Ice bridge

George Barker, Library and Archives Canada, PA-056072.

The following day the Evening Review ran a detailed account of the tragedy and the rescue, also a shorter article eulogizing the dead and an editorial saying the ice bridge should be made off limits, all on the front page. There was nothing about intake gates and weakened moorings, nothing implying that the power companies were at fault, and it was a relief. Mrs. Coulson was still after me to send Tom along to Mr. Coulson, and to have lost the chance of his assistance before I had even told Tom would have been a bitter pill. When I flipped to page two, I saw a fourth piece, by Cecil Randal:

When he finished the article, Tom said, “A bit of an overstatement.”

“I don’t think so.” I was bursting with pride. Oh, I would have preferred that the reference to the bodies be left out. Though I had seen firsthand the care he took with Isabel and knew better than anyone the nobility in the work, I was well aware of the lifted eyebrows the mention of the task usually aroused.

“I can’t say where the fish are biting.”

“Where on earth did Mr. Randal dig it all up?” I asked.

“I guess I’ve said quite a bit over the years at the Windsor. A couple of fellows there were always pestering me about stuff they’d heard.”

Ever since “Niagara’s Own Riverman,” people approach Tom on the street, wanting to know whether it will rain a week from Sunday. They are planning a family picnic and thought it best to run it by him first. Men with fishing tackle stop if he is in the yard and want an opinion on their latest lure. A week ago I answered the telephone to find a frantic woman on the other end of the line. “He slipped,” she said, between sobs. “My baby slipped out of my arms.”

“I’ll get Tom.” Since the ice bridge he has recovered three bodies. I know because each time he has come home, shoulders slumped, and handed me the stipend from Morse and Son.

“He was crying and crying,” the woman said. “He wouldn’t stop.” Tom had told me of another infant, another mother too tired, too overwhelmed, too desperate to resist the lure of the falls. I covered the mouthpiece and called for Tom.

“I only meant to loosen the blanket,” the woman said, her final words before the line went dead.

“A baby,” I said to Tom. “She said he slipped out of her arms.”

“I’ll go.” He reached for the packsack he kept by the back door.

Four months since the ice bridge, four months since Tom’s nighttime terrors began to abate, a full three weeks since he last called out in his sleep, and still, I wake, eyes fluttering open, consciousness creeping in, panic rising as I take stock. I turn quickly, but he is there, on his side, his face toward me, unlined, his brow smooth like a child’s. I search out the rise and fall of his chest, a practice once reserved for Jesse. Draped linen becomes taut and then slack as breath is exhaled. My anxiety is misplaced, even ludicrous. He is merely sleeping peacefully, as should any man who spent the day before splitting wood and tilling the earth for a vegetable patch. I am still not used to it, to his easy sleep.

His eyes open and I am caught watching and he smiles. He says, “I was dreaming about you,” and pulls me to him, and I feel the hardness between his legs. His hands are innocent just now, one on the small of my back, atop my nightdress—flannel—and the other, propping his head. Still, desire comes. His hand moves from my back to my front, slides upward, over my ribs.

Which part of our returned intimacy have I most missed? Is it early on, when pleasure and anticipation are inseparable, when I ache for more but have no wish to alter in the slightest the stroking, the murmured endearments, the hands and mouth on my skin? Or is it later, when our bodies are entwined, moving together, when anticipation fades and the pleasure of the moment reigns? Or afterward, when we share a pillow, when there is a feeling of fullness, of completeness, that I have become whole?

At breakfast Tom is in high spirits, chuckling to himself because Jesse, still in his pajamas, is waiting at the back door, fishing rod in hand. It has become their routine, setting off for the river each morning, coming back in time for supper. Every few days I will catch him in the doorway, golden in the late afternoon sun, eyes glinting, filled with wonder and awe. “Jesse spent half the morning tossing twigs and stones into a pool, figuring out what floats,” he will say, or “The standing wave off Thompson’s Point was as wild as I’ve ever seen it” or, most notably of all, “I felt Fergus out there with us today.”

Other days he comes in, and there is sorrow in his voice and I know he is again mourning the river, the river we have not yet lost.

Lake Erie sits a full three hundred feet above Lake Ontario, a drop nearly twice that of the falls, and the clever engineers of Beck’s Hydro-Electric Power Commission have figured out how to put an end to the power and money still running to waste. More water will be diverted and much farther back from the brink, as far upriver as Chippawa. And it will be put back only once the river flattens out at Queenston Heights, the farthest reach of the gorge, twelve miles away. In between they are digging a canal and making their own waterfall, hidden inside the penstocks delivering the plunging river to the turbines of the powerhouse. The newspapers say the Queenston-Chippawa power project dwarfs any hydroelectric scheme yet undertaken in the world. They say it rivals the Panama Canal. They say eight thousand men toil day and night, blasting, shoveling, hauling away solid rock.

I have heard Tom’s distress and said, “But only the other day you were saying how spectacular the standing wave off Thompson’s Point was.”

“Not for long. The river is changing. Remember the American channel all jammed up with ice.”

Goat Island divides the Niagara River into two channels at the brink of the falls, and during spring thaw the American channel became so congested that in places the cliff face of the American Falls was bone dry. Tom said that the channel was shallower than the Canadian one, that with all the canals and powerhouses the river level had dropped, that there just was not enough water to carry the ice over the brink.

“Open any newspaper,” he said. “You’ve seen the ads.”

For weeks he has made a habit of pointing out the Hydro-Electric Power Commission advertisements telling us we ought to be using electric griddles and kettles and irons, and cranking up the electric heaters when a sweater would do. And then he stopped in at the Windsor Hotel to say hello the other day and struck up a conversation with a small group of men meeting there, among them a tour operator, a pair of lawyers, several merchants, and an alderman.

Afterward he stood, wild-eyed, nearly filling the doorway of the sewing room. “All of them are against the Queenston-Chippawa power project, or at least that there’s no one keeping an eye on Beck,” he said. “They say the Niagara Falls Park Commission’s a joke, and they’re right, considering it was set up to preserve the area around the falls.”

“The commission’s done wonders with Queen Victoria Park,” I said. And they had. There were drinking fountains and restrooms and livery stables and picnic grounds with a tennis lawn, a ball field, and a bowling green. There was a decent road and no one stopping you to pay a toll.

“You know where they get their money?” He folded his arms, rocked back on his heels. “By selling the rights to siphon off water to the power companies.”

I set down the collar I was understitching. “Before the commission, we had a bunch of hucksters charging the tourists a fee just to look at the falls, and burning down each other’s property every chance they got.”

“It gets worse,” he said. “The chairman of the commission is Philip Ellis, and he used to head up the Toronto Hydro-Electric Power Commission. Some watchdog. He’s a crony of Beck, for God’s sake.”

He unrolled a magazine he had kept clenched in his fist since coming home. “It’s called The Hydro Lamp, and it’s Beck’s,” he said, thwacking it against the frame of the door. “It’s him behind the sales effort. He’s got the Hydro Circus and Hydro stores and floats in parades, advertisements everywhere you look, and now he’s got a magazine all about upping the demand for electricity.”

“No need to raise your voice,” I said, irked that I might never own an electric iron.

“As long as he keeps the blackouts coming, everyone will keep clapping him on the back for getting the Queenston-Chippawa project under way.”

Mostly I admire Tom’s allegiance to the river. Still, when I am tallying our unpaid bills and working out how many more gowns I need to take on in order to put aside even a dollar or two for a house of our own, or when Mother calls, always getting around to asking whether I have spoken to Tom about employment with the Hydro, there is a part of me that wishes he was just as pleased with the Queenston-Chippawa power project as nearly everyone else. The canal is only partially dug. The penstocks do not exist. Twice already I have dipped into the money my parents gave us as a wedding gift. And soon there will be another mouth to feed, another body to clothe, another round of bills from Dr. Galveston to pay.

And now, with breakfast finished and Tom laughing and saying to Jesse, “Maybe I’ll put my pajamas back on. Maybe we can trick the fish into thinking we’re not fishermen,” it seems as good a time as any to pass along what I had promised Mrs. Coulson I would.

“There’ll be no fishing in your pajamas,” I say to Jesse, and then, when he is halfway up the stairs, I turn to Tom, still sitting at the table. “You know I’ve been sewing for Mrs. Coulson.”

He nods.

“I’ve told you Mr. Coulson used to work for my father, that Father took him under his wing.”

“Yes.”

“It’s why she comes to me,” I say. I would never say to Tom that I sometimes wonder if she is trying to guard me from the ruin she feels is inevitable without her guiding hand.

He pushes his chair back from the table. “She comes to you because you’re good.”

“It’s not why she came in the first place. She didn’t even think I could sew; her first order was for a skirt I could have made when I was ten.”

“I know all this, Bess. I know the Coulsons are indebted to your father, to your family.”

“He’s with the Hydro, top brass on the Queenston-Chippawa project.” It is something more he would already know, as would anyone who picked up the Evening Review every now and then.

“He’s offering me a job?” Tom says. “Is that what this is about?” He plunks his mug down on the table.

“I know it isn’t ideal, but there’s not much out there and there’s the baby on the way.” There is pleading in my voice, a whiny, breathless want, and so I pause, clear my throat. “We did talk about a place of our own, way back when we were first engaged.”

“We talked about trapping and fishing and chickens in the yard, too.” He folds his arms, tips his chair onto its hind legs.

“It’s our old dream,” I say, remembering—a small house with a view of the river and a garden to keep us in vegetables, a couple of chickens to keep us in eggs, a cow to keep us in milk. It is more than enough.

His face softens, and he tilts his chair back to upright.

“You’d be a foreman. You wouldn’t start on the bottom rung.”

“A foreman?” Bewilderment comes to his face.

“That’s what Mrs. Coulson said. She’s been after me to send you along to Mr. Coulson for ages, and then ever since the ice bridge, she’s been badgering me nonstop.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

I shrug, smile.

His brow knits. His lips become a thin line. “I’ll think about it,” he finally says.