The Other Side of the Bridge (4 page)

Ian pushed aside a row of plastic strips hanging in a doorway and went into the back of the store. Pete and his grandfather lived here. The store was owned by a Scotsman—according to Ian’s father, every reserve in the country had a store owned by a Scotsman—who let Pete and his grandfather live there in return for minding the store. There were two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen that consisted of a sink and a stove at one end of the hallway. Pete’s room was small and square and stupendously untidy—clothes and gum wrappers and schoolbooks and snowshoes not put away since March and girlie magazines left lying open as if the old man wouldn’t mind, which he probably didn’t. Ian’s fishing rod was standing in a corner, looking new and shiny and very out of place. He retrieved it and went back outside. Mr. Corbiere had started on another cigarette. Ian stepped past him.

“Thanks, Mr. Corbiere.”

“Catch a big one.”

Ian grinned. “I’ll try.”

Once he got down to the shore it took him only a few seconds to spot the
Queen Mary
. She was across the bay by the sandbar at the entrance to the river—a good spot for pike, especially in the spring. By some trick of the light the old rowboat seemed to be hovering just above the surface of the water, as if it were a ghost ship or something out of a dream. He watched it for a moment, and Pete’s motionless shape within it. The evening was very still and the water gleamed a dull silver.

He cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled. The sound flew out across the water and the figure in the boat moved, and lifted a hand in acknowledgment. Then there was a distant
putputput
from the little outboard and the boat turned toward him. Ian walked out to the end of the dock.

“How’s it going?” he said when Pete was close enough. The smell of gasoline and fish rose up from the boat, luring him in.

“So-so,” Pete said.

The boat sidled up alongside the dock and Ian jumped in, avoiding half a dozen glistening trout in the bottom. Pete pushed off and headed back across the bay. When he reached the sandbar he cut the engine. The smooth swells of their wake caught up with them, rocked the boat gently, and moved on.

“I can’t stay long,” Ian said absently, picking through the tackle box for a suitable lure. “I should study. We’ve got that biology test tomorrow.”

Pete stuck a mayfly on his hook and dropped it over the side of the boat. He said, “You got your priorities wrong, man.”

“I know, I know.” The tackle box was in a similar state to Pete’s bedroom, lures and weights and hooks and bits of fur and feathers all over the place, with the odd dead bug tossed in for good measure.

“It could be a hundred years,” Pete said, giving his line a sharp jerk and hauling in a perch, “maybe two hundred, before you get another night as perfect as this for fishing. But there will always, always, be another test.”

“Too damned true,” Ian said. He was still going to have to go back in time to have a look at the textbook though. He and Pete shared the same policy, developed and fine-tuned over the years, of working just hard enough to keep out of trouble; but in Ian’s case, being the doctor’s son, the teachers’ expectations of him were irritatingly high.

They fished. Pete used a jigger—a stick with fishing line attached and minnows or bugs for bait, or sometimes just a weighted hook with a bit of deer fur on it. Ian used his fishing rod, which was a good one, a birthday present from his parents. If tonight was like other nights, and it would be, he would catch one fish to every four or five caught by Pete. If they swapped equipment, Pete would continue to pull them in and Ian would continue to get next to nothing. It was a fact of life and he had accepted it long ago.

They’d met through fishing—Ian wasn’t sure if he actually remembered it or if his father had told him the story at some later date. It was before they’d started school, so they would have been about four or five. Ian’s father had been teaching him how to fish and had taken him around to Slow River Bay, and over by the sandbar at the mouth of the river they’d seen another boat, which had turned out to contain Pete and his grandfather, also in the middle of a fishing lesson. Ian’s father knew Pete’s grandfather the same way he knew everybody within a radius of a hundred miles, and he drifted over to say hi, and the two men started talking. Pete and Ian had eyed each other up and down, their fishing lines hanging in the water, and while they were busy doing that both lines were grabbed. There had been a few minutes of chaos—Ian did remember that—spray flying, boats rocking wildly, both men trying to help without looking as if they were helping, and when the fish were finally landed and held up to be admired, Pete’s was a fourteen-inch pike and Ian’s was a four-inch sunfish. Neither boy had been able to figure out why the two men laughed so hard—Pete’s grandfather had tears running down his cheeks. But the boys held up their catches triumphantly, grinning at each other across the gunwales of the boats, two skinny kids with their bellies sticking out, fishermen for life. The fact that from then on Pete had continued to pull in the big ones and Ian had continued not to was just one of those things.

Ian reeled in his line, checked the lure, and stood up to cast again. He whipped the rod back and forth, listening to the hiss of the reel as the line played out, and let it fly. The lure sailed out over the water and then dropped down, light as a raindrop. Not a bad cast. He began slowly reeling it in, the line drawing a delicate V-shape across the surface of the water.

“Got a job today,” he said after a while.

“Yeah?” Pete said.

“Yeah. My dad said I should work this summer. Saturdays too.”

“You still have time to fish?”

“Oh sure. I’m working eight till six. I’ll still have evenings free.”

Pete nodded. He looked after the store in the summer while his grandfather acted as a guide for tourists who fancied themselves woodsmen and loved the idea of a real, live Indian guide. “Found this old Injun up in the woods in Northern Ontario,” they’d say to their friends back in the manicured suburbs of Toronto or Chicago or New York, nodding casually at a bear’s head nailed to the rec room wall. “Knows the country like the back of his hand.”

“I’m working on Arthur Dunn’s farm,” Ian said offhandedly. He reeled in his line, checked the lure, and cast again. He was aware of Pete looking at him curiously. “I thought it would beat being cooped up in town. There’s a job going in the drugstore, but I didn’t fancy standing behind the counter all summer long, listening to people complain about their headaches.”

Silence from Pete.

“Or listening to women complain about…women’s stuff,” Ian went on, and then paused, suddenly wondering if that could be his mother’s problem. The menopause. He’d read about it when looking through his father’s books in search of something—anything at all—to do with sex. The whole business had sounded gross. But his mother was too young for that sort of problem. She was nineteen years younger than his father and had produced Ian when she was only twenty. “Or old guys complaining about their ingrown toenails. I get enough medical crap at home.”

More silence. The problem with deceiving Pete was that they had known each other too long. A friend who has known you since you were four years old really knows you, whereas your parents only think they do.

They fished. Across the bay they heard the drone of an outboard, the sound gradually dying as it rounded a point of land. Silence settled again. Then two loons started calling to each other, laughing at some melancholy joke of their own, their cries shimmering back and forth across the water. The color was ebbing out of the trees lining the shore, turning them from somber green to black.

Pete said, as if ten minutes hadn’t elapsed, “Standing behind a counter is just standing, man. Working on a farm is
work
.”

He twitched the jig, paused a second or two, and then jerked the line sharply. A trout broke the surface ten feet away. He hauled it in and dropped it in the bottom of the boat. “You could’ve got a job at the sawmill,” he said, rebaiting his hook and dropping it over the side again. “You’d get a job there easy as nothin’. Every guy there’s had bits of himself stuck back on by your dad sometime or other. They’d make you foreman in three days flat, you’d be running the place in two weeks. Good money, too. More’n Arthur Dunn can afford.”

“Yeah,” Ian said, “but who wants to spend the summer working for Fitzpatrick? I’ll take Arthur Dunn any day.”

Pete hauled in a four-inch perch, too small to keep. He unhooked it and tossed it back into the water. “You could’ve got a job waitin’ on tables in Harper’s. Put a cup of coffee down here, pick a cup of coffee up there. Good money, easy work…. Or the library…. Or the gas station.” There was another tug on his line. It was the tiny perch again, the hole in its mouth from last time clearly visible. Pete raised it to eye level and said, “Where’s your brains, man?” The fish gaped in astonishment. Pete tossed it back over the side. “Or the hardware store. Woolworth’s. The post office. Any of them’d be better than a farm. ’Specially Arthur Dunn’s farm.”

“The farm’s okay,” Ian said mildly. “The horses are kind of fun.”

“The
horses
?” Pete looked at him, slitty-eyed. Then suddenly, he grinned.

“What?” Ian asked defensively.

“Nothin’,” Pete said. “Nothin’ at all.”

They fished for another hour or so but the pike weren’t interested, and when Pete caught the little perch for the third time they gave up and went home.

His parents were both in the living room when Ian got back. His mother was sitting in front of the television, though for once she wasn’t watching it, and his father was standing in the doorway. When he came in they both looked around. There was a moment’s pause, and then his father said, “You’re home early. Fish not biting?”

“Nothing worth hauling out of the water,” Ian said.

His mother was looking vaguely down at her lap. There must have been a crumb or a bit of fluff on her skirt—she picked it off carefully, studied it for a moment, and then dropped it on the floor.

TWO

TORONTO BOARD OF TRADE VISITING NORTHERN ONTARIO

CATTLE RUN AMOK—MEN CHASED TO LUMBER PILES—RIFLES USED

—Temiskaming Speaker,
March 1925

A
rthur’s earliest memory was of standing in the doorway of his parents’ room, looking at his mother as she lay in bed. It was the middle of the day but nonetheless she was in bed, and Arthur didn’t know what to make of it. The bed was very large and high and Arthur could only just see her. She had her face turned toward the window. Then Arthur’s father called from the bottom of the stairs that the doctor was coming, and she turned her head, and Arthur saw that she was crying.

Then old Dr. Christopherson came, and with him Mrs. Luntz, Carl’s mother, from the next farm. Mrs. Luntz patted Arthur on the head and told him to go downstairs and she and the doctor went into his mother’s room and shut the door. Later, cries came from the room. During all of this, Arthur’s father sat in the armchair in the kitchen with his large lumpy hands spread flat on his knees. His hands looked very strange, lying still like that. Normally if he was sitting down they were busy mending something.

In his memory Arthur had only the one picture of this scene, but from piecing things together later he knew that it must have happened more than once. Three times at least.

Then there was a long spell when his mother was in bed though she didn’t look sick, during which time his father got the supper after coming in from the fields in the evening. Most days Mrs. Luntz and other ladies from neighboring farms dropped by with food in big covered dishes, so all he had to do was heat things up. This wasn’t a bad time, as far as Arthur could recall. He remembered his father giving him a dish towel and passing plates down for him to dry, and telling him he was doing a good job. He remembered carrying his mother’s supper very carefully up the stairs and taking it in to her, and her smiling at him and thanking him.

He couldn’t remember what he did during the day, while his mother lay in bed and his father was out in the fields. He was too young for school so he must have played by himself. But he clearly remembered the day he heard his mother calling him from her room. He would have been just five at the time. He remembered hearing the panic in her voice, and the feeling in his stomach—a cold tightness, like the grip of a hand—as he ran up the stairs. His mother had her knees drawn up under the blankets. She looked afraid. Arthur had never seen fear on an adult’s face before, but he had no difficulty recognizing it for what it was. “Go get your father,” she had said. “Tell him it’s coming! Run!”