Covered Bridge (2 page)

P.S. My new address is:
Hubbo O'Driscoll,
Mushrat Creek,
c/o Brennan's Hill Post Office,
Gatineau County,
Quebec, Canada.

F
ROM 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.

W
E 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!

And 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!”

O'Driscoll was never the kind of person who didn't listen to what you were saying. That is, most of the time. But when it came to something that might be a little bit unbelievable, he might not listen very well. Maybe he'd think you were exaggerating a little bit. I wondered where he'd ever get an idea like that.

“Nerves and I went down to look over the job after dark. Didn't get anything done. Saw a ghost...”

“A ghost, eh?” said O'Driscoll. “Well, those old bridges are full of ghosts...anyway, if you do well your first month or so, you'll be full-time caretaker at least until the what's-their-names come back. We could use the $12 a month...”

“It was the shape of a woman...it jumped into the
creek...Nerves passed out...I was saying...” But O'Driscoll kept talking.

“Our job is to keep the lights in shape, report any damage or accidents or suspicious happenings and oversee the painting of the bridge every two years. The two years is coming up a month or so from now. There's expenses. Oil, wicks, tools and, of course, the paint and the labor during paintin' time is what the expenses are for.”

“There was a splash. She had on a whitish dress and a dark hat with a big brim,” I said quietly.

O'Driscoll was looking at me with pride.

I was saying just the kind of things that he would say. When I mentioned the splash, Mrs. O'Driscoll put her hands across the table, one on mine and one on O'Driscoll's, and smiled.

Then she said this out of the far corner of her mouth: “I love it here. Ghosts and covered bridges and everything! Are we ever
lucky
! I hope that the what's-their-names fall off the edge of the earth on that world tour of theirs and that they're never heard from again.”

“I'll drink to that,” said O'Driscoll, and gulped down the rest of his tea. They weren't going to listen to me about the ghost.

I was starting to think that maybe it never happened.

If only Nerves could talk. He didn't think it was so
lucky
!

A knock came to our front door. I went through the
parlor we only used on Sunday and opened the front door we hardly
ever
used. It was stuck and I had to give it an extra shove and a kick.

It was the county chairman.

In our kitchen, he told us we didn't need to caretake the covered bridge anymore. We were getting a new bridge. I was fired.

It was the shortest job I ever had.

O'D
RISCOLL
was talking about the construction going to start about a mile up Mushrat Creek. They were going to build a modern bridge over the creek so the highway would go straight through instead of circling down to the covered bridge like it always did. This would take a big bend out of the road.

He also said a couple of times that he heard some of the farmers up in the post office in Low talking about the highway getting paved.

“That'll keep the dust off the chokecherries begod!” O'Driscoll told us one of them said.

And everybody was saying how good it was going to be because there would be jobs for everybody that wanted to work and there'd be money galore around for everybody.

And O'Driscoll explained once while we were milking
the cows that the farmers around there had a pretty good life even though they had to work pretty hard for it.

But the one thing they never had very much of was money.

All the money they ever had was from the cream they sold to the dairy or maybe they'd sell a pig or a steer or maybe even raise some chickens and sell them but not very often.

And once when we were in the general store in Brennan's Hill buying what we needed which was salt, flour, tea, sugar and molasses, we heard the owner of the store say that his hired man quit on him to go and work on the new highway that was to approach the new bridge.

We bought more molasses than other people, mostly because it was our dog Nerves' favorite food.

Nerves loved to eat a big chunk of bread soaked in molasses.

What a dog.

Then he'd go down to the creek and wash his hands and face.

Maybe take a swim.

One hot afternoon Mrs. O'Driscoll was sitting in her rocking chair out the front doorway in the shade of her two rowanwood trees. She looked nice rocking there a little bit in her bright yellow and blue dress and the purple combs in her hair and above her the clumps of redrowanwood
berries hanging like tiny chandeliers. And her head resting back and a little smile on her face. She liked that yellow and blue dress because yellow and blue were the school colors of the school, Glebe Collegiate, where she worked as a cleaning lady before she became a farmer.

She had on the stove a great big pot of preserves simmering away in the summer kitchen.

The smell of the raspberries bubbling there in the sugary red syrup was reaching out through the screen door, past the woodpile, over the side road, around the walls of the barn and into the pig pen where the pigs were lying in the cool mud in the hot sun grunting and snorting and sighing every now and then and snuffling into their big nostrils, the sweetness and the pureness of Mrs. O'Driscoll's great big pot of preserves of raspberries simmering on the stove in her summer kitchen.