Covered Bridge
Page 1
Covered Bridge
COVERED BRIDGE
Brian Doyle
Copyright © 1990 by Brian Doyle
New paperback edition 2003
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We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.
National Library of Canada
Cataloguing in Publication
Doyle, Brian
Covered Bridge
ISBN 0-88899-603-9
I. Title.
PS8557.O87C6 2004 jC813’.54 C2003-906498-0
Cover photograph by Tim Fuller
Map by Megan Doyle
Design by Michael Solomon
Printed and bound in Canada
Thanks Patsy Aldana, Fay Beale, Stan Clark, Keith Clarke, Jackie Doyle, Megan Doyle, Mike Doyle, Ryan Doyle, Paul Kavanagh, Marilyn Kennedy, Dorothy McConnery, Cathy McGregor, Mike Paradis, Dr. Peter Premachuk, Rita Premachuk, Gene Rheaume, and Alan Wotherspoon, for your expertise and support.
Crickets Actually Argue!
MY DOG NERVES and I stood in the almost dark inside the portal of the covered bridge. My eyes were squinting, trying to see what was coming slowly, floating through the bridge towards us from the other end. I could feel one of Nerves’ knees knocking against the side of my shoe.
The moon put a patch of silver-yellow through the open wind space in the lattice onto the deck about halfway between us and the white thing gliding towards us. The rafters above were off in the dark. The carriage-way under our feet was dark except for the patch of moon.
Mushrat Creek burbled and gurgled quietly under us. Nerves’ teeth were grinding and chattering politely beside my ankle.
Somewhere else, two crickets were arguing.
The thing took more shape as it approached the wind space. The shape of a woman. And a voice, saying words.
“Please, Father, let me in? Please let me in, Father! May I please go in? Can’t I please get in?”
She wore a moonlight-colored dress and a wide-brimmed dark hat.
There was no face showing under the hat.
Nerves stopped knocking and went stiff against me.
Then the woman turned in the moonlight and hurtled through the space and disappeared into Mushrat Creek.
Then we heard a big splash.
That is, I heard a big splash.
Nerves didn’t hear a thing.
He was passed out.
That was the first night of my new job on the covered bridge.
The next day I was fired.
But we’re going too fast.
I’d better go back a bit.
Chipwagon Becomes U.F.O.!
YOU PROBABLY HEARD about how my father was run over by a streetcar. How he lay down on the streetcar tracks for a rest during a snowstorm. I never knew him because that happened when I was just a baby.
My mom died when I was born. I lived with Mrs. O’Driscoll. She was married to a distant cousin of my dad’s. I thought of her as my mother and I loved her. But I called her Mrs. O’Driscoll. It was a warm little joke we had between us.
And you probably heard about all that stuff that happened to me at Glebe Collegiate and at the Uplands Emergency Shelter where we lived and about Easy Avenue and my job with Miss Collar-Cuff and the mysterious money and about Mr. Donald D. DonaldmcDonald and about O’Driscoll showing up from the War almost five years late.
And about the fight I had with Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell and how we made up after and went on a picnic with everybody.
But I definitely didn’t yet tell how I wound up on a little farm up the Gatineau at Mushrat Creek in charge of a covered bridge and what happened about the bridge.
But before any of that happened I guess I didn’t tell you how Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell moved away in the middle of the night one night, and the next morning there was nothing left of her except a short note to me pinned to our door. It was in a sealed envelope.
The note said this:
Dear Hubbo:
My Dear Hubbo:
I will always, all my life, love you.
Dad is back and we’re leaving now.
Right now.
Everything is going to be better from now on, he said.
xxxxx in the middle of the night.
F3
And I also didn’t tell you about how I couldn’t write her back because she didn’t tell anybody where she was going. I asked all the neighbors if they knew, I asked the post office across the parade square, I phoned the office where we paid our rent. Nobody knew what Featherstone Fitchell’s new address was. They were just gone. Vanished. Fleurette, into thin air.
There was so much I wanted to tell her, to talk to her about.
I started a letter to her that I couldn’t send. Not now, anyway. But you never know. She might show up. O’Driscoll, he was supposed to be drowned, dead, vanished in the War, and he came back. So maybe I would find her address or maybe she would get in touch with us sometime. I guess, then, it was because of the miracle of O’Driscoll showing up that I started the letter to Fleurette.
I told her that I couldn’t send it, which seemed to be a pretty stupid thing to say, because, if I couldn’t send it, she wouldn’t hear me say that, and if I could send it, I wouldn’t have to say what I just said.
Then I asked her if she remembered that afternoon we had the picnic at the sand pits and how O’Driscoll came down the hill of sand and how he stopped in front of us? And how he took a look back over his shoulder? And how, then, he spoke? And, after nine years away, what was the first thing he said?
“Well, now,” says O’Driscoll, “what were we talking about before this interruption? Where were we, anyway?”
Then I reminded her, in the letter, how Mrs. O’Driscoll never said a word, just took a step forward, stomping on her sherry glass lying in the sand, and fell against his chest and put her cheek on his shoulder and her nose in his neck and her arms around him, and closed her eyes, squeezed her eyes shut.
But O’Driscoll’s eyes weren’t shut. He was looking at me. I remembered him from his picture, not from real life.
“You’re young Hubbo,” he said over the top of Mrs. O’Driscoll’s head. That made me feel good. He made me feel like he’d be disappointed if I wasn’t young Hubbo. O’Driscoll was like that. He could make you feel good.
Then I told Fleurette all about O’Driscoll and the chipwagon. And how, after we’d had the wagon only three days, something awful happened. We were crossing the train tracks that crossed Ottawa along Scott Street. Right on the tracks, a wheel fell off our wagon. We got the horse unhitched just in time.
The Scott Street line is pretty straight so we had time to unbuckle the traces and get the horse out of the shafts. The train didn’t even try to slow down at the last minute. It was in the morning and the train was coming in from the west so I guess the sun was in the engineer’s eyes. At least that’s what they said afterwards.
O’Driscoll said he thought they did it on purpose. He said he heard the old engine
er saying to the fireman that he’d hit a lot of things in his long career—cows, buffalo, a truck full of turkeys, a tramp who’d frozen to death, a house on a trailer—but never a chipwagon, and he was glad he did because he always wanted to see what it was like. See how high the wagon would go.
He wasn’t disappointed.
O’Driscoll said that it was probably the best hit that engineer ever had in his long years as a rotten train driver. The air was full of potato chips and paper plates and toothpicks for about a half an hour. It poured salt.
And it rained grease.
The main part of the wagon turned over and over in the air and the unpeeled potatoes were flying and bouncing around like hail the size of baseballs.
I told Fleurette some other stuff about O’Driscoll’s insurance and how he put a down payment on a little farm up here in a place called Mushrat Creek. Then I told her about how the dog, Nerves, was ours now because his family didn’t want him anymore.
Then I wrote a letter to the Uplands Emergency Shelter post office.
Dear Sir:
Please send me the address of Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell who moved out of Building Number Eight, Unit 3 at the end of June, 1950.
We don’t know where she went.
Yours truly,
Hubbo O’Driscoll
P.S. My new address is:
Hubbo O’Driscoll,
Mushrat Creek,
c/o Brennan’s Hill Post Office,
Gatineau County,
Quebec, Canada.
Fish Jumps Out of Frying Pan!
FROM MY BEDROOM window I could hear the fish jumping in Mushrat Creek. You can’t hear fish jumping, but you can hear the water take a double kind of a slurp. Sometimes the two slurps happen so fast together it sounds like only one nice delicious slurp. But it’s really two. One when the trout comes out of the water with his mouth open and his gills stretched to get the bug he’s after, and the other for when he flips his body and his tail hits the top of the water to get him back down into Mushrat Creek.
I suppose he thinks he’s safe down there but you’d think he’d know everybody can see where he’s going and what he’s doing because the water’s so clear you see right to the bottom. But I guess he does know because he likes to take his bug or his caterpillar or his fly or whatever he’s caught and swim with it under the overhanging alders or beneath where the grassy bank juts out or into the weeds or under the wharf out of the light.
He’s probably like everybody else. You go where it’s dark, where it’s private, then nobody can see you. You think.
It’s like the covered bridge.
Sometimes people go in there to do things that they don’t want anybody to see them doing because it’s dark in there at certain times of the day and night and it seems private.
But you never know who might be watching.
It wasn’t these thoughts, though, that woke me up that morning.
It was the sounds of the trout jumping in Mushrat Creek.
And our rooster crowing.
I got up and lit a small hot fire in the stove in the summer kitchen and put on a kettle of well-water. I put a dipper of creek water from the pail into the basin and washed up.
I stepped outside to dry my face.
The sun was already giving the white trunks of the birch trees across Mushrat Creek and up on the top of Rock Face a bit of a golden glow. Upstream, though, to the west, the red side of the covered bridge was still a gray shadow. And west of that, up at Ball’s Falls and Lake Pizinadjih, it would still be dark.
It was O’Driscoll who told me how to watch a sunrise. He learned it when he was a sailor in the war. He said you watch not the sun where it is supposed to come up, but something else.
Watch the flag away above you on the ship to get the first flash of light. Because the flag is higher than you, it will see the sun first. Specially when the sea is calm.
So he told me to watch the white birch trees standing on the top of Rock Face across Mushrat Creek, because they’d get the sun before I would see it. Or, even better, watch Dizzy Peak to the north, if it was clear.
This morning I missed it.
But that was O.K. because the next flash of light would be on the covered bridge and the tops of the trees, which were both higher than our house.
The rooster gave another couple of crows because he was watching for the light too.
I went down the short hill and cut through the ice house and stepped out on the little wharf on Mushrat Creek. My fishing rod was lying right where I left it in the cattails beside the wharf.
I baited my hook with a small worm I got out of my worm can that I kept in the ice house between two blocks of ice to keep cool. Worms like the cool. They might as well be nice and cool and have a nice life for a while because what was going to happen to them pretty soon wasn’t nice at all.
Three worms—three brook trout. I pulled three brook trout from where they were hiding. The worms helped me. Fish eat worms. The O’Driscolls eat fish. That’s Nature!
I cut open the stomachs and left the heads on and cleaned the bodies slippery clean in the clear water of Mushrat Creek.
I took them through the ice house and up the short hill to the summer kitchen attached to the back of our house.
I liked to cut through the ice house whenever I had the chance. Because of the smell of the damp sawdust and the wooden floor and the cold smell of the ice mixed with the wood and the log walls and the oakum stuffed between the logs.
It reminded me of jumping on the backs of the ice wagons to grab an ice chip to chew on a hot August day in Lowertown when I lived there and was small.
In the summer kitchen I put an iron frying pan on the stove, got a slab of butter from the ice box, some flour out of the bin. I melted the butter in the pan, rolled the trout in the flour and placed them carefully in the sizzling butter.
One of the trout bodies twitched a bit. Jumped.
“Now that’s fresh fish,” O’Driscoll would say.
I cut two slabs of bread and clamped them in the wire toaster. I lifted one of the stove lids. I put on the toast. I turned over the trout. I poured the boiling water over the tea bags in the pot. I turned the toast.
I moved the trout a bit in the pan. No more jumping. Getting brown in the hot butter.
I shook the fire. I made other breakfast noises. I knew that upstairs they would like to hear the breakfast noises.
I turned the toast again and then took it off and plastered both pieces with homemade butter. I put the lid back on the hole and placed the toast on the rack to keep warm.
Then I called upstairs.
The first of the family to come downstairs was Nerves.
I told you about Nerves, who we got from our neighbor at Uplands Emergency Shelter when we lived there. Nerves was our little dog who looked a lot like a rat. His tail was a little black whip, and he clicked when he walked. This morning his little eraser of a nose was moving around, smelling breakfast. Then he yawned and stretched and went to the door. While he was waiting for me to shove open the screen door for him (he usually opened it himself but this morning he was too tired), he leaned his little head on the doorjamb and closed his eyes. Seeing the ghost had played him right out.
I let Nerves out and heard the stairs creak.
After breakfast I would tell them about what Nerves and I saw last night.
Farmers Fall Off Edge of Earth!
WE SAT DOWN to breakfast and Mrs. O’Driscoll’s eyes were shining. She loved this farm. She felt like she lived on it all her life and it was only our second week there.
The people before us, the what’s-their-names, had kept it up pretty well, but there was still lots to do. The people before us were only leasing it to us while they went on a world tour that they won. They won it in a baking contest. Something they baked.
They would be back in a year.
Maybe. Who knows.
Look how long it took O’Driscoll to come back!
A
nd Mrs. O’Driscoll got to work right away as soon as we got there. Before O’Driscoll was even unpacked, Mrs. O’Driscoll had filled a half a pail with gooseberries she picked out near the cedar trees behind the outhouse. And the next day she had six jars of gooseberry jam sitting down in a neat row in the cool root cellar behind the henhouse.
I never saw Mrs. O’Driscoll work so hard and be so happy. Jam and pie and jelly and cake and homemade bread; washing, ironing, sewing, weeding, milking, separating, churning, scrubbing, feeding, picking, singing and laughing.
And O’Driscoll and I were busy, too; cutting and carrying and chasing and fixing, and hoeing and harnessing, and shingling and wiring and talking...talking...
O’Driscoll was talking.
“Did you know that the first covered bridge ever built on this planet was over the Euphrates River in the year 783 Before Christ? And that bridge is still there? At least I think it’s still there. I’m not sure if I saw it or not or maybe I’m imagining it because of the amnesia. Or I saw a drawing of it somewhere,” O’Driscoll was saying as he finished up his trout breakfast.
“The Euphrates River is in Egypt somewhere, O’Driscoll. How could you get to Egypt if you were in the South Pacific?” Mrs. O’Driscoll asked. She didn’t seem to care if she got an answer. She was too happy to bother with answers. She always liked questions better than answers.
“Amnesia is a peculiar thing,” O’Driscoll said. “You never know whether what you say about yourself is true or what. Like that business about prospecting for uranium in Labrador. I was sure about that, but now it doesn’t seem real.”
“Well, O’Driscoll,” said Mrs. O’Driscoll, “don’t bother your head about it. You’re here now. We’re all three of us here now and that’s all that counts. We’ll just prove to the government you’re not dead and you can get your veteran’s money and it’ll all be forgotten.”
“And the longest covered bridge in the world is right here in Canada. It’s in New Brunswick and it’s over the Saint John River. It’s 1,282 feet long. And it’s there as large as life because I was there and I saw it with these two eyes. I remember that as well as I remember this beautiful trout breakfast you made for us this morning, Hubbo me boy!”