The Day the Falls Stood Still Read online

  He turns and catches me studying him but does not seem to mind. “Was it much of a hike for you to the bridge?” I say.

  He shakes his head. “I’ve got a room at the Windsor Hotel.”

  The Windsor Hotel is three-story and square, featureless except for the swirls of wrought iron enclosing a narrow, second-floor veranda, and an ungainly fire escape. It is home to foreigners and drifters and whoever else does not much mind living above a saloon.

  “There’s not much to it, but it’s comfortable enough,” he says. “I’m at the end of the hall, so I don’t hear anyone else.”

  A rented room at the Windsor Hotel? What had I expected? The truth is I had not much considered an existence beyond the fictitious one where we steal away from Mother and he takes me by the hand and pulls me in close.

  We reach the whirlpool, a swirling basin of water some sixty acres in extent at the foot of the gorge, and wait as passengers disembark and others step onto the running boards of the trolley and slide along the seats. As we set off, I say, “You’re on your own?” breaking the quiet.

  “I have been for six years,” he says, “since I was sixteen.”

  “What about your parents?”

  He shakes his head. “It isn’t something I much like talking about.” But there is nothing harsh in his voice, nothing callous to suggest case closed.

  “I’ll have no choice but to think the worst if you leave it at that.”

  “They’re dead, is all.” My hand flits to his arm, lingers a moment, before I pull it back to my lap. His shoulders inch up. The palms of his hands slide over his thighs. “My mother died when I was born and then afterward, my father. A broken heart, they say. My grandparents took me in.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I never felt I missed out.” He looks me square in the face. “Any kid would’ve been lucky to have what I did.”

  “And six years ago?”

  “Six years ago, in the winter, the three of us came down with influenza. My grandmother held on for a couple of months, until she’d buried my grandfather and seen me through the worst of it.” He turns away. “It’s okay now, mostly, but it was a lot.”

  He lives at the Windsor Hotel because he has grit. If I had a sliver of it, I would admit to my life not being quite as it must seem. “I’m not going back to Loretto in the fall.”

  He nods, as though he already knows. “I figured out who your father is. Sometimes he comes into the hotel, quite a lot lately.”

  “You know him?”

  “I work in the saloon a couple of nights a week.”

  I nod, trying to keep my face from changing while I wonder what working in a saloon means about his own fondness for drink.

  “I heard him talking about Glenview, and that’s when I figured it out,” he says.

  A handful of times I have cringed in silence as Father publicly reeled off the most impressive accomplishments of the fellow who built Glenview. I look at Tom and say, “I suppose he was going on about how the fellow who built Glenview also built Town Hall and the transept of Christ Church Anglican on Zimmerman Avenue.”

  He nods.

  “It’s true.”

  “I didn’t doubt it.”

  “There’s more you should know.” I put a hand on the seat in front of us, steadying myself. “I might live in a big house, but these days my mother and I sew dresses to keep our family afloat.”

  He nods, again as though he already knows. But how can he? I am bewildered for the second it takes me to realize that men are inclined to gloat, particularly after swallowing a mouthful of drink, particularly when someone as proud as Father is down on his luck. “I like him,” he says. “All the boys at work do.”

  And then, without considering whether I want the answer I suspect I will get, I say, “How much does he drink?”

  “I counted eight ounces of rye whiskey the other night and he still wasn’t slurring his words.”

  “A lot, then?”

  “I’m no prohibitionist.”

  “Too much?” I say.

  “Too much.”

  I feel no new sorrow. Nor has coming clean steered my thoughts away from the bleakness of the Windsor Hotel.

  At the Niagara Glen, he says we will get off for a bit, until the next trolley comes along, in fifteen minutes or so. We step from the trolley and cross the flats. As we peer into a less steep section of the gorge that the locals refer to as the glen, he says, “When I was a kid I thought it was where the fairies lived, in the woods.”

  “Your own enchanted forest,” I say.

  He smiles. “There are arches and boulders as big as houses, some with potholes worn right through the middle by the river way back, when it was higher than it is now. The ferns are waist deep in places, growing as thick as I’ve ever seen.”

  I try to focus on his words, but there is the bristle hair of his forearm tickling the smooth skin of my own, and now I am wondering whether he will kiss me when we part, also whether I want him to.

  Back on the trolley, I move over a smidgen because I need to keep my wits about me and I can feel the heat of his thigh through my skirt. A fellow sitting behind us says, “It’s pretty enough but a calamity, really, all the energy still running to waste, all that water tumbling over the brink.”

  Tom’s face hardens, and I am reminded of the day we sat on the veranda, partitioned from the world by a curtain of rain. He had spoken of all the affronts the river had suffered, of man’s efforts to truss up the river like a turkey at Christmastime. Afterward I had skimmed the Book of Genesis, looking for a verse I was sure I had read before: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.” It had bothered me then that Tom’s sentiment seemed in opposition to Father’s, let alone God’s. And it bothers me still. “Have you heard about the powerhouse Beck wants?” I say. “My father says as long as Beck’s involved it will be the biggest powerhouse around.”

  “Do you know about the Boundary Waters Treaty?”

  “Yes.” Over the years I had heard Father grumble about the treaty that limited the water diverted from the river for hydroelectricity to about a quarter of the natural flow. “Sheer idiocy,” he would say. “You can’t tell me we shouldn’t be allowed a little more when the river’s high in the spring. And who cares how much is going over the brink in the middle of the night?”

  “Near as I can figure,” Tom says, “with the powerhouses already on the river taking what they’re allowed, there’s not enough left for the hundred thousand horsepower Beck is talking about.”

  “My father says Beck’s a genius at having things turn out his way.”

  “Beck’s a self-promoting industrialist who doesn’t give two hoots about destroying the river.” Tom blows out though closed lips, then catches himself—fortunately—and shifts to a softer tone. “I just hope the Boundary Waters Treaty isn’t as easy to ignore as the Burton Act.”

  The Burton Act, the first piece of legislation meant to preserve Niagara Falls, was quietly swept aside a half dozen years ago in favor of the more lenient Boundary Waters Treaty. “History isn’t on your side,” I say.

  Once we have crossed to the American side, the railbed descends to just a few feet above the water, and he says, “My grandfather used to say we were going back in time when we went into the gorge.”

  I cock my head, perplexed.

  “Look at the bands in the wall. We’re heading down to the oldest layers.”

  My gaze moves across strata of gray, pale beige, pink-brown, some jagged, others worn smooth. At the base of the walls, the river writhes and bucks in response to the narrowed gorge. “Just wait,” he says. “At the Whirlpool Rapids, the waves are thirty feet high. It’s where Captain Webb died.”

  It is part of the lore the locals gather as children: Captain Matthew Webb coming to Niagara to swim the rapids some thirty years ago, fresh from being the first to conquer the English Channel. It took four days for his body to surface,
and when it did there was a three-inch gash in his temple. Like that of the Maid of the Mist and her canoe, like that of Blondin and his tightrope, like that of Annie Taylor and her barrel, it is a story I have heard more times than I can count. “He was a fool,” I say.

  “My grandfather told him that.”

  “Your grandfather knew Captain Webb?”

  “He showed up one morning, asking my grandfather for his opinion on swimming the rapids. My grandfather told him drowning takes a few minutes, that he wouldn’t last long enough for that.”

  “Why your grandfather?”

  “Everyone knew he was the fellow to talk to about the river,” he says.

  I am sitting very still, thinking hard, because I am on the cusp of dredging up some bit of lore, something the children in Niagara Falls are told as they are tucked into beds. It is a story Father had handed down to me, something about a fellow—a giant with shoulders that filled a doorway and hands the size of pie plates when he spread his fingers wide—who had come to Niagara Falls from the north and lived out his days in a cabin overlooking the gorge, always an eye on the river, always predictions being made, always the predictions coming true.

  “Was he a giant?” I blurt it out.

  “That’s what some folks say.”

  “He came from the north.”

  “His name was Fergus, and he’d been logging in the wilderness.”

  “He walked all the way here.” I can almost hear Father, stretched out on his back, me in the crook of his arm, spinning the tale of Fergus Cole: After growing tired of salt pork and molasses, baked beans and tea, bunkhouses smelling of tar paper, tobacco, and drying socks, he started walking south, and kept walking until he hit Toronto. He stayed for only a few months before the squalor and the din of city life pushed him around the western curve of Lake Ontario and onward to the mouth of the Niagara. He walked alongside the river, over the plains beneath the escarpment, and then up the escarpment itself. The last leg of his journey ought to have been easy going; there was a decent road. But he left it and made his way through the forest thick with pine, spruce, cedar, and oak along the rim of the gorge, not stopping until he reached the Horseshoe and American falls.

  “My father used to tell me about Fergus. I know about the tar paper and the drying socks.”

  “Tar paper?” He laughs.

  “I know about the day the falls stood still. He told me about that,” I say, picturing Father’s giant dragging the last of the stragglers by the scruffs of their necks from the muddy bed of the upper river.

  “It was the first of his predictions,” Tom says. “The first of his rescues.”

  “Father always says it was the river’s way of letting the town know Fergus Cole had arrived.”

  “I can’t believe you know all this stuff.” It is plain to see he is pleased.

  “Everyone does.”

  Then, as we round Whirlpool Point, he points toward the Lower Steel Arch Bridge and says, “That’s where Ellet built his bridge, the first to cross the gorge.”

  “Wasn’t he the fellow who hung an iron basket from a cable strung across the gorge?”

  “He charged tourists a dollar for a ride. Fergus worked on the bridge as a carpenter for a bit. It made him furious, people dangling in a basket meant for moving workmen and supplies.”

  From the trolley car I have a clear view of the river’s boiling fury. It is easy to imagine the tourists suspended up above, daring to look down, peeking between gloved fingers, laughing to show their nerve. As I scan the height of the gorge walls, the story of Father’s giant using the basket and a ladder to reach a group of stranded workmen comes to me. “There was a wind squall. It was your grandfather who rescued the men.”

  “He quit after that,” Tom says. “He said the squall was a warning.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  He is quiet a moment, then shrugs. “No one should mock the river.”

  “I think it would have been God that sent the wind, not the river.”

  “Maybe either way is one and the same.”

  I am thinking of Father, wondering if he knows it is the grandson of Fergus Cole pouring his drinks at the Windsor Hotel. “Fergus taught you about the river, then?” I say.

  He nods. “We lived in a cabin at Colt’s Point. The gorge was right there. It’s what we did: hike down to the river, set a few snares, catch a few fish. Once we pulled a fawn from the forebay of a powerhouse, and my grandmother let me keep it in the summer kitchen right the winter through.”

  “I remember my father saying the constables were always on your doorstep, asking for help.”

  “They’d show up if a tourist or a boy or a fisherman was late,” he says, smiling at the thought of it. “Fergus always took me along. I don’t remember not knowing about eddies and undercurrents and standing waves.”

  “What about your grandmother?”

  “Sadie.”

  And then I cajole and prod and piece together the details he gives me. Sadie was a woman who knew that groundnut root would pass for yam once it was peeled and boiled. She knew it could be ground into flour to make a fine loaf. She cured Fergus of the warts that had plagued him since his days felling trees in wet socks. A drop of orange-red sap from bloodroot smeared between the toes twice a day. The minute Tom sniffled, she handed him a cup of pine needle tea. The minute he coughed, it was a tincture of honey and boiled white pine bark.

  “I’m sorry I won’t meet them,” I say and hear the implication, that I would have been introduced had they still been alive. And while I spoke the words sincerely, the seriousness of the idea gives me pause. I want to take back my words.

  He turns to me and says, “Fergus had just barely gotten the news the Burton Act was passed when he died. Sadie paid a boy, and he brought the newspaper every day. She’d flip through the pages, and then one day she said the act had been passed. By then I was on the mend and sitting up in the bed she’d set up beside his. When she was gone he said, ‘It’s good news. There’ll be something left for my great-grandchildren.’ It was the most he’d said in a week, and he had a fit of coughing. Then Sadie was back, stroking his forehead and telling him to take a deep breath. They were his last words.”

  I fidget with a button, face straight ahead, the best I can do to give him a bit of privacy, and try to ignore the way his voice cracked, his halted breath. And then a moment later, almost certain it is not usual for him to speak so openly, I am wondering if he might be thinking of me as someone he has been waiting for and feeling uneasy about my part in fostering the idea if I am right.

  We are a short ways from the Lower Steel Arch Bridge when he leans from the trolley and tilts his face upward, scanning the wall of the gorge. “It’s cooled off,” he says. “I don’t like being in the gorge when the temperature drops.”

  “It’s still pleasant enough.”

  “Bess,” he says, shifting his weight to his feet, “we’d better get off.”

  “Here?”

  “We can follow the tracks to the rim and catch the next trolley up top.”

  The railbed is several yards across with a few feet clearance between the track and the gorge wall and, on the opposite side, a steeply sloping riverbank.

  “We’d better hurry,” he says, grasping my upper arm and steering me toward the open side of the car while several fellow passengers turn their heads to watch.

  “You want me to jump?” I am poised at the opening, the brush alongside the track rushing by my feet, when I first hear what begins as a low rumble and ends seconds later as a resounding crash. A cloud of gray dust rises from the railbed a dozen yards ahead. Passengers scream and leap from the sides of the car as the trolley slows to a stop. My initial instinct is to join them. But a greater instinct wins out and I remain beside Tom, his hand firmly on my arm. A moment later he is telling me to stay put and leaping from the trolley and then running up alongside it. “It’s safe,” he yells. “You’re all safe.”

  Passengers turn to h
im. He nods. “No more rock will fall.”

  “I’ve sprained my ankle,” a woman says and flops onto the grass beside the track.

  “You nearly trampled me to death,” another woman says to a man with his hand on her elbow in a proprietary way.

  “I’ll sue,” a second man says.

  “Have you got a crowbar?” Tom hollers up to the conductor. “It isn’t much of a slide. We can clear it ourselves.”

  “We’d better wait for the authorities,” says the man who said he would sue.

  “You can wait all you like,” another man says.

  Tom makes his way back to me. “Are you okay for a bit?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Then he is off. He takes the crowbar from the conductor as he passes and a moment later is tipping fallen rocks into the river. Soon enough, a handful of men follow him and begin helping out.

  I wait in the trolley, watching, noticing the way the men defer to him. Which rock should be moved next? Should the rubble at the base of the wall be left to shore it up? They see his comfort with the work, his certainty that the wall above will hold. And he is easily the strongest among them, the one to whom the crowbar is passed each time a particularly large rock is exposed.

  When I am nearly to the fallen rock, he hands off the crowbar and lopes toward me. “What is it?” he says.

  “How did you know?”