The Other Side of the Bridge (30 page)

Once he was up, other things couldn’t be ignored either. The frosts had gone but until a week ago the soil had been too wet to drill. Now it was ready and the oats and barley—the crops the animals depended on during the long winter months—needed to go in straightaway. He was going to need more feed than ever before because they’d increased the size of the dairy herd, thanks to their arrangement with Otto, and if he sold them now he’d make a loss. And then there were Otto’s pigs. The piglets could be sold when they reached market weight but he couldn’t sell the sows. Otto depended on them for his livelihood.

So there would be the pigs to get through the winter, and the cattle, and the horses. He didn’t see how he could manage it. It was only ever going to be possible with the use of Otto’s land and one man alone couldn’t work two farms. He and his father had figured out that between them, using the tractor and both teams of horses, they could just do it. The tractor. Whenever Arthur thought of it he saw the giant wheels clawing the air, saw his father’s face—purple, eyes bulging out. The day before the funeral he’d driven it, for the first and last time, back to the Luntzes’ farm and stuck it in Otto’s barn. He didn’t want to see it ever again.

But Otto’s land was going to be ruined if it wasn’t tended properly; that was another worry. He needed to write to Otto and tell him what had happened, ask him to come back and sort things out. Sell the farm, or find someone to rent it to. He knew he had to do it but the thought of putting all that down on paper defeated him. How would you say it? “Dear Otto, Dad was killed your tractor fell on him.” How could you write that? His mother would know what to say but she got upset when he asked her to do it. There was no point in pressing her. She wasn’t in a state to deal with anything at the moment. He would have liked to talk things over with her, tell her of his worries, but it was out of the question. It would have been a relief to tell someone. To have someone else share his fear that they would end up in debt again. That they could lose the farm.

Some days he felt he didn’t care. Let it go. He had no heart for it, now that his father was gone. There seemed no purpose in it anymore. But then he’d think about his mother and Jake. If they lost the farm, what would they do? Where would they go?

So Arthur kept working. In the mornings after the milking was done and he had been over to the Luntzes’ to see to the pigs, he harnessed both teams of horses and took them out to the fields and worked them alternately, two hours on, two hours off. They worked sun-up to sun-down, plowing, harrowing, seeding, up one furrow, down the next. The same thoughts kept going around and around in his head, keeping pace with the heavy footsteps of the horses. Keeping pace with his grief. He ached with grief, felt sick with worry. Once he said aloud, startling himself and the horses, “What am I goin’ to do, Dad?” And the silence rushed in so hard, so fast, it knocked the breath out of him. He stopped in his tracks and the horses came to a halt and looked around at him inquiringly. “It’s okay,” he said, but he was crying all at once and they looked uncertain. “It’s okay,” he said again, wiping his face with his sleeve. “Move on.” They moved on, and he followed along behind, tears running down.

Sticking to the routine was all he knew how to do, but the routine was of his father’s devising, and memories ambushed him at every turn. For a few days after the accident the imprint of his father’s behind was still visible, alongside Arthur’s own, in the long grass bordering the field where they’d been sowing the potatoes. It seemed incredible. Just days ago, so recently that the grasses hadn’t straightened up yet, they’d sat together, sipping hot sweet tea, surveying how much they’d done and how much was still to do. Not knowing.

Had they spoken, that last time? He couldn’t remember. Probably not. They didn’t speak much. There was no need. One of them might say, “Soil’s heavy,” or “Lookin’ pretty good,” and the other might nod. Or they might just finish their tea in silence and heave themselves to their feet and go back to the teams.

Now he found he couldn’t sit down for his break. He drank his tea standing up, beside whichever team he was using. His father’s horses were gentle with him. He’d expected them to play up, unsettled by a strange hand on the plow, but they did not. It seemed to him that they understood. They were the only comfort he had, out there alone in the fields all day.

At dinnertime and again in the evening he’d walk back to the house along the track and for the first couple of weeks the prints of his father’s boots were still there, like his signature written on the land. Then it rained and they were gone. That had seemed a treachery, that his footsteps could be erased so easily. How many thousands of times had he walked along that track? All his life. His own father, Arthur’s grandfather, had brought the track into being, had cleared the land and plowed the very first furrow behind the broad swaying back of an ox. Their footsteps should have stayed forever.

Last thing at night he went out to the barns for a final look around before bed, as he and his father had always done, just to check that everything was okay. They used to stand for a minute or two in the farmyard afterward, studying the sky, and Arthur did it still, couldn’t break the habit, though of all the moments of his day it caused the greatest pain. He stood alone in the silence of the night, remembering. In his mind’s eye he saw the two of them—always saw them the same, standing together, faces turned upward. Clouds pale against the blue-black of the night. Stars cold and bright. The moon hanging there, pale and brilliant, clouds drifting across it like smoke. The sky and the silent land beneath it stretching on, and on, and on, so that he and his father were shrunk to almost nothing by the vastness of it. Two tiny insignificant specks, side by side, faces upturned, staring at the sky.

They had to write to Otto. There was no way around it. It was mid-July now and Otto’s fields were a mass of sow thistle. They couldn’t keep putting it off.

He said, “Mum, we’ve gotta tell him. He’s gotta sell the land or rent it to someone else, or it’s goin’ to be ruined.”

They were at the supper table. Jake was there, for once. Arthur hardly ever saw him anymore. School had finished for the summer but Jake was always “out.” Their mother was in a permanent state of panic about him. “Where could he be, Arthur?” she’d say at five-minute intervals. “Where do you think he is?” As it happened, Arthur knew where he was, some of the time at least. He was very close at hand, in the hay barn, to be exact, with a girl. Not always the same girl—at the moment it was Susan Leroux, a thin, wiry, dark-eyed girl who lived with her drunken bum of a father in a shack down by the sawmill. She was several years older than Jake and had a “reputation,” and Jake was busy enhancing it.

Tonight though, he was at home, in body if not in spirit, sitting at the table with them, reading a comic book while he ate.

“You’re gonna have to write to Otto,” Arthur said to his mother, trying to speak firmly. He had to make her understand.

She was instantly upset. “But Arthur, they don’t know yet what they want to do. They might want to come back. Surely we can keep it in order for them.”

Her lips were quivering. You’d have thought that after suffering such a loss nothing else would matter to her but that didn’t seem to be how it worked. She was fearful about everything now. It was as if she had finally seen the awful power of fate, its deviousness, the way it could wipe out in an instant the one thing you had been certain you could rely on, and now she was constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to work out where the next blow might fall.

Arthur said, trying to be gentle but still firm, “I can’t do it, Mum. I’ve tried. I just can’t cover the ground. Come fall, if Otto doesn’t do somethin’ I’m gonna have to sell the sows. We’re not gonna be able to feed them through the winter. We’re not even gonna be able to feed our own cows. Anyway, I can hardly milk ’em all—it’s taking me hours.”

She said tearfully, “I’ll try to help you more, Arthur. I know I haven’t been much help.”

That was for sure. She couldn’t seem to get herself together. She would start milking and half an hour later Arthur, working his way down the row of patient animals, would find her still in the same place, sitting on the milking stool, face vacant, hands in her lap. Even her own jobs, tasks she’d been doing all her life—the row crops, the farm accounts, the chickens, collecting the eggs—seemed to be beyond her. Even cooking the meals. “Oh, goodness,” she would say when Arthur came in at the end of the day. “Goodness, Arthur. Your supper…”

She seemed to have lost her mind. That felt like the right expression. She looked permanently bewildered, as if she had just put something down and now couldn’t find it. Arthur would get himself bread and cheese. Or not bother. Just go to bed.

If only she would see the truth of what he was saying now, if only she wouldn’t argue. He didn’t have the strength to argue with her. He was exhausted to the point of despair.

But she was going on. “We can’t let them down like that, Arthur. Not after all they’ve been through. We must find another way.”

“There
ain’t no other way!
” He stopped. She’d jumped and was staring at him, wide-eyed. He took a deep breath and tried to collect himself. “There ain’t—isn’t…there isn’t no other way, Mum. There’s only me to do it all, and I can’t.”

“You should get yourself a POW,” Jake said, not looking up from his comic. Superman was raising his fist to the sky.

“What?” Arthur said, impatiently. All he needed was Jake sticking his oar in. There was no reason on God’s earth why Jake couldn’t help with the milking, but of course he didn’t. Jake did nothing. Jake did nothing so consistently, so defiantly, that it was almost as if their father were still alive and Jake was still fighting him, still refusing, as a matter of principle, to do one single thing his father would have approved of.

“A POW,” Jake said. “A prisoner of war.”

“What about him!” Arthur said, almost shouted, exasperated beyond endurance. What did he care about lousy stinking POWs? They could all drown themselves as far as he was concerned.

Jake looked up at him. “You should get yourself one,” he said. “Lots of farms have them—they’re all over the place. There are about a dozen of them working at the sawmill. They’ve got them down the mines and everything.” He went back to his comic.

Arthur sat there, staring at him. “They let POWs work on the farms?” he said at last.

Jake flipped a page. He said, “Why don’t you ever know what’s going on, Art? Are you deaf or blind or what?”

Arthur looked at his mother.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she said instantly. He could tell she’d known about it. Deliberately hadn’t told him. “Enemies, working on your farm. It’s not safe!”

“They don’t let the dangerous ones do it, Mum,” Jake said.

“How do they know who’s dangerous?” their mother cried. “They wouldn’t know until it was too late! Until we’re all dead in our beds!”

Arthur was trying to take it in. A prisoner of war, working for you. Helping out in the fields.

“Don’t they run away?” he said at last.

“Where to?” Jake said. He tossed the comic aside and reached for the bread. “Anyway, they’re too scared of bears.” He grinned. “They wear this uniform—blue with a big red circle on the back, like a target—and somebody told them the bears really go for the red circle, like bulls. A couple of them broke out the first week, someone said, and after two days they were back. Asked to be let in.”

Arthur turned it over in his mind, looked at it this way and that.

His mother said, “Arthur! I won’t have them here! They’re Nazis! Murderers!”

Arthur said, “Can you have more than one?”

“Dunno,” Jake said.

“Arthur,” his mother said, her voice low and trembling, “we are not going to have murderers on our farm.”

Their names were Dieter and Bernhard—Arthur didn’t catch which was which at the time and never did know for sure—and they were delivered bright and early one Saturday morning, dumped out of the back of a truck like a couple of young bullocks.

“There ya go,” the guard said. He was a scrawny little guy with wispy white hair and a rifle bigger than he was. He must be one of the veterans from the last war: they were the ones who guarded the prisoners. “They’re all yours. You can keep ’em here, or we can take ’em back to the camp at night, up to you. Course, you lose a couple of hours’ work if you do that, so if I was you I’d keep ’em here. They get thirty cents a day, twenty cents bonus if they do a real good job, don’t give it to them, give it to us, we keep it for them. They get three meals a day. If you keep ’em here, they can sleep in the barn till it gets cold, then you gotta take ’em into the house. What’s it to be?”