R.B. As It Strikes a Contemporary
For days afterwards, surprised and irritated with himself, David McDougal could not shake what he had seen. When the call for assistance had sounded over the megaphone (a mere ten minutes after the launching of The Mighty Moose), David, in his capacity as a military officer, had accompanied the doctor further along the bank, near his own property, to the whirlpool. The Old River Man was in the process of constructing a complicated series of ropes, poles, clothesline pulleys, hooks and wires, to pull the young man out of the water along with his contraption of horns and hides since the two were hopelessly and, it would appear, almost permanently intertwined. Four policemen were stationed halfway up the bank in order to discourage the stampede of spectators who were, by now, half crazy with blood-lust and curiosity.
With absolutely nothing to do until the River Man had drawn in his catch, and the possibility of very little to do after that, David looked uncomfortably across the river to the American side. There he noticed for the first time that day the dark strip of spectators lining the far shore, as if a giant mirror had been set up halfway across the river. For one moment he wondered if they had their own daredevil, their own circus to attend. But then he realized that word must have spread across the border, flushing the crowds out of their homes there as well as here. And although he had been next to certain they could see nothing at all from that distance, there they stood like a throng of pilgrims awaiting a miracle. They would be disappointed, he had suspected, angry probably, so near and yet so far from the opportunity to scrutinize injury or death. As angry as some of the men at the top of the bank who were hurling insults at the embarrassed police.
Unable to avoid it any longer, David had looked out to the centre of the whirlpool where the remains of The Mighty Moose and its passenger moved around and around like an unidentifiable beast on a strange carousel. It was difficult to determine, at this stage, which areas were beast and which were human, but there was one thing certain: neither had survived the journey in their original form. David was amazed that the two had actually remained together, the moose hide being torn to pieces. The three pairs of antlers, or at least what he could see of them, appeared to be intact, however, proving one of the young man’s theories. But Buck O’Connor himself was clearly no longer in the land of the living, and bright red slashes of his blood appeared here and there on the more ordinary colour of the moose’s hide, giving it, from this distance, an almost festive appearance.
The Old River Man had been guiding The Mighty Moose towards shore when David noticed the three men from the undertaking establishment descending the bank with their wicker coffin.
“How can they be so sure?” he had asked the doctor who, in turn, looked at him as if he had entirely taken leave of his senses.
Then there is nothing I can do, David had thought helplessly, there is no part for me to play. Accustomed to shouting orders, familiar with being a centre of calm in the thick of imagined chaos, he began to feel guilty about his presence at this very real disaster. As if he were just a privileged spectator with a ringside seat.
The Mighty Moose approached the shore. David recognized an arm, a tattered shirt, some suspenders. The men with the wicker basket prepared for its passenger, opening the lid, adjusting leather straps. The Old River Man, at home with the corpses the river had to offer, began, almost casually, to pull away the horns and skin that surrounded the body.
“This one didn’t die of drowning,” he said.
Another child.
Pneumonia.
Jas the carpenter was out in the stable covering a small, delicately carved coffin with white paint. Sam the embalmer, having already hitched up Jesus Christ and God Almighty to the wagon, was assembling his portable embalming kit, wondering, as he always did, just how he would introduce its contents (which even he admitted appeared gruesome), to the parents of the deceased. The mother was unlikely to be a problem, crazy with grief, locked in some far bedroom of the house. But several fathers had threatened to kill him if he came near their children with his equipment. Then he would just let it go, saying “Fine, fine, it’s your child. Of course, you know best.” These were emotionally trying times for Sam. These deaths, these children. Only his loyalty to the Rochester School of Embalming persuaded him to bring along his tubes and syringes at all.
Whenever it was a child, particularly a girl, the men automatically called Maud in on the project. There were details to be worked out, details concerning ribbons and hairstyles and clothing. Hardly men’s work, they felt. If the child’s hair was to be in ringlets, then that was up to the mother and up to Maud. In a way it was like playing with dolls. The men hadn’t been trained for it. The boys were different, little men… miniature copies of older corpses. Maud would be consulted then, but never expected to fix bow ties or comb hair.
Today, a little girl of five, dead in a farmhouse near Queenston. Maud, Jas, and Sam rode out there in an uncovered wagon, the little coffin, wrapped in a blanket, lying in the back. They could feel it knock the rear of the seat whenever the grade of the hill tilted downwards. They stopped only once when Jas became concerned about what this unavoidable bumping might be doing to his recently applied white finish.
The house, when they came to it, was immediately recognizable as one where a death had taken place. Dark green shades were drawn in all the windows and a black wreath decorated the rarely used front room. There was a stillness about the place, as if wind and birds had chosen, for the moment, to avoid it. Jesus Christ and God Almighty came to a gradual, dignified halt beside the front walk and waited solemnly to be tied up to the wrought-iron fence. Jas unloaded the cargo – Sam’s embalming equipment and the small box – while Maud went on ahead and entered through the unpainted shed at the back of the house.
As expected, the mother was nowhere to be seen, though sobbing could be heard in another part of the house, accompanied by the low, soothing tones of a group of female comforters. The father sat motionless at the kitchen table with a few male companions, husbands, no doubt, of the chosen comforters. Maud could see that they had already consumed more than half of the bottle which stood in the centre of the table and that, on the shelf behind them, several more waited. By the end of the next three days the men would be drunk, exhausted, and surly, and the women would have regained their composure enough for severe disapproval to set in. None of this surprised Maud. She had seen it many times before.
Sam arrived in the kitchen with his embalming kit, which the father began to examine suspiciously. After an exceptionally brief conversation concerning the wonders of modern science, Sam hauled it back again to the wagon. Then he and Jas carried in the little white coffin and Maud’s job began.
Two of the comforting women appeared and led Maud into the room where the little girl lay, still in her own small bed. Pneumonia, it would seem. Brown curly hair and large, fixed green eyes. Maud closed them, amazed as always that the eyes of little girls didn’t shut when you lay them down, like those of a china doll. Maud dressed the child in a green frock handed to her by one of the women. Then she tied a green ribbon in her brown hair. The dress, Maud assumed, had been chosen by the mother to match the little girl’s eyes, which would be closed in the coffin, but no matter.
She laced up the little shoes, noticing that they were almost too small and were worn slightly at the heels. Still they were the child’s best shoes, Maud could see that. She combed the curls, gently, carefully. No need for the hot tongs she had brought with her. The little angel’s curls were natural, perfect.
Maud truly cared for her little friends, as she secretly and silently called the dead little girls during her moments of privacy with them. Little angels with their distant faces and still hands. So composed. Children caught in the centre of perfection, usually by disease, quick as lightning, so that death hardly changed them, only took away the colour from their cheeks, which Maud could replace with just a hint of rose-coloured powder. She would stay with her little friend now for
the better part of three days, fixing hair, arranging flowers, going home only to sleep and, finally, just before the funeral itself, which she was never asked to attend.
On the day of the service, early in the morning, Maud would go out to her own garden to gather some of the hundreds of pansies that she grew there in the summer especially for her little friends. Then, back in the parlour of the bereaved household, she would place them all around the inside edge of the little white casket. The tiny, delicate faces of flowers… some company, Maud hoped, for later.
When Maud had been very small, about the size of this most recent little friend, her mother had presented her with seven or eight china dolls, carefully preserved from her own childhood. Maud had loved them all passionately… their little sharp teeth, their fixed shining eyes. But somehow, one way or another, she had broken them. Her mother, furious, would not from that time on allow her to own a doll. “If this farm could grow dolls,” she would say, gesturing towards a hole in the barnyard where all unburnable garbage, including shattered toys, was thrown, “then you would have dolls.”
On the day of the service, after she had left the bereaved household, Maud would go into the upstairs back bedroom so that she could watch the procession file into the cemetery on the hill. Jesus Christ and God Almighty, dressed in white rather than black plumes. The little white wagon with the shining glass windows. She would wait calmly at the window until she saw the mourners huddle in a circle around the grave site. Then, she would fling herself, sobbing, onto the bed. Nothing to do with death or children. Just that her beloved little friend had been taken from her; that their time together was over, forever.
Ten minutes later she would appear at her desk, perfectly composed.
That night, however, Maud would dream that the fields of her childhood farm were filled with china dolls, their faces like pansies in the distance. All of them so perfect with their little feet rooted in the ground and their little white dresses swaying in the wind. She couldn’t get close to them. They always remained in the distance. No matter how fast she ran up the lane, she couldn’t get close to them at all.
The following day she would find herself completely ignoring her child, treating him as if he had never been born. And he, mimicking her, would behave as if his mother had never given birth to him.
It happened that way every time.
At first, Fleda recalled, it hadn’t been quite so easy to let go of the familiar articles of domesticity. The carpet-sweeper she had owned in the old house, for instance, sometimes, even now, entered her mind like an old acquaintance – one she hadn’t seen for a long time and whose face she could barely remember. And occasionally she was surprised to find earth, instead of carpets, under her feet for most of the day. True, she owned a broom, had morning chores to perform, had to sweep the tent each day, had to fill the galvanized tub with water from the barrel in order to warm it over the fire for dishes and laundry. But there was nothing here like the insistent pressure of a house that wanted putting in order. There was hardly any call to order at all.
The carpet-sweeper, she remembered, had been called “Mother’s Helper,” a name she found mildly ironic since she had never been, and somehow knew she would never be, a mother.
Sometimes when it was damp or cold she felt a faint sense of mourning for the old house (though never for the rooms in town), felt a sense of loss for its calm, quiet, predictable rooms, and the furniture that filled them. Then she would wander through her old home in her imagination, taking note of its eccentricities, its bric-a-brac, the piano, the view from the window over the sink, until at last she came to the spot she had called The Poet’s Corner, the location of much pleasure and much disquietude.
There she had placed engraved portraits of her favourite writers on the wall, and copies of their books on a table beneath, a kind of shrine where, in true religious form, she could leave behind the perceived world. As David spent more and more time in his study untangling the mysteries of his battles, she spent more and more time with these other men, until the hallucination of their language, the strength of their fantasies became, at times, more real to her than the man whose meals she cooked, whose socks she darned.
Then the house became a kind of fortress where she sequestered herself with these companions, with their visions, their dark landscapes, until she knew the geography of Venice, of Florence, of the English Lake District, better than the streets of Fort Erie, the hotels of Niagara Falls. No church bazaar, no meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary could pull her from their influence. The women of the area became suspicious and, as she became more aloof from them, finally angry and cruel. The men were simply frightened. In another era she might have been burned at the stake.
Then came her husband’s posting to Niagara, the sale of the house, the storage of the furniture, and the removal to temporary quarters in Kick’s Hotel. The second that Fleda had closed the door for the last time, had heard the latch drop and the lock click, she knew it was the end of a period, a cycle. She took her books with her into the real landscape of her own country.
From then on, except in those rare moments when she mourned the old place, her home became a dream, a piece of imaginary architecture whose walls and windows existed in the mind and therefore could be rearranged at will. A house where the functions of rooms changed constantly, where a wing could be added or a staircase demolished, where furniture could re-upholster itself, change shape, size, period.
Today, gazing past David’s socks, which she had hung on a branch to dry, she watched the ribbons on the survey stakes move in the summer breeze, still cool at this hour, and knew, for her, there would be no actual house, not soon, not ever. The stakes marked out a dream, an illusion, which if laboured into permanence, would produce a similar fortress and the feeling of caged torpor she was now beginning to associate with her last dwelling. She walked over to the space that she and David had carefully paced out and, on impulse, swung her arm right through the spot where the library windows ought to have been, feeling the cold, free air on her wrist as she did so. Then, stepping lightly over the string which connected the stakes, she began to walk right through the non-existent walls.
She had broken out of the world of corners and into the organic in a way that even her beloved poets in their cottages and villas hadn’t the power to do, and the acre had become her house. The acre and the whirlpool. Predictable flux, entry and exit of animals, birds, cloud formations, phases of the moon. The arrival and departure of men, returning to their rooms, to rectangles and corners, while she breathed whirlpool and kept her place there and her fire. The tent functioned for her merely as a shelter. And, unlike a real house, it was capable of motion and response; sagging a bit after a storm, billowing and flapping in the wind.
She was standing where the kitchen should have been, her body immersed in a transparent pantry cupboard, when Patrick took up a final, permanent residence in her mind. The poet. Released from boundaries, from rectangles, basements, attics, floors and doors, she felt free to allow him access, whatever form that access might take. Every cell in her body, every synapse in her brain, demanded the presence of the poet in her life. As if all the reading, all the dreaming, had been one long preparation for his arrival.
His arrival, which coincided so neatly with her departure. Departure from everything she had assumed she would be; from the keeping of various houses, from the sameness of days lived out inside the blueprint of artificially heated rooms, from pre-planned, rigidly timed events – when this happened in the morning and that happened in the afternoon, just because it always had and always would.
Fleda walked over to the tent and opened its soft door easily with the back of her hand. The mosquito netting clung for a moment to one of her shoulders then dropped comfortably back into place. Then, moving her fingers through skeins of wool and spools of thread in her sewing basket, she soon grasped cold steel. Holding the blades downwards for safety, she took the scissors with her to the outdoors and placed them on a st
ump in the sunlight where they shone with an unusual, almost foreign, brilliance. Then she began to pull the pins out of the bun at the back of her neck.
As she cut her long, long hair to a spot just below her shoulders, she remembered the years it had taken her to grow it; how, since she had been an adult, there had always been the morning problem of doing up her hair and how that problem would exist no longer. The act of cutting her hair now was difficult and required strength as it was thick and often resisted the blades. She managed, however, by separating it into six parts as her mother always had when she braided it for school. The severed portions Fleda paid no attention to whatsoever, merely flung them to the wind or onto the ground. Finishing, she brushed off her skirt, and the part of her back she could reach, and decided to walk down the path to the whirlpool.
She hadn’t gone more than twenty steps down the bank when she remembered the scissors and, wanting to return them to her work basket, she changed her direction.
Then she saw Patrick and stopped.
The poet, darkly dressed, his back bent, collecting her discarded hair; stuffing first the pockets of his trousers and then his jacket with it, moving from place to place, chasing the strands that were beginning to be carried away by the wind.
Gradually Fleda understood that he had watched her before, and often, and the knowledge both frightened and delighted her. “How wonderful this is,” she whispered to herself as she moved quietly away so that he would not see her. “To think that he looks at me.”
As she was returning from the whirlpool later that afternoon, she thought about her husband’s gifts to her. Books and books and now, finally, the poet himself in the flesh. Patrick, with the long sensitive hands and pale skin, his reddish hair surrounding his head like a burning aura. The weak, long, listless body. To think that he had crept through the woods like an intruder, a ghost, a witness, responding, and now he had crept right up to the hearth rug of a dream which had spilled through walls and into the landscape.
The Whirlpool Page 12
