Inside Grady and Son, Maud Grady climbed the stairs holding the child’s fist firmly in her hand.

“Thunder woman,” he whispered.

“What do you mean by that?” she asked quickly and with the slight twitch that visited the left side of her face when she was annoyed. “What on earth….” She checked herself and, after searching the boy’s face for a moment, she laughed, remembering that he would have no idea what he was saying.

She had just finished giving instructions to the men downstairs where they had been preparing for the summer’s inevitable Stuntman.

They were working mostly in secret, for preparation in an undertaking establishment was not something the community approved of, even in circumstances such as these. In fact, when sixty years before, the first Drummondville Grady had decided to stockpile coffins before they were ordered, no one spoke to him on the street for a fortnight. This was considered, among other things, to be both highly immoral and bad luck. In the outlying concessions it was rumoured that you could predict the number of infant deaths over the winter by counting the number of coffins in Jim Grady’s stable, as if he were the grim reaper himself. Years later, when he had purchased a second hearse, the Methodist minister of the time had preached a pointed sermon which he titled “The Wages of Death.”

It would not be proper for Maud to be present at the time of the performance. “Looking for business,” the town matrons would whisper as they had the first, and last, time she attempted to visit an ailing friend. Maud had been shaken then, deeply hurt, knowing that business would come to her whether she looked for it or not. Now she knew which clubs to avoid, which social events to stay away from. The Historical Society, dedicated to facts and personalities already buried, was almost safe. But even there she made it a habit never to be seen in the company of someone whose relative might have taken a turn for the worse.

In the back room, on the ground floor, the three men who worked for Maud scrubbed up their equipment like housewives expecting an important guest. Laying down their money beside the sink, they bet on the outcome. Jas the carpenter, almost reluctantly, in favour of success; Sam the embalmer, and the second carpenter Peter, for failure.

Sam was speaking now. “The last one was a mess. The River Man was fishing him out for days!” He scratched his balding head. “What’s a man supposed to do with something like that? Certainly couldn’t have recommended an open coffin.”

“A couple have made it,” Jas interjected.

“Yes, but the damned fools feel they have to do it again.” He patted a nearby coffin. “Sooner or later they all end up right here.”

“Pretty in the cradle, ugly on the table,” Peter mumbled. The other two men laughed.

On the wall beside the window a calendar, topped by a chromo litho of the Falls, announced the month of April. The embalmer walked across the room and tore off three successive sheets of paper.

“It’s a form of suicide, I suppose,” he said, crumpling April in his slim hands. “But at least we know it’s happening. I like these fellas a damn sight better than the ones who spend the winter locked in the ice -” he disposed of the month of May – “or the ones who don’t surface for a month or two… God!” He threw June into the garbage in disgust.

The other two men were silent. All of them knew about the ugliness of floaters.

“Lord,” he went on, “give me train wrecks, carriage accidents, murder victims, disasters of war, but spare me from floaters!”

The smell, the men knew, lingered for days.

“Now take your tightrope walkers,” Peter began, changing the subject. “Your average tightrope walker hereabouts is just not the suicidal type. He could be walking that rope in a tent or over the Grand Canyon… chances are just the same that he’ll make it to the other side and he knows it. But these fellas in their rapid-shooting contraptions, what in Sam Hill do they think is going to happen to them?”

The embalmer was looking far off into space. “Remember that Italian girl, the one who went across with buckets on her feet and a skirt way up to here?” He gestured to his thighs, vaguely at crotch level.

The image of that lady’s pink thighs appeared simultaneously in all three men’s imaginations.

“Wasn’t she something?” Sam continued dreamily. “I’d like to have her next to the wall on a Saturday night… buckets and all!”

Now she appeared to them once again, this time flat on her back with her buckets sticking straight up in the air.

“They say Blondin took a stove out there and fried an egg,” said Jas, who liked a fantasy as much as any man but believed, as a result of a strict upbringing, that you should never discuss such things.

But the embalmer wasn’t listening. “Some said she wore pink stockings but I could swear those thighs were as bare as God made them.” He walked over to the window. “And her arms too… you know, that girl hardly had any clothes on at all.”

All up and down Main Street, as far as Sam could see from the window, families were beginning their trek down the hill towards the river. Some were clustered around the place where the streetcar stopped; others had obviously decided to go it on foot. All carried provisions: picnic baskets, blankets, umbrellas, folding chairs, fieldglasses, spy glasses, handkerchiefs (in case of an overwhelmingly moving disaster), megaphones (to cheer on or curse at the stunt man), babies wrapped in tight bundles with bonnets twice the size of their tiny bodies. It was a restless crowd whose emotions were torn between a feigned concern for the safety of the daredevil and a more honest desire for blood. All those over the age of five were discussing the outcome of similar exploits, savouring the goriest details while shaking their heads at the impetuosity of the human spirit.

Today, a young man named Buck O’Connor, who came from no farther away than Grimsby, was to shoot the whirlpool rapids in a vehicle he had constructed himself from the antlers and the tanned hides of several moose he had killed on hunting trips over the years. “Durned fool!” Sam had said. “He won’t look nearly as good as a dead moose when he’s finished.”

The young man claimed, however, that the tanned hide of a moose is stronger than steel, and less dangerous since it gives, rather than breaks, under pressure. Moreover, he contended, moose antlers were known to be almost entirely unbreakable. His contraption, labelled “The Mighty Moose,” had been on display for a week now, at a quarter a peek, down at the Maid of the Mist Landing. Even the children who went down there to look at it came away believing Buck hadn’t a prayer.

“Goddam!” Peter the carpenter had said, returning to Grady and Son after viewing the rig. “That thing’ll be torn to pieces faster than you can say knife.”

“Guess I’d better thread my needle,” sighed Sam the embalmer.

The three men locked the workshop door and let themselves out by the back. They walked across the garden to the stables, Jas pointing out the pansies as they passed.

“Larger than usual, I’d say.”

The two horses, whom Sam had named Jesus Christ and God Almighty, were bridled, ready to go, hitched up to a wagon with a seat in the front which could accommodate all three men. They walked past it and climbed the open wooden stairs to the stable’s attic.

“The question is,” said Sam, pushing back the straw hat he always wore on special occasions, “will it be wicker or tin?”

“Wicker,” said Peter, moving towards the coffin-shaped basket. “If he doesn’t make it he won’t be in the river long enough to smell.”