The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan Read Free Book Online Page A

Bride used to let me help with. But to admit it might give the impression that I am lazy and spoiled, and I am neither, not anymore. “I don’t know about fish.”
    “Have you got forcemeat?” he says.
    “Yes.”
    “Stuff it into the gut and sew the opening closed. I used to smear it with egg and roll it in bread crumbs, but a rye flour paste and then a bit of cornmeal works, too, if you’re conserving.”
    “My mother’s got us down to white bread once a week,” I say, though I sometimes wonder if her diligence has just as much to do with necessity as it does with the war.
    “We’d better get used to it.” He glances away, shakes his head so solemnly that I know he is thinking of Ypres, Canada’s first and only battle to date. The line had been held, but massive artillery bombardments and a poison the newspapers called chlorine gas meant that in forty-eight hours one in three Canadian soldiers was a casualty. At the outset, not quite a year ago, there had been singing and cheering in the streets, declarations that the war would be over with by Christmastime. Ypres put an end to that.
    “Do you like raspberries?” I say.
    “Yep.”
    In the kitchen I tip a bowl of raspberries over a small brown paper sack and guide the fruit through the opening. I stand at the window a moment, my hips pressed against the wooden lip of the counter, contentedly watching him. He rinses the wood on which the fish was cleaned and then rounds the corner, likely headed toward the woodpile. A moment later I whirl around, startled to hear him call my name from just outside the kitchen door. “Bess,” he says, “have you got a newspaper, for the guts?”
    “You know my name.”
    “I heard your mother say it.”
    “I don’t know yours,” I say, stepping from the kitchen into the backyard.
    “Tom,” he says. “Thomas Cole.”
    While he scrapes up the innards, I wait idly, holding the berries, mouthing the name Tom, thinking I will not call him Thomas, although the few Thomases I know all go by the more formal name. This Thomas, who sleeps by the whirlpool, and catches fish and thinks enough of me to bring me one, called himself Tom. He rinses his hands clean, and I give him the brown paper sack.
    “I could bring you a fish tomorrow?” he says.
    Tomorrow Mother will be home and not at all pleased with a fish offered as a gift, even if it means more beef and bacon for the troops. “I can pay you with berries.” I hold out the sack.
    “I don’t want to be paid.”
    “The cherries are almost ready, and soon there’ll be gooseberries. I could make a pie.”
    “I like fishing,” he says. “I catch more than I can eat.”
    “We’re going to have loads of cherries this year.”
    “Suit yourself,” he says, finally taking the berries from me.
    No sooner have Isabel and I settled down to reading once again than an automobile turns from River Road onto Buttrey Street. It is not Father, and he drives one of the few automobiles in Silvertown. The neighboring men walk the several blocks between their homes and the International Silver Company, and their wives either shop nearby on Erie Avenue or go by electric trolley to Centre Street, where they can barter in Italian. “Are you expecting someone?” I say.
    “It’s the Atwells. I recognize the Runabout.” She rolls her eyes at the mention of the automobile. “They ought to get rid of it. No one drives anything with a tiller anymore.” But the Atwells are not wasteful or showy, and there is the war. “I’d die of embarrassment,” she says.
    “Shut up, Isabel.” I am sick of telling myself that Boyce Cruickshank is to blame for her mood, that he is the person I ought to be angry with.
    After the Runabout comes to a halt, Kit hops down from the bench seat. “I’m learning to drive,” she says. Edward, her older brother, who failed matriculation at the University of Toronto, despite the best tutors and references, waves a large hand and grins.
    They have spent the