Covered Bridge

by Brian Doyle

  Old Mickey Malarkey was lying away back in the 1840s. Before Canada was even a country—before Confederation. Before the invention of the radio, the telephone, the car, before electricity. Old Mickey Malarkey was telling lies when my favorite writer, Leo Tolstoy, who wrote War and Peace, was only about twelve years old.

  Whenever anybody asked Old Mickey Malarkey about being the biggest liar in the Gatineaus, he would say that he never told a lie in his life, which, of course, was one of the biggest big lies he ever told.

  You could see the top of Old Mickey’s house from where we were building the new bridge.

  About a quarter to twelve Old Mickey would leave his house, and by the time Prootoo rang the bell at twelve noon, he was already shuffling along the road. By the time most of the farmers were finished eating, Mickey would finally arrive.

  Most everybody would be sprawled out on their backs with their arms and legs spread out and their mouths open and their eyes half shut. And their stomachs swelling up and down, trying to digest all the food they ate and all the tea and water they drank.

  It would take Old Mickey about forty-five minutes to walk that far. I could probably walk from his house to where we had our dinner in about thirty seconds.

  I told O’Driscoll one day that I could probably throw a stone that far.

  “But, Hubbo, you’re young. You know, he’s pretty near a hundred years older than you. They tell me around here that fifty years ago, when your covered bridge was built, Old Mickey was sixty-two years of age. In fact, he was the foreman on the job. He’s built many barns in his day, and so building a covered bridge is almost the same. Now, Hubbo, when you’re—what is it he is, let’s see—when you’re one hundred and twelve years of age, I hope you can do as well!”

  When Old Mickey finally got there he sat on a saw-horse or a bag of cement and got his breath and then he got up and walked around through the bodies of the farmers. He was bent over quite a bit and his hands were holding each other behind his back.

  Then he started. It was a game they all knew. A conversation game.

  “Went out last night after dark on the river. Stayed about an hour. Filled the boat with catfish!” said Old Mickey Malarkey.

  “Filled the boat, Mickey?” said one farmer who was lying on his back with his arms out and his legs apart.

  “Well, filled a tub and a couple of buckets.” “A tub and a couple of buckets, Mickey?” said another farmer, lying on his stomach with his face on his arm.

  “O.K., a tub then. A tub full,” said Mickey.

  “A tub full, Mickey?” another farmer said, steam rising from him.

  “Well, it was half full,” said Mickey.

  “Half full, Mickey?” another farmer said, pouring water over his head to cool off.

  “Well, it was dark. But there were a lot of fish in there.”

  “A lot of fish, Mickey?” said the biggest farmer of them all.

  “O.K. Some fish. Some.”

  “Some fish, Mickey?” said O’Driscoll.

  “Well, say, half a dozen or so.”

  “Or so, Mickey?” said the first farmer.

  “O.K. Two. Two nice big catfish.”

  “Two, Mickey?” said farmer number two.

  “All right. One. One huge catfish. The biggest catfish I ever saw. Huge.”

  “Huge, Mickey?” said the wet farmer.

  “A good size, a fair-sized fish.”

  “Fair size, Mickey?” said O’Driscoll.

  “O.K. It was a small one. They weren’t biting, it’s the moon or something. I threw it back.”

  “Did you catch any fish Mickey?” I felt like saying, but the singing farmer beat me to it.

  “No! I didn’t catch one damn fish. Are you satisfied?” “Did you even go fishing, Mickey?” somebody finally said.

  “No! I didn’t go fishing. I hate fishing. And I hate catfish. They’re ugly and they scare me. As a matter of fact I’ve heard tell that they’re poison. The Devil put them there in the river!”

  “You’re an awful liar, Mickey Malarkey. An awful liar!”

  Just then Prootoo came along and announced that we were going to tear down the covered bridge as soon as one lane of the new bridge was laid.

  It was in the contract.

  It couldn’t be helped.

  The way she said that it couldn’t be helped, you could tell she was sort of sorry.

  But business was business.

  Boy Appointed King of Mushrat Creek!

  I WAS LEARNING a lot on my new job.

  One of the first things I learned was that I wasn’t going to earn forty-four dollars a week because I wasn’t going to be able to work every day.

  When I ran out of nails to pull, Prootoo would come up and say, “You’re laid off. Come back tomorrow. We might ‘ave some more cloux for you!” She would laugh when she said that. Then, I noticed that she was calling me “Cloux,” which is the French word for nail. But it wasn’t in a mean way.

  “Hey, Cloux! You’re laid off! Come back tomorrow. See if dere’s any cloux for you!” I was the only one on the job she joked with.

  Mrs. O’Driscoll said she didn’t have any kids of her own and she liked me because I was adopted.

  “How did she know I was adopted?” I asked Mrs. O’Driscoll.

  “Why I told her, of course,” said Mrs. O’Driscoll out of the corner of her mouth.

  Another thing I learned was about whistling. One of the smaller farmers was helping with the pulling of the nails one day. Actually, he was banging the dried cement off the wood so I could get at the nails. He was whistling a song. He was whistling “I been workin’ on the railroad.” Just to be friendly, I started whistling the same song. Whistling “I been workin’ on the railroad” right along with him. He stopped whistling and stopped banging the cement off his board and stared at me.

  “You don’t whistle the same song at the same time another person is whistling the song. Don’t you know that?”

  I apologized. I didn’t know that.

  You can learn a lot while you’re building a bridge.

  On one of my laid-off days (I called them cloux days), Mrs. O’Driscoll and I sat under her two rowan-wood trees and watched a monarch butterfly chase Nerves around the yard. As soon as Nerves got settled down again and curled up for a snooze, the monarch was back right at his nose and Nerves was on his feet showing his teeth and being pretty ferocious. Then the monarch went out and came in again, this time not fluttering and playing but gliding and diving straight for Nerves, and Nerves took off across the sideroad until he realized he was heading right for the potato field and 10,000 potato bugs. He screeched to a stop and made a quick right and headed down towards the ice house and Mushrat Creek, and we waited for the splash.

  I went again to the covered bridge to wait for Oscar to come by in his coupe. Lately I had gone part way with him. We even talked together a couple of times. He always seemed to be going to say something but he’d never say it.

  If he didn’t have stuff piled in the rumble seat I could sometimes ride back there. You felt like a king riding back there. Riding through your kingdom. Waving at the farmers along the road. The breeze flapping your shirt. You reach up sometimes, try to slap the leaves. You see a red-winged blackbird showing off his dive. You try to catch a handful of chokecherries when Oscar is rounding a curve close to the edge. Your hand is purple and sticky from the chokecherry juice. You watch the groundhogs praying in the fields, sitting up straight, just like in Foolish Father Foley’s church. You are blinking at the sun flashing through the trees, following you along. Listening to the crows complaining about nothing. Smelling the sweetgrass and the clover. Hearing the heat bugs.

  The King of Mushrat Creek.

  Until you stop. Then the dust swirls up around you and you’d better hold your breath for a minute.

  The trouble with riding outside like that though was that I wouldn’t be able to talk to Oscar, find out more about his life, about his dead lover Ophelia, about
what happened.

  Ophelia dead.

  Sometimes I walked down to Brennan’s Hill for a small can of white paint maybe to touch up our milk separator shack. Past Old Mickey Malarkey’s house, the road was lined with chokecherry trees and plum. Some of the plums were ripe enough to eat but were a bit hard, but the chokecherries were soft and juicy. Trouble was they turned your mouth purple and made you feel after like you just ate a cardboard box. I timed it so I would get to the General Store in Brennan’s Hill at half past five. That gave me time to get the paint, talk for a while (this is where I learned to tell the different evergreen trees apart), and then walk over to meet the train from Ottawa at ten to six.

  I stood beside Oscar McCracken’s mail car and watched the train. The whistle echoed all over the valley between the hills and then the train rounded the curve out of the trees and roared and coughed and chuckled and burped and farted and screeched and stopped.

  And the steam floating across the platform there tasted like metal.

  Some people got off.

  Nobody I knew, though.

  One cloux day, Nerves and I strolled over to see if Old Mac Gleason had any news. It was fun watching Nerves try to stroll.

  Old Mac sucked on his pipe for a while.

  Then Nerves and Old Mac started a long staring contest.

  Nerves often did this to people. Especially strangers. I never saw him lose one of those staring matches. I think that Nerves, in his other life, must have been a hypnotist. Old Mac looked away finally and Nerves lay down for a little snooze.

  “And how’s little Nerves today? You’re looking well, Nerves. Keeping busy, are you?” Old Mac didn’t like Nerves. Too much competition.

  Nerves opened one eye. Then he wagged one ear as if to say, “I’m fine, Old Mac Gleason. And how are you this fine morning? How’s your veranda doing? Do you think we’ll get some rain? What do you hear about the new bridge? Are you in favor of tearing down the old one or leaving it there for posterity? Do you think the devil will get you for not going to church? Does living beside a graveyard bother you at night? Do you know everybody’s business in Mushrat Creek? Do you think you’ll go to hell for making fun of Father Foley? Is your pipe empty again? Is that why it makes that sucking noise? When you spit off the veranda, do you always spit in the same place? Or do you wait to see which way the wind is blowing? When you were young, did you ever cry? Did anybody ever say, ‘be a man’? Does your rocking chair squeak the same way each time? When it was new, did it squeak? Did you ever write a letter to a girl when you didn’t know her address?”

  Nerves could say quite a bit with a little wag of his ear.

  Cloux days came in handy.

  I went for a walk up the road and talked for a minute to Mrs. Brown over the fence.

  She was in her hollyhocks.

  You could hardly see her.

  You could hardly hear her.

  She was Ophelia Brown’s mother.

  In my letter I tried to explain to F3 about Ophelia’s mother, Mrs. Brown.

  I said in the letter that Mrs. Brown looked like a cup and saucer that you only used on Sunday. Then I said she looked like meringue on the top of a lemon pie. That sounded even more silly than the cup and saucer one. But I left them both in anyway. Then I tried to say that Mrs. Brown looked like a little glass statue of a ballet dancer. I liked the sound of that one so I left that in, too.

  Later on I decided to try that she looked like a ripe milkweed pod. And, like ripe milkweed in a wind, if you blew on her, she’d come all apart and float away. And there’d be monarch butterflies all around you.

  I smiled at Nerves while I thought about F3 reading this letter (if I ever found her address), and what a picture she would have of Ophelia Brown’s mother: a cup and saucer, lemon pie, glass ballet dancer, milkweed with monarchs.

  Then I told her in the letter how sad it was about Oscar and his dead lover Ophelia Brown, and I even tried to talk about F3 and me and about our love affair and how we were apart, sort of like Ophelia and Oscar. I knew I was getting a little too dramatic but I couldn’t help it. Then I said our love affair was sort of like two potato bugs, one on one leaf at one end of the potato field and the other on a potato plant leaf way down at the other end of the field. I knew how dumb it all sounded so I read the whole thing out to Nerves. When I got to the part about the potato bugs, Nerves ran into the kitchen and hid behind the stove.

  Then I wrote that F3 and I were like fire and wood. She was the fire and I was the wood and the flames were our love and the sparks were the love words we said to each other and the smoke was the fights we had. Then I wrote that she was the wood and I was the fire and that the heat from the flames was the ache in my heart and the ashes were the rest of the cruel world when we were apart and by this time I was so mixed up that I tried to change it all to where she was a squirrel and I was a nut.

  But I didn’t say in the letter what was on my mind all the time. About the bridge. And about Oscar McCracken.

  And if they tore down the bridge, what would he do. Poor Oscar. If we could only help him!

  But O’Driscoll had his petition ready.

  Maybe something was going to happen.

  Tree Grows Out of Boy’s Nose!

  EVERYBODY WAS TALKING and arguing about the covered bridge. Some wanted to keep it. Some wanted to tear it down. Some thought Prootoo was going to get a lot of profit from the contract for ripping it down. Some said maybe they should burn it down. Have a big corn roast!

  Some didn’t care. A job is a job.

  Some wanted to leave it there for future generations. For Posterity.

  “Future generations?” said the biggest farmer of them all. “What would you want to do that for? I suppose if you built a new barn, you’d leave the old barn there, all falling down and rotten so’s future generations could stand around and admire it and say, My, look at the tumbled-down old shack they used for a barn in those days! I wonder why they bothered leavin’ that there at all. Sure, it’s only an eyesore!”

  On our noon hour, one farmer, while he was eating a pig’s leg for his dinner, gave us a little speech about the history of the bridge.

  “Imagine them building our covered bridge in 1900! Everybody from all over the countryside coming with their picks and shovels and tools to work on the bridge. Just like building a barn! The walls, put up one big piece at a time, just like a barn, and the roof beam and the rafters and then lumber and the shingles—just like a barn and the hammers all hammering and the saws all sawing away and the men all shouting and then the big outdoor picnic at the church and the pies and cakes and beans and potatoes and bread and pork and tea and onions and cabbage and pickles and even tomatoes if it was the fall! Oh, it must have been lovely!

  “And not one car came through the new covered bridge for a long long time. Only sleighs and wagons and carts!

  “Will it fit a load of hay? Will it take a load of logs?

  “Then it’s all right!

  “And after that, only a few cars a year came. And maybe a truck. Then a few more cars and trucks. And then more. And more.

  “And then, in the last few years, it seemed like every day there was more cars and bigger trucks.

  “So now we need a new bridge.

  “Time to tear down the old bridge and build this nice new one like we’re doing right now...it’s progress!”

  It was quite a speech. Specially while you’re eating a pig’s leg.

  Then Mickey Malarkey tried to tell a story about a cousin of his who was told not to shove a bean in his nose and did. And how the bean took root and began to grow and how the leaves were hanging out of his nostrils. Mickey tried to say they had to get hedge-clippers to trim some of the foliage hanging out of his nose, so they could get at the root and dig it out—and did he ever learn a lesson about shovin’ things up your nose, especially beans!

  But even Old Mickey Malarkey couldn’t keep the subject off the bridge for long.

  Sometimes some people
who lived in cottages up the river in Beer Bay and on Beer Point would drive up and get out of their cars and ask about the bridge.

  “Are they going to tear down the old covered bridge?” they’d say.

  Then the argument would start all over again.

  And the farmers that came from up in around Low would always seem to wind up arguing with the farmers from down in around Brennan’s Hill.

  And even though they might both be on the same side of the argument, they’d argue anyway.

  Then somebody started up about how hard it is to keep up a covered bridge! All the things that can happen to it. Trucks hitting it. Heavy loads. Porcupines. Bark beetles. Lichen. Moss. Wind. Rain. Ants. People carving initials. Kids. Drunks. Vandals. Suicides.

  And then some other people would start talking about the good stuff about the covered bridge, about how school kids could meet there to wait for the sleigh to take them to school in the winter except there were no more sleighs. And also about in the summer how kids could swing on a rope attached to a lower cord or stringer under the bridge and flip into the creek to swim and cool off; or how a farmer could rest his horses in there, stay in the bridge for a while to cool off and get their breath before they went up the other side pulling their load of hay or logs; or the advertisements you could pin up inside the wooden portals about meetings or dances; or how you could hold your breath and make a wish while you’re passing through; or how at night your girl would be afraid (she was only pretending) because of the dark and you put your arm around her; and how trout would sometimes leap right out of Mushrat Creek and fall through the windows into the bridge!

  And how magic it was when the bridge creaked in the wind.

  And how lovers could meet in there.

  And the drumming of the hooves, and the rumble of the wheels.

  And then some other people would spoil it and tell how a farmer once hanged himself in the bridge because his crops wouldn’t grow. Was it true? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it was another covered bridge. What difference did it make?