The Other Side of the Bridge (38 page)

Other things were going on in the world: major, historic things that were of infinitely greater importance than the small matter of one man’s love for a woman who was being stolen by his brother. In the middle of November a grainy picture of a battleship called the
Tirpitz
was taped to the window of the post office so that everybody could see it, though you couldn’t actually see much for the billows of black smoke pouring out of the belly of the ship. It was the very last German battleship, so they said, and now it was at the bottom of the sea. The war was nearly over and Hitler was on the run. A few months back the RAF had dropped more than two thousand tons of bombs on Berlin in one night; there couldn’t be anything left of it but dust. Any day now peace would be declared, and everything would return to how it was before.

Everyone knew, though, that nothing would be as it was before. Not for anyone. The prison camp guard arrived one morning not long before Christmas with letters for the boys. They excused themselves immediately after lunch and took them to the parlor, which was their bedroom, to read. Usually when they got letters they read bits out to each other and if you were in the kitchen you would hear them jabbering away, even laughing sometimes at bits of family news. It was Arthur’s mother who noticed that there wasn’t any jabbering this time.

“They’re very quiet,” she said suddenly. Arthur looked up from the buckle he was sewing on a harness. It was true, there wasn’t a sound from the parlor. He and his mother looked at each other, he with the pliers poised to pull the needle through, she with her hands in the sink.

“Do you think…” his mother said, but at that moment Dieter/ Bernhard appeared in the doorway. His face was strained.

“Dieter’s brudder,” he said. “Is tod. Dead. He is killed.”

“Oh!” Arthur’s mother said. “Oh, the poor child…” She was already halfway across the room, drying her hands on a tea towel as she went. The boy—Bernhard, this must be, the one who drove Otto’s tractor (finally Arthur knew which was which)—stood aside and she went into the parlor. She’d have her arms around Dieter in a second, Arthur knew. It was so easy for women—their arms opened out instinctively and they gathered in whatever hurt there was and that was that; they didn’t even have to think about it. Arthur and Bernhard looked at each other helplessly, then looked away.

A few lucky men came home on leave for Christmas. You’d have thought that if the war was nearly over, as they kept saying it was, they could call it quits now and let everyone go home for good, but no, the best they could do was give some of them thirty days’ leave before sending them back to the slaughter. Then, the week before Christmas, Ted Hatchett did come home for good. Of the truckload of boys who had gone down to North Bay to enlist, he was the only one, apart from Arthur himself, who was still alive.

“You must go to see him, Arthur,” his mother said, though he knew that all too well himself. “Apparently he nearly died, he was in the hospital in England for a whole year, but he’s well enough to see people now. He’ll feel strange, being back. You must visit him.”

Arthur went, full of guilt and foreboding. What could he say? What could he say to a friend who had nearly died in battle while he himself had stayed safe and snug at home? Ted had been overseas for nearly five years. Five years of being shot at and bombed, of being soaking wet and freezing cold and having your friends blown to pieces around you. Five years during which Arthur had done what, exactly? Milked the cows. Slept in his own bed every night. Eaten three good meals a day. He trudged through the snow filled with dread.

Ted’s mother looked terrible, and he should have been warned by that. Should have realized something was badly wrong when she wasn’t dancing with relief and joy that her son had come home from war. She managed to smile at Arthur when she opened the door but didn’t say anything. She ushered him into the living room, where a bed had been made up in the corner, and then left him and Ted alone. It was dark in the living room and Arthur couldn’t make out Ted’s face. He said, “Hiya, Ted. How are ya?” before his eyes adjusted to the light.

There was a scar running down the right side of Ted’s face, with a stretch of shiny pink skin covering the eye socket. And as Arthur’s eyes adjusted to the dim room, he saw more: saw that the blankets were stretched smooth and flat across the bed, smooth and flat as a tabletop, where Ted’s legs should have been. And that where his left arm should have been there was an empty sleeve, folded and pinned across his chest. He was looking at Arthur out of one eye so savagely bright it made Arthur think of an animal caught in a trap, an animal you’d kill as quickly as you could to put an end to its pain. Arthur turned around and left the room.

In the kitchen he stopped, head down, breathing hard. Ted’s mother was peeling potatoes and crying into the sink. She looked at Arthur, her face all blotchy with grief, and said, “Talk to him, Arthur. Please talk to him.”

Arthur went back to the living room and tried again. He managed to say, “I’m real sorry,” but that was it. He stood for a minute with his face averted and then he turned and went home.

He was sick with himself. Sick with the world. He wanted to smash something, anything, cleave something in two. He started clearing land, a couple of acres he and his father had just begun working on when his father died. More land to farm was the last thing he needed right now but hacking down trees was the only job he could think of that was violent enough to ease his feelings. Part way through the first afternoon he looked up from the pit of a root he was digging out and saw Dieter and Bernhard looking down at him. They were carrying axes too—they must have raided the shed—and such was his state of mind that for a moment Arthur thought they had come to kill him. It seemed entirely right; he wouldn’t even have resisted. Then they pointed their axes at the nearby trees and raised their eyebrows and he saw they felt the need for a bit of violence too, so he nodded and waved a hand at the surrounding bush—go ahead, hack ’em all down, rip the small ones out by the roots, the more the better. For three days, while snow drifted softly down around them, they attacked the forest like a raging storm, chopped and sawed, then harnessed up all four horses and dragged roots out of the ground like rotting teeth, till the place looked like their very own battlefield, cratered and ruined and smashed to bloody pulp.

At dusk on the third day Jake appeared, limping through the trees like a pale ghost. Arthur saw him coming out of the corner of his eye. He was in mid-swing, about to take another blow at the smooth rounded skin of a beech tree, and suddenly he saw blood on the snow. A big splash of blood, red as Laura’s scarf. He closed his eyes for a moment, the axe still raised, and when he opened them again it wasn’t blood, it was just a big clod of churned-up earth, black as night, not red at all. He lowered the axe and looked at Jake. The shock of seeing Ted Hatchett had actually succeeded in driving the business of Jake and Laura out of his mind for several days, but now it was back. Jake met his eyes and there was a pause, during which Arthur wondered if maybe Jake had seen blood on the snow as well.

“What?” Arthur said, and Jake said, quietly, that their mother wanted them to stop now and put everything away because tomorrow was not only Sunday, it was Christmas Eve.

There were two services, one in the morning and one in the evening. The church was crammed for both of them; even those who were not normally among the faithful turned out on Christmas Eve. It didn’t feel very festive, though. Five years of war had drained the capacity for festive feeling out of people. The war might be coming to an end in theory, but in practice the telegrams were still arriving and peace was just an unreal dream. At the morning service Reverend March did his best, preaching a sermon about the Christmas gift of hope and about giving your pain to God. Arthur would have liked to be uplifted by it but wasn’t. He didn’t feel hopeful about anything and the bit about giving your pain to God made him think of Ted Hatchett. He imagined Ted holding out his pain to God with the one hand he had left—Here you go, God, it’s all yours. What happened next, exactly? Arthur couldn’t see for the life of him how it was supposed to help. He knew that Reverend March was smarter than he was so he should take it on trust, but he couldn’t, so he gave up and watched Laura instead.

She was in her usual pew at the front of the church, and Arthur had positioned himself, as he always did, so that he had a clear view of her back. Her back was very straight and slim and upright. Looking at it calmed him, and after a while the thought came to Arthur that the bit in her father’s sermon about hope might have something in it after all. Maybe he could hope, where Laura was concerned. Maybe he had been wrong to be so fearful about her and Jake. Just look at her sitting there, listening so intently to what her father was saying. She wasn’t Jake’s kind of girl. In fact, if you tried to imagine the absolute opposite of Jake’s kind of girl, Laura would be it. Jake would have had no interest in her whatsoever if he hadn’t seen that Arthur was in love with her. He liked girls with what he called “a little bit of fun” in them, by which he meant girls who would accompany him to the barn. Laura would never accompany Jake to a barn in a million years.

And he must know that. Jake, sitting on the other side of their mother now, thinking about God knew what, must know that. He was probably tired of her already. He was just doing what Jake had always done; he was saying, “Bet you.” Bet you I can take her away from you. Bet you I’m better than you at this, like I’m better than you at everything. When he had tortured Arthur a little more he would drop her and move on. And maybe Laura would be sad for a couple of days but then she’d see Jake for what he really was and be relieved that he was gone.

All day that thought comforted him. He went over to Otto’s farm after lunch to see to the pigs—Sunday or not, Christmas Eve or not, the animals had to be fed—and Laura waved cheerily to him from the kitchen window. Pleasure washed over Arthur like sunshine. It was going to be all right.

It was after the evening service, when Reverend March was standing at the back of the church shaking hands with his congregation and wishing them a Merry Christmas, that Arthur saw Jake come up to Laura and whisper something to her. Arthur was standing with his mother, waiting his turn to shake the Reverend’s hand, so he had a good view. He saw Jake come up behind her and bend his head and whisper in her ear. Laura’s eyes widened a little and she flushed, and then she turned and looked up at him, and smiled.

Was it the smile that did it, that caused the cold snake of fear to coil around Arthur’s heart? Or the angle of her chin as she turned her face upward to look at Jake? Or was it simply the light that came into her eyes when she heard his whisper—the brightness, the happiness, the pure and unmistakable yearning in those clear, gray eyes.

He couldn’t look at Jake. Couldn’t be in the same room with him. He spent as much time as possible out in the barns, but the weather didn’t cooperate; in the middle of January the temperature hit forty below. If you stayed outside for more than a couple of minutes you could feel the marrow freezing in your bones. In desperation Arthur took to visiting Ted Hatchett. He’d go and sit with him for an hour or so in the afternoons. It was impossible to say if Ted welcomed the visits but his mother certainly did. She was so grateful it made Arthur ashamed. He was there to get away from Jake and to ease his own guilt, and also because in Ted’s presence everything, including life itself, seemed trivial, and there was a certain bleak comfort in that.

He could never think of anything to say, of course; he sat there racking his brains for some event he could tell Ted about. Not a whole lot was going on.

“Pigs chewed through the barn door last night.”

Ted turned his head slowly and looked at him. It was hard to tell if he was interested. The Hatchetts weren’t farmers—Ted’s father had worked in the sawmill and Ted himself in the silver mine—so he might not care all that much about pigs. But it was the only thing that had happened all week.

“They ain’t hungry,” Arthur explained. “Just bored. They hate bein’ inside. They like rootin’ about in the soil, lookin’ for bugs and such. Got to give them lots of straw to root about in in the winter or they go nuts an’ start eatin’ the barn. Boys didn’t put down enough straw yesterday.”

Ted said nothing. As far as anyone knew there was nothing physical preventing Ted from talking but apparently he hadn’t said a word since he was wounded. He’d been a tank gunner—Arthur knew a few more details now, from his mother—and had been somewhere in Italy. The tank hit a mine and blew up and everyone else in it had died.