The Whirlpool

by Jane Urquhart

  “But isn’t that rather self-defeating?” Patrick was saying. “I mean, once the target is hit, as it inevitably has to be, then there is no more leader.”

  “Oh, but the men respond to that with increased fervour, better fighting. ‘Revenge the General!’ they cry.”

  “So, what did Brock’s men do, after he died?”

  “Well, they ran about shouting, ‘Revenge the General!’ for a while… a few attempted to rush up the Heights. Then they retreated, took Brock’s body back to the flower garden. It’s at the old Hamilton house – the garden, I mean. I really must take you there some time.”

  “They took him back to the flower garden?”

  “Yes, and then they made one last valiant attempt to capture Queenston Heights.”

  “And?”

  “Complete chaos, severed limbs, death, the usual.”

  Fleda searched her memory for another verse.

  “But don’t you see,” David continued, “the whole thing was so wonderful. A young country like ours needs dead heroes. Someone to mourn. Someone to make a monument for.”

  “Yes, but he was English.”

  “Only while he was alive. After that, he became entirely Canadian. Not that he ever wanted to be, Lord knows… but that’s of little consequence. Canada claimed him and nothing will ever change that. ‘Push on, brave York Volunteers!’”

  David held his clenched fist in the air for a moment, and then laughed, finding himself in a ridiculous posture.

  Fleda sang, her voice becoming gradually louder:

  God send us men with hearts ablaze

  All truth to love, all wrong to hate

  These are the patriots nations need

  These are the bulwarks of the state

  David finally looked in her direction. “Fleda, for heaven’s sake, what… ?”

  But Patrick interrupted. “I believe I am a pacifist,” he said. “I believe that nothing could induce me to place my body in the direct line of fire.”

  “It depends,” said David, “on what you are fighting for.” Actually, he didn’t care at all what they were fighting for as long as he could write about it afterwards, but he knew it was important to have something to be fighting for.

  “What were they fighting for?” Patrick wondered out loud. “Were they fighting against the Americans, for Canada, against Napoleon, for the Empire… I could never figure it out. I mean, either way we lose, right? We’re either the property of one nation or another. We’re either Americans or we’re British, the only difference being that, after these conflicts, some of us are dead.”

  “I believe that they were fighting for their own country, the Canadian militia, the Indians,” David’s voice was beginning to rise. “They may not have known this at the beginning of the conflict, but by the time it was over they knew. They knew they had a country. It was all vague before that, but after… after, they became a race!”

  Fleda began to march around, slowly circling the men. She remembered having felt like this when she was a child, annoyed by adults in rooms and their serious conversations, their orderly behaviour. It occurred to her that her activities were childish, but nothing in her wanted to stop. David was noticing, was beginning to become distracted, but Patrick was lost, out there somewhere, imagining battlefields.

  “Battlefields are beautiful,” said Patrick, “when the grass comes back. You can see the marks of fighting but they are so benign… like scars… no… smoother than scars. More like memories. Battlefields are so soft, after the grass comes back.”

  He was really speaking to himself, but David responded. “They should be preserved. We never preserve anything. I want to make a museum… a better museum. Can’t get anyone to preserve anything. There is Brock’s monument, of course, but even it has been blown up once.”

  “There are these wounds in the earth and then the grass comes and covers it all up, like skin, without scars.”

  “On the other hand, you could hardly blame the Fenians,” said David, not listening at all to Patrick. “The Irish certainly have suffered, have been the victims of an overbearing aggressive imperialistic neighbour. The Irish and the Canadians have much in common and will have a great deal more unless we are very careful.”

  Lord, thought Fleda, these theories… no humans there at all. No actual people in these landscapes. What about the pain?

  “There is that tower at Lundy’s Lane,” David continued. “But what, tell me, do you see from it? Butcher shops, funeral establishments, greengrocers. And the part of the battlefield that is visible isn’t even properly marked. It’s scandalous!”

  The child in Fleda, meanwhile, had decided to take a slightly different tack. She wanted a response from Patrick and now knew she would have to address him directly in order to receive it. Moving closer to that place where he sat, she sang softly, confidentially, wickedly:

  Though your sins be scarlet

  They shall be as snow, as snow

  Though they be red, like crimson

  They shall be as wool.

  This was a verse she had whispered to herself as a child before going to sleep, so that she could enjoy, in the dark, the wonderful pictures it brought into her imagination: sheep stained bright red, the sinful, bloody scarlet hearts depicted in Papist lithographs, a pair of bright red mittens lying in a snowdrift, white sheep sinfully butchered, stained this time irregularly with their own blood. All this and more … images of red-hot coals and of scarlet flowers opening, of mouths moistening and of arteries pumping. As a child, she had loved this verse.

  The effect on Patrick was instant, though subtle. She saw him wince and then send a brief, chilling glance in her direction. He turned back to David, hoping, she suspected, that if he shut her out entirely, she would stop. She should stop. At another moment she might have even tried to stop. But it was out of her hands now. These crazy hymns she had memorized as a child were taking over. She sang the verse again louder now, but still directed towards Patrick. He was not looking at David any more. His gaze was fixed instead on his hands, his face and neck beginning to colour.

  “Though your sins be like scarlet,” she began again. She was unwilling to give it up, the anger she suddenly felt, once again, towards him, towards his own vain masculine will.

  Then, inexplicably, in mid-verse, she relaxed, became composed, uncaring. She shrugged and turned away from both men, the neutrality of the word wool still hanging in the air and finally entering her mind.

  She stopped, at that moment, responding to either one of them.

  The child was not in the cupboard when she went to look for him there. Maud stood, with a thundering heart, in the doorway, allowing her eyes to adjust to the darkness.

  The first thing she saw was the tall, tidy pile of empty canvas sacks, each one about a foot square, which occupied the corner opposite where she stood. She knew they were empty.

  Then she saw that the shelves lining the walls were covered with shoe-boxes… objects that had never before filled this space. All the labels on all the shelves had been removed. She noticed, however, that they, too, were piled neatly on the near end of a middle shelf, very close to where her hands now rested.

  The child, she supposed, had rescued the boxes from the back of the store two doors down, and kept them hidden. Kept them hidden until the hour arose when he felt the need of them.

  Now that her eyes had focused, she began to inspect the contents of these boxes. One held tie-pins, another held buttons. She knew these items. She had recorded them. Another held rings, another was full of watches. A box at the end, larger than the rest, was filled to capacity with teeth, false and otherwise. The light that moved into the cupboard from the hall glittered on gold fillings. There was another box for brooches and still another for hairpins. Maud had not noticed until then how spider-like they were, lying piled together with their legs entangled.

  She now saw that the tickets in the sunroom were merely a clue; a fragment of the great number of tickets which were packe
d together on a bottom shelf in their own special box. They were of such a variety that they might have been able to tell someone other than Maud a great deal about the personality of their owner. Some were mangled, some were folded, some looked as though they had never been touched, some were soiled from incessant handling. Some looked bleached by exposure to water, others appeared to have miraculously avoided any contact with the water at all.

  All hope of redistributing this incredible classification process lost, Maud sat on a low stool in the twilight of the closet and considered the possessions of drowned men; how they always carried similar objects in their pockets. Yet, it was the crack in the cuff-link that would allow some relative to identify a body the earth had already, mercifully, taken care of. But rarely did that relative appear. These wild, violent deaths were too grotesque, Maud imagined, to be faced. How were they explained in distant parlours? There were, of course, recipes for disappearance: he went out to buy a newspaper and never returned, he vanished in a snowstorm, he was stolen by gypsies, captured by the fairies, enchanted by a wood nymph on the eve of his marriage.

  Maud picked a shoe-box arbitrarily from a shelf directly in front of her. It was filled with pill boxes – round, square, octagonal, rectangular, silver, gold, tin, monogrammed, painted, rusted. She opened one of them. Two round pink tablets looked up at her like a pair of small enchanted eyes… like the eyes of a tiny demon.

  She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. Thousands of small objects floated across her mind, sometimes in conjunction with the words she had written describing them. Some lovely cameos from the necks of young, drowned, probably pregnant girls… a variety of timepieces, shoelaces, earrings. Once she had found a bird’s nest in a woman’s apron pocket. Where, she wondered was that now? How had the child classified it? Surely there was never more than one. She had found books too. Oddly enough, when they weren’t guide books they were mostly poetry or prayers. Small books that fit neatly into the breast pocket of a jacket.

  Then there were the items the river itself placed in pockets, the river and the rapids; a variety of stones, sticks, sometimes even small fish. One man carried a dead mouse in his pants’ pocket. Maud could never decide whether he had brought it with him to the river or whether the river had given it to him. There were tin cans and the bones of whistling swans, sometimes feathers, very occasionally a flower.

  When she opened her eyes, the child was standing in the doorway gazing at her. Lit from behind, his hair looked like a brilliant halo surrounding his head, and from inside the gloom of the cupboard Maud perceived that he was the possessor of all the light and that it was she, not he, that had been the dark wall. She had never, since her husband’s death, allowed the child access to the other, brighter side of that masonry, she had never allowed him to try to pull it down. Now the child had caused all the objects that surrounded her, all the relics she had catalogued, to lose their dreadful power. He had shown her what they really were: buttons, brooches, tie-clips, garters… merely objects.

  “Dreaming,” he said to her.

  “Dreaming,” she agreed, rising slowly from the stool.

  His hair, when she laid her hands on it, felt warm, soft, alive.

  In those last, strange days of summer, everything lost colour.

  The air was heavy, full of moisture, with odd gusts of wind so turgid they were like damp blankets flattening the grass. Yet, no rain and no spray from the whirlpool, as though it hadn’t the strength to send its white messages up the cliff.

  At night, the wind shouldered its way through the pine trees and moved solidly against the tent until it bowed under the pressure. Sometimes it slid through the flaps at the front and, for a moment or two, the interior was like the sail of a ship curving out towards the dark. On these occasions, the oil lamps would be extinguished, leaving Fleda fighting through black and then fumbling with damp, unwilling matches. This wind had no song, she decided, hardly any sound. It was more like what the medievalists called a humour. Something fighting for your body or your soul. It was a noiseless texture, like the breath of a great invisible beast panting, always at the back of your neck so that when you turned to face it, it turned too.

  During the day, the wind brought, rather than blew away, the thick mists which were responsible for turning everything grey. And even this was like an attitude or an act of will. When Fleda concentrated, she knew there was colour. She could look at the poplar trees and know they had been green, know they were turning yellow. But the wind, the weather, moaned grey with such consistency it was eventually all she could see.

  She was sometimes alone at night now; David working in the rooms in town finishing his tract for the Historical Society. Patrick visiting less and less and gone permanently even when he was there.

  The last time, he had come down through the wind and had sat silent in the tent, now picking up a book, now running his hands nervously through his hair, his confident chatter of the previous week completely eliminated. Soon the surrounding air, already heavy with the weather, became hard and still between them… the only movement caught in canvas, responding to the dogged advances of the wind outside.

  He would not speak to her, would not look at her. Alone with her he made it clear it was she he desired to be absent from. He was like the weight of the wind, rubbing against the tent, entering for a few disastrous moments, putting out all the lights, gone by the time they are lit again. Gone, but still a constant presence. The interrupted gesture, the words not spoken. She began to associate him with the great weight of this inconclusive wind. There seemed to be no end to it. And there seemed to be no reason.

  She remembered the afternoon in July when she had cut her hair; how he had walked away with his hands and his pockets full of it, leaving some behind on branches as he passed by, and how it had glowed there, almost red in the rays of the sun, almost red like his own. She had been delighted by the idea, the image, the colour. But now, if the event were to happen again, the hair would hang neutral and grey on grey branches.

  She had tried, recently, several measures to shut the man she remembered out. As if the trappings of her sex were to blame, she began to wear David’s trousers and old flannel shirts. She cut her hair again, this time to above her shoulders. This facilitated her work around the acre, clearing and the planting of bulbs, and made it much easier to climb back up the bank when she had finished fishing in the whirlpool. But undressing at night, when she caught glimpses of her breasts and thighs in the glass, she understood that this desire of hers had not diminished, had only become less centralized… an idea that had become part of the grey landscape in which she lived. This landscape now soundless, heavy with anxiety and seemingly endless.

  Yet, an idea was forming, taking vague shape. Departure. She could no longer live the closeted life of the recent past.

  And she could not live, forever, in the dream house of this grey, obsessive landscape.

  1 September 1889

  I can’t imagine this house any more. David is very pleased with the progress on the coach house… but I just can’t imagine it.

  Yesterday, I found the Old River Man’s cave, halfway around the whirlpool. It was filled with gigantic fishing equipment. Soon it will be time for the bass. This cave seemed better. I wanted to stay there. People did once, but not on this continent.

  Last week Patrick was talking about cave paintings made by savages years and years ago… how fire in the caves makes the painted animals appear to run. He was talking to David. Somewhere in France they have these caves.

  Sometimes I listen to them when they talk. Sometimes I don’t.

  I just can’t imagine the house any more, the views from its windows.

  Remember the auction sale at the old house?

  The only thing I kept was my sterling silver tea service and place settings. Everything else was scattered out on the lawn around the house, destined for the kitchens and parlours of strangers.

  David promised that in the new house all the
furniture would be modern.

  As if I wanted furniture now, or anything else. The silver stays in darkness, locked in a vault in town.

  I don’t want it either. I’ve forgotten which fork is used for what. I couldn’t survive an afternoon tea. It took no time for all of that to fade away.

  Remember manners?

  When do you say “please”? When do you say “thank you”? When, exactly, did I stop wanting to say either?

  The men keep wanting to build things; to order lumber, hire workmen, draft plans, take measurements. They keep wanting to deliver concrete messages and plan battles.

  I think about Laura Secord living for sixty more years in the same house, dreaming of one long walk she took in the wilderness, telling the story, over and over to herself, to anyone else who would listen.

  Nobody understood. It wasn’t the message that was important. It was the walk. The journey.

  Setting forth.

  Patrick’s whole life had been a departure from certain dramas which should have been his destiny. A dance in which the partners turn away.

  In the Gatineaus it had been weather; snow stinging his face, his eyes, the relentless cold. Yet, he wanted to approach the forests in winter, wanted to document, somehow, their strength. But after half an hour he would weaken, return to his wife, to the fire.

  Every fibre in his body longed for and feared magnificent dramas. He would sometimes shake his head in disbelief concerning the strength of his fear and the weakness of his persistent longing.

  Now he was standing right at the edge of the magnificent theatre that was the whirlpool, trying to steady himself to enter the current. He knew the water at the edge was tremendously gentle. Reflected leaves and subtle green ripples. If you ignored the distance to the other side, the water right in front of you was harmless and predictable. Hardly even a rumour of the whirlpool.