The River Burns (16 page)

“Those men of old,” Mrs. McCracken started to whisper.

“In days of yore,” Tara stipulated.

“Exactly. Back then, they drove the logs on the river with patience and expertise. They relied on their wits.”

“Therefore?” She loved this old gal, loved goading her on, just a touch.

“Young men today are too impatient! Everything's rush, rush, rush. They can go around. They can wait their turn. They can
relax
, for heaven's sake. Given what's at stake that doesn't seem too much to ask, if you ask me.”

“Isn't that the point of the meeting, Mrs. McCracken? To ask you. And everyone else while we're at it.”

■   ■   ■

“Work to do,” had been
Ryan's excuse for bowing out of the meeting. Perhaps to justify his fib, he cruised through town, the streets starkly empty with so many at the meeting. The supermarket shut early, everyone off to do their civic duty, which at twilight contributed to a spooky, ghostly atmosphere. Ryan's tour took him past Mrs. McCracken's house, and he considered this to be correct police procedure as well. He told her one thing, yet also gave credence to a second theory regarding the rampage through her home. Blaming kids was credible, but loggers might have committed the trespass. Among their numbers were those with the temerity. And within that tribe were those with motive, for she was a formidable political opponent in the current dispute over the bridge. They might want to unsettle her, get her off her game. Should that guess prove right, they could conceivably return when her house was empty to wreck further havoc. Fortunately, her home as he drove by seemed quiet. Lovely, in a still, sedate way in the gloominess of dusk. From there Ryan drove to the old covered bridge, in part to guard against anyone taking advantage of the exceptional quiet to scrawl slogans or commit some reckless, malevolent act.

As he arrived, he came across a group of young people, each taking turns jumping off the upper rail into the water below. A serene scene of summer, which held in its moments—the girl crying out as she leapt feetfirst into the stream, the young boy fearful on the rail prior to his first jump ever, the older boy swimming across the current to a boulder near shore, still hooting with the thrill of his leap—a nostalgia for summers past, for simple joys and special memories. If he were an artist, Ryan thought, cheesy or not he'd capture this scene. Strictly speaking, the sport was not legal, although Ryan was never the sort of police officer who enforced infractions for the sake of proving his power, and he'd made the leap into the river himself countless times as a kid. Dangers lurked—only a patch of the water's surface was free of rocks and rapids—and yet generation by generation young people managed to negotiate the dangers and teach one another to be safe even as they revelled in the risks. In Ryan's estimation, no one could be protected and shielded from himself or herself at every moment. Taking reasonable risk, as a youthful folly, was probably beneficial over the long term. Let folks or their kids speed or drink in cars, though, and he was on their tail in the blink of an eye, and merciless.

As well, the river was not swimmable, due to the proliferation of deadheads, the old logs still floating around or stuck in the river bottom or lassoed by grasses or lodged in the side banks, often just out of sight where a child might slam into one if plunging below the surface. Forget about boating, as a rudder or prop might easily be ripped off. Only the rapids cleared them out from the area below the bridge each spring, so only here, beneath the bridge, could children enjoy the water.

Walking out onto the old covered bridge he was ignored by the kids at first. He was not in uniform and stayed at one end, away from the deepest diving spot. Recognizing him, the teenagers conferred with one another, which resulted in an emissary being sent to approach him. Before the dripping boy got within twenty feet, Ryan issued an edict. “Kid, don't get me wrong. I'm not giving you permission. But I'm not on duty. I'm not on duty and I'm not in the mood for a chat.” The boy retreated to the company of his friends. In essence, Ryan was giving them his tacit approval, yet somehow he spoiled their fun. He never meant to do so. After a few minutes, following one more leap, the teenagers gathered up their clothes and towels and walked off the bridge in the direction opposite Ryan.

His weight against the railing, his arms crossed over it, he stared down at the rapidly flowing river.

The first girl he ever kissed was on this bridge.

The first breast touched.

He broke up a fight on the bridge once, standing between two youths wailing on each other and getting them to stop. Seventeen at the time, about two years younger than the combatants, he came away from the experience shaking. He'd put himself in danger, but to his surprise, inexplicably, he gained the approval of a number of his peers, guys and girls both, and from that moment forward he considered that an idea floating in his head was viable. He might actually carry through on an inkling. Ryan accepted that he was destined to become a cop.

Standing on the bridge as he did now, except that it was wintertime then with ice below and a chilling wind at his back, he contemplated, and absorbed, the agonizing death of his mother. And he returned on an autumn's evening to wallow in emotional wreckage when bad news regarding his girlfriend ripped him asunder. The bridge and the river below exerted this kind of pull on him. Others talked about heritage and history and tradition, but for Ryan the bridge counted in ways he was unwilling to speak about to anyone. Certainly not down at the town meeting. The bridge was his personal holy ground. A private place for an intimate correspondence with himself.

He understood that he was not at the meeting because he could never say there what he felt so deeply here, and to listen to lesser or silly testimonials might agitate him. There was that, and one thing more. The new woman in town. Whoa. She wrecked him. He hoped her voice was a high-pitched squeak, or that she only spoke in expletives, or was as dumb as a dump truck, or as sharply stony as the boulder divers avoided when leaping into the stream below. Anything, in fact, that would rescue him when eventually they met.

He wanted to talk to her soon. That much he knew. His brother was an inadvertent spokesman on his behalf and he couldn't let that continue under any circumstance, and the way his dad was teasing and sounding him out earlier, he better not let him be his next spokesman either.

Cowboy up,
he chided himself.
Talk to the girl.

Gazing downstream, he knew why he was such a mess. Or knew several factors. He hadn't responded to anyone since his last relationship, its end an acrimonious affair. After that he felt demoralized, inordinately self-protective, alert, absurdly discriminating. He devalued his own judgement but primarily he was afraid to fall in love again. Whenever he was sent out on an emergency call he hoped that the victim was male, for if not, he became automatically critical, as if he must analyze the woman and detail her idiosyncrasies and frailties, map the dents in her character and discern the ridges and smudges on her personality before any meaningful conversation could take place. As if he was in training for his next emotional encounter, whenever and with whomever that might be. The fear of being hurt by itself did not stymie him, but the fear of falling so profoundly under a lunar sway that he could neither think straight nor act in any competent manner or distinguish what was up or down petrified him. Because he knew what could come of it when the relationship went bad. He was less afraid of women, he understood that much about himself, than he was rattled by the depth of his capacity to tumble helplessly, irredeemably, into love, and then feel stuck, even when he wanted out of it, with only himself to blame.

In going to the bridge, he needed to make sure that on this critical night it stood safe from vandals or malevolent folks with their strong opinions, but he also wanted this, to commune with the old structure and the old river amid the old hills where he communed with his mother upon her death, and where, through several critical periods in his life, he communed with the stars above, seeking his way through life just as the river steadily bore a channel through these ancient hills.

Ryan took a deep breath.

His boyhood dream was to work on the Gatineau. Drive logs downstream. Dangerous work. Good work. A labour that was no longer available. As the river flowed, so did that history, and his own—all of it churning together, and while he could not recover the old days Ryan wondered if he could permit romance to seep through his bloodstream again. He knew he was getting way, way, way ahead of himself, but he couldn't help it. The river and the first stars were answering back, and he was able to comprehend a simple but difficult thing, that sooner or later it would not be possible to avoid falling rampantly for someone. That part was inevitable. He was prone. If nothing else, this woman called Tara already showed him that the door was now open. He'd be unable to close it. Whether with her, and his senses hoped it would be so, or with another, the door was as wide open as the sky. He was a goner. He knew that now. The view from the bridge indicated that this was so.

■   ■   ■

Sage wisdom arrived from sundry
directions, unexpectedly at times, Tara noted. But then, right after someone spoke wisely, another debater's idiotic remarks inevitably fell into step. So many who spoke seemed unable to differentiate between diehard opinion and thoughtfulness. In turn, idiocy bequeathed honourable yet mediocre thinkers with both the courage and the incentive to enter the fray, a group soon emboldened by its strength in numbers. The mediocre and then the merely garrulous spoke one after the other, until finally another sage voice piped up and altered the course of the proceedings. Then nutcases stormed the ramparts, and the cycle was faithfully reborn.

“If I wanted to be objective,” she prefaced to Mrs. McCracken.

“Now, dear, you don't want to do any such thing.”

“You have no clue what I'm about to say.”

“Just choose a side, dear. Mine.”

“You haven't spoken yet.”

“I pick my spots.”

In the way that the old lady held her head, chin up, eyes alert and calm, and in the way that she maintained an authoritative disposition, back straight, one wrist comfortably, delicately placed on top of the other in her lap, Tara presumed that her new pal was probably right.

They heard from those who either elegantly or falteringly spoke with an unerring passion about the environment. The gist being that trucks and logs ultimately were bad, therefore highways and bridges were bad, therefore the status quo was fine, and so the old bridge ought to be maintained as the only point of crossing in the immediate area. They summoned air pollution, noise pollution, and the dangers of high-speed traffic to convincingly support their positions, and suggested that the money saved might be better served to acquire parkland. “The faster they can move trees, the more they'll cut, and before you know it they'll clear-cut the entire forest.” Members of the concerned ad hoc committee at the head table nodded and jotted discreet notes.

Those on the side of the conservationists cringed, while loggers chuckled, when a cute girl with short legs out of proportion to her frame, who wore cut flowers in her hair and across her wardrobe, screeched, “I can't stand it when I see a logging truck on the road! Someday I promise you”—her right hand struck like a cleaver through the air—“one of those loads will land on a Volkswagen! Then what? With babies inside!”

“Why is it always a Volkswagen?” a logger inquired from the back.

“Child killer!” she bellowed back at him. “You wait and see!”

“Don't worry, lady,” came another's retort, “we keep our loads tied tighter than you are.”

She misinterpreted his meaning. “I'm not drunk!” That didn't occur to anyone until that moment, but now no one was sure.

Those who supported tourism read prepared statements that were quietly rational and compelling. The industry was thriving. Inns, restaurants, and shops were doing a banner business, the steam locomotive came up to Wakefield for a reason and the old covered bridge, “photographed a thousand times a day during the summer and quite a lot in the winter,” was a big part of creating their overall prosperity.

When called upon, logging executives ran down the numbers to impress the committee, and copious notes were taken.

Tara had no difficulty singling out those known as tree huggers, for many were at the game the night before and their haberdashery was proudly flamboyant. They supported every spokesperson for tourism and the academic ecologists, while adding wry notes of their own. “Our choices should follow the will of nature,” declared a man identified as Gordon Skotcher. He wore proper trousers and a suit jacket, minus a shirt. “Our choices ought to favour people over machines, a living, breathing forest over clear-cut timber.”

The tree huggers not only applauded, they cheered.

“What about jobs?” a provincial bureaucrat asked from the head table.

The speaker stared at him awhile, shifting his weight from one foot to the other before the standing microphone he gripped to steady himself. The question seemed to confound him. Finally, he answered, “You're asking me? I haven't worked in fourteen years!” Which earned the ribald hoots of the populace, loggers and tree huggers alike.

“The panel recognizes Mr. Willis Howard,” the old mayor announced, and Willis stood and moistened his lips before moving over to the microphone. He considered himself the lynchpin in the shopkeepers' drive for recognition of their economic contribution to this community. More so than any other, he resented the loggers' claim to fiscal prominence.

Yet a voice boomed out before he uttered a word. “Hang on there, chief. My hand was up long before his.”

“I'm sorry if that's the case, Denny,” the old mayor said, “but I have recognized—”