by Brian Doyle
You couldn’t smile for that long because your face would get too sore.
That’s why everybody in those old pictures looks so grumpy.
Even the little kids.
One Sunday, O’Driscoll was reading his Police Gazette and I was reading my War and Peace. I was reading the part where Prince Andrei was retreating from Napoleon in the War of 1812. He was leading his regiment through the dust in August in Russia. And they came along to a lake and all his men stripped off their clothes and jumped in the water. Then somebody yelled out that Prince Andrei might want to have a swim. So they all got out of the water to let their prince get in and take a swim. And Prince Andrei went in but he was embarrassed about taking off his clothes in front of his men.
It was in Book II, Part II, Chapter 5.
On the front page of O’Driscoll’s Police Gazette there was a picture of Adolf Hitler, the German who started the war in 1939 that O’Driscoll got lost in. After the war was over they looked all over for Hitler but they couldn’t find him. Most people said he committed suicide and his friends burned his body.
Nice to have friends. Even if you’re Hitler.
But O’Driscoll’s Police Gazette was saying that Hitler was still alive. On the front page there was a big picture of Hitler with his little moustache and a big headline saying the words, “Hitler Is Alive!” The story in the smaller print said that a barber in a country called Patagonia in South America said that Hitler came into his barber shop and got his moustache shaved off. The barber said that Hitler seemed to be a bit fatter than he was when he was losing the war that he started, but that he seemed quite cheerful and even made a few jokes.
“You can’t win ‘em all!” the barber said Hitler said.
O’Driscoll left the parlor to go out to the outhouse, and while he was gone I found out one of his secrets.
I was looking through his Police Gazette, taking a break from War and Peace, reading the stories in there. A story about a two-headed parrot. One head would tell a joke and the other head would laugh. Or one head would say, “Why did the parrot cross the road?” And the other head would say, “I dunno. Why did the parrot cross the road?” And the first head would say, “To get to the other side!” And then both heads would laugh their heads off.
And there was a story about a guy in Madagascar or somewhere who found an oyster with not a pearl in it but a whole pearl necklace. But when he took it to the jeweler’s, they said the pearls were just imitation pearls, just fake.
Then on the next page there was a story about a drowning sailor being saved by a dolphin.
The sailor fell overboard and swam around for a long time and just as he was going to sink and drown because he was so tired a dolphin swam under him and with the sailor on its back, swam to a beautiful tropical island with the sailor. And the sailor got off there and got married to the Queen of the Amazons and became King of Paradise.
The thing about this story was that O’Driscoll told me and Mrs. O’Driscoll just the other day that that’s what happened to him when he was supposed to be drowned in the War. That was the latest he told us. Then he said he thought that that was what must have happened because he lost his memory don’t forget so he couldn’t really be sure.
So O’Driscoll was stealing his stories from the Police Gazette. Telling me and Mrs. O’Driscoll stuff about when he was lost in the war. Getting the ideas from his Police Gazette.
No wonder he only half listened to my tale about a ghost.
But I had other things on my mind.
Things like initials.
O LVS O, for instance.
It had to be Oscar Loves Ophelia.
It had to be.
Man Digs a Hole Then Can’t Get Out!
INEVER WENT to church much when I lived in Lowertown or when I lived in Uplands Emergency Shelter but now that I was living on Mushrat Creek I was going to church almost every Sunday.
It was good to go and hear what everybody was saying about everything. And it felt good to get dressed up on Sunday morning after you did the milking and the separating and you fed the pigs and checked the hen-house for eggs.
At first O’Driscoll tried to get Mrs. O’Driscoll to polish our Sunday shoes and put them on the kitchen table so that when we slept in on Sunday morning we could come downstairs and jump right into these clean shiny shoes and head right out for church with no “delays.”
O’Driscoll told her that all the other farmers’ wives in Mushrat Creek did that for their husbands and their sons. He told her that it was a tradition. Then he told her more of what the other women did for their men on Sundays. They got up at five o’clock in the morning, made the fire, got the breakfast, heated up the iron, sponged and ironed the men’s pants, ironed clean white shirts for the men, got out the tie they always wore on Sunday, went out and milked the cows, separated the milk, fed the pigs, checked for eggs in the henhouse, came back in, got out the good shoes, cleaned and polished them and then put them in a neat, side-by-side way, right beside the breakfast on the table.
While O’Driscoll was explaining this to Mrs. O’Driscoll, she just stared at him. She didn’t really stare at him, she just calmly looked at him for the whole time he was telling her all this stuff about what she was supposed to do on Sunday morning for her men!
It was pretty cruel, really.
She didn’t say a word, just looking at him, like maybe the way you’d look at a sunset or something.
And the whole time, you could tell, O’Driscoll was wishing she would say something, because if she started talking, then he could stop talking, but as long as she didn’t talk at all, he had to keep talking. And the more he talked the worse everything got. It was like watching a cat play with a mouse.
Mrs. O’Driscoll used to call it “the silence.” If O’Driscoll was getting a bit too “cocky,” she would give him “the silence.”
And it seemed to work every time.
O’Driscoll would get more and more excited and say things that got worse and worse.
Mrs. O’Driscoll said once that it was like watching a man dig himself into a deep hole. “You let them dig until they can’t get out. Then you wait a while and then you help them get out,” she said.
O’Driscoll was telling her about how it was a mortal sin not to shine your husband’s Sunday shoes and that a lot of women up and down the Gatineau Valley were in Hell because they didn’t shine their husband’s Sunday shoes or if they weren’t in Hell already, “they were definitely headed in that direction...”
Mrs. O’Driscoll waited a while and then she gave him a little tiny smile that you could hardly notice. This was the way she helped him out of the hole he was in.
Then she handed him the shoe polish.
He took the polish and gave me a big wink.
The wink was the way he helped himself the rest of the way out of the hole.
After church at home, Mrs. O’Driscoll was putting on her overalls which she never did on Sunday.
“Put on your workin’ clothes, Hubbo me boy,” she said. “We’re goin’ to do a little paintin’.”
“Painting?” I said. “Painting what?”
“Your bridge, my boy,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “Your bridge.”
“We can’t paint that bridge. It’s too big. You’d need dozens of cans of paint and scaffolds and rope and all kinds of things.”
“We’re only going to paint what we can reach, boy. I’ve been out gossiping. I heard the priest’s housekeeper telling them all what Father Foley said to you that night about workin’ on the bridge and Sin and all that. That’s wrong, Hubbo. Very wrong. You’re not sinning to work for your beliefs. So just to show who’s side I’m on, let them have a look at us paintin’ this bridge, the both of us. Maybe by the example we set, others will join us and the bridge will be looked at as something worth saving!”
We got some painting done, but not much. Mrs. O’Driscoll only had a small can of red paint and one good brush, so we took turns.
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br /> “It’s the thought that counts,” Mrs. O’Driscoll was saying, as she hummed a little while I took my turn painting the tongue-in-groove sheeting on the outside of the trellis. I was leaning over the railing while standing on the abutment at our end of the bridge.
“I said I was out gossiping, Hubbo. But I’ve been doin’ more than that. I’ve been listening.”
“Listening?”
“Yes, my dear Hubbo. A tragic thing happened in this community over fifteen years ago. It involved the daughter of a poor woman I met up the road last Sunday, Mrs. Brown. Her daughter died. Her daughter, Ophelia, who was very young and full of hope, died.”
“Ophelia Brown,” I said. “I saw her gravestone. And Oscar McCracken...”
“Yes, Oscar the mailman was her betrothed.”
“How did she die?” I asked.
“Brain tumor,” she said.
Oscar McCracken and Ophelia Brown were lovers. This was almost twenty years ago. They were going to be married. Suddenly everything changed. Ophelia Brown started acting strange. She went kind of crazy. Looking around as though people were following her. Not talking to her friends. In the church three or four times a day. The tumor affected her brain. They found her in Mushrat Creek. She must have jumped out the ventilation window in the middle of the covered bridge. It was in the early spring. The water was roaring high almost over the center pier. She must have hit her head. Anyway, she was drowned. Father Foley wouldn’t give her a proper funeral. He was a young priest then. He had to follow the rules. His hands were tied. Wouldn’t let her be buried in the churchyard. Against God’s rules, he said. Oscar McCracken started going around watching his feet. Got a hump on his back from it. Ophelia wasn’t allowed in the graveyard. She was buried just outside the fence.
We took a break from painting and I showed Mrs. O’Driscoll the initials up in the rafters.
We went in and put the rest of our little bit of paint on the outside boards around the vent where Ophelia Brown had jumped.
The paint lasted a tiny bit longer than it would have because Mrs. O’Driscoll watered it down with some of her tears.
“F”-Word Linked to Priest!
MY LETTER to Fleurette was getting fatter. I was telling her about everything.
I was trying to tell Fleurette all about Father Foley and how Old Mac Gleason called him Foolish Father Foley and that Father Foley was from the town of Farrellton just north of Low up the road and how Old Mac Gleason called him Foolish Father Foley from Farrellton, which sounded funny because of all the F’s.
And I wondered while I was writing to her about him what Foolish Father Foley from Farrellton would say to Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell about Hell and what she should do and what she shouldn’t do.
Lucky that Father Foley couldn’t read people’s minds, because if he could and he read my mind in church when I was thinking about Fleurette, he’d probably blast me right straight to Hell for having such thoughts.
Funny part of it was that it was Father Foley who got me started thinking about Sin in the first place. If you yell and scream about Sin all the time, people are going to start thinking about things that they never thought of before.
Fortunately for Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell, Foolish Father Foley from Farrellton was far from fixing her with his fault-finding.
I put that sentence with all the F words in the letter.
Fleurette would like that one.
If I ever found her address.
I also told her as much as I could about Oscar McCracken.
Everybody loved Oscar McCracken.
One of the reasons was that he never missed the mail. He was always on time. He was as regular as the train. When you heard him pull up in his coupe car and when you heard your mailbox squeak (or whatever it did— some mailboxes squealed like little pigs, some groaned like cows, some went chunk like an ax hitting wood), then you knew just about what exact time it was, and you thought of what a nice man Oscar was.
Everybody also loved Oscar because most of the time, maybe all the time, the mail he brought them was nice mail—a letter from a relative from the States; a parcel from Sears or Eaton’s, a notice saying pick up that sack of seeds you ordered. (Was I the only one that never got what he wanted from Oscar? A letter from Fleurette?)
And also, everybody loved Oscar because everybody knew what happened to Ophelia Brown and everybody knew how it changed Oscar forever. Everybody knew how he felt. How he got the hump on his back from watching his feet.
And everybody knew that whenever Oscar went through the covered bridge he would stay inside there for a while and have a little chat with Ophelia Brown.
But not very many people talked about what Oscar used to do four times a day inside the bridge. Everybody knew that he’d stop for a bit and have a little chat with his lost lover Ophelia, but because it seemed a little bit crazy they didn’t like to mention it much. They didn’t like to come right out and say that Oscar McCracken talked to a ghost four times a day.
And I didn’t like to say that maybe I saw that ghost one night.
O LVS O. That’s what the bridge said.
If they said that, then they’d have to say they believed there was a ghost there or say that Oscar was crazy. They couldn’t say right out that they believed Ophelia’s ghost was there in the covered bridge because if Foolish Father Foley got wind of the fact that they believed in ghosts, especially in Ophelia Brown’s ghost, he would get pretty mad and go into a rage about Evil and everything. Father Foley already kept her out of the graveyard and anyway, Father Foley was in charge of things like ghosts and spirits and he’d be the one to decide about stuff like that. It wasn’t the farmers who were going to decide about things like that. Farmers were in charge of cows and milk and manure and seeds and hay and homemade bread and chickens and things like that.
Foolish Father Foley from Farrellton was in charge of the other world.
That is why when people heard the covered bridge was going to be torn down everybody got very confused.
First of all nobody wanted to talk about Oscar McCracken and Ophelia Brown. If the bridge was torn down, what would happen to poor Oscar? Poor Oscar who everybody loved?
It was O’Driscoll who was one of the first ones to get into the mix-up.
“What was wrong with having two bridges?” O’Driscoll was saying to farmers in the store in Brennan’s Hill. “One for the past, one for the future?”
Then I wrote about Oscar’s goat to Fleurette.
After Mass one day when Mrs. Ball invited Mrs. O’Driscoll to walk back down the road with her and drop into her niece’s place and have some tea, Mr. O’Driscoll and I and Nerves crossed the road for a stroll through the graveyard and then past Old Mac Gleason’s house. I noticed from the graveyard that the sexton’s cottage where Oscar kept the church equipment and graveyard tools had a pen and a small stable behind it that you couldn’t see from the church. In the pen was a goat.
O’Driscoll started the conversation with Old Mac Gleason about the goat.
“You know goats are thought to have originated in China some ten million years ago.” O’Driscoll sounded like he just read a sentence from a school book about goats.
“Well, sir,” said Old Mac Gleason, “this goat originated here as a kid and belonged to poor Ophelia Brown. After she died, Oscar took the goat and still has it. As a matter of fact, Father Foley hired Oscar as the sexton so the goat would keep the grass cut. Shows you how much that Foolish Father Foley knows about goats! Goats aren’t lawnmowers! Wasn’t long until he had the pen built, though. One day the goat marched right down the aisle into the middle of Father Foley’s sermon and started bleating away like she was saying what everybody else felt like saying—”Shut up, you old blatherskite Father Foley”—bleating away at him. The look on Father Foley’s face! And the terror in the eyes! You’d think he was staring at the Devil himself!
“There’s nothing Father Francis Foley from Farrellton hates worse than having his speec
hes about Sin interrupted. But that Oscar, he knows goats. Watch the way he feeds that thing. Nothing but the best. Goes out every now and then with that little car and loads it up with the kind of grub the goat loves. Pine branches, young bark, wild roses, clover. And milks her every twelve hours. I never seen a goat live so long. And keep givin’ milk, too! Nice fresh goat’s milk keeps that Father Foley nice and fat! I wonder, Mr. O’Driscoll, you being a man who has traveled widely and knowing a lot about a lot of things, do you think that too much goat’s milk could affect a fat priest’s brain? Make him crazy?”
“No, Mr. Gleason,” said Mr. O’Driscoll. “I don’t know anything about that, but I do know that the animal called the goat was always hooked up with Sin in the olden days. The old Hebrews in ancient times used to bring two goats to the altar. Then they’d draw lots. One goat went to the Lord and the other to the Devil. That one they called the scapegoat. Then the priest would confess all his sins and the sins of all the people. Then because all the sins were now with the scapegoat, they’d take it out in the bush and let it get away, let it escape.”
Like everybody always was when O’Driscoll told one of his stories, Old Mac Gleason was silent and a bit amazed.
We listened for a while to the polite Sunday morning birds.
“Well, anyways,” Old Mac Gleason said, “that Oscar, he is a queer duck himself since his lady did herself in. Rings the church bell, does the chores, takes the collection, delivers the mail, digs the graves. Never talks to anybody. Strangest package of a man I ever saw!”
I was starting not to like Old Mac Gleason.
O’Driscoll and Nerves and I crossed back over the road and cut in behind the church in back of the sexton’s cottage where the goat pen was.
The goat was black with a white face and white legs and a white beard. She had two black tassles hanging from her throat and curved black horns. Her udder was swollen and her teats pointed straight and were stiff. She was full of milk.
She had a funny look on her face. She looked like a person looks who just pasted a “kick-me” sign on your back and is trying not to laugh while looking you right in the eye.