The Other Side of the Bridge (16 page)

Ian stood under the trees at the edge of the farmyard, out of range of the blocks of light cast by the windows. Upstairs the light was on in Carter’s room. The truck was parked over by the barn; Ian went over and had a look at it. As far as he could tell in the darkness, it didn’t look any worse than it always had.

He went back to his vantage point and waited for Laura to appear. The night air was still cold—it was only May, after all. He hunched his shoulders and stuffed his hands in his pockets. It was a relief to have the snow gone so he didn’t have to worry about leaving footprints. For five or six months of the year it was really too dangerous to come. Now all he had to beware of was Arthur, who sometimes came out to take a leak against a tree rather than go upstairs to the bathroom. Or Carter—the idea of Carter discovering him made Ian’s hair stand on end.

He knew what everyone would think, if he were caught. There would be scandal. He’d be called a Peeping Tom. A pervert. But that wasn’t so. Sure, he fantasized about Laura, but he had never seen her naked, and it was only when she had been breast-feeding March that he’d seen her breasts. If that had been the purpose of his visits he would have given up long ago. But that was not why he came. He wasn’t sure exactly why he did come, but it wasn’t for that. It reassured him to know that she was there, that was all. He came to check that everything was as it should be.

One of the dogs nuzzled his legs, and he reached down to pat it. When he looked up, Laura was coming into the kitchen. She paused in the doorway and pushed her hair back off her face in a gesture of fatigue, and Arthur, who had looked up when she appeared, stood up, quite quickly for him, crossed the kitchen, put his arms around her, and drew her close. Laura rested her head against his chest, her eyes closed. She rubbed his back, very gently, with her hands.

Ian watched, electrified. After a moment or two they separated, and began turning off the lights in preparation for going up to bed. But Ian stood on, long after the darkness had closed in around him, holding their image in his mind.

SIX

COW KILLED ON NORTH ROAD

CANADA EXTENDS HEARTIEST OF WELCOMES TO THEIR MOST GRACIOUS MAJESTIES

—Temiskaming Speaker,
April/May 1939

H
ow long would it take to atone? Arthur, watching the repercussions of Jake’s accident rippling out across their lives, saw that it was going to take forever.

Jake was in the hospital for three months. At first, until he was well enough to be moved, he was in the hospital in New Liskeard, and then they transferred him to Sudbury, farther south. The transfer was done in a proper ambulance rather than the hearse, and that plus the hospital fees, plus the four operations it took to put Jake’s bones back in the right places, plus his mother’s few trips to Sudbury to visit her child, cost money they didn’t have. Arthur’s father, who in the months since the accident had developed deep grooves down the sides of his face, had to borrow the money from the bank. Debt. They were in debt. The very word made Arthur’s guts churn with anxiety.

Until that time he hadn’t given money much thought. They’d never had much, but neither had anyone else they knew. Money was something people in the towns and cities had: Mr. Taggert, the bank manager in Struan, or Mr. Fitzpatrick, who owned the sawmill—they had money. Most of the farmers in the area wouldn’t see more than twenty dollars from one year to the next. But they didn’t consider themselves poor. With the exception of salt and sugar and tea, they grew just about everything they ate, and for the other things they needed—tools, nails, shoes, gas for the truck, the odd bit of farm machinery when the bits they had were past mending—if you didn’t have the money you paid in kind. Even the doctor and the vet were happy if you paid them in chickens or ham or a bushel of corn.

But everyone knew about debt nowadays. Even if you couldn’t count to ten, you knew about debt. The men—hobos—wandering up the dusty road to Struan, looking for work, had brought with them tales of horror from all over the country. Terrible droughts on the big farms out in the prairies, people starving in alleyways in the cities, even kids being sold by their parents in the hope that their new “owner” would feed them well and not work them to death. Hair-raising stories that made you grateful that Struan was where it was, though even here things were hard. Alongside “debt” were other words that had come to have a frightening reality, here in the North as well as everywhere else. “Destitution,” for instance. “Starvation.”

The small farms around Struan had been lucky, compared to many. The drought hadn’t hit them so hard and the fields were small and surrounded by woods, so that even in severe dry spells the wind couldn’t blow the topsoil away. They weren’t totally isolated from what was happening in the world outside, of course—the price of wheat affected them, and the demand for milk—but most of the farms, including the Dunns’, were mixed and on a small scale; if they couldn’t sell one thing they could sell another, and if they couldn’t sell anything at all they could eat it, and sit tight, and wait for better times.

But the hospital wouldn’t accept a cow in payment. The hospital wanted money. A lot of money. Arthur heard a sound downstairs one night about three
A.M.
He got out of bed and crept along to the top of the stairs and saw his father lower himself into the chair by the stove as if he were an old man, and then just sit there, staring at nothing.

One evening he went back to the bridge. He’d been trying to comfort himself with the thought that he couldn’t have saved Jake anyway, but he needed to know that for sure. Standing on the bridge, looking down at the surging water, he had a brief moment of hope, because although he’d got to Jake pretty damned fast after he fell, he could see that he would not have been able to get there in time to catch him, even if such a thing were possible. But there might have been another way, a much simpler way. He left the bridge and walked along the bank, studying the structure of it from the side, and felt his innards clench within him. He went back and walked out to the middle of it, where he and the cow had stood, and lay down on his stomach and hung his head over the side and reached under, groping for the pole Jake had been hanging from. He felt his fingers touch it, the cold, slippery smoothness of it. He could have reached Jake’s hand, if he had tried. He could have pulled him to safety. But he had not tried. He had done nothing. He had said “Good.”

That word. He tried to tell himself Jake wouldn’t have been able to hear it over the rush of the water. He clung to that hope.

Had he known that this time Jake wasn’t crying wolf? Sometimes he thought he must have, deep down. Jake had been annoying him so much that day, maybe he had even willed him to fall. Maybe, just for a moment, at the very heart of him, he had wanted Jake dead.

He wished someone would punish him, send him to jail or something, though he knew there could be no worse punishment than watching what his parents were going through. He wanted to confess but couldn’t bring himself to do it. He should have confessed at the time. He remembered his mother, bending over Jake’s twisted body, crying, “What happened? Oh, what happened?” Remembered himself telling her Jake had slipped. He should have told her the truth then and there. He should have said, “I could have saved him, Mum. But I didn’t believe him.” He should have done it then, because it was getting harder to do with every passing day. And worse, much worse, one day soon Jake was going to tell their mother himself, and she would tell their father, and then they would truly despise him. After each of his mother’s trips to Sudbury, Arthur searched her face to see if she knew. But each time her look was as it always was. What was Jake waiting for? Why didn’t he tell her? There were times when Arthur wished he would.

And then, about two months after the accident, he and his father were out in the bush one afternoon cutting poplar saplings for fencing, and suddenly, out of the blue, his father said, “How did he fall?”

They hadn’t been discussing Jake. They hadn’t been talking at all. It was hot and still, the sky heavy with the threat of rain, and the flies and mosquitoes were driving them crazy. They were just trying to get the job done, fast, so they could get out of the woods.

Arthur straightened up and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He should have been glad that now he could get it over with at last, but his insides had turned to jelly.

“He…slipped,” he said at last. That lie again. He didn’t look at his father. To lose his good opinion—suddenly that seemed unendurable, worse than living with the guilt.

“There’s a handrail,” his father said, not looking at him either. He leaned on the willowy stem of a poplar with one hand, bending it over, ready for the blow.

“Yeah. But he slipped…under it.”

“Slipped under the rail? That what you’re tellin’ me?”

“Yeah.”

“He was foolin’ around,” Arthur’s father said, splitting the trunk of the poplar with one savage blow. “Just like I thought. Foolin’ around, like always.”

“Yeah, but…” Arthur said. This was a possibility he hadn’t thought of, that his father would lay the blame on Jake.

“But nothin’!” his father said, fury in his voice. “But nothin’! Foolin’ around, always foolin’ around. And now look. Look what’s happened.”

He picked up the fallen poplar, furiously hacked off the crown and tossed it onto the pile of other poles. “How’re we goin’ to pay it off, eh? You tell me. You know what happens if we can’t pay it off? You know what happens? The bank takes the farm. That’s what happens.”

Arthur’s heart was pounding. He felt words like pebbles rolling around in his mouth, so many he was almost choking on them, all of them wanting to come out at once.
It was my fault, Dad. I let him fall. I could have saved him. I could have reached him, but I didn’t. I thought he was cryin’ wolf again, but I think I knew he wasn’t. I think I knew. You know what I said when he told me he was slipping? I said, “Good,” Dad. I said, “Good.”

He tried to say it, got as far as opening his mouth, but his father rounded on him; pointed at him with the head of the axe.

“Don’t you damn well make excuses for him! Don’t you damn well do that ever again! You and your mother.” He shook the axe at Arthur. He was so mad spittle was flying from his mouth. “Fourteen damned years old, never taken responsibility for a single damned thing he’s ever done. A baby’s what he is. A big useless nuisance of a baby. And now look.” The still air echoed with his rage.

All summer long, while the sun beat down on the ripening crops, turning them from green to dusty gold, Arthur worked off his guilt in the fields. Sun-up to sun-down he was out there. There was comfort in the labor, but no absolution.

Jake came home at the end of July. An ambulance brought him all the way from Sudbury. More debt, though when you looked at him it seemed disgraceful to think about money. He was in plaster from head to toe; both of his legs were in casts from his feet to his hips and another cast encased him from his hips to his armpits. His face, which was practically all of him that you could see, was so thin the bones seemed about to split the skin.

The ambulance men carried him into the kitchen on a stretcher and put him on the bed Arthur’s mother had made up for him there. When they had gone, and when Arthur’s mother, practically torn asunder by the mixture of anxiety and joy, had gone upstairs to get some further item for Jake’s comfort, and when his father, who hadn’t said a single word since the ambulance arrived, had gone outside again, Arthur went up to Jake’s bed. His mouth was so dry he could hardly speak.

“How ya doin’?” he managed finally.

“Okay,” Jake said.

The two of them looked at each other. Arthur was no more capable of reading his brother’s expression than he had ever been, but he knew he had to say what needed saying right now, before another moment passed. He licked his lips. “About what happened…” he said.

Jake watched him.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur tried to say, but his voice cracked. He swallowed and tried again. “I’m sorry about it.”

It sounded so stupid he almost expected Jake to laugh. You cripple your brother for life and all you can say is “sorry”? But if there were other words he didn’t know what they were.