The Other Side of the Bridge (6 page)

He was embarrassed. He thought he must somehow have done it wrong. Squeezed too hard or not hard enough or not in the right place. Then he thought maybe he was just too old, that only little kids could do that sort of thing. But Jake didn’t stop doing it as he got older; the hugs got less intense and less frequent but he still hugged her from time to time and it still had the same effect. It was as if he flicked a switch and a light came on inside her. She would glow for half an hour afterward.

“Time Jake started helpin’ out,” Arthur’s father said when Jake was seven years old.

They’d just finished supper. Arthur’s father was sitting sideways in his chair at the table, mending a harness. He had a leather-needle, fearsomely sharp—he’d already stabbed himself with it twice, which was maybe what had given him the head of steam necessary to bring up the subject of Jake—and he was forcing it through the leather with the help of a pair of pliers.

Arthur’s mother was washing the supper dishes. Arthur was at the far end of the table cleaning the shotgun, a job his father had entrusted to him on his twelfth birthday and of which he was hugely proud. His father had taught him to use the gun as well, and said he’d give him five cents for any rabbit or crow he shot, rabbits being good for the pot and a real nuisance around the row crops, and crows being just plain evil.

Jake had disappeared the minute his plate was empty, like he always did. They could hear him outside. He’d created so much fuss when Arthur was allowed to shoot the gun and he was not that his mother had bought him a bow and arrow set, a small one, from the Hudson’s Bay. He’d painted a big round target on the side of the barn and every now and then there was a
thwack
as an arrow landed. Arthur knew that during the day, when their father was out in the fields and their mother was safely occupied elsewhere, Jake had a different sort of target. He would heap a couple of handfuls of dry grass and twigs around the bottom of a fence post, and half-fill an empty tin can with gasoline from the tank in the barn. Then he’d set the can on top of the fence post, light his heap of dry grass with a match, and attempt to shoot the can off the post. When he succeeded there would be a gratifying
whoosh
and flames would leap up the sides of the post. He was usually pretty quick to douse it with water, but even so a number of fence posts were getting badly charred and one of these days their father was going to notice.

Arthur worried about this. In the past couple of years his role as his brother’s protector had widened to include protecting him from the consequences of his own actions. Their father was an even-tempered man and it took a lot to make him wrathful but Jake could provide a lot, and when their father really got going it was an awesome sight. Arthur had been thrashed by him only once, for leaving a stump fire unattended, and he’d taken care not to give him cause again. Jake had been whipped several times. He’d made the most of it, walking with a limp for days, but it had been their mother who really suffered, and so Arthur suffered too. Moreover, he suspected that their father did as well; he had no wish to hurt his wife and would have spared her if he could, and that made him madder at Jake than ever. So Arthur started going out after each of Jake’s arson attacks and surreptitiously scraping away the charred wood from the base of the posts. Sometimes he had to sand them down to get rid of the black.

Now Arthur could hear the reluctance in his father’s voice as he brought up the subject of Jake helping with the chores. He hated a confrontation with his wife more than he hated crows.

“Oh, I don’t think he’s big enough yet, Henry.” Arthur’s mother turned around from the sink. “You only have to look at him.”

“I did look at him,” Arthur’s father said, reluctance dragging his voice down to a mumble. “He looks big enough to do chores. Feed the chickens. Take out the swill bucket. Things like that.”

Jake chose that moment to bound in from the farmyard.

“You think you’re pretty strong, Jake?” Arthur’s father asked. “Or you still just a kid?”

“Sure, I’m strong,” Jake said, grinning. “I can beat Arthur.”

“Arthur lets you beat him,” his father said, “so that don’t prove nothin’. See if you can lift that chair.” He nodded at a kitchen chair. Arthur’s mother turned around to watch, anxious, her hands dripping suds.

Jake grabbed the chair by its back and heaved it off the ground. He swung it back and forth in tight arcs, grinning at the three of them.

“Bet you can’t carry it to the door,” his father said, and Jake lurched over to the door.

“That doesn’t prove anything, Henry,” their mother said.

“Sure does. If he can lift the chair he can lift the swill bucket.”

“There’s a world of difference between lifting something and carrying it all the way out to the barn.”

“Not such a big difference as all that.” Arthur’s father put down the harness and wiped his hands on his shirtfront, then picked up the harness again and stared at it hard. Maybe he was going to have to stab himself with the needle again before he could carry on.

Arthur’s mother pursed her lips. She looked at Jake and said, “You go on outside now, Jake. You too, Arthur.”

Arthur carefully put the gun down on the table and followed Jake outside. They made a show of going around the corner of the house and then slid back and flattened themselves against the wall by the kitchen door.

“He’s just a baby still,” their mother was saying.

There was a pause, during which Arthur imagined he could hear his father thinking there was a good reason for that. He said, “Arthur was doin’ plenty at that age.”

“Arthur’s suited to farmwork. Jake isn’t. You can see that.”

Arthur glanced sideways at Jake. Jake grinned at him. He had great confidence in his mother’s ability to win arguments on his behalf.

Their mother said, her voice quiet but full of pride, “Don’t you see that Jake is different? He’s so clever—he’s going to have choices, Henry. He will have something better than this.”

Arthur could hear their father’s baffled silence. What could be better than this? Finally he said, “Still won’t do him no harm to do his share. Do him good.” He sighed, and Arthur imagined him wiping his hands on his shirt again. “He’s goin’ to grow up soft, Mary, if he don’t do no work. He should do his share. Look at Arthur. Didn’t do him no harm at all, doin’ chores when he was Jake’s age. He done them well, and I don’t remember hearin’ him complain.”

Arthur felt the strange sensation of pride swelling in his chest. He had taken the work for granted, it was what people did—the people he knew, anyway. His friend Carl Luntz worked alongside his father and his two elder brothers just the same. Arthur had never questioned it. Certainly never expected to hear praise.

He felt Jake’s eyes and turned his head to look at him. Jake’s mouth was puckered tight with disgust. His eyes were dark, and Arthur had trouble reading their expression. It wasn’t respect or admiration though, that was for sure.

Arthur’s mother was wrong when she said that everybody loved Jake. There were exceptions.

“Charlie Taggert threw my schoolbook in the mud,” Jake said. He and Arthur were walking home from school. It was September, the worst time of the year as far as Arthur was concerned—endless months of school ahead, cooped up in one stuffy schoolroom at a too-small desk, while outside the maples flamed red and gold and the air was as clear and pure as springwater. Inside was the leaden weight of boredom; outside was the sharp tang of wood smoke and the urgency of shortening days. You could smell the winter coming. You could see it in the transparency of the light and hear it in the harsh warning cries of the geese as they passed overhead. Most of all, you could feel it. During the day the sun was still hot, but as soon as it dipped down behind the trees the warmth dropped out of the air like a stone.

Like the boys on other farms, Arthur headed for the fields as soon as he got home from school in the afternoons in order to get a couple of hours of harvesting in before dark. It had been bone-dry right through June and July, and then just as they were coming up to the corn harvest there’d been a solid week of rain and they’d had to wait for the crop to dry out. Now it was dry and Arthur’s father was out in the fields sunup to sundown. He came in at night covered in dust and sweat and tired almost past eating. Arthur would gladly have played hooky and worked beside him all day, but his mother forbade it and his father let on that he agreed with her.

Jake helped when he was told to. Then, and at no other time. And he worked so slowly and ineptly and with so much complaint that his father said it was hardly worth the bother, though he bothered anyway as a matter of principle. Jake might as well have been growing up in the town for all the interest he showed in the farm.

“Dad says do you want to come and help with a calving,” Arthur said. His father had sent him to fetch Jake, thinking calving at least would interest him. Surely anyone would be interested in a new life beginning.

“Do what?” Jake was playing with a pack of cards he’d found somewhere. His hands moved swiftly, fanning the cards out and folding them together again. They made Arthur think of birds’ wings.

“Come and help. Jessie’s having her calf.”

“Can’t she do it herself?” Jake asked. “She must be able to or there wouldn’t be any cows in the world, they’d all have died out like the dinosaurs.”

It was a good thing it was Arthur that Jake said it to, and not their father. Arthur knew that Jake was just being logical, and meant the comment seriously, but their father would consider it a smart remark and Jake’s smart remarks made him mad.

“Don’tcha want to come and watch, even?”

“Not right now.” Jake slipped all the cards with faces into a certain order so fast you could hardly see his hands move. “I’m kind of busy. Later, maybe.”

It was school he lived for. School and all the goings-on there, triumphs and disasters, friends and enemies. Especially enemies.

“Look at it!” Jake said as they walked home together. He pulled a book out of his schoolbag and brandished it at Arthur. It was covered in mud. Under the mud you could just make out a dark-green cover and the title, in gold print.
English History
. Arthur remembered it, dimly. Kings and queens, dozens of them. Wars, dozens of those too, and all of them with dates, as if anyone cared. Miss Karpinski said the purpose of studying history was that if you didn’t you were doomed to repeat it, but as far as Arthur could see the history books proved that you were doomed to repeat it anyway, so what was the point?

“Look at the state it’s in!” Jake opened the book more or less in the middle. It looked as if someone had placed it facedown in a puddle and leapt up and down on it half a dozen times. “Miss Karpinski’s going to kill me.” He sounded really worried.

“No she won’t,” Arthur said. Miss Karpinski loved Jake. He was the last person in the school she would kill.

“She will! You know what she says about books!”

“What?”

“That they’re sacred! That you’re supposed to treat them with respect and stuff, because they’re the keys that unlock doors.”

Arthur couldn’t remember Miss Karpinski saying those things, but it sounded like her all right. He must have been not concentrating at the time. A failure to concentrate was apparently one of his problems. He was fourteen now and still in grade eight—he should have gone up to the high school, on the other side of Struan, with Carl and the rest of his class a year ago, but he’d failed the exams. Jake, on the other hand, had skipped a year, so now he and Arthur were separated by only two rows of desks. Arthur found this state of affairs almost unendurable, and the worst of it was that it looked set to go on forever. His father would have been happy for him to leave school as soon as the law allowed, which was the day he turned sixteen, but his mother had been so upset by his last report card that she’d said he was going to get his grade twelve if it took him the rest of his life. The fact was, it was going to take him the rest of his life. To start with, to pass grade eight he would have to please Miss Karpinski, who was both judge and jury when it came to the exams. He couldn’t imagine ever pleasing Miss Karpinski.

Jake was still waving the book at him. “What am I going to say to Miss Karpinski?” he asked. His voice was shrill with what appeared to be real anxiety, though with Jake you could never be sure.

“Just tell her it was an accident.”

“But Charlie Taggert says he’s going to do it again! He says he’s going to do it to every single one of my books unless I give him my milk money.”

Arthur looked at him uneasily. Jake was a liar—you couldn’t believe a word he said—but if by some unlikely chance he was telling the truth this time, and if he did get into trouble, and if Arthur were discovered to have known about it but not helped, his mother would never forgive him.

“What do you want me to do about it?” he said reluctantly.

“Beat him up,” Jake said promptly. “He’s a bully.”

Arthur’s brow furrowed. Charlie Taggert was smart and had glasses and Arthur didn’t like him, but he didn’t look like a bully. On the other hand, Jake didn’t look like a bully either but he was. Jake was a subtle bully, a devious bully. He specialized in getting people into trouble. Maybe he simply wanted to get Charlie into trouble. Or maybe Charlie wanted to get Jake into trouble. Or maybe Charlie did want Jake’s milk money. Or maybe Jake had done something to Charlie and Charlie threw the book into the mud to get even, and it had nothing to do with milk money. Where Jake was concerned, Arthur always felt he was in over his head, floundering in a sea of unknown possibilities.