The Other Side of the Bridge (17 page)

Jake turned his head away for a minute, gazing at the door their father had gone out of. He looked about six years old lying there, and at the same time about sixty. After a minute he looked back and said, “Did you mean what you said, Art? When we were on the bridge? Did you want me to fall?”

The breath came out of Arthur in a rush, as if he’d been hit in the stomach. He’d been prepared for shouts of accusation or savagely whispered threats of revenge, or for Jake to say he’d hate him for the rest of his life, but not this direct, simple, unbearable question. When he was finally able to speak, all he could say was “Jesus, no, Jake. Oh, Jesus, no,” the words coming out between a croak and a sob.

Jake studied him for a while. Then he said, “How’s Dad?”

“What?” Arthur said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. He could hear their mother walking around upstairs. If she overheard them it would kill her.

“Was Dad very upset?”

“Jesus, Jake! What are you talking about?”

Jake looked at him steadily. “Was he upset?”

“Jesus!” Arthur said, in agony all over again. “Of course he was!” It was the simplicity of the questions he couldn’t bear, and the knowledge that Jake must have been lying on a hospital bed, unable to move, asking himself those questions for three whole months.

“He didn’t come and see me,” Jake said. “Not once.”

“Mum wanted to!” Arthur said in anguish. “It cost a lot of money for someone to go. They couldn’t both go.”

Jake looked away. Finally, without looking back, he said, “Anyway, I guess it doesn’t matter.” He seemed about to say something else, but they heard their mother’s footsteps on the stairs.

How do you go about making amends for something like that? A lifetime wouldn’t be long enough.

That summer it seemed to Arthur that his life had changed forever—it was inconceivable that things could ever return to how they had been before. And yet they did. Labor Day came, the end of the summer holidays, and his mother made him go back to school. It was incredible. There he was, nineteen years old and the size of a truck, every last vestige of childhood wrung out of him by five months of anguish, sitting at a desk like a little kid, back in grade eleven for the second time.

His friends, when he saw them—Carl, Ted, and the others—couldn’t believe it either. They didn’t exactly say so, but Arthur knew they found the idea downright embarrassing. None of them was the type to give unasked-for advice but Carl said once, in an undertone, speaking out of the side of his mouth and looking off into the woods, “Why don’t you just stop goin’, Art? She can’t make you. You’re bigger’n she is.” Arthur thought about it. Imagined himself standing in the kitchen, saying, “I ain’t goin’, Mum. That’s all there is to it. I just ain’t goin’.” But he could never get the picture to come clear. He had never defied her and guessed he never would.

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.