The Other Side of the Bridge (12 page)

“Slow down,” Arthur said. He felt as if it was him Jake was yanking at.

“She can go faster than this when she wants to,” Jake said.

“She doesn’t want to.”

“Maybe you’ve got all the time in the world,” Jake said, “but I’ve got things to do.”

“The bridge is just up there.”

Farther into town there was a proper bridge across the river that separated the Dunns’ and the Luntzes’ farms but this one was a shortcut and saved more than a mile. It was roughly made with poles and ropes and wooden planks, sturdy enough, but the poles were long and had a fair bit of spring in them. Fifteen feet below, Crow River boiled its way over the rocks. It was a pale icy green, swollen with runoff. Arthur’s father and Otto Luntz between them kept the bridge in good order but the cows didn’t know that and Arthur didn’t blame them for their unease.

“Jeez, it’s really raging,” Jake said, peering down into the foaming water.

Arthur tied his heifer to the handrail of the bridge. “We’ll take yours first,” he said.

It needed two people all right. Arthur pushed from one end and Jake pulled from the other, Arthur saying, “Okay, girl, okay. It’s okay,” Jake saying, “Come on, you stupid cow!” They got her over in the end and tied her to the rail, then started back across the bridge. Jake stopped in the middle and bounced experimentally. The bridge replied in slow motion, heaving under their feet. Arthur grabbed the handrail.

“What you
doin’
?” he said. Mostly he just ignored Jake’s behavior—it wasn’t worth getting worked up about—but today Jake really did seem to be hell-bent on getting whacked.

“I forgot this was so good,” Jake said, letting the motion subside and then leaning over the rail. “It really dances.” He leaned over further, trying to see the underside of the bridge. Arthur reached the other end and stepped onto firm ground.

“See that pole?” Jake said. “The one underneath? Bet you couldn’t go hand over hand—you know, hanging from it. All the way across.”

Arthur didn’t bother replying.

“Bet you couldn’t,” Jake said, grinning at him.

“Let’s get the cow across,” Arthur said. “You got things to do, you said.”

“Bet I could go across, if you’re scared to,” Jake said. “Bet you.”

“Bet you.” His favorite phrase since the day he was born. He turned everything—
everything—
into a competition. It seemed so pointless, since he was better than Arthur at everything anyway. But he just had to keep proving it. “Bet you.”

“Yeah,” Arthur said. “Bet you could. Let’s get the cow across. I gotta get back to the farm. Thought you were in a hurry, anyway.”

“Bet it wouldn’t take me two minutes,” Jake said, peering over the side again. “Maybe five. Five minutes.”

He ran to the end of the bridge and scrambled down until he could grab hold of the pole. The sides of the gorge were steep; once you left the edge they fell away into a sheer drop—not all that far, but at the bottom were great slabs of granite with water foaming over them. In places the water was deep, maybe deep enough to provide a cushion, but in other places the rocks broke through the surface, glistening, pink as salmon in the sunlight.

“Should I do it?” Jake said, grinning up at Arthur.

Arthur untied the second cow, wondering if he could get her across by himself. She wasn’t happy about it. She put one foot on the bridge, then took it off again and looked longingly over her shoulder, back at the farm.

“I’m going to do it,” Jake said. The bridge gave a little shudder as he grabbed the pole with both hands and swung himself out. “It’s easy,” he shouted from under the bridge. “You’re so yellow. Yellow-bellied. Chicken-livered.”

“Come on,” Arthur said to the heifer. “It’s okay. Just wobbles a bit.” He pulled gently and she tried again, one foot, then the other. “’Atta girl,” he said. She stepped forward, all four feet on the bridge now, and Arthur kept moving, walking slowly backward, encouraging her. “See? It’s okay, isn’t it?”

“This is great!” Jake said from underneath them. His voice broke up each time he moved his hands. “I’m nearly…in the middle…already. I told you…I could do it…. It’s great!”

Arthur and the cow were nearly in the middle too, but the motion was worse now, and Jake’s hand-over-hand movements were adding to it. The cow staggered. The bridge swung sharply in response and she staggered again. Arthur cursed his brother. “Damn you!” he said. “Damn you!”

“Art!” Jake said, his voice suddenly different. “Don’t shake the bridge. It’s slippery. It’s wet here!” Arthur ignored him. The cow was really scared now, pulling back against the rope, her eyes rolling.

“Come on now,” Arthur said, gently as he could. “Nearly there. Come on.” She tried another step, managed it, took another. They were right in the middle now.

Jake didn’t seem to be moving at all. They were ahead of him, the bridge at its maximum swing.

“Art! Stop walking! I can’t hang on!”

He must think there was no limit to Arthur’s gullibility. “Come on, girl,” Arthur said. “Come on.”

“Art!”—panic in his voice—“I mean it! I can’t hang on!”

Arthur stopped. He hated his brother. At that moment, he truly did hate him. This love he had for getting himself into situations that might or might not be dangerous and yelling for Arthur to rescue him, and Arthur never knowing whether to believe him or not, and finally having to believe him for their mother’s sake, only to find that Jake had been kidding once again. Jake
loved
that. Loved proving to Arthur and the world just how stupid Arthur was. How gullible. He never got tired of proving it.

“Art!”—his voice a shriek—“I’m going to fall!”

“Good,” Arthur said. A word that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

He felt Jake fall. Felt his weight leave the bridge. Just like that.

For a moment he was paralyzed. Disbelieving. He couldn’t even draw a breath. He stood in the middle of the bridge, staring at the cow, his eyes wide. Then his breath came in with a rush and he grabbed the rail and looked over. For a moment he couldn’t see Jake because he expected him to have been washed downstream, whereas in fact he was almost directly under the bridge. He was face up, wedged between two rocks. Water was streaming around and over him. Over his face.

Arthur didn’t remember afterward how he got down to the river bed. He must have slid down the bank or jumped. He waded out into the icy surge of the river, the breath shocked out of him by the cold. He grabbed Jake under the arms and dragged him to the shore. For one ridiculous moment he wondered if this could be another trick, if Jake could have planned the fall and was playing dead or unconscious for fun—one further, final, joke. But Jake’s head lolled to the side, and the water streamed out of his nose and mouth in a way that made Arthur cry out with fear.

He couldn’t get up the bank the way he had come down. It was too steep to climb unencumbered, let alone carrying a body. He waded along the edge of the river, sometimes thigh deep, the water boiling around him, stumbling over the rocks, feet and legs numb and unresponsive as tree trunks, looking for a way up. He carried Jake in his arms at first, and then, once he found a way up, slung him over his shoulder, panting with fear. He thought Jake was alive, was pretty sure he’d felt him cough, but he couldn’t stop, there in the middle of the river, to be sure. And who knew what injuries he might have or what further damage he, Arthur, might be doing by heaving him up and over his shoulder. But what else could he do? He could not carry him in his arms up the bank, and he could not leave him in the water.

At the top he lowered Jake carefully to the ground to check that he was breathing, and he was, so he picked him up again and ran. All the way across the fields he could see nothing but his mother’s face. How could he walk into the house like this, carrying his brother’s body? How could he face her? It was impossible to just walk in on her, unannounced. She would die from the shock of it. He prayed that his father would be in the farmyard or in one of the nearest fields. Please God. Please. Sobbing the words as he staggered along.

His prayer was answered. His father saw him coming—Arthur saw him straighten up and stand for a minute, wondering what it was that was heading toward him over the fields, and then start toward them, slowly, and then abruptly at a run.

“Tell Mum,” Arthur shouted when his father was close enough. He was crying and found it hard to get the words out. “Tell Mum. Get the doctor.”

In nightmares, in years to come, scenes from that day came back to haunt him. Jake’s face, under water. That image most of all. But also Jake laid out on the kitchen table, his legs at an angle no legs could possibly assume, and their mother bending over him, literally wringing her hands, her worst nightmares come true. She kept sobbing, “What happened? Oh, Arthur, what happened?” He should have told her then—told her everything—but he couldn’t do it, so he said, “He slipped, he just slipped,” and kept saying it, every time she asked, trying to make it true.

Just before his father arrived with the doctor—followed by the hearse, which doubled as an ambulance—Jake opened his eyes. Arthur could see him trying to focus on the ceiling. Then, with a huge effort, he turned his head a fraction and his eyes moved slowly around the room, taking in his mother, and then settling on Arthur. After a moment his lips moved, as if he wanted to say something. To damn Arthur, without a doubt. To accuse him. To tell the truth.

Tell her, Arthur thought, suddenly wishing he would. Tell her what happened. He deserved it, he just wanted it over with.

But Jake said nothing. Maybe he couldn’t get the words out. He closed his eyes again, and shortly after that Dr. Christopherson arrived, and examined him briefly—Arthur’s father standing flat against the wall as if pinned there by shock—and then with the help of Mr. Leroy, the undertaker, carefully shifted Jake onto a stretcher and took him away.

Arthur was still standing in the middle of the room, going over and over those final seconds on the bridge, trying to change them: trying to replace what happened with what should have happened, what he should have done. Worse still, going over and over what he had said, that one unbearable, unforgivable word. Trying to unsay it. Desperate to find a way around the unalterable fact that once you have said something, it is said. Once it has left your lips, you cannot take it back.

FIVE

TOWN LIGHTS OUT:
Air Rifles Banned

50 YEARS OF SILVER PRODUCTION

—Temiskaming Speaker,
May 1957

M
rs. Christopherson had been Dr. Christopherson’s nurse as well as his wife, so when she left, Ian’s father was in a fix. After a week or two of chaos he seemed to realize that he was going to have to do something about it, even if only (as he told Ian) for the short term. At that stage, it was clear to Ian that his father still believed his wife was going to come back.

In the meantime, the doctor placed an advertisement in the
Canadian Medical Association Journal
.
RN wanted,
he wrote,
for small northern town.
He should have left out
northern
. And maybe
small,
as well. There were only two replies and one of those dropped out when she realized just how far north Struan was. The other one, Jessie Armitage, came out of ignorance.

By then it was summer, and the lake was at its most benevolent. The sun shone every day. It had been a dry spring and there were remarkably few mosquitoes. The nurse—twenty-two years old, Toronto born and bred—was enchanted. “It’s so beautiful up here,” she said to the patients as she changed a dressing or gave an injection or extracted a pea from a child’s ear. “I had no idea there was someplace so beautiful in my own country!”

But then came autumn and the equinoctial gales began to blow, stripping the trees of their leaves as if they were disgraced. The lake turned gray and sullen and the swells weren’t gentle anymore: they heaved ominously, and tattered rags of spray blew off their tops. The wind barreled down from the north, driving before it clouds as dark as slate. Pale curtains of rain swept across the lake. Someone in the town said to Jessie Armitage, “This is nothin’. You wait till it’s snow ’stead of rain out there. Then you’ll see somethin’. Then you’ll learn what cold is.”