The Other Side of the Bridge (11 page)

“We’re putting it on at Christmas, so we have to practice every night. It’s really good and everybody in town is going to be invited, and we’re going to make posters and send them to all the stores, and they’ll put them in their windows so everyone will know.”

“You come home straight after school. You got work to do.”

“But Dad…”

“You come home straight after school.”

And then in the evening, when supper was over and Jake was in his room doing his homework, and Arthur was in his room not doing his, Arthur would hear their mother’s voice, arguing gently for Romeo.

“It’s so nice that he enjoys school, Henry, and that he’s doing so well. They must think he’s very talented to ask him to be the hero. I think we should let him do it. I think it would be good for him.”

There was silence for a minute. Then Arthur’s father, sounding like a man who knew he was going to lose the argument but had to make his point just the same, said, “They should know better. They should know better than to make farm kids do things after school.”

“It’s only until Christmas, Henry. I think it would be wrong to stop him. After Christmas he will be able to do his fair share of the work again. You and Arthur could manage up till then, couldn’t you?”

Arthur imagined his father’s big heavy face. Imagined him thinking that to say Jake would do his share of the work “again” implied that he had ever done it. But their mother had had a dose of flu a month ago from which she still hadn’t fully recovered, and Arthur knew that his father was worried about her and wanted to cause her as little anxiety as he could. And never could resist her anyway.

Arthur didn’t hate his brother, or not very often. Mostly he just didn’t understand him. How did they get to be in the same family? What did Jake want? Because Arthur definitely got the feeling Jake wanted something; you could see it sometimes: there was a fretfulness, a frustration—something indefinable behind the eyes.

Christmas came and went. Romeo died for love and was a triumph, according to his mother. Arthur had to take her word for it. He and his father missed the performance—they were supposed to go but they were in town buying supplies at the hardware store and lost track of the time. Worse still, they had the truck, so Jake and his mother had to hurry the two miles to the school through the snow with Jake’s fancy costume wrapped up in a paper bag. They arrived with only five minutes to spare and found Mrs. Castle, the English-teacher-turned-director, almost wringing her hands. When they got home, driven by Otto Luntz (it turned out the whole Luntz family had been there, as had practically every other soul in Struan), Jake went straight to his room without speaking.

“He so badly wanted you to come,” Arthur’s mother said to them, tight-lipped with disapproval. “It was so important to him, and he wanted you to see it. You most of all, Henry. You more than anybody.”

“Since when is a damn-fool play so important?” Arthur’s father said sharply, stung by guilt and his wife’s reproach. Arthur couldn’t remember her ever reproaching his father before. “Farming’s important. Work’s important. Time he knew what matters and what doesn’t.”

January and February passed, and were easier to get through than usual because the weather was so bad that the school was closed more often than it was open. At the beginning of March there was a blizzard that blew for ten straight days, and doing the most basic farm chores was so difficult and so unendurably cold that Arthur almost—though not quite—thought that being at school might be a nice rest. Snow piled up against the north side of the house and barns until it reached the roofs, which at least gave them some protection against the howling and demented wind. It buried the pig shed altogether, not once but again and again. Every morning they had to dig down to find it, as if the pigs were victims of an avalanche. It felt like an avalanche, felt as if the entire North Pole was sliding down to bury them.

They were prisoners in their own home and their jailers were the wind and the snow. A couple of times a day they shoveled out a trench from the house to the barn and stable, and another trench to the woodpile, and that was as far as anyone dared to go. Arthur’s mother was anxious about Gertie Luntz, who had had her appendix out on her own kitchen table at the end of February, but it was too dangerous to snowshoe over to check that she was all right. The blizzard would swallow you up within seconds. You could be walking in circles for hours and never know it.

They spent the days huddled around the kitchen stove, mending everything in sight, all except Jake, who spent most of his time in his bedroom, doing whatever it was that Jake did. It was freezing up there—Arthur put off going to bed as long as possible—but still that was where Jake chose to be. The company of his family bored him—that was plain as day. Even his mother seemed to bore him. And it was true that their conversation wasn’t all that stimulating.

“Better get up on that roof.” (This from their father after a groan from the roof timbers.) “Take a shovel. Too much weight on it.”

“Okay.” (From Arthur.)

That would be it for an hour.

“Would anyone like some tea?” (Their mother, cheerfully.)

“Sure.”

Another hour.

Just once, Jake seemed to liven up a bit. It was right after supper—a whole evening of doing nothing lay ahead—and Jake suddenly said, “We should play cards! I’ll go get my pack of cards, okay?”

“I got better things to do with my time than play cards,” their father said.

“You do?” Jake said, looking around the room. They’d run out of things to mend days ago.

“Biggest damned time-waster ever invented,” his father said sharply, suspecting impudence. Jake got up and went to his room.

Near the end of that week one of the horses took sick. They had four shire horses—huge animals, intelligent and willing, whose forebears had been shipped over from the old country by a farmer in New Liskeard twenty years previously and bred by him ever since. This one was a two-year-old gelding called Moses. They had had him nearly a year and he was working out well. But on this dark, snow-driven, subzero morning, when Arthur and his father battled their way out to the barns, they found him restlessly knocking about in his stall. He was off his feed, couldn’t seem to stand still. There was a vet in New Liskeard but he might as well have been on the moon. The nearest phone was in Struan, and even if they got through to him all the roads were blocked. By the afternoon, the blizzard still screaming around the sides of the barn, the horse was worse. By evening he was frantic with pain, throwing himself at the sides of the stall, eyes rolling, froth flying from his mouth.

“Colic,” Arthur’s father said. Arthur wanted to ask, Is he going to die? but couldn’t bring himself to say the words. There was nothing they could do to make things easier for him: he was so crazy with pain they couldn’t even get into the stall to try to quiet him with their hands. One ton of horse, like a freight train out of control. They stood by his stall, stamping their frozen feet, wretchedly keeping him company, until finally, about eight o’clock, they couldn’t stand it anymore, and Arthur’s father went back to the house and got the rifle and shot him.

Jake was in the kitchen when they finally went in, curled up in a chair by the stove, reading a book. He looked up and raised his eyebrows at the sight of the rifle. “You guys hunting in this weather?” he said.

Their father paused. Stood in the middle of the room, head down, studying the floor. Then he went and hung the rifle on its rack over the door, and left the room.

“What did I say wrong now?” Jake asked. Suddenly he was furious, close to tears with rage. “What did I say wrong
now
?”

Arthur, his mind filled with the image of that great still body on the frozen floor, could think of nothing to say.

April. The wind turned around and blew from the south and like magic the snow sagged, collapsed on itself, and melted away. The air smelled of damp earth and things trying to grow, trying to force their way up out of the still-frozen ground.

“Those two there,” Arthur’s father said, nodding at two heifers over by the fence. “Told Otto I’d send ’em over this morning. Simplest thing is, you two take ’em over. Just walk ’em around.”

Arthur nodded. It was Saturday, the best day of the week. Sunday would have been just as good if it weren’t for the fact that it was followed by Monday.

Jake said, “When?”

“Now,” their father said.

“Can’t Art take them?” Jake said. “I have to go into town.”

Their father was in the middle of harnessing the team. He turned slowly and looked at Jake. Arthur felt a prickle of apprehension, and also of annoyance. Sometimes he got the feeling that Jake was
trying
to provoke their father. Yesterday he had forgotten to feed the pigs. How could you forget to feed the pigs—something that had to be done every day, something that was
always
done? It was as if he wanted to see just how far he could push their father before he snapped. Arthur couldn’t understand it; it was like deciding to stir up a nest of rattlesnakes or prod a hive of bees: maybe you didn’t know the exact details of what would follow but you did know that it wasn’t going to be nice. So why do it? Why didn’t Jake just shut up and do what he was told?

Their father looked at Jake in silence; Jake shrugged and turned away. Arthur relaxed. He went over to the cows and took their tethers and handed one to Jake. The two of them set off down the track between the fields, leading a cow apiece.

There was still snow lying in the furrows, streaking the fields black and white like giant lengths of corduroy. The road was muddy and slippery with patches of ice hidden under the slush, and the heifers were slow.

“I don’t know why it takes two of us,” Jake said when they were out of sight and earshot of the farm. “Can’t you manage two cows by yourself?”

“No,” said Arthur.

“Why not? You’re so good with cows.”

“’Cause of the bridge.”

“What about it?”

“They don’t like it. Scares ’em. Moves too much. We’ll have to take ’em across one at a time.”

“Okay, but once we get them across the bridge, will you take them on? ’Cause I’ve got to get into town. I’m meeting someone.”

Arthur shrugged. “Okay.”

“Great!” Jake said. “Don’t tell Dad, all right?”

Arthur shrugged again. They slogged on, Jake trying to speed things up, eager to be gone, pulling the reluctant heifer behind him. She swung her head unhappily. “Come on, come on, come
on
!” Jake said.