The Old River Man appeared at the screen door with a package, something damp, wrapped in brown paper. He had taken the long way around the garden, having noted that Jesus Christ and God Almighty, of whom he was deeply afraid, were outside of the stable, hitched up to the wagon. Horses were such large and obvious beasts of the earth, so foreign to water, that he would go miles out of his way to avoid them. Now, he stood at the screen door, clutching his parcel, looking nervously over his shoulder, checking to make sure the horses weren’t coming any closer.

Maud, who happened to be in the kitchen then, scowled at him from somewhere near the stove. Babies, sometimes even babies. Maud had no time for babies. She had told him over and over to leave the babies in the river. No one will claim them, she said, they are nobody’s children.

These babies were not like her little friends with their lovely little hands and feet. These were unwanted extensions of other women’s bodies.

“It’s not a baby,” the old man said now, aware of Maud’s frown.

She pushed open the door and walked outside to speak to him. The Old River Man stepped a few paces back and, after once again turning to note the location of the horses, he placed the parcel on the ground in the shadow of a clump of Shasta daisies.

Within minutes Maud was writing:

Right arm of a man
no marks to lead to positive identification
except tattoo
says, “Forget me not, Annie”
surrounded by a heart-like shape.

So far that season, that spring and summer, there had been seventeen “floaters” for Maud to deal with. She knew precisely what it meant each time the Old River Man appeared at her back door under her defunct porch lamp. Their conversations, at these moments, were limited, almost ritualistic. Cap in hand, smelling of river, his hip-waders shining with moisture, he would wait for her to speak.

“Where?”

To this question there were only two possible answers: Maid of the Mist Landing or down by the whirlpool. It depended on the original location of the drowning and the currents of the river. At a certain place beyond the falls a decision was made by the water, some of which moved to the left, over to the dock, while the rest moved towards the lower rapids and eventually into the whirlpool. Left at the mercy of this kind of chance, the human remains ended their journey in either the former or the latter location, though, on certain occasions, if the trip had been particularly rough, they might end up in both.

Once the Old River Man had relayed his information, he would shift uneasily from foot to foot while his eyes slid to the corner cupboard where he knew his payment (in the form of a seemingly endless supply of Seagram’s whiskey) was kept. Then, bottle in hand, he would disappear through a break at the end of the garden. This time the child had witnessed the close of the meeting and, looking directly at his mother, had said the word “whirlpool” in the River Man’s gravelly voice.

Within a matter of a few weeks the child had become a perfect mimic, repeating not only every word spoken but reproducing the tone, the pitch of the voice as well. Maud had to believe now that through the years that he had remained stubbornly silent, he had been digesting, verbatim, conversations, arguments, and harangues. And that he had been listening carefully (perhaps through the grates in the floor) to the funeral preparations, the carpenter’s chatter, the long, hysterical monologues of those who came to Grady and Son to choose a coffin for someone they loved.

Now, at least once a day, the child would repeat the whole performance: the sobs of the widow, Sam’s artificial condolences, the sales pitch, his voice adopting the tone of the speaker. After she had repeatedly tried and failed to interrupt the process, Maud found herself attempting to guess whose funeral he was playing back to her, as if she were involved in some form of tasteless parlour game. As she bent over her needlework and the child chattered, or whispered, or shouted in the corner, she would find herself commenting mentally, “Why that must have been Jake Warner’s,” or “That sounds like Mrs. Simpson after she lost her daughter Ella.” Then, shocked at her own complacency, she would cross the room, get down on her knees, and beg the child to stop, only to be answered by an exact reproduction of her own entreaty.

He was unpredictable. Sometimes he would go for days repeating only a word here and there.

“I’m going downstairs now,” Maud would say.

“Now,” the child would repeat.

Then, the next day he would break, quite suddenly, into a chorus of one of the embalmer’s lewd songs and in the embalmer’s tenor voice.

This turn of events began to affect all conversation at Grady and Son. Maud dared not discuss the neighbours’ activities with Sam for fear their words might be repeated during a friendly visit. This eliminated gossip. The child was light on his feet, moved like a cat. You never knew when he might be listening, or how far the sound of your own voice might travel. Slowly, but inevitably, the reversal took place. The child spoke constantly, his mother and her employees hardly at all.

Once, after a lengthy and gruelling interview with the relatives of a man who was drowned and buried, unidentified, some weeks before, Maud heard the child speaking in her voice in the evening, from deep in the darkness of his bedroom. He was reciting the same list she had recited to them. Hearing him, she was disturbed by the clipped, professional sound of her voice, cold, removed. “Apparently dark-complexioned,” the voice stated, “thumb and finger on left hand disfigured, light woollen underdrawers, upper teeth good, eyes apparently brown.”

Unable, finally, to bear it any longer, she threw open the door to his room with such force that the doorknob made an indentation in the adjacent plaster wall.

“Why?” she demanded. “Why are you doing this? You must stop, immediately, now, you must stop!”

“Stop!” the child shouted.

The sound of her own voice coming back to her, from the other side of the room.

The child borrowing her voice, shouting, “STOP, STOP, STOP, STOP!”

Some summers the river was possessive of its dead and kept the flesh to itself. Then the Old River Man appeared at the back door only three or four times during the season, occasionally with news only of fragments. Maud could never understand it; a season with twenty-nine or thirty river bodies followed by one with only two or three, and no obvious changes in the condition of humanity or the weather. But the Old River Man showed no surprise – only vague disappointment that the catch had been so small. He called these “dry summers,” more because of his lack of remuneration than with any reference to the river itself. But this year there had been a bumper crop and the old man was drunk most of the time, so much so that Maud began to worry that the whiskey might affect his ability to spot the drowned and battered flesh. Nonetheless he arrived with regularity, displaying only a slight stagger when he moved away again towards the end of the garden.

Maud was paid fifteen dollars per body by the city, in return for disposing quickly and quietly of these unpleasant embarrassments to the mighty tourist industry. The flesh itself did not bother her. She could hardly refer to it, in its condition, as human. It had changed beyond that, had become, instead, some other kind of element. It was the objects and bits of apparel that this flesh had attached to itself on the last day of its existence that both disturbed and fascinated her. And it was these things that she recorded and kept, though she knew that they were not destructible like the body, unless put to death by something stronger than water, something like fire. When she examined, and then began to list the contents of pockets, she was forced to remember that the thing before her, packed in ice, had been human… stupid, self-deluding, vain, tender. Then the questions would enter her mind and a relationship would form between her and the drowned flesh. A personality would develop behind the words, a life would take shape.

Why had this flesh dressed itself on the morning of its death? Why the choice of blue socks, or a blue tie-pin? Why the coins in the pocket, the rabbit’s foot, a good luck charm, religious medals around necks destined for annihilation, watches recording the exact moment of contact with the water, rings with their precious stones missing, eyeglasses in the breast-pocket of a suit coat? Why the suit coat at all, when your destination is the river, the rocks?

The answers to these questions, which were not answers at all, mere speculations, built a frail network of history around each death. Maud’s collection of private legends, stored verbally in her notebook and concretely in her cupboard at the end of the hall. This was how she maintained order, how she gathered together some sense out of the chaos of the deaths around her.

As she closed her book after making a record of the tattooed arm, she recalled the sound of the child’s voice travelling through the garden.

“What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

His little voice, high and cracking in a bizarre parody of female sorrow.