The Other Side of the Bridge (18 page)

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

W
hen 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.

Mr. Hardy sat down behind his desk and raised his eyebrows at Ian. “Am I right to assume I’m speaking to the next Dr. Christopherson?”

He had smiled, and Ian had felt irritation rising up in him like a wave. “I’ve decided I’d like to study agriculture,” he said.

He’d had no idea he was going to say such a thing until the words came out of his mouth, but it was satisfying to see his teacher’s reaction.

“Agriculture,” Mr. Hardy said slowly, as if he hadn’t heard the word before and wasn’t too sure what it meant.

“Yes,” Ian said. “I’d like to be a farmer.”

Mr. Hardy picked up a pencil and doodled a little square on the blotter on his desk. He nodded thoughtfully. Then he looked across at Ian. “You’ve thought seriously about this, have you, Ian?”

“Yes,” Ian said.

“Have you discussed it with your father?”

“Yes.” Which was a lie. He hadn’t discussed it with anyone, because he had no intention of becoming a farmer. He had spent enough time with Arthur to know that farming was not an easy option. It was just that he seemed to have become allergic to the question. It felt as if people had been asking him that question twice a day since the day he was born. Though maybe it wasn’t so. Maybe he just kept asking it of himself.

“Well,” Mr. Hardy said after another pause. “There’s an excellent school of agriculture in Guelph. Would you like to apply to that?”

Ian’s heart started to thump. Was this it, then? Had he just decided his future in a single spasm of irritation?

“Where is…Guelph, exactly?” he said, as if that had anything to do with anything.

“Southern Ontario. Not far from Toronto.”

There was a long silence. The teacher doodled another square. Ian cast about in his mind for a way out. Finally he said, “Can I think about it?”

Mr. Hardy nodded. “I think that would be a good idea.” He looked up and smiled again, and his smile suggested that he knew Ian was bluffing, which irritated Ian so much that he almost decided to become a farmer after all, out of spite.

But here he was, months later, still thinking about it, or to be accurate, still avoiding thinking about it, and the final exams were upon him. Each year the teachers implied that the exams you were taking now were the most critical ones you would ever face, and each year the moment you’d finished you could see the next lot looming. It was like climbing a mountain—it wasn’t until you reached the top that you realized it wasn’t the top, it was merely a foothill. To add to it all, for some unaccountable reason in the past year he had started creating hurdles for himself, mini-peaks within the overall mountain range. He’d be annoyed with himself if he didn’t achieve an A. He had no idea why. He envied Pete, who seemed to be less concerned about the future with every passing day.

It was math he was studying when his father called him. Math was one subject he’d never worried about. He’d always thought that you could either do it or you couldn’t, so there was no point in studying for it, and he’d continued to believe that right up until he’d flipped open the textbook earlier in the evening and seen the chapter on differential equations and integration. He’d understood it fine when they’d studied it in class, but now it looked like Greek—in fact, parts of it were—and the exam was tomorrow.

He’d been working for a couple of hours when there was a commotion in the hallway downstairs. Loud voices and scuffling. A moment later his father called him from the foot of the stairs in the calm but very definite tone he used when he needed help now, this minute. Ian got up from his desk and went down the stairs fast.

There was a trail of blood leading from the side door to his father’s office, and when he got inside there was a sizable pool of blood on the floor. The room was crowded with people. His father and Sergeant Moynihan were trying to lift a struggling man onto the examination table, and there was another man standing against the wall. Most of the blood was coming from the first man, from a wound in his thigh. Ian stepped forward, grabbed a flailing leg and helped heave him onto the table. He didn’t know the man, but guessed from his accent—not French, but something European—and from the stink of alcohol that he was a logger. He was swearing in fractured English, and Sergeant Moynihan was swearing back. “Just shut up, for Christ’s sake,” he was saying. “You’ve caused enough trouble for one night, we don’t need to listen to you as well.”

“Bloody bastar’,” the man said, trying to lunge at the man against the wall. “Stinkin’ bloody bastar’.”

He was young, early twenties at most, and strongly built, and Sergeant Moynihan had to lean hard on his shoulders while Ian lay across his legs. The second he was on the table Ian’s father jammed his hand into the man’s groin to stop the bleeding. It had been spurting out, bright red blood. That spurting, pumping action and bright red blood was bad news, Ian knew. His father tapped the man’s chest sharply with his free hand and said, “Listen to me. You’ve got a bad cut here. If you don’t let us see to it you’re going to be in real trouble. Do you understand?”