The Other Side of the Bridge (10 page)

Arthur was sure Jake’s enthusiasm was fake, put on to impress their parents, but still it stuck in his throat and made it difficult for him to swallow his supper.

“See, in Latin, nouns have different forms and they have different endings—
loads
of different endings—and we have to learn them all. So I wondered if someone could test me after supper?”

Jake kept slipping sideways looks at their father as he said all this. Their mother would be hanging on every word, her face pink with pleasure, but it was their father’s reaction he seemed interested in. But his father just chewed silently, pushing down the food.

“I want to quit school,” Arthur said.

He and his father were examining the boarding on the north side of the barn. Some of the planks were starting to rot and would have to be replaced. And it needed to be done soon. Winter was coming and a drafty barn could result in a whole herd of cattle coming down with pneumonia.

His father straightened up and looked at him.

“It’s a waste of time,” Arthur said. “I want to quit.”

His father dug around in his ear with a dirty finger. “Better speak to your mother,” he said at last.

“I already did.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

It had taken him weeks to work up the courage to approach her, and even more weeks to work out which words were the right ones, the ones that would convince her. How could he explain to her the pointlessness of carrying on? The futile years he had spent sitting at a desk. The endless exams, and his failure to pass them, and the fact that he didn’t care. In the end, all the reasons and all the words he could think of added up to just one sentence.

“It ain’t teachin’ me nothin’ I need to know,” he’d told her. He’d stood awkwardly in the kitchen, six foot two in his socks, two hundred and forty pounds, a man, not a boy,
aching
to do a man’s work. If one of the plow horses had dropped in its tracks, Arthur could have slung the great leather collar around his own neck and finished the job himself, no trouble at all. At school he could hardly squeeze his body into the space between the desk and the seat. He wanted to say, “Look at me, Mum! Look at me! I shouldn’t be sittin’ at those desks anymore.” But he knew that argument would cut no ice.

His mother was chopping onions, wiping the tears away with the back of her wrist. Her mouth was a straight white line. She said, “Arthur, you don’t know what you’re going to need to know in the future.”

Maybe she was right about that, but he was pretty sure he knew what he was not going to need to know, namely Latin, chemistry, physics, math, French, history, geography, and Charles Dickens. It was true that there was a machine shop at school that had some handy tools in it, but even there he hadn’t learned anything his father hadn’t taught him already.

“If they could teach you how to predict the weather,” he said, “that would be good. But they don’t teach stuff like that.
Useful
stuff. They
don’t teach useful stuff
.”

She looked at him uncertainly. “Don’t they?” She’d only been as far as grade eight herself.

“No.”

She hesitated for a moment and he held his breath. But then her mouth went tight again.

“They taught you to read and write,” she said. “You didn’t think that was useful at the time, but everyone needs to know how to read and write.”

“Yeah, but I can!” Arthur said. “I know all that stuff! And adding and subtracting and multiplying and that other one—dividing. I don’t need more than that, Mum. All the rest I need to know, Dad can teach me. And he needs me on the farm. He needs help. He’s got too much work to do on his own.”

He felt exhausted. He’d never strung so many sentences together in his life. Surely she must see that he was right.

But she pressed her lips together and shook her head. “Your father’s managed just fine all these years; he can manage a few more.” She sighed and turned to face him directly, holding the onion knife out to the side, and he knew that he had lost. “A man without an education is at a disadvantage, Arthur. Your father is at a disadvantage. He’s a good farmer, but he’s at a disadvantage with educated people.” She smiled at him. “You’ll thank me one day. I promise you. When you have your grade twelve, you’ll thank me.”

His father, still waggling his finger in his ear, looked at him helplessly. “What did she say?” he asked.

“She said I’d thank her one day.” Arthur’s voice was so dragged down by misery it was hardly audible, even to him.

“Oh,” his father said. “Yeah, well…” He took the nail he’d been using to test for rot and pressed the point of it into another plank of wood. It sank in ominously. “Gotta get at this quick,” he said. His voice was sad, apologetic. He’d have liked to help, but he couldn’t.

November. Arthur and Jake trudged to school each day in the dark and trudged home again in the dark, and one thing to be grateful for was at least, now that Jake was older, they didn’t have to go together. Most days Jake went in early to meet with his friends and Arthur went at the last possible moment, sliding in the door just as the bell rang. He and Jake were in separate classrooms—something else to be grateful for—they didn’t see each other during the day except at lunchtime. He sat at his too-small desk in an ill-lit classroom and looked out the window at the gray, snow-heavy sky, and endured. All his friends had left school now, to take jobs at the sawmill or in the silver mines or on their fathers’ farms. He got to see them only on Saturday nights. He and Carl Luntz, his best friend, would walk into town together with Carl’s older brothers, and meet up with Ted Hatchett and Jude Libovitz and the rest, and they’d go and hang about down by Ben’s Bar. They weren’t old enough to go inside, but the liquor generally found its way out, and every Saturday night without fail there would be a fight about something or other and someone would go home with a broken nose or a couple of black eyes. Arthur mostly didn’t take part in the fighting. He could never get that worked up about things and the only person he’d ever wanted to hit was Jake. But he was happy enough just standing on the sidelines, watching.

Carl and his brothers were on the peaceful side too, but Ted Hatchett and Jude Libovitz were both enthusiastic fighters. Especially Ted. Ted loved fighting—any excuse would do. He also loved liquor, so one way or another Arthur and Carl generally ended up carting him home between them, each with one of Ted’s arms across his shoulders, back to where he lived with his mother on Crow River Road. Ted worked in the silver mine. His father had been killed in an accident at the sawmill when Ted was small and his mother wouldn’t let him near the place. She insisted that he work in the mine instead, which involved two hours’ walk, morning and night. But Ted didn’t seem to mind. He had no brothers or sisters, so he and his mother were on their own and Arthur got the impression they were pretty close.

“I’m an only child,” Ted wailed mournfully one night as Arthur and Carl dragged him along through the darkness. “Half an orphan, and an owowownly child. So sad, so sad.”

“Sad for your mum, all right,” Carl muttered breathlessly. Ted was even bigger than Arthur, so he was quite a load. “If she could only have one she sure deserved better than you.”

“That’s unkind.” Ted was exhaling alcohol fumes powerful enough to melt the snow under their feet. “Isn’ he unkind, Art?”

“Dunno about that,” Arthur said, grinning to himself in the darkness. “Could be right.”

Ted’s mother would greet them grimly at the door on each occasion, survey Ted’s bloody nose or half-torn-off ear and say, “Take him upstairs. I don’t know why you bother with him. Just leave him in a ditch next time.” Though she would thank them both on their way out.

If it was raining or snowing too hard to go into town, Arthur usually went over to the Luntzes’ farm and sat on Carl’s bed and watched him whittle antlers out of driftwood. Carl’s parents, Otto and Gertie Luntz, had emigrated from Germany and still spoke with funny accents, but the boys had all been born in Canada. Their farm was bigger than the Dunns’, big enough that it would support all three boys and their families in due course, and the farmhouse was bigger too, so each boy had a good-sized room of his own. Walking into Carl’s room was like walking into a forest. He had antlers on his wall that any stag would have been proud to own. He’d pick up bits of driftwood on the beach and whittle them into prongs and then glue the prongs together at exactly the right angle and sand them down until you couldn’t find a join if your life depended on it. His walls were covered with antlers—moose, caribou, white-tailed deer—and every now and then he’d stick a real set up there in the midst of them and ask Arthur or whoever happened to be passing his bedroom door to pick it out, and nobody ever could.

“But vy doss he do it, Artur?” Mr. Luntz would whisper—loudly—his brow furrowed in mock perplexity. “Dat is wot I asks. Der is so many deers in dis country, der is so many, many antlers, so vy ’e makes more? You are a friend of him, so maybe you know?” Carl, without looking up from his whittling, would say mildly, “A friend of
his,
Dad, not a friend of
him,
” and Mr. Luntz would wink at Arthur and Arthur would grin shyly back.

He loved Saturday nights. The rest of the week had nothing going for it whatsoever. The kids he sat beside at school—those who had stayed on after they were sixteen—were mostly nice enough, but he didn’t belong with them. They were the brainy ones, most of them town-bred, like Steve Williams, whose father ran the Hudson’s Bay store, or John Adams, whose father was the minister at the Presbyterian church. All of them were younger than Arthur. They would nod at him when he came in to take his seat; he was a fixture, like one of the desks. The teacher would start talking and Arthur’s brain would shut down automatically—there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. He would stare out the window at the road and at the fields behind it, and the dark, silent trees behind the fields, and his brain would just sit there like a lump of cold pudding. Once, in the middle of a history lesson—it was Canadian history, which turned out, incredibly, considering how little of it there was, to be more boring than the history of any other country on earth—a timber wolf slid out of the shadows, head low, body crouched, yellow eyes fixed on the school. No one else noticed it. The teacher’s voice droned on. Arthur watched the wolf. The silver-gray of its coat against the silver-gray of the birches behind it. The stillness, as if time itself had paused for a moment. The pale, watchful eyes. You could see how it belonged where it was, how it was meant to be in that landscape. You could imagine that it and the shadowed trees behind it were waiting for humans to move on, or die out, so that they could reclaim the land. “Watch out for the traplines,” Arthur thought, though his father wouldn’t be pleased to see it so close to the farms. As if it had heard him, the wolf turned and melted back into the woods.

The moment the bell rang at the end of the day Arthur was off, stamping through the snow, back to the farm to help his father with whatever needed doing. And lots needed doing, even in winter—repairs they hadn’t had time for during the summer months, maintenance of the buildings, care of the livestock. The cattle were all in the barn now, the pigs in the shed tacked onto the side of the barn, the horses in their stable. All of them needed to be fed and watered and have the muck cleared out and fresh bedding put down. They needed their feet inspected and their ears looked into and the occasional pat on the nose to encourage them through the long dark winter days.

Jake was meant to go straight home too, to do his share, but it seemed there was always something that kept him at school late. Arthur didn’t care, but his father did.

“Where you bin?”

“At school.” Jake’s face shining with innocent enthusiasm. He was thirteen now, and sometime during the last year his looks had turned the corner from being sweet to being handsome: all planes and angles, and that wheat-colored hair.

“You come straight home after school. You got work to do.”

“But I can’t, Dad! We’re putting on a play—a
real
play, by Shakespeare. It’s called
Romeo and Juliet,
and I’m Romeo. He’s the hero. He commits suicide.”

Arthur paused in his task of cleaning a sore on a cow’s udder and considered the idea of Jake committing suicide. He turned it over in his mind a couple of times, resting his head against the cow’s warm belly. Jake dead and gone. The idea had appeal all right.