The Whirlpool

by Jane Urquhart

  “No English poet,” said Fleda, “would spend a lot of time worrying about pine trees.”

  “But,” thundered McDougal, becoming quite angry, “this is not England!”

  After her husband marched testily away Fleda looked at the dark pines that surrounded her and knew that her argument had been with David, not with the poet’s choice of subject matter. She had secretly, all the while, been imagining poems filled with the smell of cedars carried on the breath of a northern wind. Scotch pines, white pines. Roots in the ground, needles in the sky.

  She walked to the part of bank where she could see the beach through the foliage. From that height the crowd looked to her like a large dark stain growing at the edge of the whirlpool. Wondering how Wordsworth or Browning would interpret landscape such as this or events such as these, she turned away.

  She absolutely refused to take part in it. She felt alien, completely different, distant. She could not understand why her husband would want to be a witness, to watch a man who killed animals kill himself inside an animal. At moments like these the separation that she felt from the world expanded to include a separation from her husband. He had become worldly and she had noticed, as he walked away, his awkwardness, his lack of grace. He talked and talked, always in the way men did, moving his arms in jerky, ridiculous ways, wishing to express his point physically. Fleda was bored by him, at this moment, by the physical fact of him. She wished he would simply stop… stop walking, stop talking, making his foolish points.

  Inside the tent she spread the plaid blanket on the floor and leaned her back against the edge of the bed. All through the next hour, through the cheers and the later groans of the crowd down at the river, she did not look up. She was reading Browning’s “In a Balcony.”

  Patrick met McDougal near the car tracks and they walked down to the river together.

  “She wouldn’t come,” said McDougal.

  Patrick smiled. He had known this would be the case, would not have been there himself had he thought otherwise.

  They arrived just as the festivities were about to begin and were immediately struck by the fact that they might not be able to see the event at all, since the crowd had spread so far up the bank. The best vantage points had been filled hours ago by seasoned spectators with a great deal of foresight. The rain, which had threatened all morning, now began to make a feeble appearance. Suddenly, as if by magic, the sky was obliterated by an enormous ceiling of umbrellas. Patrick began to perspire.

  He looked around anxiously. It appeared that, from nowhere, another thirty feet of crowd had materialized behind him and was now pressing up against his back hoping to catch at least a glimpse of the impending tragedy. Patrick felt as if his windpipe was beginning to close, denying him access to air. Searching for some form of meaningless distraction he began to recite, mentally, all of the nursery rhymes he could remember. He could see the river, but it was a long, long way off and from this distance the rapids looked as benign as soap suds… noiseless, comforting. Baa, baa, black sheep, Patrick crooned inside his head. Yes sir, yes sir, he sang, keeping his eyes directly between the two bowler hats in front of him through which he could see the water. Little Bo Peep, he began silently. Then he felt the straining belly of the man behind him brush his back, and a sudden nausea began to creep upwards from his knees.

  Further down the bank a man with a megaphone was making an announcement: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, YOU ARE HERE TO WITNESS A FEAT OF AMAZING VALOUR, A DEATH-DEFYING SPECTACLE REQUIRING BOTH COURAGE AND PRECISION. Patrick’s ears were ringing. The spoke of an umbrella came very close to removing his left eye. Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb, YES, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, TODAY, BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES, THIS COURAGEOUS YOUNG MAN (pause, cheers from the crowd) little lamb, little lamb. THIS YOUNG MAN WILL CHALLENGE THE FURY OF NATURE, THE WRATH OF THESE HERE RAPIDS IN A VEHICLE OF HIS VERY OWN CONSTRUCTION… everywhere that Mary went, Mary went, Mary went. Patrick’s mouth felt dry, his heart was pounding. The air around him smelled of the picnic lunches on the breath of the mob. A VEHICLE CALLED THE MIGHTY MOOSE MADE FROM THE HIDES AND HORNS OF THAT FINE STRONG ANIMAL KILLED BY THIS YOUNG MAN HIMSELF IN THE DARK OF OUR ANCIENT FORESTS. (More cheers, some whistles, one or two catcalls.) Jack and Jill went up the hill, sang Patrick’s imagination, desperately, AND NOW, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, OUR YOUNG FRIEND WILL CLIMB INSIDE HIS MIGHTY MOOSE AND WAVE GOODBYE TO YOU ALL. (Much neck craning on the part of the crowd, much waving of handkerchiefs on the part of the ladies of the crowd, more cheers.) Patrick swallowed three times in rapid succession and, running out of nursery rhymes, he began a silent repertoire of children’s prayers. Now I lay me down to sleep. NOW, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, AT THE SOUND OF THE GUN, THE MIGHTY MOOSE WILL BE PUSHED INTO THE THICK OF THE CRUEL RAPIDS. ONE… if I should die before I wake, Patrick whispered, TWO… I pray the Lord my soul to take. BANG!!!

  Patrick bolted through the crowd followed by angry curses of those whose view he’d blocked. He managed to get thirty or forty yards beyond the last line of spectators before he flung himself down beside some flowering shrubs. Then, the winter crowds of Bank Street, black figures on a white ground, filed through his mind and he rose and staggered further into the woods, dizzy and weak with repetitive waves of nausea. Finally, when he had gone far enough – far enough away from the smell of the crowd’s damp clothing, the sausage on its collective breath, he lay quietly down on the forest floor. Rolling over on his back, he allowed the rain to fall directly on his face and the mob in his mind began to thin, the nursery rhymes to dribble away. Now there was only the sound of the rain on his forehead. The sound and the feel of it, like the day he had seen the woman under her umbrella. She had been absolutely in place, regardless of weather. Distant, serene, untouchable. So much a part of the landscape that the foliage in which she stood seemed to germinate from her. He wanted to watch her again, right now, in the wet forest – without anxiety. It did not occur to him that she would seek shelter from the weather, which would be, for her, merely a troubled stanza, something she could read, calmly, from start to finish.

  He stood and began to walk along the path that lined the bank towards the tent and, as he did, the sun reappeared.

  Patrick was approaching her geography without fear. She might not even see him, he reasoned, and if she did she would not know who he was, would assume that he was merely one of the spectators who, for some reason or other, had left the crowd.

  When he arrived and she was not there he was neither surprised nor disappointed. Perhaps it was just the place he wanted, feeling now so weak, so disoriented. Perhaps it was just the quiet rustle of the trees she normally awoke to.

  He sat near the tent, tired, calm, waiting.

  By the time David returned, Patrick had been sitting outside the door of the tent for over two hours. His damp jacket, which he had removed and draped over the raised end of a log, was now almost entirely dry again. The fear connected to the crowd had left him minutes after he had arrived at the Heights and since then he had simply remained motionless in the sun, completely unaware of the alert presence of the woman on the other side of the fabric wall. His arms rested on his knees and his two hands were clasped in front of him like one oversized fist.

  David pulled up a stump and sat down beside him. “He lost his head,” he said to Patrick. “My God… it was awful.”

  “What happened?” asked Patrick.

  “That young man from Grimsby… he went through those rapids and he lost his head. It was horrifying.”

  The crowds appeared briefly in Patrick’s mind’s eye and then the small floating shape between two bowler hats.

  Fleda burst suddenly from the door of the tent. “Oh no,” she said, “it’s barbaric!”

  Patrick, shocked by her unexpected materialization, jerked to his feet and backed up several paces.

  “My wife,” said McDougal distractedly. “Have you met?”

  “No,” said Fleda, nervously adjusting the mosquito netting at the entrance o
f the tent.

  “I didn’t know she was here.” Patrick nodded towards the woman. “Hello,” he said. God! he thought, not knowing what to do. Seeing no means of escape he sat down again on the stump and prepared to ignore her, to pretend, now that he was undeniably in her presence, that she was not there at all. Still, he was aware of her activities as she moved away from the tent. Now she was putting the kettle on the pole, now she was searching for matches, lighting the fire. She asked him if he would like some tea. He hardly replied, barely spoke to her at all, allowing her to perceive only the smallest hint of a response. He would be distant with her now. More distant than he had been when he was hidden and watching her.

  David was visibly upset, could scarcely hold the cup of tea the woman placed in his hand. “I doubt you could see anything so grotesque,” he said, “even in battle.”

  Patrick suspected that David’s battles, like his own, would always take place privately, in the confines of his own mind or in the form of black marks on white paper. No mutilated bodies littering the landscape afterwards. Death would always appear in the form of a sentence for vast numbers of soldiers or as a paragraph for a particular hero.

  David stirred his tea, around and around, making a small eddy in his cup. “Where did you get to anyway?” he asked Patrick. “I turned around and you had vanished.”

  “I was ill… the crowds… I can’t… I thought I was through with it but… I couldn’t function with all those people pressing in on me.” Patrick rubbed his forehead with his left hand, as if he felt the pressure again, there in the woods.

  Fleda glanced for a moment at the poet’s hand, and at the shadow it made on his forehead. Then she looked quickly away.

  No one said anything for a long time. Then David, sensing that this was a moment when one could admit to weaknesses, said to Patrick, “I probably would be no good in battle, you know.”

  Neither Fleda nor Patrick disagreed with him.

  “All that blood, and the horses… suffering.” He considered his own horse to be a national treasure.

  “I don’t care whether or not you’re good in battle,” said Fleda, prepared to be sympathetic, intuiting her husband’s need for reassurance.

  Patrick could sense that the woman’s attention which, until now, he had felt hovering around himself, was sliding easily towards her husband. He felt it floating away and coming to rest in the location where it was most comfortable, and it made him briefly angry. Who is this woman? he wondered. This wife. He wanted to capture her somehow, to put her where she belonged in his story, back inside the fieldglasses where he could control the image.

  The couple were beginning to discuss their plans for supper. The woman was moving in and out of the tent carrying utensils and supplies, speaking with her husband in a language that was difficult for Patrick to follow; fragmented talk, references to the small events that made up the fabric of their life together. And the objects that they handled over and over, day after day, until their intimacy with them entered a space beyond words. A mere nod of the head and the other would produce a cooking pot or a knife – it was like a sleight of hand performance. They knew each other so well, they were each other’s habits. This wife, thought Patrick, this nurturer, this housekeeper!

  “I will build the house here.” David turned from his wife to address Patrick. He pointed to the survey stakes near the centre of the property. “And a good place for it, too, I should think, right there with the Yankees directly across the river where I can keep an eye on them.”

  Patrick watched the yellow ribbons on the ends of the wooden poles flicker like candles in the soft breeze.

  David nodded towards his wife. “We’ve argued about every single aspect of it; the nature of the floorboards, the view from the windows, the size of the windows.” He moved his foot back and forth, gently kicking at stones and grass. “She’d have the whole place made of windows, if possible, and the inside filled with birds and flowering plants.”

  Patrick smiled. He liked this version of the woman better. “I wouldn’t think you’d have much trouble with the Yankees nowadays,” he said.

  But David did not answer. He was gone, seventy years back… was watching the Americans spill over the bank further down the river. Watching them spill like a dark waterfall, leap into boats and head for Queenston. Some of them had been swept so far downstream that they had to return to their own shore and begin the assault again. Some, David secretly believed, had been drowned when their boats capsized, the current still being very strong there, though nothing like the whirlpool or the rapids that led to it. And Brock. He thought of Brock, riding, riding to get there in time. Funny how he always thought of battles in terms of magnificent movement, the great seething manoeuvres of regiments, or desperate journeys on the part of commanders. Or in terms of detail. The sheen of the flank of a beautiful horse, one small heroic gesture. What he had never thought of, what he had never placed on his maps which drafted the details of endless marches, was the blood. It had simply escaped his imagination. Until right now.

  Patrick began to snap small dead branches over his knee for kindling, becoming unconsciously connected to the woman’s domestic chores. The sun, he noticed, was beginning to bring out pure gold highlights in her hair. It was details such as this that interested him, not her brooms and dustcloths. It would still be daylight for hours now. Summer weather. Evidence of the storm had all but disappeared. The sticks he picked up from the ground had a thin line of damp on their undersides, that was all. He placed them, dark side up, in a row by his left foot, so that they would dry.

  He looked up to discover that the woman was standing directly in front of him. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “about the whirlpool. David told me about your swim. What made you decide to do it?”

  He did not wish to hear that then. This questioning was an independent action, an act, as Patrick perceived it, of betrayal. She became again the housekeeper, completely unlike the woman he watched, the silent unconscious partner… of his, of the landscape. The woman he wanted remained completely still while everything moved around her, towards her and away from her, while he controlled the distance.

  To the woman he merely said, “I am very flattered by your interest.” This quite softly so that her husband would not hear.

  McDougal went into the tent to look for the draft of the Laura Secord paper to show Patrick, leaving the two of them, for a few moments, alone together. They were uncomfortable now, silent. Neither looked in the other’s direction.

  Walking back to his uncle’s farm, Patrick felt the woman close to him again. Alone, with his imagination set free, he disregarded all he had seen and heard, and allowed the woman and the whirlpool to combine. By the time he reached his room he had completely reinvented her. He could hardly wait to return to the woods where, hiding once again, he could watch her in the pure and uncorrupted state he had carefully constructed for her.

  17 July 1889

  This is what happened.

  Through the small net window in the tent I saw him approach, and fear, or something like it, leapt in my heart like a fish.

  I could see him approaching even though he was a long, long way off. It had been raining and then the sun came out, making everything sharper, clearer than it had been before.

  The trees around him looked as if they were filled with crystal… tiny prisms all over the branches, and the grass he walked on was like a carpet of shattered mirrors.

  Wet tree trunks, blackened by rain. I saw one of his hands there, surprisingly white, against the bark. He was steadying himself, using the tree for support.

  I am trying to get this right so that I will remember. Looking through the window, looking through the mesh of netting that covers it. I know he didn’t see me.

  Standing entirely still, I could hear the water drop from the trees onto the canvas roof of the tent.

  I saw him leave the tree and move a few steps forward. He looked directly at the tent but couldn’t see me because th
e netting hid my face. Suddenly, I regretted that my forest did not have more pines for him. Even though I had never seen him before, I knew exactly who he was. I recognized him. He looked injured; injured and beautiful.

  I thought: moving out from the door of the tent is the path that David and I have made, just since we’ve been here, from the tent to the fire. He was coming towards the tent, but not on that path and David wasn’t with him.

  When he came closer I saw that he was pale, that his clothes were soaked through, that loose twigs and leaves were attached to his jacket and trousers. I had no idea what he was going to do.

  I stood so still inside the tent that I thought I might have even stopped breathing. I was so moved by the sight of this thin young man walking, almost drunkenly, through my forest… as if the air were difficult to move through, as if the air were water.

  He didn’t open the flap of the tent to look inside, but sat down on a stump instead beside the wet ashes of the fire.

  I could not go out to him.

  Later, when David arrived, I stepped outside, pretending that I had known nothing of the appearance of the poet. David was upset about the tragedy up the river but I couldn’t concentrate on that at all, kept wondering instead what the young man was thinking, when and if he would speak to me, and what on earth I would say if he did.

  His hands are beautiful… long and clean and pale with small blue rivers branching towards the fingers. And they are nervous, never still, running through his hair, adjusting his jacket, reaching for sticks on the ground.

  I wanted to talk to him about the whirlpool, about its power. Surely he must feel it, and this must be at least part of what invites him to swim. But when I asked he seemed reluctant to answer, as if he didn’t wish to speak its name.

  I will never forget his approach to the tent. How hesitant it was, how tentative.

  “I only knew one poet in my life

  And this, or something like it, was his way”