by Brian Doyle
Then we cinched the new page wire to the first original post, brought it out around the new post and stapled it there, then brought it back to the second original post.
We cleaned up around the job and walked back a bit to look.
The grave of Ophelia Brown, Oscar McCracken’s lover, was now inside the graveyard fence.
In fact, it looked kind of special.
It looked like the fence went along and then said, whoops, let’s jog out here a bit, we don’t want to forget to include our Ophelia Brown, now do we?
Back at the sexton’s cottage we sat on the grass and drank cold water. Nerves seemed glad to get out of the graveyard.
Oscar was calm now, and in a sort of a good mood.
“Maybe I’ll wait a few days before I leave. See what happens. I’m not mad at Father Foley. It’s not his fault. It’s the rules.”
Then, Oscar, just for a joke, pulled the wide-brimmed hat off the line and put it carefully over the goat’s horns.
“This looks good on you, do you know that?”
We both laughed. The goat bleated.
Even Nerves looked at the goat without hiding because she looked so harmless in that hat that she wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Oscar said he was tired and went in. I noticed he didn’t shut the goat pen gate, but I was too tired to care. He could do it later when he went up to Mrs. Brown’s to sleep.
Nerves and I went home.
I fell onto my straw mattress, mud and all. And I drifted and rode off into a sleep.
There was a big dance in the covered bridge.
I was dancing with the biggest farmer of them all. Fleurette was there, dancing with Father Foley. She was wearing a white dress with lace, blue shoes and a blue hat with a broad brim. She had a white rag tying up her black hair. Some of the farmers were tearing down the bridge during the dance. There was hammering, with the sound of little hammers like the hoofbeats of a goat. Oscar was up in the rafters trying to hang himself and underneath us Mushrat Creek was boiling, spurting redhot lava. O’Driscoll came riding through the bridge on a dolphin while Mrs. O’Driscoll, floating, played the fiddle, her face the face of an angel.
Then the music gets faster and Old Mac Gleason has got Nerves and he’s throwing him out the wind-vent and Mushrat Creek is full, like in the spring, but it’s not water that fills the creek and lashes against the sides of the bridge, it’s potato bugs! And Ophelia Brown is trying to stop Old Mac Gleason and my feet are nailed to the deck and I can’t move! I’ve got my nail puller but I can’t move! No...! No...! No...!
“Hubbo! Hubbo me boy! Wake up, lad! It’s me, O’Driscoll. Get up. Get up. Quick!”
It was. It was O’Driscoll, shaking me awake.
“Come quick, boy! Something terrible has happened! It’s Father Foley! They found him in the bridge! He’s dead! They say somebody must have killed him. Get your pants on!”
Man’s Head Turns Into Pumpkin!
EVERYBODY working on the new bridge was saying that Father Foley didn’t just die, he was murdered. They weren’t saying it very loud, mind you. Maybe only whispering it, or saying it without saying it at all.
For instance, you wouldn’t actually hear somebody come right out and say, “I think so-and-so murdered Foolish Father Foley last night in the covered bridge.” Oh, no, you wouldn’t hear that. But you might hear somebody say this: “They say that there’s rumors going around that some people have heard others say that they’ve been told that there’s a suspicion that something bad that you wouldn’t like to say out loud happened to Father Foley in the covered bridge last night.”
And the other person would maybe say, “Well, he died in there, we all know that for sure.”
And the first person might say, “Yes, we do know that for sure, but they say that maybe they know how or why he died.”
And the other person would say, “Well, what is it that they say is what maybe happened?”
And then the person who started it all would probably say, “Oh, I wouldn’t like to say.”
And then some other people would stop working on the new bridge and put down a hammer and lean on a shovel and then start talking about who it was who maybe killed Foolish Father Foley from Farrellton in the covered bridge last night.
One might say, while he was leaning on his shovel, “They say that people have heard people say that somebody, who maybe even some of us know, might be the one to be the cause of Father Foley’s death.”
And the other, while he was putting down his hammer, “Yes, and they say, now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this but they say that that person who was maybe in on the Father’s horrible death the other night in the covered bridge was somebody we know that has something to do with delivering the mail around here in this part of the country.”
We all carried steel rods for about three hours.
Before noon two policemen drove up with Oscar and Mrs. Brown in the back.
The policeman asking the questions had a big wart on his nose.
“This is the young gentleman here,” said Mrs. Brown, showing me to the policeman. You could hardly hear Mrs. Brown.
The policeman with the wart on his nose was very quiet and polite and friendly. He asked where I was last night, what was I doing, what time was it, when did I last see Oscar?
I told him.
“And this graveyard business. What were you doing there?”
“We were fixing the fence.”
The policeman’s wart seemed to swell up a bit.
He got back in the car and they drove quietly away.
We carried steel rods until noon.
I was so tired I could hardly talk.
Lunch hour came at last.
“They’re saying Oscar could have sneaked out of Mrs. Brown’s after she was asleep and waited for Father Foley inside the bridge,” O’Driscoll said. “And hit him over the head.”
“I know,” I said. “But it’s not true. He couldn’t have!”
“Pretty strange, all right, Hubbo me boy,” O’Driscoll sighed. “Everybody heard Oscar threaten the Father. That’s a very serious thing, Hubbo. Are you sure you didn’t see Oscar do anything last night?”
Now O’Driscoll thought I was holding something back. That maybe I was a witness to something. I’d probably spend the rest of my life in jail.
Or be hanged by the neck until I was dead.
O’Driscoll all of a sudden gave me a hug.
He must have realized he made me feel bad.
“I’m sorry, Hubbo me boy. Listen now, don’t worry. I know you’re telling the truth, and when you tell the truth, everything always turns out fine!”
I wondered what Mrs. O’Driscoll would say if she heard O’Driscoll talk that way about the truth.
The rest of the hour we spent half listening to Mickey Malarkey telling us a pack of lies about his father and his ancestors.
It’s hard to imagine, when your muscles are aching and your bones are sore and your eyes are full of dried sweat and your stomach is so full of food and tea that there’s steam coming out of your mouth; it’s hard to imagine somebody as old as Mickey Malarkey having a father.
He told us his father, Justin, also lived to be 114 years of age and had a head bigger than a large pumpkin. He said that his father Justin’s great-grandfather whose name was Brendan and was born in the year 1695, the year before the discovery of peppermint also lived to be 114 years of age!
Later in the afternoon but long before quitting time, Prootoo rang her bell and when we all were around, Ovide Proulx made an announcement:
“Everybody will report to the church at five o’clock. The town council has got the coroner over dere from Wakefield because he wants to tell everybody personally what ‘appened to da body of Poor Father Foley. Also, de police are dere too and dey want to question everybody about what dey can tell after dey hear what the coroner is going to tell. Work is finish for today.”
Everybody was walking and packing up and asking question
s and guessing what the coroner was going to say.
We headed up the road in small groups towards the church. It was going to seem funny being in there without Father Foley yelling about Hell.
The singing farmer sang part of his song behind us:
Brian O’Lynn and his wife and wife’s mother
All went up to the church together
The church it was locked, and they couldn’t get in
“We’ll pray to the Devil,” says Brian O’Lynn!
I ducked behind the church and took a look around the sexton’s cottage.
The gate was open to the goat pen.
The dress hanging on the line was gone.
The goat was gone!
Could it be? Could that be what happened?
Priest’s Blood Sucked Up By Sponge!
NEWS THAT the coroner was coming up from Wakefield spread fast, and when he arrived there was quite a crowd waiting for him in the church to hear what he had to say about Father Foley’s death. Just about everybody was there. Even Oscar.
And beside him, the policeman with the wart.
Mrs. O’Driscoll slid in beside us in the pew we were in.
“Oscar’s goat’s gone!” I whispered to her.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I think I know what happened,” I said.
“Shh,” she said.
“Ladies and gentlemen. The autopsy showed that Father Foley did not die of a blow to the head. That wound was superficial and probably was caused by his fall. Nor did he die of a heart attack or of a brain tumor or a blood clot or any other such normal causes of sudden death. No, the cause of death in this case is much more rare.”
The coroner waited. He thought that everybody standing around would look at each other and say words like “rare” and “normal” and go “oooh” and “ahhh.” But they didn’t. They just sat there.
Then the coroner said some more.
“Father Foley died of a mysterious and sinister condition sometimes called Neurogenic Shock or Vasovagal Collapse. Vasovagal Collapse is due to a loss of peripheral arteriolar resistance resulting from reflex dilation in areas of skeletal muscle. The pooling of blood in peripheral vascular beds with loss of vascular tone results in inadequate venous return, a fall in cardiac output and subsequent reduction in arterial blood pressure. The heart has not sufficient fluid on which to contract. The lost blood of Father Foley did not pour out of him. It disappeared into his vastly dilated capillary bed and into his tissues.
“Something paralysed the vast capillary bed of Father Foley’s body, causing extreme dilation. His blood then disappeared into it as if sucked up by a sponge!” He waited again. He was waiting for people to start asking questions. They didn’t. They just sat there.
“What could have paralysed Father Foley’s capillary bed, you ask? All he was doing was passing through the covered bridge.” The coroner seemed mad. The audience was not cooperating.
“There is only one answer to that,” said the coroner slowly. “And that answer is FEAR!
“FEAR!” he repeated. Nobody moved.
“Yes, my friends. I have to conclude that Father Foley dropped dead because someone, or someTHING, SCARED him to DEATH!”
Now the audience co-operated.
This made sense! Now everybody started talking at once.
Of course Father Foley could have been scared to death!
Didn’t he almost scare himself to death just about every Sunday during his sermon about Hell?
What about when he just about jumped out of his skin the time the goat came into the church that time?
“He certainly was the jumpiest priest we’ve had around here for a while,” said Old Mickey Malarkey.
They were all talking now.
“I knew it!” I said to myself.
I knew it.
Goat Possessed by Satan!
WHEN THE CORONER was finished his report, the policeman and his wart took over and a discussion started.
I slipped out the small north door that Oscar always used. Nobody saw me.
I ran down the road, through the covered bridge, up our side road, under the red chandeliers of our rowan-wood trees, around the house, past the woodpile and the summer kitchen, past the log stable and around by the manure pile and the pig pen, up through the pine bush and turned onto the old logging road towards the Gatineau River.
Beyond the corduroy there was a section of road where a purplish brown mat of dead pine needles stretched back as far as you could see into the bush.
This part of the road was damp clay and would show tracks.
I found what I thought I’d find.
Small cloven hoofprints!
I looked down the road. The evening light was slanting and filtering into the tunnel of tall sumac and poplar trees. The road turned and dipped into gloom.
I turned back and went home to wait.
I stuck my head in the big stone crock and pulled out a chunk of homemade bread.
O’Driscoll hit the door open and looked behind himself and said, “There’s a lot of talk goin’ about a missing goat Hubbo me boy. What’s goin’ on?”
“That’s it!” I said. “That’s what happened! I heard the hammering last night! I heard the hooves! I’m sure the goat got out! She ran through the bridge! Met Father Foley coming home from his rounds with the sick. The timing is perfect. I heard the goat hooves last night when I was half asleep! We left the gate open. The goat ate part of the dress off the line, got tangled up in it, ran out the gate and met Father Foley in the bridge. And she was wearing that hat! There’s fresh tracks on the road. Let’s go! The goat came down our road. I heard her!”
“Let’s go and get the policeman to come with us,” said O’Driscoll.
I guess everybody must have told the policeman with the wart on his nose what Father Foley was like because he seemed to enjoy the idea of coming with us to follow the goat tracks.
On our way, I explained to him about the hat and the dress and Oscar’s ghost trick and the open gate.
“Quite a place, this Mushrat Creek,” said the policeman with the wart. “Ghosts and goats and covered bridges and devils and dead priests.”
His wart was starting to look kind of cute.
We were walking down the slope over the stinkhorn fungus and edging our way down the bank.
And there she was. Tangled up in some branches. Looking pretty lost. She gave a little bleat to us.
The hat was still over her horns.
The dress tangled over her body so that running through a covered bridge towards you in the dark, the dress flying and those eyes behind the hat brim and the thundering hooves could be pretty scary all right.
Specially if you were Father Foley with his light.
Poor Father Foley!
Man Laughs For Whole Week!
THREE WEEKS LATER, on one of my cloux days, I went up on Dizzy Peak to pick some blueberries. While I picked I spoke to Fleurette as though I was writing more of the letter. I tried to make it dramatic. I tried to make it sound like she was reading it.
From up here on Dizzy Peak you can see the whole world. To the east, the dam and the big flooded country above it and below it the narrow fast river the way it used to be when only the first Canadians lived here.
North there is the town of Low and then Venosta, and in the mist of the mountains, maybe, Farrellton.
West, rolling humpbacked mountains and lakes here and there like broken bits of mirrors.
And the covered bridge down there, with its new paint job.
And the new bridge just above it, a cement slab.
I could hear her voice reading it. And her sighing.
I already wrote in her letter how it was that the bridge didn’t get torn down after all.
It was Mrs. O’Driscoll who figured it out. And Prootoo.
At a county council general meeting Mrs. O’Driscoll got Prootoo to get up and make a motion. Mrs. O’Driscoll told her to move that the covered bridg
e be dedicated as a monument to the late Father Foley. It was seconded by the biggest farmer of them all.
That way Ovide Proulx got the contract to paint the bridge instead of tearing it down.
How could anybody vote against that? Even Old Mac Gleason, who actually went to the meeting, had to put his hand up!
Business was business.
O’Driscoll laughed for almost a week about it until Mrs. O’Driscoll finally got sick of the whole story and shut him down by giving him the silence.
Now as Oscar McCracken traveled the bridge four times a day and paused each time inside, in the quiet there, he could, if he wanted to, read at each portal, a brass plaque.
The plaque said these words:
Let this covered bridge be dedicated to the memory of Father Francis Foley of Farrellton who gave his life herein for the people of his parish.
God Love Him
May He Rest Peacefully.
Up on Dizzy Peak, I pretended to write some more.
And here on Dizzy Peak, the sun beats on the rock and in between, the tough blueberry bushes growing in the moss, loaded with blueberries, powdered and fat, wait.
You lean over the edge, hanging by one hand to a ridge of rock a million years old and strip a handful of berries from a plant growing out of the side of the peak. Your pail on the ledge beside your hand is almost full, so you jam the handful of berries into your mouth instead.
The berries are hot and firm and sweet and you can feel them burst and pop in your mouth and the blue juice overflows down your chin.
You are eating the sun and the earth and the rain.
Fleurette would like that writing. If I could ever write it that way.
I got home with a pailful of blueberries, washed them and cleaned them, and put them on to simmer in some sugar for Mrs. O’Driscoll.
Later I met Oscar in the bridge, sat with him during his quiet time, and drove down with him to meet the train.
Sitting there on the fender of Oscar’s car, my feet on the wooden station platform, my arms folded across my chest. I was feeling the muscles in my arms with my fingers. My muscles were hard and bulging from the work on the bridge.
