Meanwhile, during all of this, Ham was in his wigwam, sleeping. He slept like a mule. You could hear his snores all the way down to the shore. At least I thought you could. I knew he’d eventually get up, find her gone, and start looking. I knew he’d come down the trail noisily, heaving from side to side, unsteady on his feet, coughing and wheezing, because he was a grizzly of a man, and he snorted and snuffled even when he was still. You wanted to give him fair warning if you came up to him from behind. One was inclined to wear a bear bell around the guy.
Anyway, in her full naked glory there was a shame in her that made her put her hands up, and then down, and then up. I said, I’m going to hold you under and speak the words, and you’ll be down there in the depths, where it’s dark and dreary, amid the detritus and waste for a moment, and you’ll panic, most likely, feeling my hand here, I said, putting my hand on the back of her head. But you must resist the panic because I’ll keep you under just as long as it takes me to say the words. Then I’ll release you and you’ll come up sputtering into newborn light brighter than anything you’ve seen before. And she said, I’m right for it, I’m in need, I’ve got blemishes that must be washed away, and I said, Good, good, you’re ready. But one more thing. When you see that newborn light, take a long look before it fades when your eyes adjust. You only get a glimpse before it goes away, and then you have to rely on memory, and if your memory isn’t strong you’ll lose your grip on salvation. Then I took her into the water and started, pushing her under, and at some point I heard Ham on his way down, heaving through the brush. He must’ve seen me through the trees. What did he see? A man gripping his girl’s head, holding her down while she wiggled with the Holy Spirit, splashing a froth into the air. Naturally, from his vantage, he misconstrued my actions and became wild with rage, dancing his way bowlegged through the brambles, held back only by his fear of water. Ham’s terror of water was incredible. He could hardly find it in himself to splash his own face from the tap. He found brushing his teeth impossible. You could see his fear in the way he went in up to his toes and then backed out quickly. There were huge forces at play. He’d gone up against them as far as he could, and then he drew a line. He cursed the water, the river, and then yours truly. Against this backdrop, I tried to keep to the task at hand, and if anyone’s to blame for my failings, for holding her under a beat too long, it’s Ham himself for proving such a distraction. Timing is everything when it comes to the work of baptism. One wrong move and God enters the world at a weird angle. Take my word for it. I kept to the task at hand. After I released her body to the currents, Ham raced along the shore. I can’t account for her spirit, but her body swung in wide windmill loops as it was drawn downstream, just out of Ham’s reach. For a moment he stood still, quivering in a force field between his rage toward me and his lust for her. Lust won the prize, and he moved downstream, trying to lure her in with the end of a branch. But the currents were too strong.
Long story short, I went back to Ham’s wigwam and sacked his food. Long story short, I ate his food while he followed her body all the way to Lake Michigan, where he stood on the shore and rolled his shoulders, as if bracing for a fight. He stood on the shore and bellowed. He was a grand, operatic bellower. His voice spiraled out over the water, as if blown from a conch shell. A big fat bellow that came five miles up the river to his wigwam, where by the time the sound got to me it was weak and feeble but still as clear as day. I sat, held off on my chewing as long as I could, and listened, clenching my teeth against the ringing in my ears and the soft breeze that was coming through the leaves as evening approached. I was happy, because when the evening light met the Kalamazoo it did so on equal terms, and then for a while, until night fell and it was too dark to see, the river looked clean and even drinkable, Meg, as pure as anything you’ve seen in the world up until now.
He talked and then fell silent and then talked some more, until a few hours later they were in Niagara Falls and he nudged her awake so she could see the mist plume over the horizon. Then they drove along the river and up to the observation station and got out to stretch their legs. That river goes the wrong fucking way, it goes north instead of south, he explained, taking her hand. Then he climbed onto the fence and sat, patting the wooden railing. It goes against the grain of gravity heading that way, Meg. And it did. To their right the Niagara’s water tore along the bank, groped hard, forming small eddies in which leaves and bits of trash pooled; to their left all fury and wonder until the river got close to the edge and then grew smooth and calm, thin with hesitation. You’ll be able to walk out there if you’re careful enough and stick with the harder surface near the edge, he said, and if I tell you to do it, you’ll do it, won’t you? You’ll step right out there on your beautiful little feet when I give you the command, and you’ll be just fine.
One more textbook case of discard and loss, another suicide fished out of the waters. Bodies were pushed to the bottom initially — for a few minutes — and then, unless snagged on the rocks below, they bobbed up and twirled around, unable to catch the outflow, which made it easy for the man named Kit Wilson, who took his Zodiac out with the collecting nets, to catch hold of her body and draw it up against the hull. Another slipper, he thought. Another foolish tourist who got too close. Another drunkard unable to resist the lure of danger. Another kid who went in too deep and couldn’t get out of the rage. Another American testing the edge. (Canadians rarely went over.) Another girl skinny-dipping with her boyfriend, swimming too far out into the tangle of currents, taking the long trip down with plenty of time to think over her life and to consider the mistakes she’d made in one form or another. Maybe she simply couldn’t live up to the expectations that life had, and decided that this was the best way to go, majestic and grand, united with the great drive of the water that had been coming over this escarpment for a million years (with the exception of that wonderful time, years ago, when just a trickle came over the scarred jawbone of rock while the rest of the mighty river was surprised to find itself diverted through the power-plant intake pipes). It seemed that at least once a year the same girl came over the falls to give him a bit role in the large drama that would culminate when the news crews showed up and asked him to speak. His Canuck voice would be clear and exact: We don’t know where she came from. No idea why she did it. The falls aren’t something to fool with. And, No, I don’t get used to pulling them out like this.
He fished her out and saw that she was maybe fourteen or fifteen, with a thin, malformed rump, tiny arms, and a bruised face, cut along her brow, from which stared a pair of mute blue eyes. Her lips were pulled back in a grimace, exposing a gap between her two front teeth. Looking down at the body, flexing along with the hull, he got a hint of her story. (Later he’d hear her name, Meg Allen, and learn that her history could be traced back as far as a hotel in Cleveland, where she had murdered a seed dealer from a place called Mansfield, and then a bit farther back, to a hell-on-earth childhood in Akron.) Whatever produced these bodies with regularity would go on, he thought. If there was a way to stop it, it had long ago been forgotten. He held the tiller and got the motor going full throttle and watched as the wake dug surprisingly straight and clean out of the torment. He loved the feel of the boat when its stern cut deep and, in turn, the bow lifted toward the sky, slapping over the waves. He loved the way the wake spread itself out — even in the foam and rage — and how, when he was past the wash-up, as they called it, the water gathered itself into order and smoothed quickly, as if eager to be done with all the noise and to get back to a more settled existence on the way down to the whirlpool, where it would spin mindlessly for a few minutes before being released into the relative calm of the river as it headed toward the merciful breadth of Lake Ontario.