The Whirlpool (14 page)

17 July 1889

T
his 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 the 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
.

F
or 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.

A
nother 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.