The Other Side of the Bridge

by Mary Lawson

  The ridiculous thing was that Jake, who was longing to get back to school, was nowhere near strong enough, and was probably going to miss a whole year. At the end of August, Dr. Christopherson had come out to the farm and cut the casts off him and helped him to his feet and supported him while he took his first steps, and then broke it to them that although Jake was healing well, one leg was now shorter than the other, and he was going to have a limp for the rest of his life.

  Arthur took the news a lot harder than Jake did. Jake looked as if he thought a limp might be kind of interesting. Arthur, on the other hand, knew that if they both lived to be a hundred years old, every time he looked at Jake he was going to see that limp.

  But still, he almost forgot about it with the agony of being back at school. The first few days went by in a haze of disbelief. He sat at his desk like a sack of cement, hearing and seeing nothing. Then, on the Monday morning of the second week, they were herded off to the gym for assembly, all the classes jammed in together, and Mr. Wheeler, the principal, came in and got up on the little stage at the end of the room and said he had an important—no, a momentous—announcement to make.

  Arthur stopped listening. The gym had high windows that you couldn’t look out of, like a prison, so he looked at his feet instead and thought that he would rather be dead than be here. After a minute or two, though, he became aware of a stir in the room—kids were looking at each other, some of them were grinning and looking excited—and then he caught a word or two of what Mr. Wheeler was saying. “Duty” was one of the words, and “patriotism” was another. And it turned out that his momentous announcement actually was quite momentous. Canada was at war.

  There had been rumors for quite a while about a war coming. In fact, there had been something about England being at war with Germany in the Temiskaming Speaker the previous week, but it hadn’t meant much to Arthur and wouldn’t have even if he hadn’t been preoccupied by guilt. There was a joke that the only news that mattered in the North was the weather, but he couldn’t see what was supposed to be funny about it. It was true. His father would say the same. His mother was the only one in the family who was interested in what was going on in the world outside. She read the paper and would have liked a wireless, too—the Speaker came out only once a week, so the news was always out-of-date by the time they got it. But when Arthur and his father got in from the fields in the evening, they were so tired they wouldn’t have cared if half the world had been wiped off the map.

  But now it seemed the world had come to Struan. Mr. Wheeler, standing on the rickety little stage at the front of the gym, was reading to them from the speech that the prime minister himself, Mr. Mackenzie King, had broadcast to the nation. “‘The forces of evil have been loosed in the world,’” Mr. Wheeler read. He looked out at his audience, a gymful of schoolchildren, graded by age and size, the youngest sitting on the floor at the front, the older ones standing at the back. His face was grave. “‘The forces of evil,’” he repeated. Maybe he liked the sound of it, because he repeated it again, in capitals this time. “‘THE FORCES OF EVIL’!” He let the words echo around the gym. “And every able-bodied man”—he dropped his voice and looked slowly around the room, not reading any more, making his own speech now, “every able-bodied man will be anxious to go to the defense of our mother country. Those of you who are not old enough as yet should not despair.” He looked gravely at the younger children seated on the floor at his feet. “Your turn will come.” He lifted his head and smiled at the older boys. “Those of you who are old enough will be proud, I know, to serve your country, and will do so valiantly.”

  School was dismissed for the day. Arthur started to walk home but then changed his mind and went back into Struan. He guessed that when the other guys heard the news they’d probably come into town. It was full of people already—Arthur had never seen so many people all together before. They were gathered in little clutches around the front of the post office and on the steps of the bank. The older ones mostly looked worried and serious, the younger ones excited. Half a dozen boys were laughing and shrieking and pushing each other off the steps of the drugstore. While Arthur watched, Mr. Phillips, the druggist, came out and told them it was no day for behavior like that.

  Arthur hung around on the outskirts of a group of men by the post office. They were saying that it would all be over in a matter of weeks, that this Hitler guy was full of gas. Arthur listened to them, head down, but keeping an eye out for Carl or one of the others. Finally he saw Carl and Ted coming down the road and went to meet them.

  “Hi,” Ted called. “You heard, eh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Whaddaya think?” Carl said. “You going to join up?”

  “Yeah,” Arthur said again. He saw that it was the answer to everything. He’d sign up and go to the war, and even if it lasted only a couple of weeks, his mother would never be able to send him back to school. No one, not even his mother, could send someone who had been in uniform back to school. He would fight for his country. That would be a good thing to do, something he could set against the terrible events of the summer.

  He didn’t discuss it with his parents. They had heard the news by the time he got home but if the idea of him joining up had crossed their minds they didn’t say so. He guessed they’d be hoping it wouldn’t occur to him. His mother would try to stop him going and his father might too. His father didn’t approve of war. He’d been in the last one and it had put him off wars for good. Arthur felt bad about deceiving them but he didn’t know what else to do.

  He met up with Carl and Ted and a couple of others that evening after supper. Carl had heard there were enlistment teams traveling around the North signing people up, but they decided they wouldn’t wait for that. What if the teams had never heard of Struan? It wasn’t very big and might not even be on the map. It would be safer to go down to North Bay—that was where most men were going. They agreed to give it a couple of days just in case the Speaker had got it wrong and there wasn’t a war after all, but by the following day it was clear that it really was happening.

  The next morning the whole bunch of them—Arthur and Ted and Jude Libovitz and Carl and Carl’s two older brothers and a couple of guys from the sawmill and two Indian guys from the reserve—set out together. Arthur left home at the usual time, as if he were going to school. It made him sweat to think what his parents would say when they found out, but by then it would be done. Once you had enlisted, that was that.

  He’d been so busy worrying about his parents’ reaction that it wasn’t until he was in the back of the truck—they had borrowed Carl’s father’s old flatbed—that he started to think about what it was going to mean for his father in practical terms. Then he felt so bad he almost jumped out. How could he walk off and leave his father to manage the farm on his own with debts up to his ears? But then he reasoned that there were still men roaming the country looking for work, and though his father couldn’t afford to pay them, many of them were so desperate that they were prepared to work for three square meals and a bed in the barn. And anyway, the war would be over in a few weeks and then he’d be free to work with his father all day and every day for the rest of his life, so it was going to work out for the best all around.

  They had a good day for the trip. Warm and sunny. They’d all thrown their coats on the floor of the truck and they sat on them and watched the trees and the rocks and the fields go by. They got to New Liskeard and then headed south, through Temagami. Already Arthur was farther from home than he’d ever been in his life. Carl had brought a big bag of apples and they sat there munching on them, talking about what was to come. They decided they were all going to join the army. Ted said he didn’t like the sound of the navy—what happened if your ship went down?—and as for the air force, forget it. None of them had any faith in those parachute things; they all had done a fair bit of hunting and they’d seen the way birds came hurtling to the ground when they’d been shot. “And they’re mostly feathers,” Carl
said. “They don’t weigh nothin’. Think how fast we’d fall. Man, we’d make such a hole in the ground they wouldn’t have to dig us a grave.”

  They talked a bit about the war but nobody had much idea what it was about. There was this German guy, Hitler, and he was trying to take over the world, that was all they knew. There was an awkward spell then because they all suddenly remembered that the Luntz brothers’ parents were German. But then Gunter, who was the eldest, must have realized what the silence was about, because he suddenly got mad and said they were as Canadian as anyone else in the truck, as Canadian as anyone else in the whole damned country: they’d been born here, and their parents had given them their blessing to go off to fight for Canada—not England, mind you, they weren’t fighting for England, but for Canada—and had told them to take the truck to go and join up, and what more proof did anybody want? Which made them all feel ashamed.

  After that they were quiet for a bit. The countryside was still pretty wild. Arthur wondered what Germany would look like, or wherever they ended up. Not as beautiful as Canada, that was a safe bet. He got a kind of ache mid-chest at the thought. Homesick already, and he was only fifty miles from home.

  And then suddenly they were in North Bay. It was a big town, way bigger than Struan, buildings everywhere, the roads jammed with cars and trucks and army vehicles. The whole place was swarming with men and boys, hundreds of them, it seemed to Arthur, and all of them wanting to sign up. Some seemed to be straight out of the woods, tough-looking guys with beards down to their bellies and clothes that looked like they’d been through a couple of wars already. They would be trappers or hunters or lumberjacks; most of them carried rifles as if they thought the army would expect you to bring your own. It was a mystery to Arthur how they could have heard the news so fast, but there they were. He thought he wouldn’t mind being drafted into the same outfit as some of them…them and the Indian guys. They looked as if they could take care of themselves all right, and you could bet they were pretty damn good shots.

  It wasn’t until he had this thought that it came home to him that war was about killing people. He might even get killed himself. The idea struck him as funny. Just a couple of days ago he’d been standing in the school gymnasium, thinking that he’d rather be dead than be there, and now it looked as if maybe God was going to take him up on it. He didn’t believe it, though. Couldn’t imagine himself dead. Also couldn’t imagine killing anyone, couldn’t imagine aiming a gun at someone, far less pulling the trigger. But maybe you could just fire to one side of them and hope they’d do the same for you.

  They had parked the truck by this time, and joined the lineup of men, and all the time Arthur was thinking these things they were being herded around like cattle, people asking them questions and filling in forms. Eventually Arthur found himself standing in a big tent, stark naked, being examined by an old guy in uniform who turned out to be a doctor. The doctor asked him more questions, about illnesses he might have had and such things, most of which Arthur didn’t know the answer to, and what with that and the embarrassment of standing there in the buff he couldn’t concentrate on what the doctor was saying, and it took him a while to realize that he was being rejected.

  “Why?” he said, bewildered, when it finally sank in. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Flat feet,” the doctor said, scribbling on a form. “Flat as pancakes. Never seen a flatter pair of feet in my life.” He looked up at Arthur. “You know they say an army marches on its stomach? It’s a lie, son. An army marches on its feet, and those feet wouldn’t be up to the job.” He leaned back in his chair and guffawed as if he’d cracked a really good joke, and then started scribbling again.

  Arthur looked down, flattening his privates with one hand so they wouldn’t obscure the view. His feet looked flat all right, but so what? They worked. All the thousands of miles he had trudged across the fields of home, lugging sacks of potatoes, bales of hay, bushels of wheat, and the army thought he wouldn’t be able to carry a rifle and a little knapsack across some field in Europe?

  “They don’t hurt,” he said to the doctor. “They’ve never hurt at all. Except once when my brother threw a knife into one of them.”

  “Go home, son,” the doctor said, without looking up at him. “Next, please.”

  They gave him a little button to wear in his lapel, to show that he was medically unfit and not a coward. But no one would know what it meant. People didn’t come up to you to read what was written on a button before making up their minds about you.

  His mother forgave him. When she knew he had been rejected her relief was so great that she forgave him for trying to sign up. His father sat there, shaking his head; Arthur saw that his hands were trembling, but he was past caring. Jake was at the table too. He was up and about now, hobbling around the kitchen. Arthur reckoned he must think being turned down because of flat feet was pretty funny, considering his own injuries, but at least he wasn’t smirking. He was just listening, saying nothing.

  “You tried, Arthur,” his mother said soothingly, her voice full of sympathy now that he was safely home. “You tried your best to serve your country. No one can do more.”

  Her voice grated on him. It made him want to shout at her, which he had never done. He kept his head down and shoveled in his dinner. Flat feet. He felt sick with humiliation and disappointment. All of his friends were going, of course. It was a repeat of when he was sixteen and they had all left school except him. He was like some poor bloody bullock with its head permanently stuck in a fence, watching the rest of the herd amble off to greener pastures.

  “You tried,” his mother said again. “No one can help having flat feet, Arthur. There’s nothing you can do.”

  “Sure there is,” his father said. He seemed to have recovered from his shock and there was something in his voice—a winding up, a digging in, like a man girding his loins for battle—that made Arthur pause with his fork halfway to his mouth.

  “What do you mean, Henry? They’ve turned him down.”

  “All those boys,” his father said. “All those boys. Otto Luntz? All three boys goin’. How’s he goin’ to run that farm? Jim Collins? Both his boys gone. Frank Libovitz? Same. They’re gonna need men to work in the fields. Country’s gotta eat. The army’s gotta eat.”

  “What are you saying, Henry? Arthur tried to go. He offered and they turned him down. They can’t ask more of him than that. He’s free to carry on with his education.”

  Arthur’s father put down his fork and wiped his hands on his shirt a couple of times, then looked straight down the table at his wife. “Arthur’s not sittin’ in school when other boys are off fightin’ for their country. That’s what I’m sayin’. If he can’t fight, he has to farm.”

  His mother said, “Henry, there’s no—” but his father raised his hand and cut her off.

  “That’s the end of it,” he said. “I’m tellin’ you, Mary. That’s the end of it.” He picked up his fork and went on with his dinner.

  And that was the end of it.

  Freedom. Nineteen years old, flat-footed and riddled with guilt, but free at last.

  SEVEN

  SPECKLED TROUT SEASON STARTS ON SATURDAY

  COMPARE THREE WAYS OF PASTURING COWS

  —Temiskaming Speaker, April/May 1960

  When he was younger, Ian had assumed that as you got older things became clear. Adults had seemed so sure, so knowledgeable, not just about facts and figures but about the big questions: the difference between right and wrong; what was true and what wasn’t; what life was about. He’d assumed that you went to school because you had to learn things, starting off with the easy stuff and moving on to the bigger issues, and once you’d learned them that was it, the way ahead opened up and thereafter life was simple and straightforward.

  What a joke. The older he got, the more complicated and obscure everything became. He understood nothing anymore—nothing and nobody, including himself.

  Cathy broke up with him in April
. She said their relationship wasn’t going anywhere. He hadn’t realized it was supposed to. Where did she want it to go? When he asked her that, she burst into tears. Now she avoided him, turned her back on him, walked off if he tried to talk to her. He felt bad about it. He still liked her and would have preferred to remain friends.

  And then there was the equally complicated business of what he was going to do with his life, in terms of a career. A couple of months ago, Mr. Hardy, the history teacher, had asked him to stay behind after school for “a little talk.” There were nine of them taking grade thirteen, six boys and three girls, and Mr. Hardy was having little talks with each of them in turn, so Ian had known it was coming.

  “Well, then,” Mr. Hardy had said, closing the door behind Ian and motioning him toward a chair. “What’s it to be?” They were in the history classroom. A map of the world hung on the wall behind him, with the British empire colored pink. A cartoon was pinned up beside the map—gigantic Canadian soldiers looming over a terrified little Hitler—and beside the cartoon was a newspaper headline, yellowed with age, that read, SUCCESS OF OPERATION PROVIDES JOLT FOR NAZIS. Both cartoon and headline referred to the battle of Dieppe in the Second World War, and Mr. Hardy, who’d had his leg shot off there, had printed a caption for the cartoon in neat black letters that said, THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR IS TRUTH. His classes knew more about the battle of Dieppe than they knew about all the other battles in history put together.