Building Niagara’s Toronto powerhouse

Photo courtesy of Ontario Power Generation.

I lie on my side, cheek in hand, elbow propped on a pillow, watching Tom sleep as I have most mornings for the six weeks since his return. He is still handsome, though not so youthful as before the war. There are dusky hollows beneath his eyes and, on his chin, stubble that did not used to appear overnight. At the uppermost edge of his cheekbone, there is a small, ragged scar where a bit of shrapnel missed his eye. His hair has yet to grow long enough for waves, and, having met only winter sun, it is dark in color, more like earth than like beach. I cannot see the river on him the way I once thought I could, in the feral locks, in the underside of a chin bronzed by reflected light, in the green of his eyes. The color has seemed muted, diluted by the bleak wasteland of a battlefield.

Again he slept only fitfully, calling out no, sweating profusely with tangled linens wrapped about his legs. Three times, I woke him and saw relief flood his face as his eyes fluttered open to discover my hands on his shoulders, shaking him from the nightmares he mostly keeps to himself. The fourth time, it was early morning, and in the dim light I could see his eyes, open but wide with fear. His mouth was twisted with effort, and his hands were reaching, desperately. When he was truly awake I asked what he had seen. “A hand,” he said, “a hand in the mud. A soldier was being swallowed up by it. Only the hand was left.”

“It was a dream. It’s gone.” I stroked his cheek.

“At Passchendaele I was told to keep advancing. I was told I’d only imagined the fingers were reaching for help. “Might even belong to a Hun,’ is what my officer said.”

A short while later the three of us are eating toast in the kitchen. I lift the coffeepot in Tom’s direction. “More?” He nods, and I fill his raised mug. As I push myself back from the table to tend to the bacon sizzling on the stove, Jesse breaks the quiet. “Daddy, play outside?”

It is the question he asks most mornings. And Tom usually says yes and they put on their coats and boots, and Jesse marches in the snow and calls it quicksand. Every now and then he topples over and hollers until he is saved. I have watched through the kitchen window and seen Tom leaning against the pump, aloof. Yesterday I saw him startle, caught off guard, when Jesse aimed a stick and shrieked that Tom was a Hun.

“What about setting a snare or two?” I say. “I could make a rabbit stew.” He used to take such pleasure in the river, and Foster’s Flats, the lowermost terrace of the glen, was once his preferred spot for snaring small game. I have thought an outing there might help, an idea that has grown as the days pass with Tom never setting out for the rapids, whirlpool, or falls. I remember, too, an early letter from overseas: “I guess by the time I meet our son he’ll be old enough to learn all about the river. Until then, daydreams will have to do.”

“I told Mrs. Andrews I’d bring in some wood,” Tom says. It is how he spends his days—mending a latch, straightening the woodpile, sanding and staining the windowsills. But soon there will be nothing left of the tasks Mrs. Andrews and I had put off for so long.

“Jesse should be taught how to trap,” I say.

“All right. All right. I’ll show him how it’s done.”

For a moment I feel the beginnings of hope, a warm ember set to spark. He will make his way to the river, and, better yet, Jesse will accompany him. It is not the first time I have chucked prudence aside and let myself think he was turning a corner of sorts. But then he says, “There used to be rabbits just to the west of the rail yards,” and hope fizzles to ash.

As I lift a strip of bacon from the pan and wait for the fat to drip away, it seems to me the odor is slightly off. I hold the pan out to Tom. “It smells like it should,” he says. Then he and Jesse devour nearly a half pound. But the idea of putting a forkful into my mouth is so unpleasant that I let two strips grow cold on my plate. With Jesse, I lost my taste for bacon early, months before my belly swelled.

My immediate reaction is disbelief. Our intimacy has been sporadic at best, with only three instances since his return, and the first was an abysmal failure, with Tom pumping and pumping until I felt rubbed raw and then, when I was very nearly at my wits’ end, rolling away from me onto his back and saying, “I’m sorry, Bess.” Even so, disbelief shifts to panic as I calculate that my period is late. Yes, I want a playmate for Jesse, a baby for Tom to know from birth, another child to love. Eventually. But not just now. We have not yet figured out how to be a family of three, and, as a baby, Jesse took every ounce of stamina I could muster and then some. And I can only imagine what Mrs. Andrews will say. At first it was just me and a wardrobe full of clothes. Then came the baby, who howled in the night and peed on her favorite carpet and cut a ragged triangle from the sheers hanging in the dining room. And now, there is Tom, who sometimes calls out in the night and flinches if a door swings shut too abruptly and leaves whiskers in the sink and eats enough so that a roasting chicken no longer does for two meals. Oh, she would never put us out the door, but it hardly seems right to stay. Even with a family of three, the bustle of the house has become a strain by the end of the day. When it was just the two of us, she sat in the kitchen in the evenings playing solitaire or crocheting lace collars and cuffs. But she has begun heading up to her bedroom ever earlier and quietly closing the door. I count out nine months and tell myself I have got until the fall to coax Tom from his stupor, to figure out how we will manage with a second child.

Tom heads out to the shed after breakfast, likely to dig up a few snares. As I wipe the table and tuck in the chairs, it occurs to me the timing of Jesse’s arrival had seemed far from idyllic at first, with Tom away. Yet I have no doubt it was Jesse’s tiny hand in my own that forced me to keep my chin up and my eyes mostly dry. And there was comfort in holding him in my arms, in feeling Tom was with me though he was not. So maybe there is reason to be pleased. Maybe a second child will be the magic that turns the three of us into a family. Surely Tom will rise to the occasion. Surely he will place his hands on my belly and marvel at the tiny heel kicking beneath. I lift my sweater from the peg at the back door.

I am in the shed doorway with my sweater pulled tight around my waist when Tom turns toward me, his arms full of snares. He juts his chin in my direction. “What’s the smile about?” he says.

“I think I’m pregnant.”

“Oh.”

“The bacon seemed off. It’s what happened with Jesse.” I wrap my sweater tighter still around my waist.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m late, too.”

“Wow,” he says. He smiles, but it is not the same lopsided smile I had imagined a thousand times while he was overseas, and he hangs on to the snares, rather than returning them to the crate and putting his arms around me.

“I know it’s a shock.”

He sighs and says, “What about money, Bess?”

“We’ll manage.”

“I need to look for work.”

A week earlier Mother and Father had come to welcome Tom home, and knowing Mother would relish a visit with Mrs. Coulson, I had scheduled a fitting—a jacket and skirt cut from charcoal gray wool crepe—to coincide. While I marked the hem, the talk turned to the Queenston-Chippawa power project, and Mrs. Coulson told Mother and me how Mr. Coulson was run off his feet trying to make sure all the men the Hydro had hired were put to good use. And then she said, “I’m sure Bess has told you I’ve been after her to send Tom along to Mr. Coulson,” and I marveled at her audacity. She would see to it Tom worked at the Hydro, as she had decided was best, even if it meant prompting Mother to harp at me as well.

Both women turned to me, waiting, Mother’s lifted eyebrows questioning that I had withheld this bit of news from her. “Well?” Mother said.

“He’s barely home.”

“Best send him to Mr. Coulson while he still needs men,” Mother said.

“He isn’t adjusted to being back. He’s still restless at night.” I wouldn’t say more than that, not within earshot of Mrs. Coulson. At any rate, Mother knew my worries. I had had to explain why I put off their visit by more than a month and ended up saying more than I thought I would—the calling out in the night, the failed intimacy, the way Jesse was overlooked. But she had been dismissive. “Remember the trouble your father had over all that aluminum business? He was over it the minute he set foot in the tannery.”

“There’s nothing like a good day’s work to tire a fellow out,” Mrs. Coulson said.

I did my best to appear sidetracked by a particularly stubborn pin. “I’m just not sure the Hydro is for Tom, even once he’s rested up,” I finally said. Immediately I was regretful. Might my apparent indifference have cost Tom his only chance for work? And what was more, I had seen nothing to hint his allegiance to the river had even survived the war, nothing to hint he had not altogether forgotten the writhing, bucking water, shattering to mist and spray and thunder at the brink of the falls.

“Not sure?” Mrs. Coulson said, a furrow coming to her brow.

Another stubborn pin was more than Mother could endure, and she said, “Tom isn’t much for progress. He wants all the water left going over the falls,” causing me to cringe.

“There’s plenty of water,” Mrs. Coulson said. “Plenty of water and almost no work. Has Tom made the rounds?”

I shook my head.

“He should,” Mrs. Coulson said. “There isn’t any other work. He should see for himself.”

I could see she was put out. I nodded, a little sheepishly, and Mrs. Coulson relented, shifting the conversation to the plans of the Great War Veterans’ Association for a cenotaph. “You should come out to a meeting, Bess,” she said. I had been lonely for ages, and with Tom home I was no longer able to bolster myself with thoughts of Once the war ends…, Once Tom’s back…Being in the company of other women, especially women with husbands just home from overseas, seemed like an evening well spent. But Mrs. Coulson did not mention a date or a place, and it seemed she would have if the invitation were sincere. I supposed there was the problem of how she would introduce me. Her dressmaker? Daughter of the disgraced Mr. and Mrs. Heath? Wife of a layabout?

I take a snare from the bundle in Tom’s arms and fiddle with the lock. Should I mention the Hydro? Might Mother and Mrs. Coulson, with their pronouncements of work as a cure, be right? “What you need is to rest up a little longer,” I finally say. “We’ve got the money from my parents.” I had hoped to one day put the three hundred dollars toward a home of our own, a home that has surely become all the more pressing now that we are to be a family of four.

Eventually Tom and Jesse set out for the rail yards, and I stand at the front door, watching as they wade through drifted snow, Jesse with his small, mittened hand held in Tom’s. But when the wind gusts and snow swirls around their legs, Tom reaches to turn up the collar of his coat and in doing so drops Jesse’s hand. My last glimpse, as they round the corner, is of Jesse padding behind, his forgotten hand held aloft, straining for Tom’s.

With the war and then the Spanish flu and now Tom, I feel more than ever that I lack whatever it is that brings others serenity. For ages, since well before Tom’s return, I have found myself thinking longingly of my Loretto days: wake-up bell, morning chapel, breakfast, classes, lunch, sewing, more classes, recreation, supper, music practice, study hall, evening prayers, lights out. Always the same. It occurred to me that by following the rules, by behaving in a certain way, we had strewn our daily life with rituals, rituals that had given me peace.

With Tom still away, I had gone to Morrison Street Methodist in search of that peace. The Order of Service, and the words of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer and the Benediction, remained unchanged from week to week. There was the same odor of old hymnals, the sun warming the third pew each Sunday at ten o’clock. I suppose there was comfort in the predictability of it all. And sometimes I was encouraged by the reading of a particular scripture or roused by the beauty of the stained glass. I attended regularly enough that when I missed, I would be stopped on Bridge Street or Erie Avenue. “Are you well, Bess?” one or another of the Methodists would say. Still, I was not soothed in the way I had hoped, and it seemed as unlikely as ever there was a being up there, keeping watch. Soon enough I was mouthing the words to the Creed—I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth—rather than speaking them aloud. Eventually church without belief seemed a foolhardy pursuit, and Sunday mornings again became lazy breakfasts and walks in the woods of the glen with Jesse.

After Morrison Street Methodist, I began to wonder if what I really needed was to pray, if with all the hymns and scripture readings and homilies, the time left over for quiet reflection had been inadequate. And I wanted to pray for Tom at the front. I remembered a feeling of warmth and love coming to me in the academy chapel, a feeling of being a part of something much greater than myself. I remembered moments of consolation, certainty that the way things turned out was anything but sheer luck.

Every evening for three months, I sat cross-legged on my bed before turning in, hands folded in prayer, and resolved to stay on track this time. But always it was the same, my mind drifting to Tom overseas, to Jesse in his bed, to whether Isabel’s child might have resembled him in some way, to a frock I had yet to complete, even to a grocery list. I tried to remember mist dappled with bits of shimmering silver, making its way heavenward. But in the end all that seemed certain was that I had not made the future any more sure.

Maybe I need to take my cue from Jesse, who simply offers his hand again and again, who seems entirely oblivious to any difference between this father and the daddy I promised for so long. When I asked Mrs. Andrews what she thought, she only lifted a shoulder, as though she had not noticed a thing. But she knows that Tom has not yet felt the full weight of Jesse tugging at his heartstrings, that certain doors are flung shut even to me. It is why she shoos Tom and me out the door in the evening, why she is bleary-eyed from sewing for Mrs. Usher and Mrs. Cox and all three Leonard girls, while I sew for only Miss Bingley and Mrs. Coulson. It is why I hear her shushing Jesse most mornings as she leads him past our closed bedroom door, why she made me a nightdress of sheer silk, causing me to sneak into bed earlier in the week and lay there shivering, cold silk against my breasts, far too self-conscious to coax Tom to the middle of the bed. Admittedly, it was almost a relief, not to persuade, not to hope, not to feign pleasure, not to stroke his hair afterward. But I am afraid that I might lack the fortitude to reach for him again.

One evening a while back, when Mrs. Andrews was insistent that I needed a bit of fresh air, Tom and I left the house. With Tom leading the way, we headed west on Bridge Street, in the direction opposite the river, which hardly came as a surprise. We ended up at Fairview Cemetery, and I followed him under the arch at the entranceway and along the rutted path to his family plot, where both Fergus and Sadie were buried. As he brushed the snow from their headstones, he looked so broken that I was unnerved. I said, “Tell me, Tom. I think it might help to tell.”

“It’s just that…” He looked away from me, to the trampled snow at his feet. “I lost my nerve over there. I felt really alone, more than I ever have, and then my nerves went.”

I remembered the letter. “I am feeling alone, lost, and I can’t figure out how to feel like myself again.”

“I’d lie awake, in the trench, staring up at nothing, thinking up ways to get away from the front.” He said more, of how he hoped for a blighty, a generous bit of shrapnel in the thigh, a wound just serious enough to mean his removal from the battlefield. “I thought about shooting myself in the foot. But shooting yourself was a capital offense, and even if other fellows said it was true, I wasn’t sure a sandbag between my boot and the gun would stop the powder marks. And then there was the chance of gangrene setting in.”

“I wouldn’t think much of a man who wasn’t fazed by war.”

“I thought about claiming shell shock. But I’d heard the troops sent to Queens Square Hospital in London were treated with jolts of current, not enough to kill a man, just enough to deaden his mind before sending him back.” He laughed then, a short, mocking huff. “I wouldn’t have had to fake much.” After a particularly long night of shelling, he said he had caught himself stuttering. But Queens Square Hospital in mind, he had simply pressed his lips shut. And when he trembled and tea slopped over the rim of the cup clenched in his hands, he emptied it into the slick beneath the duckboards.

“Tom,” I said, stooping so that I might meet his down-turned gaze. “Thinking about how to save yourself isn’t a crime. Plenty of the fellows were doing more than just daydreaming about it. Why else would the rules about self-inflicted wounds even exist? Why else would anyone even know about sandbags and powder marks?”

“Sadie used to say I had the eyes of a hawk,” he said. “I could pick out a mole in a thicket or spy a grouse too far off for anyone else to see.”

“You’ve always noticed what others don’t.”

He lifted a shoulder, dismissively. “Even when I was running across no-man’s-land, I could pick out the nose of a rifle in the sandbags or figure out the range of a machine gun in a pillbox. Not at Amiens though. By the time I got to Amiens, I couldn’t make sense of anything.”

In my mind’s eye, Tom runs through smoke, kicked-up dust, barbed wire, a deafening cacophony of exploding shells. It was the sort of image I had pushed away during the years he was gone. “No one should have to endure what you did, Tom.”

“Let me tell you something,” he said, folding his arms over his ribs. “At Amiens I couldn’t make out where the bullets were coming from. At first I thought I only had to stay quiet, to pay attention, that, like every other time, what to do would come to me. I waited until I couldn’t wait anymore. Then I climbed out of the trench and hightailed it toward the enemy line. They called the fellows who didn’t shirkers and degenerates, and shot by firing squad. One morning we were made to roll out and fall in at dawn. They sat a kid called Bobby Marshall on a crate in front of us. He was handcuffed to a post behind his back. They pinned a round piece of white paper over his heart. We were made to watch. That’s why I ran.”

“It’s all over now.” My fingers grazed the sleeve of his coat.

“The fellow in front of me took a bullet in the head.”

“You came back.”

He touched Fergus’s headstone. Then he took my hand and led me home and said nothing more.

I stand at the window long after Jesse and Tom have disappeared, watching whirlwinds of snow flit from hemlock to oak, then dither a moment before moving on. What can I do to help him regain his old self? When Isabel died, like Tom, I had lost any sense of sure-footedness in the world. Yet my fear was certainly only a sliver of what he had known at the front. And by the time I had completely given up on God, Tom was there beside me—my solace, my antidote to an out-of-kilter world.

When I went to him at the Windsor Hotel, he had said he could feel Fergus with him, especially on the river. It was the place where our realities differed. Even in death, Fergus had remained close to him, while for me Isabel was gone, a precious memory, a sister who was no longer able to love me as she once had.

It hits me now that while my own feelings about the river are at least somewhat ambivalent, it is of the utmost importance to him. He once went to the river. He watched. He listened. It fed his sense of awe and wonder and mystery, some notion of order in the world. And now he has spent too much time away from the place he loved most, too much time away from all that kept Fergus close. I know it with a certainty that is like a cold slap. I must take him by the hand, or the scruff of the neck if it comes to that, and help him find what is lost.