Covered Bridge (5 page)

“You know the postman, don't you? Oscar McCracken? He's just finished the Sunday mail. He's also our grave-digger, did you know that?”

I could tell now it was Oscar McCracken the way he was walking now away from Ophelia Brown's grave with his head down, watching his shoes.

“Strange rig, that one. A queer duck, that's for sure,” said Old Mac Gleason. “When you get to know Mushrat
Creek a little better you'll find out more than you'll ever need to know about strange rigs like that Oscar McCracken and his grave outside the fence...you know you're the first strangers that have come in to live here for a good while now. You think you'll settle here? You could find a better spot than beside that old broken-down covered bridge...say, that's a funny lookin' dog—what kind of a dog is that anyway—or is it a dog at all—sure, it looks more like a—I don't know what the hell it looks like come to think of it...”

Just then, Mrs. O'Driscoll came along, calling to us from the road. She had been up a ways, visiting after church.

Mrs. O'Driscoll and I and Nerves walked across the covered bridge to our mailbox.

Was there a letter there from Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell? There wasn't, but there was a seed catalogue for Mrs. O'Driscoll and a Police Gazette for O'Driscoll.

At least some of our family was getting some mail.

O'Driscoll looked forward to getting his Police Gazette every two weeks or so. He would save it for Sunday and take it into the parlor after church and sit down in there and read it.

Nobody went in there very often unless maybe there was a visitor in the house. But O'Driscoll liked to go in there on Sunday when his shoes were shined and he had on his white shirt and tie. Sometimes I went in with my
War and Peace
and sat there with him and read silently
there, sitting on the chair with the big sunflowers that matched the couch that O'Driscoll was on.

The parlor smelled of sweet dust and old bread dough. It was very quiet in there. Except for the ticking of the clock on the fake mantelpiece. There were two big old photographs in round frames on the walls, a yellowish color, a man and a woman, stiff collars, sour faces. And one square photograph of a little kid who looked like he hated his clothes. There was something wrong with his face, though. I couldn't figure out what it was. Then O'Driscoll told me one time while we were having breakfast.

He told me that in the old days it took a long time to take a picture.

You had to stay perfectly still for quite a while to get your picture taken because of the way the first cameras were made.

You couldn't smile for that long because your face would get too sore.

That's why everybody in those old pictures looks so grumpy.

Even the little kids.

One Sunday, O'Driscoll was reading his Police Gazette and I was reading my
War and Peace
. I was reading the part where Prince Andrei was retreating from Napoleon in the War of 1812. He was leading his regiment through the dust in August in Russia. And they came along to a lake and all his men stripped off their
clothes and jumped in the water. Then somebody yelled out that Prince Andrei might want to have a swim. So they all got out of the water to let their prince get in and take a swim. And Prince Andrei went in but he was embarrassed about taking off his clothes in front of his men.

It was in Book II, Part II,
Chapter 5
.

On the front page of O'Driscoll's Police Gazette there was a picture of Adolf Hitler, the German who started the war in 1939 that O'Driscoll got lost in. After the war was over they looked all over for Hitler but they couldn't find him. Most people said he committed suicide and his friends burned his body.

Nice to have friends. Even if you're Hitler.

But O'Driscoll's Police Gazette was saying that Hitler was still alive. On the front page there was a big picture of Hitler with his little moustache and a big headline saying the words, “Hitler Is Alive!” The story in the smaller print said that a barber in a country called Patagonia in South America said that Hitler came into his barber shop and got his moustache shaved off. The barber said that Hitler seemed to be a bit fatter than he was when he was losing the war that he started, but that he seemed quite cheerful and even made a few jokes.

“You can't win ‘em all!” the barber said Hitler said.

O'Driscoll left the parlor to go out to the outhouse, and while he was gone I found out one of his secrets.

I was looking through his Police Gazette, taking a
break from
War and Peace
, reading the stories in there. A story about a two-headed parrot. One head would tell a joke and the other head would laugh. Or one head would say, “Why did the parrot cross the road?” And the other head would say, “I dunno. Why did the parrot cross the road?” And the first head would say, “To get to the other side!” And then both heads would laugh their heads off.

And there was a story about a guy in Madagascar or somewhere who found an oyster with not a pearl in it but a whole pearl necklace. But when he took it to the jeweler's, they said the pearls were just imitation pearls, just fake.

Then on the next page there was a story about a drowning sailor being saved by a dolphin.

The sailor fell overboard and swam around for a long time and just as he was going to sink and drown because he was so tired a dolphin swam under him and with the sailor on its back, swam to a beautiful tropical island with the sailor. And the sailor got off there and got married to the Queen of the Amazons and became King of Paradise.

The thing about this story was that O'Driscoll told me and Mrs. O'Driscoll just the other day that that's what happened to him when he was supposed to be drowned in the War. That was the latest he told us. Then he said he
thought
that that was what must have happened because he lost his memory don't forget so he couldn't really be sure.

So O'Driscoll was stealing his stories from the Police Gazette. Telling me and Mrs. O'Driscoll stuff about when he was lost in the war. Getting the ideas from his Police Gazette.

No wonder he only half listened to my tale about a ghost.

But I had other things on my mind.

Things like initials.

O LVS O, for instance.

It had to be Oscar Loves Ophelia.

It had to be.

I
NEVER WENT
to church much when I lived in Lowertown or when I lived in Uplands Emergency Shelter but now that I was living on Mushrat Creek I was going to church almost every Sunday.

It was good to go and hear what everybody was saying about everything. And it felt good to get dressed up on Sunday morning after you did the milking and the separating and you fed the pigs and checked the hen-house for eggs.

At first O'Driscoll tried to get Mrs. O'Driscoll to polish our Sunday shoes and put them on the kitchen table so that when we slept in on Sunday morning we could come downstairs and jump right into these clean shiny shoes and head right out for church with no “delays.”

O'Driscoll told her that all the other farmers' wives in Mushrat Creek did that for
their
husbands and their
sons. He told her that it was a tradition. Then he told her more of what the other women did for their men on Sundays. They got up at five o'clock in the morning, made the fire, got the breakfast, heated up the iron, sponged and ironed the men's pants, ironed clean white shirts for the men, got out the tie they always wore on Sunday, went out and milked the cows, separated the milk, fed the pigs, checked for eggs in the henhouse, came back in, got out the good shoes, cleaned and polished them and then put them in a neat, side-by-side way, right beside the breakfast on the table.

While O'Driscoll was explaining this to Mrs. O'Driscoll, she just stared at him. She didn't really stare at him, she just calmly looked at him for the whole time he was telling her all this stuff about what she was supposed to do on Sunday morning for her
men
!

It was pretty cruel, really.

She didn't say a word, just looking at him, like maybe the way you'd look at a sunset or something.

And the whole time, you could tell, O'Driscoll was wishing she would say something, because if she started talking, then he could stop talking, but as long as she didn't talk at all, he had to keep talking. And the more he talked the worse everything got. It was like watching a cat play with a mouse.

Mrs. O'Driscoll used to call it “the silence.” If O'Driscoll was getting a bit too “cocky,” she would give him “the silence.”

And it seemed to work every time.

O'Driscoll would get more and more excited and say things that got worse and worse.

Mrs. O'Driscoll said once that it was like watching a man dig himself into a deep hole. “You let them dig until they can't get out. Then you wait a while and then you help them get out,” she said.

O'Driscoll was telling her about how it was a mortal sin not to shine your husband's Sunday shoes and that a lot of women up and down the Gatineau Valley were in Hell because they didn't shine their husband's Sunday shoes or if they weren't in Hell already, “they were definitely headed in that direction...”

Mrs. O'Driscoll waited a while and then she gave him a little tiny smile that you could hardly notice. This was the way she helped him out of the hole he was in.

Then she handed him the shoe polish.

He took the polish and gave me a big wink.

The wink was the way he helped himself the rest of the way out of the hole.

After church at home, Mrs. O'Driscoll was putting on her overalls which she never did on Sunday.

“Put on your workin' clothes, Hubbo me boy,” she said. “We're goin' to do a little paintin'.”

“Painting?” I said. “Painting what?”

“Your bridge, my boy,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “Your bridge.”

“We can't paint that bridge. It's too big. You'd need
dozens of cans of paint and scaffolds and rope and all kinds of things.”

“We're only going to paint what we can reach, boy. I've been out gossiping. I heard the priest's housekeeper telling them all what Father Foley said to you that night about workin' on the bridge and Sin and all that. That's wrong, Hubbo. Very wrong. You're not sinning to work for your beliefs. So just to show who's side I'm on, let them have a look at us paintin' this bridge, the both of us. Maybe by the example we set, others will join us and the bridge will be looked at as something worth saving!”

We got some painting done, but not much. Mrs. O'Driscoll only had a small can of red paint and one good brush, so we took turns.

“It's the thought that counts,” Mrs. O'Driscoll was saying, as she hummed a little while I took my turn painting the tongue-in-groove sheeting on the outside of the trellis. I was leaning over the railing while standing on the abutment at our end of the bridge.

“I said I was out gossiping, Hubbo. But I've been doin' more than that. I've been listening.”

“Listening?”

“Yes, my dear Hubbo. A tragic thing happened in this community over fifteen years ago. It involved the daughter of a poor woman I met up the road last Sunday, Mrs. Brown. Her daughter died. Her daughter, Ophelia, who was very young and full of hope, died.”

“Ophelia Brown,” I said. “I saw her gravestone. And Oscar McCracken...”

“Yes, Oscar the mailman was her betrothed.”

“How did she die?” I asked.

“Brain tumor,” she said.

Oscar McCracken and Ophelia Brown were lovers. This was almost twenty years ago. They were going to be married. Suddenly everything changed. Ophelia Brown started acting strange. She went kind of crazy. Looking around as though people were following her. Not talking to her friends. In the church three or four times a day. The tumor affected her brain. They found her in Mushrat Creek. She must have jumped out the ventilation window in the middle of the covered bridge. It was in the early spring. The water was roaring high almost over the center pier. She must have hit her head. Anyway, she was drowned. Father Foley wouldn't give her a proper funeral. He was a young priest then. He had to follow the rules. His hands were tied. Wouldn't let her be buried in the churchyard. Against God's rules, he said. Oscar McCracken started going around watching his feet. Got a hump on his back from it. Ophelia wasn't allowed in the graveyard. She was buried just outside the fence.

We took a break from painting and I showed Mrs. O'Driscoll the initials up in the rafters.

We went in and put the rest of our little bit of paint on the outside boards around the vent where Ophelia Brown had jumped.

The paint lasted a tiny bit longer than it would have because Mrs. O'Driscoll watered it down with some of her tears.

M
Y LETTER
to Fleurette was getting fatter. I was telling her about everything.

I was trying to tell Fleurette all about Father Foley and how Old Mac Gleason called him Foolish Father Foley and that Father Foley was from the town of Farrellton just north of Low up the road and how Old Mac Gleason called him Foolish Father Foley from Farrellton, which sounded funny because of all the F's.

And I wondered while I was writing to her about him what Foolish Father Foley from Farrellton would say to Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell about Hell and what she should do and what she shouldn't do.

Lucky that Father Foley couldn't read people's minds, because if he could and he read my mind in church when I was thinking about Fleurette, he'd probably blast me right straight to Hell for having such thoughts.

Funny part of it was that it was Father Foley who got me started thinking about Sin in the first place. If you yell and scream about Sin all the time, people are going to start thinking about things that they never thought of before.