Covered Bridge

by Brian Doyle

  O’Driscoll was never the kind of person who didn’t listen to what you were saying. That is, most of the time. But when it came to something that might be a little bit unbelievable, he might not listen very well. Maybe he’d think you were exaggerating a little bit. I wondered where he’d ever get an idea like that.

  “Nerves and I went down to look over the job after dark. Didn’t get anything done. Saw a ghost...”

  “A ghost, eh?” said O’Driscoll. “Well, those old bridges are full of ghosts...anyway, if you do well your first month or so, you’ll be full-time caretaker at least until the what’s-their-names come back. We could use the $12 a month...”

  “It was the shape of a woman...it jumped into the creek...Nerves passed out...I was saying...” But O’Driscoll kept talking.

  “Our job is to keep the lights in shape, report any damage or accidents or suspicious happenings and oversee the painting of the bridge every two years. The two years is coming up a month or so from now. There’s expenses. Oil, wicks, tools and, of course, the paint and the labor during paintin’ time is what the expenses are for.”

  “There was a splash. She had on a whitish dress and a dark hat with a big brim,” I said quietly.

  O’Driscoll was looking at me with pride.

  I was saying just the kind of things that he would say. When I mentioned the splash, Mrs. O’Driscoll put her hands across the table, one on mine and one on O’Driscoll’s, and smiled.

  Then she said this out of the far corner of her mouth: “I love it here. Ghosts and covered bridges and everything! Are we ever lucky! I hope that the what’s-their-names fall off the edge of the earth on that world tour of theirs and that they’re never heard from again.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” said O’Driscoll, and gulped down the rest of his tea. They weren’t going to listen to me about the ghost.

  I was starting to think that maybe it never happened.

  If only Nerves could talk. He didn’t think it was so lucky!

  A knock came to our front door. I went through the parlor we only used on Sunday and opened the front door we hardly ever used. It was stuck and I had to give it an extra shove and a kick.

  It was the county chairman.

  In our kitchen, he told us we didn’t need to caretake the covered bridge anymore. We were getting a new bridge. I was fired.

  It was the shortest job I ever had.

  Book Causes Earthquake!

  O’DRISCOLL was talking about the construction going to start about a mile up Mushrat Creek. They were going to build a modern bridge over the creek so the highway would go straight through instead of circling down to the covered bridge like it always did. This would take a big bend out of the road.

  He also said a couple of times that he heard some of the farmers up in the post office in Low talking about the highway getting paved.

  “That’ll keep the dust off the chokecherries begod!” O’Driscoll told us one of them said.

  And everybody was saying how good it was going to be because there would be jobs for everybody that wanted to work and there’d be money galore around for everybody.

  And O’Driscoll explained once while we were milking the cows that the farmers around there had a pretty good life even though they had to work pretty hard for it.

  But the one thing they never had very much of was money.

  All the money they ever had was from the cream they sold to the dairy or maybe they’d sell a pig or a steer or maybe even raise some chickens and sell them but not very often.

  And once when we were in the general store in Brennan’s Hill buying what we needed which was salt, flour, tea, sugar and molasses, we heard the owner of the store say that his hired man quit on him to go and work on the new highway that was to approach the new bridge.

  We bought more molasses than other people, mostly because it was our dog Nerves’ favorite food.

  Nerves loved to eat a big chunk of bread soaked in molasses.

  What a dog.

  Then he’d go down to the creek and wash his hands and face.

  Maybe take a swim.

  One hot afternoon Mrs. O’Driscoll was sitting in her rocking chair out the front doorway in the shade of her two rowanwood trees. She looked nice rocking there a little bit in her bright yellow and blue dress and the purple combs in her hair and above her the clumps of redrowanwood berries hanging like tiny chandeliers. And her head resting back and a little smile on her face. She liked that yellow and blue dress because yellow and blue were the school colors of the school, Glebe Collegiate, where she worked as a cleaning lady before she became a farmer.

  She had on the stove a great big pot of preserves simmering away in the summer kitchen.

  The smell of the raspberries bubbling there in the sugary red syrup was reaching out through the screen door, past the woodpile, over the side road, around the walls of the barn and into the pig pen where the pigs were lying in the cool mud in the hot sun grunting and snorting and sighing every now and then and snuffling into their big nostrils, the sweetness and the pureness of Mrs. O’Driscoll’s great big pot of preserves of raspberries simmering on the stove in her summer kitchen.

  And upstairs, in the heat, the way O’Driscoll liked it (Mrs. O’Driscoll said out of the corner of her mouth he must have been in the North Pole all the time he was away and he’s trying to make up for it now), O’Driscoll lay sleeping, grunting and snorting a little bit and breathing in the hot raspberry syrupy smell that floated into the house from the summer kitchen up through the vent in the ceiling and right around O’Driscoll’s body and up around his head.

  I went down to the ice house and sat in there on an old car seat in the cool corner in the sawdust. The smell of the oakum between the logs was almost like chloroform, and I dozed off a bit and let my book, War and Peace, fall to the floor.

  The noise the book made when it hit the floor shook the whole building.

  And the ground.

  It was deep noise, a thud from the center of the earth.

  No, it wasn’t the book! A book couldn’t do that! I was awake now.

  It was dynamite!

  They were blasting about a mile up Mushrat Creek.

  Construction for the new bridge was starting.

  A while later, some dead trout floated by. They floated on their backs, their white stomachs shining in the sun, the dark pink of the inside of their gills like little ribbons around their necks.

  Gooseberry Has Face of a Beautiful Woman!

  I WAS WRITING more stuff to Fleurette. Trying to explain about Mrs. O’Driscoll and how happy she seemed to be. Her face, it was, it looked, it seemed like she was just going to start smiling any minute now. How some people’s faces look like they are just about to start crying and other people’s faces look like they are just going to get mad and start shouting at somebody.

  But Mrs. O’Driscoll, her face was so different from what it used to be like. When she was a cleaning lady at Glebe Collegiate Institute and we lived at Uplands Emergency Shelter her face was often like one of those faces that might start to sigh any minute or maybe even start to cry.

  And I tried to tell Fleurette how maybe it was because O’Driscoll was lost in the war and how it was only when she had some of the sherry that she liked that she wore her face in a different way.

  But now, here at Mushrat Creek with O’Driscoll, Mrs. O’Driscoll’s face was the same whether she had the sherry or not.

  And I tried to think of what to compare Mrs. O’Driscoll’s face to, to put in Fleurette’s letter.

  Her face was calm like the covered bridge. It was content like Mushrat Creek. It was clear like Dizzy Peak. It was funny like a gooseberry on a gooseberry bush. And it was full of love like the Gatineau Hills.

  And it was wise, like the Gatineau River.

  Fleurette would like these ways that I tried to say what Mrs. O’Driscoll’s face was like.

  And I was writing how you get to like somebody’s face. Like O’Driscoll’s. At fi
rst I thought he was sort of funny-looking. Now I loved his face. What happened? It didn’t look like the same face at all.

  But mostly I was trying to explain how they were going to let the bridge get old and rotten. How you have to take care of things or they’ll disappear.

  Or maybe they would just let it get neglected until it got dangerous, and then they’d have to tear it down.

  It didn’t seem right.

  Mailman Enters Covered Bridge—Does Not Exit!

  THE VERY FIRST person I met around Mushrat Creek was Oscar McCracken.

  Oscar McCracken’s farm was the last farm on the road going south before you got into Brennan’s Hill.

  Oscar lived there with his mother and his younger brother. He worked hard on the farm and also delivered the mail twice a day in his little car with only a front seat.

  It was a pretty old car. A 1929 Ford Coupe. You could open the windshield by winding a handle on the dashboard. You cranked the motor with a hand crank to start it. It had two narrow steps under each door called running boards.

  The train came up in the evening and went down in the morning. Oscar met the train at ten to six in the evening in Brennan’s Hill and picked up the mail and delivered it up along the road past our place as far as Low.

  Then he drove back home.

  He also met the train in the morning at ten after nine in Low and did his route again.

  That meant he crossed the covered bridge four times a day.

  About a week after we moved in I walked down our side road past the potato field on one side and the dusty chokecherry trees on the other side to our gate at the main gravel road and our mailbox. The entrance to the covered bridge was right there on the right.

  I stood leaning on the gate because I wanted to find out something. I wanted to find out why it took so long for the mail car to go through the bridge. First you’d hear it stop at the house of Old Mickey Malarkey and you’d hear the mailbox squeak and the car door slam. Then you’d hear the car groan in first gear, hear it swallow, hear it whine in second gear, hear it swallow and just hear it start crying in third gear and then stop in front of our mailbox. After the mailman put in our mail (it was never for us at first, it was always for the farmers who were going to fall off the edge of the earth), you could hear the car door slam, the motor moan in first gear, swallow, whine in second gear...but then the car would be inside the bridge and you wouldn’t be able to hear as well, except for the rumbling of the wheels on the carriage-way...then silence.

  Sometimes two or three minutes would pass by before you would hear even any rumbling and then the car would burst out the other side, whining in second gear.

  You could hear the thunk of the ramp as the wheels left the deck. Then, swallow, high gear and gone.

  I stood there leaning on our gate to see if I could see why it took the mailman so long to get through the covered bridge.

  Along he came to Malarkey’s. I followed him with my ears:

  squeak (the mailbox),

  slam (the car door),

  first gear, groan, swallow (gearshift), second gear, whine,

  swallow, third gear, cry...stop.

  The mailman got out. He came over to me and told me his name. Oscar McCracken. He gave me a catalogue. He got back in the car. He drove into the covered bridge and stopped about half the way in. He shut off the motor. He sat there.

  I could feel the silence he was in as I leaned over our gate to get a better look.

  After a long while, Oscar McCracken got out, cranked his car started, got back in and drove out the other side of the bridge and up the road towards Low.

  I walked into the bridge and stopped almost halfway over and waited. I listened to Mushrat Creek below and to the swallows twittering secretly in the mud nests in the rafters. I was standing beside the gap in the siding which was for air circulation and also for cutting down on wind obstruction.

  And for letting in the moon some nights. And for ghosts to dive out of.

  Up in the rafters near the eaves was a gap, left there also for circulation and wind.

  Further up the rafters closer to the arch, near where the end of a tree-knee angle brace met on one of them, there was something written. Carved in the wood.

  I crawled partway up the truss using the ventilation gaps and the timbers and braces for my hands and feet until I could make out the writing.

  The catalogue I still had in my hand slipped between my fingers, bounced off my foot and through the gap and down into Mushrat Creek.

  I didn’t even know I had it in my hand until it dropped.

  There were five letters printed deep and strong and perfect into the rafter. Printed with care. Loving care.

  O LVS O

  I got down and checked out the gap for the piece of mail. Gone. Down Mushrat Creek. Didn’t matter. It wasn’t for us anyway.

  O LVS O

  O for Oscar probably. Oscar loves O. Oscar loves Oscar? Oscar the mailman carved in a bridge that he loves himself?

  So much that he’d climb up and sit in those rafters and carve a message to himself?

  Ridiculous.

  It must have been some other person named O.

  I walked through our gooseberry shrubs up onto some rocks and sat under the huge butternut tree between the stand of pine and the cedar bush.

  I was thinking about what I had written in the letter to Fleurette that I’d probably never send.

  I wrote that if you don’t take care of things they’ll rust and rot away and die. Then I got an idea.

  Sometimes if you write things down you get ideas you never knew you had.

  Under the butternut tree I got an idea that I didn’t have until that very minute.

  I would be the covered bridge caretaker anyway! Maybe that way, people would notice and...

  Covered Bridge Has Two Exits—But No Entrance!

  I WAS OUT caretaking my bridge. When I checked the lamps I worked at night.

  I ran a rope from the lantern to a small pulley in the top of the portal of the bridge to another pulley between the truss and the rafters and down to a nail in one of the braces, high enough up so some little kids wouldn’t untie it or fool with it and have the lamp come crashing down or set a fire or break one of their heads open.

  The caretaker before me used a long wooden ladder to take care of his lamps, but it was pretty old and shaky from being out in the weather leaning on the side of the bridge for so long, so I cut it up for stove-wood and installed my pulley system in its place.

  I had a lantern at each end of the bridge. The North and the South Portal.

  Each end would be lit but the middle would be dark.

  Unless the moon was right; then you had the patch in the middle. And, if you were lucky, maybe a ghost.

  What I noticed was that the people who lived on the north side of the bridge always called the North Portal the entrance and of course the other end the exit.

  And the people on the south side of the bridge called the South Portal the entrance and the other end the exit.

  To some people this could be a bit of a mix-up. For instance, one night somebody who lived on the south side of the bridge might drop in to our place and tell me that the lamp was out at the entrance of the bridge. And then a little later somebody who lived on the north side of the bridge would drop by and say that the same lamp was out at the exit of the bridge.

  And if the first person stayed a bit to talk to Mrs. O’Driscoll or to O’Driscoll for a while and then the second person came along with the news about the lamp, you’d get a little argument start up because they’d both be there at once.

  “It’s the lamp at the exit.”

  “No it’s not; it’s the one at the entrance.”

  The same kind of argument that they’d maybe have over what you meant when you said this Sunday or if you said next Sunday.

  “Next Sunday; is that the Sunday coming or is that this Sunday? Or is it the Sunday after next? Wait now. Is next Sunday the Sunday after
this or is it this Sunday? Which is it?”

  “The dance is next Saturday. Is that the Saturday coming or the Saturday after this?”

  “It’s this Saturday coming.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

  “I did. I said it was next Saturday!”

  “It’s not next Saturday then, it’s this Saturday!”

  On my very first Sunday working for free on the bridge, a report came that a lantern was out at one of the exits. I got my can of coal oil, my scissors and my cloth and strolled down our side road to the bridge.

  It was a beautiful night, Mushrat Creek gurgling and babbling away like a baby full of milk and the Gatineau sky full of stars.

  As I came up to the South Portal I could see that that light was on. It was bit sooty but it was burning.

  It was the North Portal they must have said was out. I walked into the bridge and shaded my eyes from the light above me so I could see the other portal.

  The moon wasn’t quite right so there was no patch in the middle.

  At the other end there was a light on but it wasn’t in the right place. It was right close to the level of the carriageway, not up near the peak of the portal where it should have been hanging. Could it have slipped down? Broken pulley? Bad knot?

  I decided to clean the South Portal light first, the one above me.

  While I worked I glanced up from time to time to see the other end.

  I reached up on tiptoe and untied the rope from the nail and lowered my lantern. I lifted the globe with the lever and blew out the flame. While I let the globe cool and my eyes got used to the dark, I realized the light at the other end was moving!

  I pressed my back against the first timber of the truss of the bridge and let the light walk by me.