The Whirlpool (8 page)

H
is uncle’s farm was prosperous – a kind of miniature empire with large cathedral-like barns, and board and batten sheds, and even a gazebo in the landscaped backyard. It consisted of land that had been forced into submission by several generations of large, heavy-muscled men with strong, obstinate wills. The house had been replaced three times in a century and now, at the farm’s centre, and at the end of an impressive double row of sugar maples, there stood a seemingly indestructible fortress of red brick, entirely symmetrical, with windows and chimneys mirrored on either side of a Georgian door. Stretching out from this, in all directions, were acres and acres of fruit trees, each one pruned to size and irregular only in the grotesque gestures of their branches which were, in this season, disguised by a thick covering of leaves.

Patrick, arriving in this neat, well-ordered landscape, had felt, as always, his own sense of inadequacy and that of his father who, instead of taming the new land, had attempted to tame its inhabitants by preaching fire and brimstone sermons in poverty-stricken parishes. He taught his son how to read Latin instead of how to make a split rail fence and later spent the few dollars he was able to save having him properly educated, hoping that, when the process was complete, Patrick might decide to enter the ministry. The call had never come,
however, and Patrick, unable to deal effectively with either the body or the soul of the new country, had found himself, at thirty-three, eking out a subsistence salary as a clerk in the capitol city, grasping desperately for bits of unstructured time in order to pursue his obsession with the art of poetry. And there was the disappointed wife who hovered in his mind as a constant reminder of his inability to provide, either physically or emotionally. Reading, always reading, she complained as night after night he disappeared into the old-world landscape with Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Browning.

In the beginning, his wife had accompanied him on his Sunday outings in the Gatineau Hills where he went in search of the often elusive inspiration. But eventually the cold and the boredom overcame her and the apparent futility of his quest. With the unexpected, practical intelligence that sometimes springs from those of uncomplicated mind, she had said to him one winter day as they stood surrounded by unvaried spruce, up to their hips in snow, “You’re never going to find Wordsworth’s daffodils here.” After that, Patrick went into the woods alone.

He hated the cold, but clung to the concept of landscape and so he stubbornly persisted. With numb fingers he recorded his observations in his notebooks, waiting sometimes months until he moulded them into poems. Some of these had been published in one small magazine or another south of the border, and finally in a slim collection he had paid for himself. Just enough reinforcement to feed the disease, the desire; enough to make him believe that he was different from the men he worked with. Enough to ensure that he would stumble through each work day in a fog of utter loneliness.

During the past winter he had suffered an attack of pneumonia which had left him weaker physically and in a state of perpetual despair. He began to believe that there were forces beyond his control conspiring to erase all words from his mind. Finally, he found it difficult to speak at all. The idea of people
gathered together, the noise, the maddening hum of conversation, caused him panic. His doctor, genuinely alarmed, suggested a twelve-week vacation away from his work, the family, preferably in a rural setting. The uncle was contacted and generously opened the doors of his healthy world – a world that Patrick would feel, initially, overwhelmed by.

Within a few weeks, however, he would discover that his uncle was not particularly interested in whether or not his young nephew could build a barn or plough a furrow. In fact, he was much too busy to be concerned with him at all. And so Patrick was left alone to wander around the woods, bird-watching, collecting plant specimens, or simply allowing his mind to digest the scenery. He wrote no poems, having lost touch, somewhere during the illness, with that part of himself, but he slept a great deal and began to recover some of his lost weight.

He had visited this Niagara County farm often as a boy and so now he was able to behave there as one does with familiar people and places. He was able to choose either privacy or participation, depending on his mood. Most often he chose a combination of both, wanting the comfort of company without the responsibility for conversation or action attached to that comfort. He liked to listen to the mild, safe words which passed, in the evenings, between his uncle and aunt.

Two evenings before as he sat making notes in the parlour, thereby avoiding conversation, he had found himself listening to the old couple arguing a point. He could barely believe the coincidence.

“If I were interested in history,” his uncle was saying, “I’d have no time for progress. I don’t want to remember the way it was. All stumps and mud was the way that it was. What kind of a fool would want to remember that?”

“Well, the major’s talks are learned,” argued his aunt, “and he prints them up so that you can read afterwards what you don’t understand.”

“Don’t tell me I don’t understand. Any cow in the field understands stumps and mud.”

“But this is the 1812 war he’ll be talking about.”

Patrick’s uncle was unimpressed. “My grandfather fought in that war, lost the use of one arm, and was never given a stipend. It’s nothing you’d want to remember. Let it go, that’s my opinion.”

“I’m going to the talk,” his aunt insisted.

“Well, I’m not surprised. All the women for miles around will be filling up the hall because his own wife won’t be there, and that’s for sure.”

“It’s shameful,” agreed Patrick’s aunt, “her living in the woods out there, like a gypsy.”

Patrick felt as if everything around him had suddenly jerked into focus.

“She should be having babies and minding house,” his aunt continued.

“I’ve heard that the major’s going to build her a house,” said the uncle, “all made out of windows with -”

“I’ll go with you, Aunt,” Patrick interrupted from the other side of the room. His voice sounded unusually loud to him and oddly distant, as if someone else had shouted the sentence from a far corner of the house.

His aunt was pleased and surprised and began at once to direct her conversation towards her nephew: what she would wear; her friends and enemies who were likely to be there; the likelihood of the talk being too long; the suitability of the refreshments afterwards.

Patrick wasn’t listening. He was trying to absorb the information that the woman in his mind had a flesh and blood husband. Something a little more tangible than the ring he had seen resting on the cover of the book.

Tonight he dressed for the lecture at the Historical Society with a certain sense of unease; more because of the anticipated
crowd than because of the historian who fascinated him purely because he was married to the woman. History. Like his uncle, Patrick was confused by the word. History, his story, whose story? Collections of facts that were really only documented rumours. When he thought hard about them, thought hard about facts, they evaporated under his scrutiny. Crowds of men rushing towards each other with gleaming weapons. Fires. Large, hot, man-made fires. And the repetition. As if by speaking it over and over this collection of past facts might liquefy again, change from vapour into rain, become a large, touchable body of water.

He put on the same costume that he had worn in Ottawa, daily, to his place of employment. Dark jacket and pants. Dark vest, white shirt. He placed his pocket-watch, a silver circle with a locomotive etched on it, inside his vest pocket. That way, if necessary, he would be able to occupy himself by watching the progression of time.

One hour later he met the military historian.

“Major David McDougal,” the large man introduced himself, pumping Patrick’s hand vigorously. “So pleased to meet you. I’ve read some of your work… in the Canadian Appendix to the
Younger American Poets
, I believe. Yes, I’m sure that’s where it was. Very fine, very fine.”

“Thank you,” Patrick managed to croak, greatly surprised.

“We need writers!” the historian continued. “Yes, we need real writers… thinkers. Yes, this country needs thinkers; thinkers that think Canadian. You
do
think Canadian, don’t you?”

“Well, I hope… I mean I think I think Canadian,” Patrick replied, laughing.

“Good!” boomed McDougal emphatically, and without a hint of the other man’s amusement. “Nobody else does. Thinking Canadian is a very lonely business, my boy, and don’t
forget it. Do they think Canadian at the University of Toronto? No, they don’t. They think Britain… the Empire and all that nonsense. Do they think Canadian in the churches? No, they don’t. They think Scotland, Rome. Why not a church of Canada, I ask you? Surely we could at least have our own religion. I’ll bet this group assembled here doesn’t have more than one Canadian thought a day, and they pretend to be interested in Canadian history!” The major threw his arms straight up in the air in a gesture of bewildered outrage.

Throughout the long, well-researched, but undeniably boring lecture, Patrick did his best to appear as if he were thinking Canadian. He was oddly drawn to the speaker, liked his good-humoured, outspoken sense of betrayal, his unaffected pomposity. The poet’s mind, however, tended to slip back into the woods above the whirlpool where he supposed the trilliums were about to disappear for the season. Soon the more colourful wildflowers of early July would replace them. He thought about the woman. He was sure she would still be reading, reading by moonlight, rising only to pour water into the kettle, the fire underneath it stronger in the dark. Occasionally, the major’s voice broke into this picture and then Patrick looked through the windows of the hall into the night where he imagined the glow of battle fire on the surrounding orchards.

“So, you will come to visit me, I hope,” the major said afterwards to Patrick. “In my rooms at the hotel I have incontestable proof that we won that battle regardless of what any American might try to tell you. Why all this running away, why all this casting of baggage into the river, I ask you? Why all this destroying of ammunition? Is that the way a victorious army behaves? Of course not!” The major snorted contemptuously.

“We won. There is simply no doubt about it. We fought hard, many, many lives were sacrificed… but we won. Imagine having a victory stolen from you like that. The Americans are robbing us of our victories! It’s unconscionable!”

Major McDougal was silent for a few moments, considering the atrocity. Then he turned again to Patrick. “Friday at two, then? Bring some poems, if you like,” he added, just before he was swept away by a crowd of admiring matrons.

Riding home in the buggy through moonlight, while his aunt talked and talked, Patrick began to restructure the geography in his mind. His uncle’s farm, the woman, the war. The farmer had, to the best of his abilities, managed to order the forces of the natural world. The woman had apparently integrated herself with the terrain around her. And the war had forced exaggerated events into the landscape.

Control, acceptance, and man-made fire.

T
he child was watching the fish in the pond, thinking that he would not stop, now that he had begun. He wanted to move the fish around, to remove them from their various prisons, to interrupt their monotonous, seasonal journey from pool to tank and back again.

Why should they not have the rest of the garden, the rest of the world?

Why should they not have the dangerous sun as well as the soft, warm water?

The word
pool
spread over the child’s brain, soft fins at his temples and then as an echo and then as a spiral.

When he hit the surface of the water with his palm, the fish moved in a jerky, hysterical fashion, turning sharp corners, their paths becoming rectilinear.

Gone the gentle undulations, the swishing of membrane through liquid. Enter the straight paths and intersections of fear.

The child looked at the drops of water on his palm. Suns in every bead of it and colours non-existent in the world.

The word
world
moved lazily behind his forehead, followed by the word
water
. And the word
weep
was in there too, trying to come forward.

His mother was working on the other side of the garden. Mud on her shoes, canvas gloves covering her hands. Digging to set in marigolds. Rust and yellow.

The child moved towards her, carrying a small burlap sack full of toy soldiers in one hand, his rabbit in the other. When he was near his mother he began to arrange the members of his tiny army in order of size, making a clucking noise that had nothing at all to do with soldiers. Perhaps, Maud speculated, the sound had something to do with horses. She would, she decided, buy him some toy horses. Hoping for the day when the syllables he spoke coincided with his activities.

By the time she had set in four plants he had moved away from the soldiers who remained behind in a rectangular block, perfectly organized upon the lawn. Maud paused to watch her child’s progress across the yard, knowing that he would stop, once again, at the small rockbound pool.

He would stay there, more than likely, for the rest of the afternoon.

Pure sun today. Maud looked across the length of the property up the hill to the graveyard where the older stones gleamed from between clumps of cedars and the trunks of giant oaks. Not too much activity there. No funerals. A few widows perhaps, dragging yards of crape and carrying watering cans. This desperate desire to make something grow out of earth that held someone’s bones. Maud kept her gardening close to the house, had not planted even a single geranium at the spot where Charles was buried, flanked by his parents. Pansies for her little friends in the children’s hearse were more important. They had their own little garden right here.

She had visited Charles’ grave only once; a strange, black-veiled creature she had been then, groping blindly from stone to stone, empty-handed, struggling along in her cocoon of crape. As she had expected, several spiders had made their webs between the marble columns on the front of the stone, from wingtip to wingtip of the angel that stood on top of it and in the grass adjacent. It had started to rain and, concerned about her already greying skin, Maud had hurried away from the spot, convinced that all was well there. She hoped to God that no over-zealous caretaker would decide to remove the webs, believing
in her heart of hearts that the ground for miles around would shudder with Charles’ wrath were that to take place. She thought also that, were it possible, she would have an entire sepulchre made for him from the webs of energetic spiders. An odd image this had produced in her imagination; a gauzy tentlike structure, festooned with wild, uncultivated roses, quivering in the breeze. More like the cradle of an enchanted princess than the grave of an ordinary undertaker.

Now, in her own garden, she began digging again with her little spade and within seconds struck something hard, unyielding. Subsequent attempts to budge the object produced the sound of metal against metal. Finally, she was able to slip the spade beneath the object’s underside and lever it out of the ground to the side of the flower-bed where it rolled for a few inches before coming to a stop. Another cannon-ball. It left a smooth, spherical indentation in the earth where it had rested for some seventy-five years. Maud placed the roots of four or five marigolds there and quickly set the soil in around them. She would have one of the men come out to fetch the cannonball, put it in the barn with the others. She hadn’t the least idea what ammunition such as this was meant to accomplish, whether it was meant to explode, to cause fire, or to shatter bones. Whatever the case, she would keep it for the military historian who lived in the hotel across the street. The one with the strange young wife who some said had gone to live in the woods alone. Maud, however, had seen her several times during the winter and so was inclined to discredit the story.

The child clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, imitating horses. Then he breathed through his clenched teeth, imitating the wind in the poplar trees.

Her task completed, Maud leaned the spade against the wall of the house and began to walk towards the boy. As she got nearer, she saw that he was talking to the carp, moving his mouth in a repetitive fish-like manner. She hoped whatever he was saying would somehow relate to fish, or at least to marine life in general – even to water.

Then she picked out his words on the breeze.

“Keeping,” he was saying, looking now at his mother, something approaching contempt altering the features of his small face. “Keeping, keeping, keeping.”