The Other Side of the Bridge

by Mary Lawson

  “She will! You know what she says about books!”

  “What?”

  “That they’re sacred! That you’re supposed to treat them with respect and stuff, because they’re the keys that unlock doors.”

  Arthur couldn’t remember Miss Karpinski saying those things, but it sounded like her all right. He must have been not concentrating at the time. A failure to concentrate was apparently one of his problems. He was fourteen now and still in grade eight—he should have gone up to the high school, on the other side of Struan, with Carl and the rest of his class a year ago, but he’d failed the exams. Jake, on the other hand, had skipped a year, so now he and Arthur were separated by only two rows of desks. Arthur found this state of affairs almost unendurable, and the worst of it was that it looked set to go on forever. His father would have been happy for him to leave school as soon as the law allowed, which was the day he turned sixteen, but his mother had been so upset by his last report card that she’d said he was going to get his grade twelve if it took him the rest of his life. The fact was, it was going to take him the rest of his life. To start with, to pass grade eight he would have to please Miss Karpinski, who was both judge and jury when it came to the exams. He couldn’t imagine ever pleasing Miss Karpinski.

  Jake was still waving the book at him. “What am I going to say to Miss Karpinski?” he asked. His voice was shrill with what appeared to be real anxiety, though with Jake you could never be sure.

  “Just tell her it was an accident.”

  “But Charlie Taggert says he’s going to do it again! He says he’s going to do it to every single one of my books unless I give him my milk money.”

  Arthur looked at him uneasily. Jake was a liar—you couldn’t believe a word he said—but if by some unlikely chance he was telling the truth this time, and if he did get into trouble, and if Arthur were discovered to have known about it but not helped, his mother would never forgive him.

  “What do you want me to do about it?” he said reluctantly.

  “Beat him up,” Jake said promptly. “He’s a bully.”

  Arthur’s brow furrowed. Charlie Taggert was smart and had glasses and Arthur didn’t like him, but he didn’t look like a bully. On the other hand, Jake didn’t look like a bully either but he was. Jake was a subtle bully, a devious bully. He specialized in getting people into trouble. Maybe he simply wanted to get Charlie into trouble. Or maybe Charlie wanted to get Jake into trouble. Or maybe Charlie did want Jake’s milk money. Or maybe Jake had done something to Charlie and Charlie threw the book into the mud to get even, and it had nothing to do with milk money. Where Jake was concerned, Arthur always felt he was in over his head, floundering in a sea of unknown possibilities.

  “I can’t just go beat him up,” Arthur said. Charlie was a little kid, and in any case, Arthur wasn’t the beating-up sort. He was peaceable, given the choice. Even among his own friends he didn’t go in for the rough-and-tumble most of them engaged in.

  “You have to,” Jake said. “It’s the only thing that will stop him.”

  “You can beat him up yourself,” Arthur said.

  Jake gave him an exasperated look. “He’s bigger than I am.” The truth was, they were about the same size, but Jake never fought physically. Not that he was peaceable, but fighting was the one thing he wasn’t good at. Not with his bare hands, anyway. This was the year of Jake’s obsession with knives, but Miss Karpinski didn’t allow knives at school, which was a good thing in Arthur’s view. His foot still hurt him sometimes, where Jake had thrown the hunting knife into it, and the incident had involved him in all kinds of trouble because he’d had to make out that he’d done it himself—they’d both have been skinned alive if their father had discovered the truth. Arthur had had to pretend that he’d accidentally put the prong of a pitchfork through his foot while he was mucking out the barn, a lie that required him to ruin a perfectly good boot, because no one would be fool enough to use a pitchfork with bare feet.

  “Why don’t you just tell Miss Karpinski?” he asked.

  Jake looked shocked. “You mean tell on him? You want me to tell on him?”

  It was impossible, of course. Jake was right about that. To tell on someone was the one unforgivable sin.

  Arthur thought about it. “I’ll warn him,” he said.

  “You can’t just warn him! He won’t pay any attention to a stupid warning!”

  “I’ll warn him that if he doesn’t pay attention to the warning I’ll beat him up.”

  Jake kept at him the rest of the way home but Arthur didn’t budge. He had to keep out of trouble this year or Miss Karpinski would keep him in grade eight until he had a long gray beard.

  He approached Charlie Taggert in the schoolyard the next day—went up to the group of boys he was with and stood right in front of him so he had to stop talking to the others and pay attention. Charlie looked up at him, his eyes large spooky ovals behind his thick glasses.

  “What?” he said.

  “Leave my brother alone,” Arthur said.

  “What?” Charlie said again, looking puzzled.

  “You heard me,” Arthur said. The words sounded pretty good. For a minute he considered a new image of himself—a champion of rights. “I’m warning you,” he said ominously.

  “I haven’t done anything,” Charlie said. He looked apprehensive but stubborn.

  “You threw my brother’s book in the mud,” Arthur said. “If you do it again I’ll beat you up.”

  “I never touched your brother’s book.”

  “You did so,” Arthur said.

  “I never touched anybody’s stupid book.”

  Arthur felt a shadow of doubt pass over him, like a crow flying in front of the sun. He looked around for Jake, but Jake had vanished. He looked back at Charlie.

  “You did so,” he said again, louder, trying to keep the doubt out of his voice. Other kids were standing around watching. “You said if he didn’t give you his milk money you’d do it to all his books.”

  Charlie said, “I didn’t. I don’t want your brother’s stupid milk money. My dad runs the bank—I don’t need your brother’s stupid money. Your brother bet me his stupid money I couldn’t tell how he did that stupid trick with those two cards, and I did, and I didn’t even take his money because I don’t need it and my mum says you farm kids are poor. I’m going to tell my dad you threatened me.”

  “I didn’t threaten you,” Arthur said. “I only said if you did it again I’d threaten you.”

  “I’m going to tell my dad,” Charlie said. And he did. And Mr. Taggert, who happened to be chairman of the school board that year, phoned Miss Karpinski, who sent a letter to Arthur’s mother requesting that she come and see her, and Arthur’s mother had to go and apologize for Arthur and was ashamed and humiliated to the soles of her shoes.

  There had been many times in the past when Arthur had wanted to give Jake a bloody nose, but never more than this time. He fantasized about it for days—saw his fist make contact, the lovely rich blood running down—but whenever and however he pictured it, his mother’s face slid into the frame as well: the horror in her eyes, her bitter disappointment in him. So he didn’t do it.

  The fact was, giving Jake a bloody nose wouldn’t have answered the question that Arthur wanted answered. What had Jake been trying to achieve? A suspicion came to him after the event—a possibility that he hadn’t considered at the time—and it bothered him, and he would have liked to be able to dismiss it. The suspicion was this: that Jake had no real quarrel with Charlie Taggert, beyond a casual dislike and a resentment at having his card trick undermined, and that he’d never intended Arthur to beat Charlie up, and knowing Arthur so well had never really thought he would. Because Charlie had never been Jake’s target. It was Arthur he’d wanted to get into trouble all along.

  Was that possible? Could he have made up the whole business with the history book, muddied it himself, maybe, or dropped it accidentally and then decided to put the accident to use?r />
  Arthur worried at the idea, chewed at it. Finally, and with relief, rejected it. Because there was no sense in it. Jake had no reason to do such a thing, and even Jake wouldn’t get his own brother into so much trouble for no reason at all.

  THREE

  RAINS DOUSE BUSHFIRES

  NO. 11 HIGHWAY WASHED OUT

  —Temiskaming Speaker, May 1957

  If he had thought about it properly, Ian would have realized that working on the Dunns’ farm was not going to bring him all that close to Laura Dunn. Close to Arthur, yes, but that wasn’t what he’d had in mind.

  Saturday morning at eight o’clock, as he leaned his bike against the side of the barn, Laura came out and said, “He’s down at the ten-acre, Ian. He said to go straight down.” She pointed at the hedge running alongside the track. “Third field along on the left. It’s down a bit of a hill—that’s why you can’t see him from here. I think he said you’re doing the potatoes today.”

  “Okay,” Ian said.

  “We have dinner at noon. I’ll see you then.”

  “Okay.”

  And that was that. She went back inside. Contact time just less than a minute. Still, it was a minute more than he would have had otherwise. And he would see her at noon.

  It was a great morning: a pale blue sky, feathers of cloud off in the distance. A light breeze, still cool—it was only May after all—but bearing the smell of summer to mingle with the smell of fresh manure. Manure was a bit of a problem underfoot—it seemed both horses and cows used the track. He was wearing his oldest shoes but boots would have been better. In between watching his step he looked at the fields. First on the left: pigs, rooting about under a clutch of very old apple trees; first on the right: plowed, the dark soil freshly turned. Second on the left: plowed; second on the right: pasture, and about thirty cows, heads down, munching. They were getting a mixture of young and old grass—you could make out small bright green shoots poking up through the dry yellow of last year. From what he could see, the more distant fields were either plowed or turned over to grass. Some of them were fenced with old zigzagged railings, others were edged with rocks and tree stumps, some fairly new, some so old that they had all but rotted away. Beyond the fields the trees stood dense and dark, their tops tinged with the pale, indistinct green of new growth.

  When he reached the boundary of the third field, Ian could see Arthur and the horses, as Laura had said. The horses were standing idle at one side of the field, unhitched from their wagon, heads together as if they were plotting something behind Arthur’s back. Arthur himself was out in the middle of the field, walking backward down a furrow. He was holding a bucket and kept picking stones out of it and dropping them into the furrow. Ian slowed down, mystified, wondering if maybe Arthur was soft in the head and no one had thought to tell him. Then he got it. Not stones, potatoes. Seed potatoes.

  Arthur abruptly left the furrow and trudged to the side of the field. There was a large sack standing there, and now that Ian looked he could see that there were more sacks positioned around the field and more still on the wagon. Arthur bent and began to fill his bucket from the sack. When he straightened up he saw Ian and put the bucket down and made his way up the side of the field to greet him.

  “Mornin’,” he said.

  Ian gave him what he hoped was an enthusiastic grin. “Morning.”

  “Potatoes today,” Arthur said.

  “Great!”

  Arthur was wearing muddy overalls and heavy work boots clogged with mud and what with his solid shape and mud-colored hair Ian thought he looked pretty much like a giant potato himself. He knew women were supposed to be attracted to powerful-looking men, and Arthur definitely filled the bill on that score, but still, it was hard to imagine what Laura had ever seen in him.

  “Got you a bucket,” Arthur said, and plodded back to the sack of potatoes, behind which, Ian saw, there was a second bucket.

  “Fill it up,” Arthur said. “Drop ’em in. ’Bout a foot apart. Like this, see.” He took a potato out of his bucket, dropped it into a furrow, took a step back, dropped another one, and looked hopefully at Ian. Ian nodded, glad that none of his friends could see him. He imagined Pete saying, very, very slowly, You take the potato out of the bucket, man. And then you drop it into the furrow. Then you take a step backward. Then you take another potato out of the bucket….

  “You finish this row,” Arthur said. He took his own bucket and headed off to the start of the next row.

  They planted seed potatoes for four hours. There was more to it than Ian had expected. In particular, more pain: pain from the stress of walking backward without collapsing the furrows as you went; pain from the weight of the bucket; pain from the curious posture required, head down, shoulders hunched. Well before the first hour was up his muscles—all of them, in every part of his body—reminded him of the diagrams of human musculature in his father’s textbooks: the muscles were drawn in red ink and looked raw and stretched to breaking point.

  He kept himself going with thoughts of Laura. He thought about dinnertime. Arthur would be there, which was a pity, but maybe after dinner he would go off for a nap, and the two of them would be left alone. He imagined them sitting in the shade of an old apple tree, one without pigs around it, talking about this and that, enjoying the peace and each other’s company while Arthur snored in a room upstairs.

  At twelve o’clock Arthur finally set down his bucket and trudged across the furrows to announce that it was time to go in. Ian followed him gratefully back to the house. They washed at the pump, the icy water numbing their hands and arms, two rangy dogs sniffing around Ian’s ankles, the chickens clacking and strutting about. There was a towel hanging outside the back door. Arthur dried his hands on it and passed it to Ian, smiling shyly, looking as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t think quite what it might be, and while he was thinking about it Laura went past the screen door carrying a stew pot. She saw them and paused.

  “Oh, good,” she said. “You’re here. Come in and sit down. Ian, I’ve set a place for you beside Arthur.” She gave them a rather harried smile and disappeared.

  Ian followed Arthur inside. The kitchen was like the kitchens of other farmhouses he’d been in, large and square, serving the function of living room as well. The cooking area was at one end of the room and at the other was a wood-burning stove with a couple of armchairs crouched around it. The center of the room was taken up with a long wooden table. It was set for seven and four of the places were already occupied.

  All morning he had been imagining that dinner would be a quiet, intimate affair—just Laura, Arthur, and himself, with Arthur not really counting. He’d entirely forgotten about the kids. There they were, all three of them—the boy who’d nearly knocked him off the steps, the small girl, and the baby in its high chair. There was also a very old man, propped up on cushions and so bent over that his chin nearly rested on the table.

  Laura was ladling stew into the girl’s bowl and the girl was complaining about it.

  “Well just leave them,” Laura was saying. “Just pick them out and put them on one side.”

  She smiled at Ian. “You’re there, Ian.” She pointed with her elbow, both hands being occupied with the stew pot. “Arthur’s at the head of the table and you’re between him and Carter. Oh, I haven’t introduced you: Carter, Julie, March”—she indicated the children in descending order of age—“and this is my father—you may remember him, he was minister at the church for years. No, maybe you’re too young. Grampa”—she leaned toward the old man and spoke loudly—“this is Dr. Christopherson’s son, Ian. He’s come to help Arthur.”

  “Hello,” Ian said uncertainly. Laura hadn’t told him her father’s name, but maybe it didn’t matter because the old man gave no sign that he’d heard a word she’d said.

  “But, Mummy,” the little girl said, her voice reduced to a whisper by Ian’s presence. “They’re all mixed up.”

  “You can pick them out,” Laura said. “L
ook. Like this…”

  Ian followed Arthur down to the end of the table, trying to quell his disappointment. He sat down beside the boy, Carter, who was tapping the table with his knife, a complex rhythm of dots and dashes like Morse code, and didn’t acknowledge Ian’s presence by so much as a glance. He looked like Arthur, Ian thought, but not as nice.

  “Ian,” Laura said. Suddenly she was standing so close to him that the sleeve of her dress nearly touched his arm. “You’ll be hungry, would be my guess. How did it go this morning?” She began ladling stew onto his plate, not waiting for an answer. “Say when.”

  “When,” Ian said politely. “Thanks, Mrs. Dunn. It looks wonderful.” It was worth all the agony of the morning to be this close to her.

  She gave him her lovely smile. “Laura. You don’t need to call us Mr. and Mrs., does he, Arthur?” She had an apron on over her dress, which was pale blue with tiny white flowers on it. It had a V-neck, which was always a good thing because of where the V led to, but he couldn’t see how low it went because it disappeared under the apron.

  She moved on swiftly, doling out everybody’s stew. Finally she went to her own place at the other end of the table. Miles away from Ian.

  The baby was waving its arms about and making threatening noises. “Shush,” she said to it. “Are you going to eat nicely with us? Would you like a piece of carrot?” She fished a bit of carrot out of the stew pot with her fingers and put it on the baby’s tray. The baby threw it on the floor.

  “I still haven’t heard how it went this morning, Ian,” Laura said, retrieving the carrot and putting it back on the baby’s tray. The baby picked it up and threw it on the floor again and Laura sighed and left it there. She smoothed down the skirt of her dress as if in preparation for sitting down; Ian saw the swell of her hips and looked away. “How was it? Did you find the work terribly hard? It won’t be the sort of thing you’re used to. Oh, Grampa, hang on—that’s a big piece. I’ll just cut that up for you.” She was off again, moving quickly around to her father’s place to cut up his food. The old man watched her hands, mumbling to himself.