I don’t like vinegar on them, said the woman beside him.
Damian half turned to her, but she was speaking to her friend.
I like gravy, though. Donald can’t stand it on fries, but I like it.
A person caught in that current might possibly have a chance of swimming to the bank, Damian considered. But the current would be unrelenting; it would sweep the swimmer away just at the moment he held out a hand for help. He’d be tossed over the edge.
He who hesitates is lost, his father called. Don’t be afraid.
Damian knew he’d slide and fall straight into the dark, rushing river below. So Lisa went first. She was only five. She did what their father told her to do and laughed when she tumbled against him at the bottom. Damian’s heart was thumping hard as he reached for the rope and held it with both hands. Thumping hard as a grouse. He clutched the rope and skidded down, holding on so tightly that the rope seemed to rip the skin from his hands.
His father caught him, rubbing the burns on his hands, and the three of them stood on the bank together. Damian’s heart was still beating fast, but he was dazzled by the water pouring into the deep, black pool, a pool that was ringed around with a wall of rock topped with spruce trees. They gazed at the waterfall without speaking. Bright and dark. Then their father tore off his T-shirt and jeans, his socks and shoes, and made a swift, shallow dive into the pool. He came up, laughing, his hair plastered against his head.
God knows where Donald got to, anyway, said the woman. He said he was going for a leak, but it can’t take that long.
Damian lifted his eyes to see, farther away, a place where the river dipped and rolled before it coursed over the Falls. It furled in vivid green, a constant wave that seemed to stay in one place, thick as a muscle. Just at the edge, the water became a froth of white.
The lip of the waterfalls made a long, rounded curve. In the middle distance was Goat Island, separating the American Falls from the Canadian. The American Falls were less impressive, with piles of rocks below. Lisa had told him that they’d once stopped the Falls for several months
on that side, as if they’d been turning off a tap. They’d wanted to get rid of the talus at the base, though in the end they’d decided to leave it. But in halting the flow they’d found things they didn’t expect. Bones. Twelve quarts of coins. More bones. All those people, Lisa had said, had thrown themselves in. They’d killed themselves.
How did she know that?
She’d done a project on it. The one she’d done for Mr. Craig.
A whole project on how many people killed themselves at the Falls?
He was stupid, she told him. He was a
stupid
idiot.
He remembered the tone of her voice.
Stupid
.
She’d always wanted to see Niagara Falls. When she was little, she’d had a paperweight that their Uncle Roger had sent to her one Christmas: if she shook it, little flakes of white fell over the miniature Falls. There was some looping white script on the top of the paperweight:
Niagara Falls, Canada
. Because she liked it so much, more things had arrived from their uncle, in mailing tubes, until she had posters of the Horseshoe Falls in Icy Glory, An Aerial View of the Falls, the
Maid of the Mist
Near the American Falls, the Spanish Aero Car Offers Thrills Over the Whirlpool, the Spectacular Blossom Festival, and Roger Hockridge Challenges the Falls Again. The poster of Roger Hockridge, Canada’s Number One Daredevil With His Bomb Barrel, had been put up on the ceiling of her room. She liked looking at the round barrel, decorated with red maple leaves, bobbing at the edge of the Falls – a barrel that held Uncle Roger, the uncle they’d never met. It was the very poster Damian had ripped down and put up in his own room, because he didn’t get the same one.
He’d got one of his uncle being carried on the shoulders of some grinning men, but not one of the Bomb Barrel.
Lisa also had pens with
Niagara Falls
scrolled along the sides in silver lettering. There was one made with clear plastic: when it was turned upside down, a spurt of blue-green liquid descended. When the pen was turned the other way, the blue-green waterfall drew back, up, and over the edge. Lisa took it to school when she was in grade seven and promptly lost it. Another pen was sent, but it didn’t work as well as the first, because the liquid representing the Falls merely dripped when the pen was turned.
She knew the history of the Falls. She knew who had lived and who had died among the daredevils; she could rhyme off the names and death dates of the ones who hadn’t made it. She’d read about how the Falls had been before the Europeans came, and after they’d arrived, when Father Hennepin knelt at the sight, his portable altar strapped to his back. She told Damian how the Iroquois had seen wolverines reaching out to snag carcasses of dead elk from the river, how rattlesnakes had sunned themselves on Table Rock when it hadn’t been named Table Rock, back when it had been a huge, unbroken shelf, and how eagles had wheeled over the water in great flocks, lost in mist, almost as if she saw it exactly as it had been hundreds of years before. A sacred place – wild, fearsome, untouched.
Damian turned away from the railing, steadying himself by putting a hand on the top of a Hi-Spy Viewmaster II. It cost fifty cents for a minute, so he dug a couple of quarters out of his pocket and dropped them into the slot. He looked through the viewer into darkness. Nothing. He stayed where he was, listening intently, aware of the roaring that filled his ears. The sound of the nearer current was layered over the
rush of water farther away, combined with the noise of the Falls themselves, a heavy curtain of sound.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to be there at all. He had no idea why he’d brought it up with his mother. Wanting to scatter his sister’s ashes in a place she’d hoped to visit had only been a half-baked idea he’d had, but his mother had fastened upon it. She’d made arrangements. She’d phoned her brother, though Damian knew that relations between them were cool. The next thing Damian knew, they were going to be spending several weeks with his Uncle Roger and his cousin Elvis, neither of whom he’d ever met. His mother had put off all her massage appointments for a month; it was the first time in years she’d taken so many weeks away from work. She had pulled down the blinds in the little house in the backyard – the Studio, as she called it. She had locked it up.
And, she added, a pencil poised above a list she was making in the kitchen, the Motel au Vieux Piloteux had been booked in Trois-Rivières, because they could make it there from Halifax on the first day – a long day, but it would break up the trip nicely.
It really was a good idea, his mother told him. Lisa would have wanted her ashes scattered on the Niagara River.
But as soon as she said it, they both knew it wasn’t something Lisa would have wanted. If Lisa had been able to want anything, she’d have wanted to stay alive. They’d stood in the kitchen looking at each other. His mother was stricken, but Damian didn’t put his arms around her; he simply turned and went out of the room.
Nevertheless, they had made the trip to Niagara Falls. It had been ten months almost to the day since it happened.
I’d like to see, piped a voice, and Damian looked down to see a girl with tight brown braids staring up at him. There was a small cap on her head. Please, she added.
Sure, he said. But it ate my money – you can’t see anything.
A plump Mennonite woman reached out, putting a large, tanned hand on the child’s shoulder. Damian dropped his eyes, making his way past a cluster of little girls, all wearing long dresses and sensible shoes.
You shouldn’t speak to strangers, Leah.
He has hair like the angel Gabriel.
He’s not the angel Gabriel.
Damian walked along the path by the river, feeling the force of the current moving toward him as he went against it. It gave him a sense of vertigo. Near the intake pool for the power plant was a smooth lawn that ended in a jumble of rock.
A man and woman were sitting there, and the man had his fingers tucked into one of the belt loops on the back of the woman’s white jeans. He leaned over and kissed her on the ear, and she half-turned to him and murmured something. They got up and left: the woman brushing at a grass stain, the man chucking a paper coffee cup into the water. Damian watched as the cup was caught on the surface of the green water, light and buoyant, spinning comically before it vanished over the edge. He could feel the power of the water, yet at the same time it didn’t seem so very powerful; it was close enough for him to dip his feet into the river.
The waterfall was shot through, here and there, with sunlight. Laughter. His father netted by shadows, by dappled lights, swimming strongly away from them, toward the waterfall, where he dunked under and came
up –
Holy Christ, it’s cold
– always moving away from them.
Come on, you two, his father had called. Damian, hop out of your clothes and jump in.
Lisa stripped down to her pink-and-green bathing suit and jumped in.
There!
You did it!
How strange her small legs looked as she frog-kicked frantically toward her father.
It’s cold, darling, he said as Lisa threw her arms around his neck.
Damian sat down on a flat rock by the Niagara River, and it occurred to him that he could go back to the car and get the box with the urn in it. He could throw handfuls of Lisa’s ashes into the water, since it was what he had come here to do, after all – toss up handfuls of that remarkable dust that had once been a human being and watch it drift away.
Sometimes he thought the urn of ashes lived inside him. Lisa, the memory of Lisa, the ashes of Lisa, boxed in and taped shut. She could have been in her bedroom there, inside her little urn. She could have been sitting on her miniature bed, in her miniature room with the miniature posters all around her, the one of the Spanish Aero Car and the one of Uncle Roger’s Bomb Barrel. There she was, sitting on the bed inside the box that was inside his brain. Her smile was fixed in the immovable smile of the dead. She was gently smiling or not quite smiling, a bit like Buddha. He carried her everywhere he went, but soon he’d have to let go. His eyes stung with tears. It always happened like this. Things went away, leaving him behind.
Here we are, said Ingrid as Damian parked the car under the shade of a chestnut tree in front of a rambling white house. Now don’t worry when you meet Elvis. He’s harmless.
I wasn’t worried, said Damian.
And your Uncle Roger –
You’ve told me all this.
Someone’s done a book about him, she said, getting out of the car and leaving the door open. A book about Roger. And they’re coming here to film him for television.
She was proud of him, thought Damian. She was proud of her brother, but she’d never brought her children here.
Why didn’t we ever come here to visit? he asked.
She was standing beside the open door and he could only see part of her. Well, she said, gesturing with the water bottle. I know I could have brought you – it had to do with Elvis’s mother.
But she’s been gone a long time, hasn’t she?
Yes, I guess she has. But things between Roger and me –
He couldn’t hear what she was saying. She drummed her fingers against the kayak on the roof rack.
Damian got out and yanked his knapsack from the backseat. It was the house where his mother had grown up, one that seemed to offer an expansive welcome, in the way of old mansions, with its ample front porch and ivy growing over the eaves and up the rounded wall of the turret. It might have stood there for a hundred years or more, like an oak tree growing on an unkempt lawn patched with crab-grass. Behind it was another, smaller house in the same style, half hidden by trees and a high box hedge that no one had clipped, so the leafy ends – thin, green arms – waved up to greet him.
His mother had already started taking the bags out of the trunk. She took out the heaviest one, her burgundy suitcase, before Damian could help her with it.
Someone was singing, and the voice, off-key, was accompanied by monotonous strumming. When Damian heaved his mother’s suitcase forward, though the wheels on it didn’t work, he was startled to see a young man blocking the path, wearing bell-bottoms and a shirt unbuttoned on a pale, freckled chest. He held a child’s red guitar; his song started and stopped and started again. Uhhh-huh – honey – uhhh-huh –
He stared at Damian.
Who’re you? He held up one hand with his fingers curiously clenched.
Oh, Elvis, you’re so much taller, said Ingrid, coming up behind Damian. In each hand she held one of the freshly baked pies they’d bought on the way. When did I last see you? It must have been at Mother’s funeral. That was five years ago. Elvis, this is Damian. Damian, Elvis.
She had been speaking very quickly; she stopped abruptly.
Who’re you? he asked Ingrid.
I’m Ingrid, your Aunt Ingrid – your father’s sister. Is he here?
Elvis slowly brought down his clenched hand and turned his back on her. He shifted from one foot to the other, and after a moment he started strumming the guitar again.
Elvis, we’re going to find your father, Ingrid said, holding the pies flat.
Damian followed her up the steps. He wanted to walk all around that grand porch to the front of the house, where he thought he’d be able to look over the Niagara River,
across the gorge, to New York State. The windows were huge, with panels of flowering vines in the transoms. Yellow glass, red glass, blue glass.
I guess I’ll see if he’s inside, she said.
Damian put down the suitcase and went around the porch. He’d been right; when he got to the front of the house he could see across the gorge, though he couldn’t see the river below. He sat down on one of several old Adirondack chairs and shut his eyes. It was just as hot as it had been before, but there was a cool breeze, and it brought the scent of clover to him. Not far away was the sound of a lawn mower, droning back and forth, until it caught on something and there was a brief explosive sound. The leaves moved a little on the chestnut tree, concealing a robin that was making a sweet sound over and over.
Phoebe, phoebe
, it called. It lulled him.