The Whirlpool

by Jane Urquhart

  Fleda sighed and unconsciously walked right through the spot where the front door of the house was to be, heading back, once again, to the tent. Inside she picked up a plaid blanket and reached towards Patrick’s small book which David had brought only a few days before to the forest. Then, disturbed by the emotions that the sight of the little collection aroused in her, she changed her mind, felt that examining its contents, at this moment, would be an invasion of privacy, though whose she was not entirely sure. She glanced at the bed where she and David had spent the night, noticing the jumble of an unsmoothed blanket which looked as if it might have concealed an oddly shaped beast. Then, after running her fingers once over the embossed book cover, she left the poems unopened on the pine table.

  Outside again, she walked over to the section of the bank where the whirlpool was visible, despite thick foliage. There she placed herself in the hammock which David had strung between two cedars. For a minute or two she looked down, watching the few seagulls who had ventured this far inland from the lake move around and around, following the pattern of the current. For the first time she felt the several parts of her world interlock… felt herself a part of the whirlpool, a part of the art of poetry.

  Every weekday morning, around eleven o’clock, Sam O joined Maud in the kitchen to drink coffee, discuss business, and gossip. Nowadays, the child was usually present at these meetings, listening intently, as if he were consciously building his vocabulary.

  As the kitchen did not face south like the sunroom, it was not filled with the same kind of overpowering light. Still, there was a warm feeling to it, pine being the predominant material used in the chairs, tables, and cupboards in the room. Maud, herself, lightened the atmosphere now that she was no longer in full mourning. She had changed her entire wardrobe to mauves, and light mauves at that, moving as close as she could to the edge of half-mourning while still maintaining her respectability. Today, she looked almost pretty, dressed in a lavender calico cotton print with a bit of white lace at the throat and the sleeves. The brooch containing Charles’ hair looked decorative rather than sombre when pinned on this costume.

  Sam was concerned about Jesus Christ, his favourite of the two horses.

  “She just doesn’t seem to have much pep,” he said to Maud. “Nothing like the way she used to be. I remember two or three years back you’d dress her up for a funeral and she’d just know she was going on parade.”

  “Parade, par-ade,” the child echoed.

  “She’d hold her head up like a queen, shake her feathers. Now she’s just listless, like she just doesn’t care any more. I think she is depressed about something.”

  “Something,” the child announced.

  “Remember,” said Maud, “she’s not as young as she used to be. She’s been here a long, long time. Maybe we should be looking for a new horse.”

  “God Almighty would go into conniptions if we replaced her,” said Sam, alarmed. “I don’t think he could work with anyone else.”

  “Conniptions,” the child repeated, and then, because it was such a strange, new word, he repeated it again.

  “Used to be,” Sam continued, “you’d put her in a military funeral and she’d just fire right up. She likes music, you know, especially marching bands. She likes those drums and she was never frightened of the salute like some horses might be. God Almighty, now, he would sometimes get a little nervous, but never Jesus. She’d just stand there at attention, like the soldiers.”

  “Gun!” exclaimed the child, and Maud smiled at him, pleased that he had made the connection.

  “How was it?” she asked Sam, referring to the funeral a few days earlier of the last 1812 veteran in the neighbourhood.

  “Just fine,” said Sam. “That historian went on and on with his address, but apart from that it was just fine. Except for Jesus being listless.”

  “Listless,” said the child, and this time his little face mirrored Sam’s worried expression.

  Sam and Maud drank their coffee silently for a while, mindful of the child’s seeming ability to totally digest their conversations. The child got down from his stool and walked over to the sink where he discovered an empty cup. Soon, he was back at the table, pretending to drink coffee along with the adults.

  “That was the strangest thing,” Sam eventually said.

  “You mean the horse?” asked Maud.

  “No, no, that other funeral.”

  “Oh… the stunt man’s.”

  “No, remember last week when Peter and I took the casket to Chippewa?”

  Maud nodded. The child nodded.

  “Well, we get there, and here is this young girl, lying in bed, dead as a doornail from TB.” Sam stood up, walked over to the stove, poured himself a second cup of coffee, and returned to the table. “There she was,” he continued, “and pretty too. You know how some of them aren’t if they’ve been sick too long, even if they were to begin with.”

  Maud crossed her arms and nodded again.

  “Well, this one has a wedding dress laid out over her, on top of the blankets, with the veil on her head, partly covering her face.”

  “What… why?” asked Maud.

  “Seems she was engaged to the grocer’s son when she took sick and her dress and all was all made up and then when they knew for certain she was going to die, her mother decides she’d better get married first.” Sam looked thoughtfully down into his coffee cup.

  Maud waited for him to continue.

  “So they called in the parson and, because by then the girl was too weak to put on the gown, they just laid it on top of her on the bed and put the veil on her and married her up.”

  “Oh no…” said Maud.

  “And then she just immediately died. Just like that, right under her wedding dress.”

  Maud shook her head. “Oh no…” said the child.

  “It is strange to be dying and getting married at exactly the same time,” said Sam. “The mother even decides that she has to wear the wedding dress in the casket. And now, because she’s dead and not just weak, she can put her right inside it.”

  “Married,” said the child. “Dying.”

  “So then, when Peter and I go back there three days later for the funeral, to take her to church, you know, the mother’s got all these pretty dresses… all different colours, all laid out like, all over the furniture in the parlour. Seems they belonged to the bride. And what does the mother do but start rolling them up and stuffing as many as she can into the coffin with the girl. ‘She’ll need her trousseau,’ she kept on saying, ‘She’ll need her trousseau.’”

  “Trou-sseau,” said the child.

  Sam was silent for several moments. Then he spoke. “Not much upsets me, but that bride did. And maybe that’s what upset Jesus Christ too. Her pulling that bride with all her clothes packed around her, down to the church and then over to the graveyard. Horses have feelings, you know. Maybe that bride upset her.”

  “Bride,” the child whispered to himself, liking the sound of the word. “Bride, bride.”

  Maud carried Sam’s story around with her for the rest of the day, thinking about costumes. Lord, she thought, they are always dressing you up as something and then you are not yourself anymore. This young girl, the frozen, immobilized bride, coerced into it and then dead and unable to ever grow beyond it. No one now would even remember her name. Anecdotally, she would always be the bride, the one who was married and buried in the same breath.

  Just as Maud in her costume of violet cotton would still be “the widow,” were she to stop now.

  Bride, wife, widow. She would not stop now.

  27 July 1889

  David has informed me that rattlesnakes have been spotted hereabouts so now I seem to anticipate reptilian shapes flickering at the edge of my vision. I have been unable to ascertain whether they rattle before or after they strike, but will hope that it is before. Funny that the sound of a child’s toy should be a portent of doom.

  Patrick spent the morning here w
ith us in an endless and unsuccessful search for a tiny wild orchid called Ladies’ Tresses, which he says blooms only around the U.S./Canadian border. He has a small botany book, which he now carries everywhere, and fieldglasses for the birds. We descended the bank through the damp, leafy places where the plant should have existed, but found absolutely none, only a great deal of fireweed. David says the Americans probably stole every example. I had my umbrella with me though the sun was shining. I swung it through the undergrowth in front of me to flush out rattlers, but we found none of those either.

  Patrick said only six words to me all day, in the form of a question: “Why have you brought your umbrella?”

  He didn’t stay to hear my answer but rushed on ahead, eager to get to the whirlpool.

  It is becoming more and more difficult. How much of this am I imagining and how much is real? Does he intentionally make metaphoric reference to his own behaviour… looking for Ladies’ Tresses? I am sure, or, at least I think I am sure, that he still watches me. I have seen the glimmer of his fieldglasses in the forest, and once I glimpsed his tweed jacket through the leaves. Then, when he’s here we behave with such indifference towards each other. And David carrying on about the war as if nothing were happening. Nothing is happening.

  And yet… and yet, I feel the power of his observation.

  I think of “Andrea del Sarto.” Why did Browning put the cousin’s whistle at the end of the poem? Perhaps it should have been there throughout. Every time I read the poem I hear the sound of it from the beginning; a subtle invitation – come out from behind your walls into the scenery. Let the view change around you… forever. And Andrea:

  “the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt

  Out of the grange whose four walls make his world.”

  Andrea imagining heaven as “Four great walls in the New Jerusalem.”

  Earlier this evening, just before dark, I walked out into the night air, over to the edge of the bank. Quarter moon over the whirlpool. Quite abruptly, just at the moment when it’s not quite night, the sky opened, exposed its black distances. Everything around me became unsurveyed… unsurveyable.

  Now, searching for a voice other than the dark, I am back in the tent reading. Here the coal-oil lamp on the table turns the canvas yellow-orange and deepens the odd bits of colour on the furniture.

  In this light I am reading Browning. Pulling in around Browning, trying to avoid the pull of the open dark, the limitlessness of the stars over the whirlpool.

  Reading Browning. Learning Patrick.

  “Love’s corpse lies quiet therefore

  Only love’s ghost plays truant

  And warns us how in wholesome awe

  Durable masonry; that’s wherefore

  I weave but trellis-work pursuant

  – Life, to law”

  Part of me, however, still listens to the night; not to the small intimate sounds, scratching and rustling near the tent, but to the larger experiences: the low, constant sigh of the whirlpool, the gentle, steady breeze at the top of the pines.

  I am listening and reading, my attention shifting from Browning to the outdoors, to a glimmer of Patrick, back to Browning, And once, after I had read the lines:

  “The solid, not the fragile

  Tempts the rain and hail and thunder”

  I was certain that I could hear the creaking of a thousand stars as they changed position in that dark, unfathomable sky.

  August in the garden. Maud was engrossed in weed removal, making room for the late-summer blossoms, tending the precious beds of pansies. Wind high in the maples at the front of the building, breezes closer to the ground.

  Maud looked at the child. He was so beautiful there in the garden in mid-August, his fair hair illuminated by sun and moving gently on the current of the air.

  “Lovely boy,” she said quietly, brushing a lock of golden hair out of his eyes.

  “Lovely boy,” he replied, ignoring her caress.

  The garden gloves made her hands look like two small kittens curled on the pattern of her apron. She rested for a moment, kneeling on the grass, shadows of leaves on her hands, her shoulders.

  Maud sensed the chrysanthemums of early autumn stirring, twitching their roots below the ground. Everywhere on the grass there was light and darkness, moving and changing. Beside her lay a collection of dead, discardable blossoms. Sweet odour of decay.

  She was wearing her mauve cotton dress and had opened it at the collar to let the breeze touch her throat. Inside the gloves her hands were ringless, all jewellery left behind in the house. Happy, absorbed in her activities, she began to sing. A thin sound, carried all over the garden by the wind.

  The child moved towards the picket fence that separated the front yard from the street. “Man,” he said, very quietly, under his breath.

  Maud stopped singing. She assumed that he was referring to the small tree he stood directly in front of.

  “No,” she said, from force of habit, “Bush.”

  “The man,” said the boy, louder this time, gazing past the pickets out into the empty thoroughfare.

  “The road?” questioned Maud. “Don’t you mean the road?”

  It was so dry in this season that tiny whirlwinds of dust moved up Main Street borne on the back of the breeze. The child watched one of these make its irregular progress past the front gate.

  “The man,” he said again.

  Maud pushed her spade into the arid soil and rose slowly to her feet. She walked over to the spot where the child was standing and, placing one hand on his shoulders, scrutinized his line of vision, noticing the whirlwind as she did so.

  “Dust,” she said emphatically.

  “The man,” replied the child, searching up and down the street.

  “The man?” asked Maud, and then, speaking mostly to herself, “What man? There is no man.”

  “There is no man,” mimicked the boy. He was silent, serious for a few moments. Then he began again.

  “Where is this man?” asked Maud. “There’s no man here. Who is this man? Why are you talking about a man? Flower,” she said, drawing his attention towards a yellow rose.

  “The man,” said the boy, entirely disregarding the flower.

  “All right,” said Maud, resigned. “The man.”

  The child’s small face lit up like a lamp. “Oh,” he said, looking at his mother. “Oh, the man.”

  What was this, Maud wondered; why, now, this repetitive word?

  “Oh,” responded the boy. “Oh, the man.” He paused. “Swim,” he said.

  Maud turned abruptly back to the garden, tired, so tired of arbitrary words.

  “Forest,” the child said, following her to the flower-bed, his features filled with animation.

  “No!” said Maud, suddenly straightening her spine and shaking her head, these disembodied nouns making her oddly uncomfortable. “No more of this today.” She waved the child away. “No more words,” she said. “In fact,” she continued, “no more sounds.”

  “The man,” said the boy sadly as he turned away from his mother.

  Maud removed seven weeds in rapid, angry succession, then sat back on her heels as if waiting for the garden to grow, or for a flower to unfurl before her very eyes, to show her, in an immediate way, that some of her efforts produced results. Nothing, of course, changed at all.

  It seemed to her that only in her absence could miraculous transformations occur; only while she slept or lapsed into forgetfulness. Then the river released its dead, the child spoke, her garden blossomed, the season changed. But never under her direct gaze. A phrase… the man… had slipped into the child’s mind. Where had she been when that happened?

  As she raked the earth with her garden tools she relaxed, forgetting, and began to sing again. Soon she heard the child, his voice mingling with her own. Singing too, perhaps. Then she heard the words rise above her own voice.

  “O my God, my God!” he wailed in a shrill woman’s voice. “What am I going to do? What am I goin
g to do?”

  He had made a tiny burial mound out of the garden dirt. The chief mourner, he was a woman hysterical. The sound of pure female grief filled the garden coming, it seemed, from each direction until Maud covered her ears to be through with it.

  The child was rocking back and forth by the little toy grave, sunlight and shadow dancing all over the grass.

  Fleda was haunted, almost constantly now, by the idea of the poet watching her. She was fascinated, and as her fascination grew it began to surround her like a bubble, a bubble she couldn’t break. She would be sitting by the fire or clearing weeds with David, who would be talking about his museum, his book when suddenly the other man’s name would slip out of her mind and into the conversation; softly, easily, like a knife entering butter. She began to question her husband.

  “What do you and Patrick talk about?”

  “Do you think he’s found anything to write about here?”

  Whole scenes in which the poet had played a part would superimpose themselves over her present landscape until Fleda felt she could only really reach her husband by swimming through a foggy dream of Patrick. A clump of today’s poplars on her right was blocked by a memory of the time she had cut her hair and Patrick had stuffed his pockets full of it. The noise of the axe against the cedar tree David was now chopping… eliminated by a scene from the whirlpool: Patrick observing the currents, the swimmer in him active, alive.

  He was not the dark man she had dreamed about during her childhood, not the one who arrived one morning and obliterated the past with his passion.

  The past remained unaltered, strong behind this curtain, this veil of recent memory. The afternoon Patrick had read Swinburne’s “Triumph of Time” aloud, slowly, dreamily. The morning he had arrived at their acre early, crazy after nightmares, with his red hair uncombed, electrified. Fleda had decided, then, to tell him about the veil he was creating, the one that separated her from the present.