The Other Side of the Bridge

by Mary Lawson

  As much as anything else, the building of the house had been a statement of faith on the part of the people of Struan. Until then they’d had to go to New Liskeard if they required a doctor, and if you needed medical help badly enough to make the journey to New Liskeard, the odds were that you were in no state to make the journey. Getting their own doctor was a sign that the town had arrived. In the brief interval between applying the final coat of paint and the arrival of Dr. Christopherson, the people of Struan found excuses to walk past the house and admire it. You looked at that house and you thought, this is no fly-by-night northern settlement sprung up around a sawmill; any town that can afford to build its doctor a house like this is here to stay.

  Ian was aware of most of this personal and civic history, and as far as he was concerned his grandfather must have been raving mad. Imagine voluntarily leaving a city like Toronto to come to a hick town like Struan. And though you could excuse his grandfather’s mistake on the grounds of ignorance—he couldn’t have had any real idea what he was coming to—there was no such excuse for Ian’s father. He had been born and brought up in Struan, and had then escaped, but after living in Toronto for almost a decade while he took his medical degree and worked in the Sick Children’s Hospital, he had returned to Struan to take over his father’s practice. Ian couldn’t understand it. Why would anyone do such a thing? What was Struan, apart from a sawmill? A sorry bunch of stores lined up along a dusty main street, with nothing in them anyone would want to buy. A couple of churches. The Hudson’s Bay Company. A post office. A bank. Harper’s Restaurant. Ben’s Bar. A hotel—because, incredibly, some people chose to come to Struan for their holidays—and a little clutch of holiday cottages down by the lake. The lake was the town’s only asset, in Ian’s opinion. It was large—fifty miles long, north to south, and almost twenty miles across—and deep, and very clear, surrounded on all sides by low granite hills studded with spruce and wind-blasted pines. Its shore was so ragged with bays and inlets and islands that you could spend your life exploring and never find half of them. When Ian dreamed of leaving the town, which he did all the time nowadays, the thought of leaving the lake was the only thing that bothered him. The lake and Laura Dunn.

  He parked his bike up against the veranda of the house, climbed the wide wooden steps to the porch, and went in. The door to his father’s office was closed and he could hear voices behind it, but the waiting room was empty, so Ian sat down on one of the dozen or so battered old chairs lining the walls and flicked through a two-year-old copy of Reader’s Digest while he thought about Laura Dunn. The way strands of her hair escaped from their elastic band and drifted around her face. Those shadowed eyes. Her breasts. He’d noticed—he couldn’t help noticing—that on the front of her dress there had been two wet circles where her breasts had leaked milk.

  The door to the office opened and Ted Pickett, owner of Pickett’s Hardware, came out with his arm in a sling. He nodded at Ian and grimaced and Ian grimaced back. Patients entered the house by a side door but both the office and the waiting room were right off the hall, so all his life he’d been used to seeing people going in and out in varying degrees of anguish, and he’d got his responses down pat.

  “He doesn’t think it’s broken,” Mr. Pickett said.

  “That’s lucky,” Ian said.

  “He thinks it’s just sprained. Hurts like hell though.”

  Ian nodded sympathetically. “Did you fall off the ladder?” There was a ladder on wheels in the hardware store that Mr. Pickett scooted around on, reaching for nails or nuts or brackets or hinges, an accident waiting to happen.

  “Yeah,” Mr. Pickett said, looking surprised. “How did you know?”

  “I just…kind of…wondered,” Ian said politely.

  When Mr. Pickett left he knocked on his father’s door and went in.

  “I’ve got a job,” he said. His father had his back to him. He was rolling bandages and placing them neatly back in their drawer. His desk was littered with papers—patients’ notes, medical journals, bills—but the tools of his trade were always properly put away.

  “That was quick,” he said.

  “Arthur Dunn’s farm,” Ian said. “He said I could start Saturday.”

  His father turned around and took off his glasses and blinked at him. “Arthur Dunn’s farm?”

  “Yes, you know…doing…farm work.”

  “Farm work.” His father nodded vaguely, as if trying to imagine it.

  “I thought I’d like something outdoors,” Ian said.

  Dr. Christopherson put his glasses back on and looked out the window. It had just started to rain. “Yes,” he said doubtfully. “Well…if that’s what you want. Arthur’s a nice fellow.” He looked dubiously at Ian. “It’ll be hard work, you know.”

  “I know,” Ian said.

  “Did you see the horses?”

  “Yes.”

  “Magnificent animals.”

  “Yes,” Ian said, though he had barely noticed them. He and his father smiled at each other, glad to be in agreement. They were usually in agreement, unlike Ian and his mother.

  Next he went and told his mother, who was watching I Love Lucy in the living room. Television had finally—finally!—reached Struan a couple of months earlier, proof, if more were needed, of how backward things were up here. Ian’s mother had disapproved of it at first, but now she watched it more than he did. In fact, just lately she seemed to watch it all the time. She was supposed to be in with his father—she was his nurse—but apart from the odd emergency, Ian hadn’t seen her in the office for weeks.

  “Mum?” he said, standing in the doorway. She was in one of her absent moods—he could tell even though he couldn’t see her face. She had two moods nowadays, absent or annoyed, and whichever one she was in he invariably found he preferred the other.

  “Mum?” he said again. She turned her head a few degrees, not taking her eyes off the screen.

  “I’ve got a job,” Ian said.

  She turned a little more and met his eyes, and he saw the glazed look fade as she focused on him.

  “What was that?” she said.

  “I said I’ve got a job.”

  “Oh,” she said. She smiled at him. “That’s good.” She turned back to the television. Ian waited a minute but there was no further response, so he went into the kitchen to get a reaction from Mrs. Tuttle instead. She was breading chicken pieces for supper, dipping each piece in a bowl of beaten egg and then slapping it back and forth in a dish of bread crumbs.

  “I’ve got a job, Mrs. Tuttle,” Ian said.

  “Have you now?” she said, placing a breaded breast down on the baking tray and taking a pale, slippery-looking chicken leg from the hacked-up carcass on the chopping board. “That’s exciting. What is it?”

  “Helping Mr. Dunn on his farm.”

  She paused, then turned her head to look at him. Her glasses were splattered with the day’s cooking—a dusting of flour from the tea biscuits, a little smear of butter, a scattering of crumbs—even what looked to be a shred of carrot peel. “Goodness!” she said, ducking her head in order to look over the top of them. “Whatever did you want a job like that for?” Which was what he’d expected her to say, and therefore satisfying in its way, so he smiled at her and left.

  His mother was still in front of the television when he passed the living room door on his way upstairs; I Love Lucy had finished and she was watching a program in French. It struck Ian as strange, because she didn’t speak French. He wondered if anyone else’s mother watched television during the day. It was hard to know. The mothers of most of his friends were farmers’ wives and didn’t have time to sit down, much less watch TV. But his mother had never been like other people’s mothers. She didn’t come from the north—she was an outsider, from Vancouver originally. She wore smart shoes with heels, even around the house, and skirts with sweaters that matched, and had her hair set in loose waves instead of tight little corkscrews like the mothers of his friends. In the e
venings, she and Ian and his father ate formally in the dining room, instead of at the kitchen table. They used napkins—proper white linen ones, washed and starched and ironed by Mrs. Tuttle every Monday. Ian suspected that no one else in the whole of Struan would have the first idea what to do with a napkin.

  One good thing about his mother’s moods of late was that suppers were fairly brief and painless affairs. In the past they’d been hard work because she would insist on having what she called a “civilized conversation” while they ate. That was what evening meals were for, according to her—they were for families to get together and exchange views and experiences in a pleasant environment. Maybe that would have been okay if he’d had half a dozen brothers or sisters to share the burden of thinking up something to say, night after night, but there was only him. He didn’t see why they couldn’t read at the table. He would have preferred it and he knew his father would as well—you could tell by the wistful, unfocused look in his eyes. He was longing to immerse himself in an article on the renewed threat of polio in rural areas or the latest wonder drug or a new type of surgical dressing that didn’t stick to wounds. In Ian’s case it would be fishing magazines: a fifty-five-pound muskie caught down in French River, the pros and cons of trolling versus casting, the last word in fishing tackle. He pictured himself and his father, shoulders hunched, chins six inches from their plates, absently forking in their dinners, happily absorbed in the printed word. His mother could look at one of her Eaton’s catalogs. Why not? It would be much more relaxed and at least as companionable as the performance they had to go through every night in the name of family togetherness.

  But in the last little while she seemed to have lost interest in conversation, civilized or not. Sometimes she still made a halfhearted attempt to get things rolling by saying something like “So, what has everybody been doing today?” but this evening she didn’t even do that. The three of them ate more or less in silence (he and his father both gazing into the middle distance as they chewed, thinking about the things they would have liked to be reading) and then they all excused themselves from the table and went their separate ways.

  Ian got on his bike and set off for the reserve. It had rained hard for ten minutes or so while they were eating but now it had cleared and the evening air was cool and fresh. The clouds were drifting away out over the lake and the pale sky shone in the puddles at the sides of the road. Main Street—the only road out of town—was deserted. The stores closed promptly at half past five and the entire population of Struan went home for supper. That was one of the things about the town that exasperated Ian—the way it died in the evenings. The only places that stayed open were Harper’s, which served meals until half past six—seven o’clock on Fridays—and Ben’s. Ben’s Bar was the nearest thing Struan had to a den of iniquity. Every Saturday night it filled up with men from the logging camp upriver who came into town to spend their week’s wages on liquor. They’d get completely hammered, cause Sergeant Moynihan and Ian’s father between them no end of trouble, and then go back to the camp and the town would settle back into its usual dull predictable self for another week.

  For many years Ian hadn’t given the town a thought, because it was all he knew, but the previous summer his mother had taken him to Toronto for a week and his eyes had been opened. What had impressed him most had not been the size of the city or the noise or even the buildings—he’d been expecting all of that. What had struck him most forcibly was the fact that when he walked down the street he hadn’t known anyone. Thousands upon thousands of strangers. He’d found it amazing. Liberating! Contrast it with Struan, where everyone had known everyone else since the day they were born. And it was worse for him than it was for most people because of his father being public property—“our doctor,” people called him—and having his office at home. Ian had noticed that they didn’t call his mother “our nurse,” though. They called her Mrs. Christopherson and left it at that. People were a little bit afraid of her—he knew that. She could be sharp. She could say, “The doctor is a busy man, Mrs. Shultz. Use your common sense.”

  But they seemed to claim Ian’s father as their own, and his home, too, and maybe—in the past year or so he had started to feel this—even Ian himself. Virtually everyone in Struan had sat in his father’s waiting room at one time or another, waiting to have their sore throats looked at or bits of their fingers sewn back on, and while they sat they had watched Ian grow up. Many of the older ones must have watched his father grow up as well; they would have seen him crawling around on the same wooden floorboards that Ian crawled around on, getting bigger by the day and gradually turning into their doctor. Ian was starting to suspect that they thought of him in the same way. Increasingly he got the feeling that people looked at him and automatically thought, Here comes another one. The next Dr. Christopherson.

  In fact the previous week old Mr. Johnson, who’d had his toes shot off forty years ago at the Somme and shuffled along with the help of two sticks, had stopped him in the street and asked if he could have “more of them pills.” Ian had said, “I think you should talk to my dad, Mr. Johnson,” and the old man looked bewildered. He stood in the middle of the road, blinking up at Ian, his mouth hanging open with the effort of trying to make sense of what he was saying. Ian thought, Oh, come on! I’m only fifteen! But everyone said he looked just like his father, the same big-boned, loose-knit Scandinavian frame, the same pale hair. Maybe if your eyesight was poor it was hard to tell the difference. In the end he took pity on the old man and guided him back onto the sidewalk before he got flattened by a logging truck, and said he’d have a word with his father about the pills.

  But the incident irritated him. In Mr. Johnson’s case it might have been just a matter of confusion and poor eyesight, but it brought home to him the assumption—unspoken, but suddenly clear—that he would follow in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps. As if he had no say in the matter, no ideas of his own.

  He imagined living in Toronto, or Vancouver or New York. Think of the freedom. You could be whoever you wanted to be. No one expecting anything of you, no one knowing who your parents were, no one caring if you were a brain surgeon or a bum. Only wherever he ended up, there would need to be a lake or at least a river nearby. He couldn’t live far from the water.

  He cycled down Main Street to the outskirts of Struan, which took all of three minutes, and then out along the road to the Ojibway reserve, which took a further five. The reserve was spread along the shore of a bay, with a point of land jutting out into the lake between it and Struan, a symbolic barrier as well as a geographic one. The road ran out of pavement half a mile before it reached the reserve, and the land itself was so low it would grow nothing but bulrushes and bugs—blackflies by the million in early summer, then mosquitoes big enough to pick you up and carry you away. The reserve store, though, where Pete Corbiere lived, was situated right down by the lake, which meant it got the benefit of the wind and was less buggy than the rest. Pete’s grandfather was sitting on the steps when Ian arrived, smoking and staring off into the woods. He had scars on his fingers from letting cigarettes burn down too far.

  “Hi,” Ian said, leaning his bike against a tree.

  Mr. Corbiere nodded in greeting.

  “You look busy,” Ian said. He liked the old man but was never sure how to approach him and several years ago had settled on an uneasy jocularity that he now wasn’t happy with but couldn’t seem to stop.

  Mr. Corbiere nodded again. “Workin’ my butt off,” he agreed. “Your rod’s inside. Put it there to be safe. Kids were playin’ with it.”

  “Oh,” Ian said. “Thanks.”

  “How’s your dad?”

  “He’s fine, thanks, Mr. Corbiere.” He looked around for some sign of Pete. “Is Pete out already?”

  The old man jerked his head toward the lake.

  “Thanks,” Ian said again. “Where’s the rod?”

  “Pete’s room.”

  Ian stepped delicately around Mr.
Corbiere’s broad rump and went up the steps into the store. It was dark and smelled of mold. A gigantic chest freezer hummed to itself against one wall. At certain times of year the freezer was full of game—rabbits, sometimes still unskinned, hunks of venison, ducks, geese, once a whole beaver, its tail stretched out flat. Beside the huge freezer was a smaller one full of fish, and beside that a smaller one still, given over to ice cream and Popsicles. Along the back wall there were a few shelves with tins on them—Heinz beans, tinned peaches, Irish stew. On a bottom shelf were three loaves of packaged sliced bread. At the other end of the room were hardware items—matches, fishhooks, batteries, snare wire, flyswatters, axes, woolen socks. No beaded moccasins. Beaded moccasins were sold by the roadside at rustic wooden trading posts, along with quill boxes and miniature birch-bark canoes and totem poles six inches high. The trading posts themselves were advertised by large billboards portraying stern-looking Indian chiefs in war paint and full headdress. The Ojibway had never gone in for headdresses and the totem poles belonged three thousand miles away on the west coast of Canada, but the tourists liked them so the band went along with it. “Wouldn’t want to disappoint anybody,” as the old man said.

  Ian pushed aside a row of plastic strips hanging in a doorway and went into the back of the store. Pete and his grandfather lived here. The store was owned by a Scotsman—according to Ian’s father, every reserve in the country had a store owned by a Scotsman—who let Pete and his grandfather live there in return for minding the store. There were two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen that consisted of a sink and a stove at one end of the hallway. Pete’s room was small and square and stupendously untidy—clothes and gum wrappers and schoolbooks and snowshoes not put away since March and girlie magazines left lying open as if the old man wouldn’t mind, which he probably didn’t. Ian’s fishing rod was standing in a corner, looking new and shiny and very out of place. He retrieved it and went back outside. Mr. Corbiere had started on another cigarette. Ian stepped past him.