The Other Side of the Bridge (5 page)

Here there was a picture as well as a memory: a picture of himself, flying along the edge of the fields, his feet stumbling on the clods of heavy rain-soaked earth. “Dad! Dad!” Terror in his voice. What was coming? Something terrible, terrifying, and his mother all alone in the house with no one to protect her.

And then some hours later, when it was dark and the doctor had come, along with Mrs. Luntz again, and they were with his mother, it became apparent from the screams that echoed down the stairs that they could not protect her any more than he or his father could. Arthur wanted to go to his father and climb onto his lap but he was afraid of the look on his father’s face and of the appalled silence between the screams. He wanted to go to his room and get into bed and cower there, but to do that he would have to go up the stairs and pass the door with the dreadful sounds behind it. So instead he curled into a tight ball in the other armchair and stayed there, until many hours later the screaming finally stopped. And then there was another sound, a bawling, like a cross between a crow and a sheep, and he knew that whatever it was had come at last, and had triumphed, and his mother was dead.

Except that in the morning there she was, not dead at all but sitting up in bed, smiling, holding a bundle and saying to him, “Come and see, Arthur! You have a brother! This is your brother! His name is Jacob—isn’t he lovely? You can call him Jake.”

Was that where it all started, then? Before Jake was even born, with the loss of those other babies? So that when Jake finally arrived, the outcome of all that pain and fear and grief, he would be so precious to his mother that she could hardly bear it? She carried him around with her all day, holding him tightly, fending off death with the crook of her arm. She loved the new baby—oh, Arthur knew that!—but her love seemed to consist mainly of an agonized anxiety. Arthur would see her looking at Jake with an expression almost of despair, as if she expected him to vanish at any moment, torn from her arms by some dark force. It didn’t help that Jake was a sickly child, prone to colds and high temperatures. Or maybe he wasn’t really sickly—maybe it was her fear. One cough from the baby and she sent Arthur’s father to fetch the doctor, and the doctor’s old car would come lurching its way down their driveway, windshield wipers battling against the snow.

“Babies are tougher than they look.” That was what Dr. Christopherson said. He said it many times, patiently, attempting to reassure her. But she was not to be reassured. Each new phase of Jake’s development brought a whole new host of dangers, so many of them that Arthur wondered how he himself had ever survived. Once Jake started crawling, life became more perilous still. “Did I fall down those stairs, ever?” Arthur asked his mother after she had scooped Jake up from the top of the stairs—he had been some yards away, but from his mother’s face Arthur could see that it had been a near thing. But she had her face buried in Jake’s neck and didn’t hear his question.

But he, Arthur, had probably been a big tough baby. If he had fallen downstairs he’d probably have bounced. Whereas Jake would certainly be killed.

The day Jake took his first step, Arthur was formally recruited to the battle against the forces of fate. From now on, and Arthur knew this was a long-term assignment, his first and foremost job in life was to protect his little brother. In fact, he didn’t need recruiting. He already knew that his mother’s happiness depended on Jake’s well-being. Adoring her and needing her as Arthur did, what choice did he have?

Here was another picture: himself and Jake, aged about nine and four, playing in the farmyard. Beside the barn there is a pile of empty boxes, lightweight slatted crates that their father uses for carrying lettuces and tomatoes and other row crops to the market in Struan. Arthur is building himself a castle of crates, an impressive, many-storied structure. Jake has dragged one crate away for his own purposes. Something—a sense of unease—causes Arthur to look up, toward the house. He can see the kitchen window from where he is, and he sees that his mother is standing at it, staring out at something. On her face is an expression of horror. Arthur’s heart leaps in panic. He looks in the direction of her gaze and sees that Jake has pulled the crate over to the water trough and has climbed up on it in order to see what is inside. Arthur scrambles out of his castle and flies, shouting as he goes, “Get down! Jake! Get down!” Still feet away, he launches himself at his brother, knocking him off the box and sending him sprawling and howling in the dust.

The water in the trough was no more than nine inches deep. A mouse might have drowned in it—in fact, from time to time one did—but surely not a child. That was what Arthur’s father said—or maybe didn’t quite say, maybe just looked a little puzzled at the fuss—when he heard about the incident that evening. To Arthur, still glowing in the warmth of his mother’s gratitude, it was an academic question, since he had acted not to save Jake’s life but to rescue his mother from her fear. But in any case it turned out that his father was wrong to doubt the seriousness of the incident. A child could drown in an inch of water; Arthur’s mother had read it in a magazine. An inch of water. It had happened.

His father didn’t argue, though Arthur could see that he had some difficulty visualizing it. He frowned to himself and narrowed his eyes. An
inch
of water? He studied his boots. But he didn’t argue. He bowed to his wife’s superior knowledge. Fatal accidents to children fell within her area of expertise, even Arthur knew that. There were subjects his father knew about, such as the farm, and subjects his mother knew about, such as everything else. He knew that his father admired his mother for her intelligence. She read the
Temiskaming Speaker
from cover to cover, every week, and on the rare occasions when the
Toronto Daily Star
made it all the way up to Struan, she bought that too. She was the one who wrote letters if they needed writing, and paid all the bills. Arthur’s father could read things provided they weren’t too complicated, and he could add up all right, but when it came to writing, his fingers were clumsy and the letters and figures didn’t come out as they were supposed to.

Arthur’s mother was better at dealing with people, too. The previous spring, when a late frost killed off half the crops and Arthur’s father had to go and see the bank manager, she went with him to do the talking. Arthur’s father knew what was needed to put things right, how much money he wanted to borrow and how long it would take him to repay it, but he was afraid that in the enclosed space of the bank manager’s office the words would refuse to come to him and he’d be left standing there, looking stupid. The Dunn men weren’t big on words.

So he relied on his wife. He readily accepted that there were things which she knew that he did not, including how much water it took to drown a child.

Despite his mother’s fears and Arthur’s occasional guilt-ridden, mostly repressed wishes, Jake didn’t drown or fall off the roof or get run over by a car, and he grew into a lovely, sunny child. Those were the words Arthur’s mother used to describe him. Everyone loved him—she said that too. “It’s because he’s so cheerful,” she said. “So interested in everything and everyone.”

Arthur studied his own reflection in the square of mirror in the bathroom. His big plain face and mud-colored hair. Sunny wasn’t the word that sprang to mind. What would the right word be? Not cloudy…Overcast? Dull? That was it. Dull. He even felt dull.

As for being interested in everyone and everything—well, he wasn’t. Most people and most things were boring, when you got right down to it. But he didn’t believe Jake was all that interested either. He just looked as if he was. Even as a small child he had better control over his face than Arthur did: he could make it express anything he wanted, regardless of what was going on beneath the surface. He could make his face shine with interest and enthusiasm when Arthur knew for certain that inside he was wearing either a sneer or a yawn. He only bothered to do it with adults, of course; they were the ones worth impressing. He would greet any adult who crossed his path as if he or she were his favorite person on this earth. He’d say, “Hi, Mrs. Turner!” and his face would light up and glow with warmth as big old, fat old Mrs. Turner waddled up, and then five minutes later, when she’d pressed a nickel into his hand and gone beamingly on her way, he’d be imitating the waddle and trying to persuade you to do “knock-and-run” on her door.

Arthur, on the other hand, was forever being told he looked glum. He wasn’t glum; it was just the way his features sat on his face. And when adults crossed his path he kept his head down, because he had no idea what to say.

“You’d better watch out, Arthur,” the teacher said. “Your little brother’s going to catch up with you.”

It was Jake’s first year at school. Arthur was in grade six. He had to set off for the two-mile walk to school fifteen minutes earlier than he used to because Jake couldn’t walk as quickly and mustn’t arrive at school all tired out from running to keep up. Arthur didn’t see why they had to go together; there were no hazards to pass on the way to school that he was aware of, no raging rivers to cross, no mountains to climb. Bears ambled through the area from time to time, but no more often than they had when he was Jake’s age, and no one had worried about him being eaten by a bear.

But it turned out there was something to worry about after all. In the past year or so, strangers had been wandering up the long road from the south. Hobos, people called them. They were looking for work, his father said. It seemed that in the world outside there were no jobs anymore. From time to time one of the hobos would knock at the kitchen door and ask if he could help out in the fields, or chop firewood, or anything else that needed doing, anything at all. Arthur’s father felt sorry for them and would have been happy to employ one or two, but he couldn’t pay them; money was something farmers—the ones around Struan anyway—had never had much of and nowadays they had even less. Arthur’s mother felt sorry for the men too, and gave them food sometimes, but she was also afraid of them. Who knew what a desperate man might do?

So Arthur was obliged to become his little brother’s bodyguard, escorting him to school and back, protecting him from…what, exactly? What did his mother think a hobo might do to Jake? Eat him? Arthur couldn’t imagine, but he knew better than to argue.

Before the end of Jake’s first week at school Arthur knew something else, which was that being at school with Jake was not going to be a picnic. All eight grades were taught together—eight rows of desks, grade oners along the wall nearest the door, grade eighters nearest the windows—so comparison of siblings was more or less inevitable, and that Jake would outshine him in every way was inevitable too.

Arthur had suspected for some time that it was his father he took after in the brains department. All his father knew about was farming, and that was all Arthur was ever going to know about too. He was a dunce at school. His mother had told him that book learning was important, so he tried, but none of it made any sense. Miss Karpinski would ask him a question and he wouldn’t have the first idea what she was talking about.

“Can you define an adjective for me, Arthur?” she would say, impatience already licking at the edges of her voice although he hadn’t yet had time to fail to know the answer. She was much younger than Arthur’s mother and wore dresses with round white collars and belts pulled so tight at the waist that it was surprising she didn’t break in half. “Come on, now, we’ve just done it—haven’t you been listening? An adjective is a part of speech that…? What does it do?”

He had no idea.

Jake did, of course. He sat on the far side of the classroom with the youngest kids, smirking at Arthur’s stupidity. He’d been born knowing what adjectives did.

So schoolwork was added to the list of things that Jake could do and Arthur could not. The list got added to at regular intervals. Jake could whistle, for instance, while Arthur’s mouth was somehow the wrong shape. Jake could ride a bike. The length of time between Jake’s first sitting his small neat behind on a bicycle seat and being able to spin off on it, unaided and in control, was about three minutes. Whereas something about bikes eluded Arthur. He knew only one other person who couldn’t ride a bike, and that was his father, who had never tried because he said he couldn’t see the point.

But Jake’s best trick was the way he could make their mother glow. He would wrap his arms around her and hug her with all his might—Arthur wondered why his mother liked it so much, considering how fierce it was, but she loved it, you could tell. So one evening Arthur tried it. He went up to her while she was peeling the potatoes for supper and put his arms around her and squeezed—carefully, because he knew he was much stronger than Jake and didn’t want to hurt her. She stopped what she was doing and looked down at him in puzzlement. She said, “What is it, Arthur?” Not unkindly, just perplexed.