They sat in silence for a considerable time, each reliving the other’s story, and picking up bits of dialogue from the shore.
“I was wondering,” he said, perhaps merely to change the subject, but it was not entirely that, for the time was upon them to speak of difficult things and perhaps to seal their arrangement, “if there’s not a lawyer around somewhere, anyone you might know of, who might lend some time to a poor sap in jail. A kid came to this town selling asphalt and he’ll be leaving in a paddy wagon with a one-way ticket to prison.”
She needed a moment to think through the ramifications. “It’s possible, Ryan,” she pointed out to him, speaking slowly, “but our complicity—”
“I know.”
“Everyone’s— It won’t wash off. Or burn away like the bridge. The truth still has to be suppressed. And he was, in his own right, a criminal.”
“I know. But he didn’t do the crime he’s going down for. I arranged it that way. After the damage has been done, can’t we help somehow?”
Tara indicated Denny, who was out in the water wrapping chain around another deadhead, aided by people ashore. Nothing further needed to be said. Everybody was going to have to pitch in around here in order to change just about everything in their lives.
26
Sundown marks an early impression upon a valley town. Cascading hills darken while the opposite sides of their peaks are dyed with a fresh smudge of pastel colouring. Shadows expand across the forest, yet the face of a sheer stone cliff shines with a diamond glaze. Returning from a long day’s labour, a driver passes through the steep gloom governed by heavy foliage into blinding sunlight, then follows a twist in the road where the light rapidly flickers, jumpy amid the leaves.
A clarity consumes the air. Evening remains on the verge, as the warmth of a summer’s day in early September lingers.
Dinners are wolfed down. Many men dispense with the formality entirely, pack a sandwich and a beer and return to their vehicles. In numerous homes a debate ensues. Older boys want to tag along, to be part of this. “It’s a school night!” mothers contend, an objection that for once carries faint merit. Girls vie to break the rules also, and in the end their moms join in, anyone who can wield a hammer or nudge a shingle into place who isn’t fearful of heights, or fears missing the occasion more. The opportunity won’t come again, not in this time nor in any other. A word is uttered: history. Tonight, history will be fabricated as the sun goes down, as hillsides glimmer with a reddish hue. Later on, under a waxing gibbous moon, as a wry dalliance of stars reflects on the silvery, oily black river below them, people of this town will labour through a night that casts a lurking judgement on their lives.
So they drive, yet more arrive on foot, traipsing down to the river’s bridge for reasons they hold to be both complex and personal. Old pals embrace. Perpetual foes greet one another with a glance, their truce repaired for this project. Young ones seek each other out, then fidget, awaiting their chores. The elderly also hang back. Unable to wield tools or haul materials up a ladder, they gladly converse, lend their opinion, recall sad things and glad things, and speak of other people. Sagely, they nod with a sense of the evening’s wonder, then go still, overcome for a bit, moved by their luck to be alive to experience this moment. Conversations resume, lift upon air ascending from the warm soil into the evening’s cooling grace.
Although it’s rarely mentioned, everyone sees again in his or her mind’s eye a vagrant night in this place, when the river sorely raged with fire. Less than a gracious memory, yet an imprint inextricably embedded within them all.
Ghosts attend. For some as reminiscence. For others, as a tangible presence or two, attached to those who fell along the way, yet who deserve to be here. A few spare a moment’s thought for one who slumps alone in his prison cell. No one’s innocence has been spared. The dead, then, the broken, the joyful, the familial, the earnest, and the warring factions who are bound together now by common enterprise, all justly receive their instructions, then climb, take up their hammers and begin to pound away.
Twiing! Twiing! Th’wonk!
Across the rooftop of a covered bridge, hammers rise and slam down. As the last light of the day winks upon the rush of water below, and on into the moonlit dark, every man, child, woman, and friend, enemy, saint, or deviant, the victorious with the defeated and every revenant on a visit, in bright, holy rhythm begins to pound, needing to fix this, to make their world whole again.
The finish is too close now to quit and wait for daylight, and the hours after work and dinner have brought in so many more reserves who tonight are especially keen. The crisp crack and twiing! of hammers on nails is all a body can hear, the dull th’wonk! on wood as nails strike home. Doing this the old-fashioned way was Alexander O’Farrell’s idea, a suggestion picked up, proposed, and carried through by his son Dennis. Nail guns not permitted. Whenever it has been both feasible and economically viable the bridge was constructed using methods from a bygone era, and tonight, aided by a few gas lamps and the moon, the workers can see well enough. Not a soul complains and no flattened thumbs are tossed into the resplendent rapids below.
They hammer in the haunting, breezy dark.
Twiing!
Echoes roil on down the riverside.
Th’wonk!
Then, quite abruptly, the crew of volunteers goes still. No hammer is swung. As though each man and women experiences a similar reaction or is receptive to a mystical cue at virtually the same instant, they stop working. A cough. A shuffling as people alter positions. Muffled conversations. Yet a sudden quiet, just like that. The tribe of workingmen and -women quits hammering and instead chooses to gaze in near silence upon the constellations above in their lazy, blinking strut, or upon the river below in its artful surge. Everyone takes a breather. While the moonlight has washed out a few stars, men and women still crane their necks, while others chose to lie upon their backs and gawk, skyward, in their tiredness and in their awe, for would ever such a time occur again, to be out hammering nails on a rooftop at night creating a work of art under the wild sacred heavens while a river gambols beneath them?
“I know why we stopped hammering,” Denny O’Farrell comments. As do others, he breathes heavily from his exertion. Now eleven, his eldest, Boy-Dan, received permission to stay up this late to help, for as Denny and Alex explained to Val, the opportunity would not return even in the lad’s lifetime.
“I’ll bite,” his dad, Alexander, says. “Why?”
“Because we don’t want to finish.”
Alex considers that awhile. Then says, “Not a day goes by in my life, Denny, when I don’t wonder who or what sired you.”
Boy-Dan thinks that that is too hilarious and says so, and laughs, while Denny merely grins, taking no offence.
No one needs to explain himself or herself to another. Of course they desire to finish building the new old covered bridge in the place where the original stood. For more than two years now they have enjoyed the benefit of a new highway span upstream, and this faithful replica will be merely decorative, prohibited to vehicular traffic, enjoyed by those on foot or on bicycles or, to the consternation of a few, on skateboards. Lovers will kiss on the bridge, even get married on it, and children will run and skip and gaze down at the rapids. As summers return and the tempest of the river subsides, adolescents will leap through their fears to plunge into the cool waters below. Another brave generation of whelps. Tourists will snap photographs and bask in the aura of another time when beauty and tranquillity engendered solace from lives of hard labour, sacrifice, and periodic woe. They want to finish the bridge because this has been an undertaking for the ages, to live for generations as lore, as pride, as adoration. Volunteer loggers fished from the river the old timbers left behind by the logjams of old and the sawmills agreed to hew the wood and plane and cut timbers, so that the wood for the new old bridge, its trestles and braces and walls and even it
s shims, comes only from logs culled from the Gatineau, and at no cost. As if the old bridge, its ashes in the water, gave itself back. Loggers, mill workers, tradesmen and carpenters, barbers and chefs and clerks and accountants carted and sawed and hammered and riveted into place each beam and post and support and plank, and the whole town raised the money when cash was necessary for the engineering costs, principally, and also for paint and the legal and accounting fees and for taxes and hardware and for the rental of cranes and trucks and other pieces of heavy machinery whenever a donation of equipment proved deficient. Now they are shingling the peaked roof, the final step in the enterprise and a task to which the community has swarmed, loggers and tree huggers alike, businessmen and tradesfolk and artisans and housewives and retirees, children, too, firemen and bakers, bums and bankers, everyone anxious to be on the rooftop to complete the task and if it goes on through the evening into the den of night, so much the better. So of course they want to finish, but Denny and no one else needs to explain why no one is in a rush to have that final nail hammered home, for everyone desires that the bridge be built yet no one wants their activity to conclude.
This is the crucible of their lives as a community.
Blessings and their ample shortcomings are etched onto the frame, knitted into the hatch of tresses, and bolted, knotted, painted over, and made to look pristine. That last moment can only arrive with sadness, and too soon. With pride and yet regret.
“Dad,” Denny says, knowing full well that his own son sits beside him also, “not a day goes by when I’m not proud of the fool who did.”
Three generations of O’Farrells fall back into the communal silence. They have much to reflect upon. Denny feels the substantial dark ache that lies submerged in his chest as he considers again the stranger lodged in a prison cell for the crime that he, Dennis Jasper O’Farrell, instigated and committed, and he will suppose that his father will dwell on that poor man, too, often. He hopes that his son has no inkling of that aspect, and never will. He presumes that his brother remembers the fellow as well, that not a day goes by when the name Jake Withers fails to cross Ryan O’Farrell’s synapses. Each of the three, Ryan, Jake, and Denny, play third base. They have that in common. He understands the countervailing theory, that the boy did wrong, went bad, that he could have stood trial for crimes that boasted of longer sentences, that it was only a matter of time before he was caught and convicted for those serious felonies and that in the overall scheme of things he was probably done a favour. Maybe, but Denny knows also what is right and what is wrong, and while building the bridge has been the right thing to do, putting a man in jail for a crime he did not commit is wrong. But he and everyone else did it anyway, the right and the wrong, and then just let it go at that.
That is who they are now, he knows. Who he is.
They live with the knowledge daily.
And persevere.
Attempts to get Jake out came up short. Denny reminds himself often that he could just confess, set the man free that way. But he made his choice years ago, and carries on.
He likes to think that such events and lessons compel him to be a better man, but he believes also that he should have been a better man when it counted, as there isn’t much he’s willing to do now about the past. Except to do his job, raise his family, and erect the bridge to help undo the wrong he committed the night he cast the old bridge upon the waters of the Gatineau River in flames, so fiercely roaring.
Although the word offends him, Denny sacrificed for the new old bridge. Innumerable weeks passed when he gave more time to the bridge than to his job or family. Now he is seeing it finished, at last. Some have talked that the privilege of hammering the final nail home ought to be his. He doesn’t know about that, but believes that if his hand raised that hammer it would also be gripped by many, not by himself alone or even by a few. By a boy in jail, for sure. By his brother, who landed on Skootch’s ball club that summer, replacing Jake Withers at third base, and who virtually single-handedly beat the Blue Riders in the playoffs with his bat, breaking Denny’s heart. Ryan still plays third for the hated Wildcats, who are mostly tree huggers and criminals, raising a few eyebrows, and regularly outhits his younger brother. Ryan deserves to grip the hammer for the final nail, also. And his dad, a true king of this river, and Val, who saved him, and people he didn’t much like, such as Willis Howard who kept the books. He grew to respect what a demanding job that could be, although he still doesn’t like him but the feeling is mutual, so who really cares, and of course Raine Tara-Anne Cogshill, his sister-in-law. She goes by Raine now, switching her first name rather than her last when she got married, that girl just did things differently. But she gave them the idea to rebuild the bridge themselves and held up the legal end. Part of her new law practise, which she parlayed into becoming the logging company’s local lawyer. She and Ryan moved into Mrs. McCracken’s old house, left to her by the old lady herself, and there’s another one who definitely would place her hand on that hammer—Alice Beauchamp McCracken, in whose memory the bridge would soon be christened.
She might even manage to hold the final nail. At least he couldn’t damage her ghostly fingers if he missed.
Men who carried out the arson with him would also hold that hammer, André, Samad, and Xavier, for they stood by him in the crime but were also among the first to agree to the restoration, committing time and labour and battling to keep others’ spirits up to do the same. André once privately admitted to him that he regretted what they did that night and would change things if he could. They clinked beer bottles in commemoration of the thought.
The newlyweds lived in Mrs. McCracken’s old house while building a new home by the riverside on property formerly owned by Skootch. He got himself arrested, and Tara, now Raine, defended him. Payment turned out to be a willingness to sell a chunk of land he originally inherited, which he bragged was worth a million and it might have been, except that he sold it for a song to the man who arrested him and the woman who got him off. She kept busy, with her practise and her portion of Willis Howard’s store, and also represented local artisans who now sold their wares across the continent thanks to her budding distribution network. So busy, yet everyone’s labours these past years were slowed by the communal effort to rebuild.
All those whose hands were placed upon this structure—they will grip his hammer, too. Loggers, both good friends and strangers, who performed the initial and arduous task of clearing the river of old timber, their hands clasped his. And Denny thanked those who gave countless hours of time and effort, tree huggers, and crazy Skootch himself, in and out of jail, who coughed up cash and supplied additional labour and agreed to truncate the baseball schedule so that men were free to donate more hours on the bridge. Chances are, whoever broke into Mrs. McCracken’s house, adolescents probably, grew up a bit and worked on the bridge, too, even to demonstrate that they were sorry. Perhaps not, but Denny hoped so, and thanked them anyway. Quietly, privately, he thanked other workingmen and -women and businesspeople and just plain folks who claimed no particular affiliation to one industry or another, whose desire was nothing more than to participate in forming an object of grace, of singular perpetual beauty, to seize a chance to create something in the company of their neighbours with their hands and their hearts and through an affection for one another and through a sense of abiding love.
“I doubt that I can even lift that hammer,” Denny whispers, although his son and his father, who hear him, do not know the reference, and he does not explain himself, so deeply is he immersed in his reverie, “without their help.”
His whole torso an ache, he returns back to the silence on the rooftop of the bridge and that strange, unfathomable majesty. Denny will never know, few do, who starts up, but one lone hammer does break their code to commence its labour, a gradual, rhythmic, decisive crack and twiing! twiing! and a crack and th’wonk! and then it begins on the next nail twiing! and each man and woman, prou
d to be upon the rooftop on this night, galvanized by the light of the moon and by the river and by the company they keep, by their work and by the hammer’s defiant song, crawl back into position, and take up a nail, and grip a hammer, and in the old-fashioned way begin to pound.
Twiing! Twiing! Th’wonk!
Across the bridge, then, under the soft moonlight and shimmer of constellations reflected upon the turbulent waters below, every darkened form, in bright, holy rhythm, starts to pound, and pound, pledged to undo what had been done, to begin, inexorably, again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Out of the blue one day I received a commission, for which I am now particularly grateful, from the magazine L’Actualité, to be among ten writers who would each visit and describe with some intimacy a different region of Quebec. I chose the town of Wakefield, and the communal piece went on to earn a National Magazine Gold Award. In my investigation of the town, I was given a personal tour of the Wakefield Mill Inn by its owner, Robert Milling, from whom much history was gleaned, useful for the article initially and subsequently the novel. Weekend stays at a local cottage in the company of Dr. Robert Dorion helped deepen my knowledge of the area and added local stories, as did returning to regional provincial parks in my tent. The second iteration of this material came as a short story, which was never submitted anywhere except to students to whom I was teaching creative writing at Concordia University. I learned from their comments but kept the story squirreled away. Next, the tale travelled on to become the genesis for a film script, and the author is thankful to SODEC and Telefilm Canada for their funding and to the director Leo Bélanger and editor Shea Lowry for their insight. That effort had to be abandoned, as the story was growing out of its earlier forms more rapidly than it could be contained, demanding to be born as a novel. So here it is.
The River Burns Page 42