The Other Side of the Bridge (41 page)

Maybe it was because of this, the feeling of restlessness and change, that he didn’t pick up the signs that something was amiss with Laura. Or maybe it was because by then he thought she was safe. Late on a Monday afternoon, shortly after the boys left, Arthur was driving home from the market and saw Jake coming out of Harper’s with a girl who wasn’t Laura. They were laughing about something, both of them doubled up with laughter. Arthur slowed the truck and saw Jake reach out and punch the girl’s shoulder lightly with his fist; saw the girl hit him back, still laughing; saw them scuffle, playful as kids, but nowhere near as innocent. Arthur felt his very soul expanding with relief. It was over. Jake was tired of Laura at last.

He didn’t finish with her all at once of course, that wasn’t Jake’s way. He kept her in reserve, like a nearly stale loaf of bread that you haven’t given to the pigs yet in case you decide you want one more slice. The afternoon following the incident in town, Arthur was in the farmyard when Laura arrived with her books under her arm; it was Tuesday, and she and Jake always did their homework together on Tuesdays. She thought she must somehow have missed him after school and had come on alone. A few minutes later Jake arrived, and looked surprised to see her, but he put his arm across her shoulders, the way he did with girls, as if he owned them, and said casually, “Oh, sorry! Should have told you. I had to go into town for something.” Arthur saw Laura look up at him, perplexed but hopeful. Almost, but not quite, reassured.

Arthur went out to the barn and shoveled dung. Rage and joy battled within him, along with something less admirable, something he was ashamed of but couldn’t deny: satisfaction. Now at least Laura would realize exactly who and what Jake was. Much as he wanted to beat Jake to a pulp, Arthur wanted even more for Laura to see that she was well rid of him.

So he did nothing. He watched Laura’s growing bewilderment and distress, as one week gave way to another, and he put it down to unrequited love.

In the middle of July, two things happened in quick succession that should have made him suspicious. The first was that Jake came out to the barn one evening just as Arthur was finishing the milking, and said he needed money.

“Something’s come up,” he said, looking around at the milking stalls as if he’d never seen them before. “Got to get it sorted out.”

“How much?” Arthur asked. He didn’t ask what for because he didn’t care, and in any case knew Jake wouldn’t tell him.

“All you’ve got.” Jake grinned at him, but he looked uneasy. Jake was never uneasy, so that should have been a warning in itself. “I’ll pay you back.”

Arthur knew he wouldn’t, but didn’t care about that either. He gave Jake ten dollars, which was all he had in his pocket.

“Is that all you’ve got?” Jake asked, in a tone of disbelief.

“Yes,” Arthur said, and went back to the milking, and didn’t give it another thought.

The second thing happened the next morning. Arthur had been hoeing turnips for a couple of hours when his mother came panting down the track that ran between the fields—she was getting a trifle heavy around the hips in her middle age—to tell him that Jake’s bed hadn’t been slept in. Arthur figured he was in someone else’s, but knew better than to say so. His mother insisted that he come back to the house to confirm that Jake wasn’t there and sure enough he wasn’t, but lying on top of his chest of drawers was a note that their mother in her anxiety had failed to notice. Arthur picked it up and read it, and passed it to his mother. It was short and to the point:
Sorry to go without saying good-bye. Love, Jake.

Years later, the image of his mother reading that note was to be one of Arthur’s clearest and most painful memories of her. He’d be doing something else, repairing a fence maybe, or removing a stone from a horse’s shoe, thinking of nothing in particular, and suddenly there she’d be: a brave, loving, foolish little woman, a mother above all else, finally defeated, standing in the bedroom of the person she loved best in the world, reading the single sentence with which he said good-bye.

It was the end of July when Laura came to him: a warm summer’s evening, the sunset filtering through the trees. Arthur was at Otto’s farm, checking on the pigs. They were out in the orchard rooting about under the trees and he was watching them and thinking about Ted Hatchett and didn’t hear her coming up behind him.

She said, “Arthur?” and he started and turned, and then flushed because she was so close to him, standing right by his elbow.

In spite of having said his name, she wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the pigs as if they were what she had come to see.

She said quietly, “Arthur, did he say anything to you? Do you know where he’s gone?”

He didn’t understand at first. She was referring to Jake, he knew that, but he saw that she was very upset, very distressed. He thought she must still be pining over him, and felt a pang of disappointment.

She said, “I keep thinking about my father. About what it will do to my father.” She looked up at him then and he saw fear in her eyes. That was when he realized what she was saying. He could hardly believe it; it seemed impossible, because what she was saying was that he’d been right all along: his suspicions about Jake had been spot on. He stared at her, incredulous, searching back through his mind, trying to think when it would have happened, and where, and why he hadn’t guessed. VE Day. It would have been VE Day. He remembered now. Saw Jake, drunk and triumphant, entering the room.

Laura said in a whisper, “Arthur, is he going to come back?”

He didn’t know what to say. No, Jake was not going to come back. Arthur might know next to nothing about his brother but he did know that. Becoming a husband and father before the age of twenty would not be part of Jake’s plan.

Laura was watching him fearfully, her eyes searching his face. He saw her understand. She let her breath out and drew another in, unsteadily. She said, “Arthur, what am I going to do?”

Silent Arthur. A man uneasy with words. For the first time in his life he knew exactly what to say.

“Marry me.”

He knew she didn’t love him, and that she was still in love with Jake. He knew she only married him because there was no other option. It made no difference. He loved her and he wanted to look after her, and that was all.

He knew that certain things would be difficult, though in fact some of them turned out to be harder than he’d expected. His mother, for instance; he was taken aback by her reaction.

“I know what’s going on, Arthur,” she said, her voice made harsh by a bitterness he hadn’t known she was capable of. “I see what’s happened. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know. I’m not blind. Though I was blind, I see that now, thinking she was so sweet, when in fact she’s the kind who’s out to trap boys, out to ruin their lives, boys with their whole futures in front of them. If you think you can bring her back here you’re mistaken. I won’t have her in the house. That’s the end of it. If she comes, I go. You decide.”

After a whole lifetime of trying to spare her pain, it hurt him to be the cause of more, but he would marry Laura no matter what the cost. He offered to build his mother a house of her own, closer to town, but she refused even to discuss it. She went to live with a cousin down in North Bay and though Arthur went to see her when he could, she never forgave him.

The wedding night was hard too. He’d thought carefully about what he should do, and when the time came he showed Laura to his parents’ room with the double bed in which he and Jake had been born, and said that if she needed anything he’d be in his room just down the hall. She looked up at him, her face white with the strain of the day, and the relief in her eyes was hard to bear. But he dimly feared that once she stopped being grateful to him she might come to hate him for not being Jake, and all he could think to do to avoid that was to demand nothing of her. He promised himself that he would not enter her room unless she invited him and he kept that promise, though it was two long years before she appeared one night in the doorway of his room.

When she gave birth to Jake’s son, though, that was the hardest of all. She was entirely preoccupied with the baby, and although he did not resemble his father, Arthur was sure that she saw Jake when she looked at the child. Arthur saw him too. He found it next to impossible even to look at the boy. He knew it was wrong of him, knew that Carter was not to blame for anything and that if he couldn’t love him he should at least try to accept him, but it was beyond him.

None of those things altered how he felt about Laura. All he allowed himself to wish for was that she would be able to accept their life together and not hold the circumstances of it against him. So it was amazing to him when one night, not long after the birth of their daughter, Laura looked up from the chair by the stove in which she sat to nurse the baby, saw him watching her, and smiled, and said quietly, “Thank you, Arthur.”

He didn’t know what it was that she was thanking him for, but he saw that she was happy, or at least mostly happy. It was more than he had ever hoped for, to have made her happy. He considered himself the luckiest of men.

It was fifteen years almost to the day when Jake came back. He shouldn’t have let him stay, of course. That very first day, when Jake came limping across the field toward him smiling his famous smile, he should have told him to go. But there was something in Jake’s face as they approached each other across the field—not contrition, Jake wasn’t capable of contrition, but a kind of ruefulness, a recognition of past history, that had made Arthur think maybe Jake had changed. In fifteen years a man might change, mightn’t he? And if he had, wouldn’t it be wrong to turn him off the farm for sins committed when he was scarcely more than a child?

And then there was his own happiness—Arthur’s happiness. That came into it too. Things had turned out so well for him; he had all that he had ever dreamed of and more. Whereas Jake, he suspected, in spite of or maybe because of the flashy car, did not. Surely that required him to show a little generosity, a little forgiveness?

And then there was the fact that Laura seemed in no way pleased to see Jake. In their bedroom, the night after Jake arrived, she had said, “Arthur, I don’t think he should stay long.” Didn’t this show that far from needing to do as she asked, there was no need to do anything at all? That was what he told himself. He reassured her that Jake wouldn’t want to stay more than a day or two in any case, and reassured himself as well.

And finally, of course, there was, and always would be, that moment on the bridge.