wound around and around the stick. The snake couldn’t strike even had it wanted to.

  Charles had been so shocked, so horrified that he had not thought to ask the man what he intended to do with the snake. Maud could see the way Charles’ hands had moved as he described the incident to her, making a spiral in the air to show how the snake’s body surrounded the stick, then making a fist near the floor to represent the snake’s fearsome head. He had estimated that the creature must have been at least four feet long.

  Maud came, now, slowly, slowly back; back from the Niagara Glen and the morning filled with silver webs spun in darkness, back from the terror of the snake, and then back from the parlour four years ago where Charles told his story. Maud never knew, would never know now, who the other man was.

  She sat quickly upright in her chair as she became conscious of being away in the memory of her dead husband’s memories. Shaking the images from in front of her eyes, out of her mind, she returned to the task before her and wrote:

  Body of a Man Found at Maid of the Mist Landing July 3rd, 1889

  then, after pausing to refill her pen, she continued:

  Dark grey hair

  Narrow leather belt

  Laundry mark D.N.

  Heavy fleece-lined underdrawers

  Corduroy pants

  Shoe about number 9, plain without toe caps

  Fleece-lined undershirt with marker (D.N.)

  Blue polka dot handkerchief

  Half a packet of Fashion smoking tobacco

  Bone pipe stem with silver funnel

  Also a Peterson pipe

  25 cents Canadian and 10 cents American

  Good teeth

  About 5 ft. 10 inches in height

  Who was this man, this D.N.? She would more than likely never know. Who was the keeper of his memories?

  There was something tragic, not about his battered body, necessarily, but about his blue polka dot handkerchief, his Fashion smoking tobacco, his Peterson pipe.