The Other Side of the Bridge

by Mary Lawson

  Arthur’s mother was better at dealing with people, too. The previous spring, when a late frost killed off half the crops and Arthur’s father had to go and see the bank manager, she went with him to do the talking. Arthur’s father knew what was needed to put things right, how much money he wanted to borrow and how long it would take him to repay it, but he was afraid that in the enclosed space of the bank manager’s office the words would refuse to come to him and he’d be left standing there, looking stupid. The Dunn men weren’t big on words.

  So he relied on his wife. He readily accepted that there were things which she knew that he did not, including how much water it took to drown a child.

  Despite his mother’s fears and Arthur’s occasional guilt-ridden, mostly repressed wishes, Jake didn’t drown or fall off the roof or get run over by a car, and he grew into a lovely, sunny child. Those were the words Arthur’s mother used to describe him. Everyone loved him—she said that too. “It’s because he’s so cheerful,” she said. “So interested in everything and everyone.”

  Arthur studied his own reflection in the square of mirror in the bathroom. His big plain face and mud-colored hair. Sunny wasn’t the word that sprang to mind. What would the right word be? Not cloudy…Overcast? Dull? That was it. Dull. He even felt dull.

  As for being interested in everyone and everything—well, he wasn’t. Most people and most things were boring, when you got right down to it. But he didn’t believe Jake was all that interested either. He just looked as if he was. Even as a small child he had better control over his face than Arthur did: he could make it express anything he wanted, regardless of what was going on beneath the surface. He could make his face shine with interest and enthusiasm when Arthur knew for certain that inside he was wearing either a sneer or a yawn. He only bothered to do it with adults, of course; they were the ones worth impressing. He would greet any adult who crossed his path as if he or she were his favorite person on this earth. He’d say, “Hi, Mrs. Turner!” and his face would light up and glow with warmth as big old, fat old Mrs. Turner waddled up, and then five minutes later, when she’d pressed a nickel into his hand and gone beamingly on her way, he’d be imitating the waddle and trying to persuade you to do “knock-and-run” on her door.

  Arthur, on the other hand, was forever being told he looked glum. He wasn’t glum; it was just the way his features sat on his face. And when adults crossed his path he kept his head down, because he had no idea what to say.

  “You’d better watch out, Arthur,” the teacher said. “Your little brother’s going to catch up with you.”

  It was Jake’s first year at school. Arthur was in grade six. He had to set off for the two-mile walk to school fifteen minutes earlier than he used to because Jake couldn’t walk as quickly and mustn’t arrive at school all tired out from running to keep up. Arthur didn’t see why they had to go together; there were no hazards to pass on the way to school that he was aware of, no raging rivers to cross, no mountains to climb. Bears ambled through the area from time to time, but no more often than they had when he was Jake’s age, and no one had worried about him being eaten by a bear.

  But it turned out there was something to worry about after all. In the past year or so, strangers had been wandering up the long road from the south. Hobos, people called them. They were looking for work, his father said. It seemed that in the world outside there were no jobs anymore. From time to time one of the hobos would knock at the kitchen door and ask if he could help out in the fields, or chop firewood, or anything else that needed doing, anything at all. Arthur’s father felt sorry for them and would have been happy to employ one or two, but he couldn’t pay them; money was something farmers—the ones around Struan anyway—had never had much of and nowadays they had even less. Arthur’s mother felt sorry for the men too, and gave them food sometimes, but she was also afraid of them. Who knew what a desperate man might do?

  So Arthur was obliged to become his little brother’s bodyguard, escorting him to school and back, protecting him from…what, exactly? What did his mother think a hobo might do to Jake? Eat him? Arthur couldn’t imagine, but he knew better than to argue.

  Before the end of Jake’s first week at school Arthur knew something else, which was that being at school with Jake was not going to be a picnic. All eight grades were taught together—eight rows of desks, grade oners along the wall nearest the door, grade eighters nearest the windows—so comparison of siblings was more or less inevitable, and that Jake would outshine him in every way was inevitable too.

  Arthur had suspected for some time that it was his father he took after in the brains department. All his father knew about was farming, and that was all Arthur was ever going to know about too. He was a dunce at school. His mother had told him that book learning was important, so he tried, but none of it made any sense. Miss Karpinski would ask him a question and he wouldn’t have the first idea what she was talking about.

  “Can you define an adjective for me, Arthur?” she would say, impatience already licking at the edges of her voice although he hadn’t yet had time to fail to know the answer. She was much younger than Arthur’s mother and wore dresses with round white collars and belts pulled so tight at the waist that it was surprising she didn’t break in half. “Come on, now, we’ve just done it—haven’t you been listening? An adjective is a part of speech that…? What does it do?”

  He had no idea.

  Jake did, of course. He sat on the far side of the classroom with the youngest kids, smirking at Arthur’s stupidity. He’d been born knowing what adjectives did.

  So schoolwork was added to the list of things that Jake could do and Arthur could not. The list got added to at regular intervals. Jake could whistle, for instance, while Arthur’s mouth was somehow the wrong shape. Jake could ride a bike. The length of time between Jake’s first sitting his small neat behind on a bicycle seat and being able to spin off on it, unaided and in control, was about three minutes. Whereas something about bikes eluded Arthur. He knew only one other person who couldn’t ride a bike, and that was his father, who had never tried because he said he couldn’t see the point.

  But Jake’s best trick was the way he could make their mother glow. He would wrap his arms around her and hug her with all his might—Arthur wondered why his mother liked it so much, considering how fierce it was, but she loved it, you could tell. So one evening Arthur tried it. He went up to her while she was peeling the potatoes for supper and put his arms around her and squeezed—carefully, because he knew he was much stronger than Jake and didn’t want to hurt her. She stopped what she was doing and looked down at him in puzzlement. She said, “What is it, Arthur?” Not unkindly, just perplexed.

  He was embarrassed. He thought he must somehow have done it wrong. Squeezed too hard or not hard enough or not in the right place. Then he thought maybe he was just too old, that only little kids could do that sort of thing. But Jake didn’t stop doing it as he got older; the hugs got less intense and less frequent but he still hugged her from time to time and it still had the same effect. It was as if he flicked a switch and a light came on inside her. She would glow for half an hour afterward.

  “Time Jake started helpin’ out,” Arthur’s father said when Jake was seven years old.

  They’d just finished supper. Arthur’s father was sitting sideways in his chair at the table, mending a harness. He had a leather-needle, fearsomely sharp—he’d already stabbed himself with it twice, which was maybe what had given him the head of steam necessary to bring up the subject of Jake—and he was forcing it through the leather with the help of a pair of pliers.

  Arthur’s mother was washing the supper dishes. Arthur was at the far end of the table cleaning the shotgun, a job his father had entrusted to him on his twelfth birthday and of which he was hugely proud. His father had taught him to use the gun as well, and said he’d give him five cents for any rabbit or crow he shot, rabbits being good for the pot and a real nuisance around the row crops, and crows being ju
st plain evil.

  Jake had disappeared the minute his plate was empty, like he always did. They could hear him outside. He’d created so much fuss when Arthur was allowed to shoot the gun and he was not that his mother had bought him a bow and arrow set, a small one, from the Hudson’s Bay. He’d painted a big round target on the side of the barn and every now and then there was a thwack as an arrow landed. Arthur knew that during the day, when their father was out in the fields and their mother was safely occupied elsewhere, Jake had a different sort of target. He would heap a couple of handfuls of dry grass and twigs around the bottom of a fence post, and half-fill an empty tin can with gasoline from the tank in the barn. Then he’d set the can on top of the fence post, light his heap of dry grass with a match, and attempt to shoot the can off the post. When he succeeded there would be a gratifying whoosh and flames would leap up the sides of the post. He was usually pretty quick to douse it with water, but even so a number of fence posts were getting badly charred and one of these days their father was going to notice.

  Arthur worried about this. In the past couple of years his role as his brother’s protector had widened to include protecting him from the consequences of his own actions. Their father was an even-tempered man and it took a lot to make him wrathful but Jake could provide a lot, and when their father really got going it was an awesome sight. Arthur had been thrashed by him only once, for leaving a stump fire unattended, and he’d taken care not to give him cause again. Jake had been whipped several times. He’d made the most of it, walking with a limp for days, but it had been their mother who really suffered, and so Arthur suffered too. Moreover, he suspected that their father did as well; he had no wish to hurt his wife and would have spared her if he could, and that made him madder at Jake than ever. So Arthur started going out after each of Jake’s arson attacks and surreptitiously scraping away the charred wood from the base of the posts. Sometimes he had to sand them down to get rid of the black.

  Now Arthur could hear the reluctance in his father’s voice as he brought up the subject of Jake helping with the chores. He hated a confrontation with his wife more than he hated crows.

  “Oh, I don’t think he’s big enough yet, Henry.” Arthur’s mother turned around from the sink. “You only have to look at him.”

  “I did look at him,” Arthur’s father said, reluctance dragging his voice down to a mumble. “He looks big enough to do chores. Feed the chickens. Take out the swill bucket. Things like that.”

  Jake chose that moment to bound in from the farmyard.

  “You think you’re pretty strong, Jake?” Arthur’s father asked. “Or you still just a kid?”

  “Sure, I’m strong,” Jake said, grinning. “I can beat Arthur.”

  “Arthur lets you beat him,” his father said, “so that don’t prove nothin’. See if you can lift that chair.” He nodded at a kitchen chair. Arthur’s mother turned around to watch, anxious, her hands dripping suds.

  Jake grabbed the chair by its back and heaved it off the ground. He swung it back and forth in tight arcs, grinning at the three of them.

  “Bet you can’t carry it to the door,” his father said, and Jake lurched over to the door.

  “That doesn’t prove anything, Henry,” their mother said.

  “Sure does. If he can lift the chair he can lift the swill bucket.”

  “There’s a world of difference between lifting something and carrying it all the way out to the barn.”

  “Not such a big difference as all that.” Arthur’s father put down the harness and wiped his hands on his shirtfront, then picked up the harness again and stared at it hard. Maybe he was going to have to stab himself with the needle again before he could carry on.

  Arthur’s mother pursed her lips. She looked at Jake and said, “You go on outside now, Jake. You too, Arthur.”

  Arthur carefully put the gun down on the table and followed Jake outside. They made a show of going around the corner of the house and then slid back and flattened themselves against the wall by the kitchen door.

  “He’s just a baby still,” their mother was saying.

  There was a pause, during which Arthur imagined he could hear his father thinking there was a good reason for that. He said, “Arthur was doin’ plenty at that age.”

  “Arthur’s suited to farmwork. Jake isn’t. You can see that.”

  Arthur glanced sideways at Jake. Jake grinned at him. He had great confidence in his mother’s ability to win arguments on his behalf.

  Their mother said, her voice quiet but full of pride, “Don’t you see that Jake is different? He’s so clever—he’s going to have choices, Henry. He will have something better than this.”

  Arthur could hear their father’s baffled silence. What could be better than this? Finally he said, “Still won’t do him no harm to do his share. Do him good.” He sighed, and Arthur imagined him wiping his hands on his shirt again. “He’s goin’ to grow up soft, Mary, if he don’t do no work. He should do his share. Look at Arthur. Didn’t do him no harm at all, doin’ chores when he was Jake’s age. He done them well, and I don’t remember hearin’ him complain.”

  Arthur felt the strange sensation of pride swelling in his chest. He had taken the work for granted, it was what people did—the people he knew, anyway. His friend Carl Luntz worked alongside his father and his two elder brothers just the same. Arthur had never questioned it. Certainly never expected to hear praise.

  He felt Jake’s eyes and turned his head to look at him. Jake’s mouth was puckered tight with disgust. His eyes were dark, and Arthur had trouble reading their expression. It wasn’t respect or admiration though, that was for sure.

  Arthur’s mother was wrong when she said that everybody loved Jake. There were exceptions.

  “Charlie Taggert threw my schoolbook in the mud,” Jake said. He and Arthur were walking home from school. It was September, the worst time of the year as far as Arthur was concerned—endless months of school ahead, cooped up in one stuffy schoolroom at a too-small desk, while outside the maples flamed red and gold and the air was as clear and pure as springwater. Inside was the leaden weight of boredom; outside was the sharp tang of wood smoke and the urgency of shortening days. You could smell the winter coming. You could see it in the transparency of the light and hear it in the harsh warning cries of the geese as they passed overhead. Most of all, you could feel it. During the day the sun was still hot, but as soon as it dipped down behind the trees the warmth dropped out of the air like a stone.

  Like the boys on other farms, Arthur headed for the fields as soon as he got home from school in the afternoons in order to get a couple of hours of harvesting in before dark. It had been bone-dry right through June and July, and then just as they were coming up to the corn harvest there’d been a solid week of rain and they’d had to wait for the crop to dry out. Now it was dry and Arthur’s father was out in the fields sunup to sundown. He came in at night covered in dust and sweat and tired almost past eating. Arthur would gladly have played hooky and worked beside him all day, but his mother forbade it and his father let on that he agreed with her.

  Jake helped when he was told to. Then, and at no other time. And he worked so slowly and ineptly and with so much complaint that his father said it was hardly worth the bother, though he bothered anyway as a matter of principle. Jake might as well have been growing up in the town for all the interest he showed in the farm.

  “Dad says do you want to come and help with a calving,” Arthur said. His father had sent him to fetch Jake, thinking calving at least would interest him. Surely anyone would be interested in a new life beginning.

  “Do what?” Jake was playing with a pack of cards he’d found somewhere. His hands moved swiftly, fanning the cards out and folding them together again. They made Arthur think of birds’ wings.

  “Come and help. Jessie’s having her calf.”

  “Can’t she do it herself?” Jake asked. “She must be able to or there wouldn’t be any cows in the world, they�
��d all have died out like the dinosaurs.”

  It was a good thing it was Arthur that Jake said it to, and not their father. Arthur knew that Jake was just being logical, and meant the comment seriously, but their father would consider it a smart remark and Jake’s smart remarks made him mad.

  “Don’tcha want to come and watch, even?”

  “Not right now.” Jake slipped all the cards with faces into a certain order so fast you could hardly see his hands move. “I’m kind of busy. Later, maybe.”

  It was school he lived for. School and all the goings-on there, triumphs and disasters, friends and enemies. Especially enemies.

  “Look at it!” Jake said as they walked home together. He pulled a book out of his schoolbag and brandished it at Arthur. It was covered in mud. Under the mud you could just make out a dark-green cover and the title, in gold print. English History. Arthur remembered it, dimly. Kings and queens, dozens of them. Wars, dozens of those too, and all of them with dates, as if anyone cared. Miss Karpinski said the purpose of studying history was that if you didn’t you were doomed to repeat it, but as far as Arthur could see the history books proved that you were doomed to repeat it anyway, so what was the point?

  “Look at the state it’s in!” Jake opened the book more or less in the middle. It looked as if someone had placed it facedown in a puddle and leapt up and down on it half a dozen times. “Miss Karpinski’s going to kill me.” He sounded really worried.

  “No she won’t,” Arthur said. Miss Karpinski loved Jake. He was the last person in the school she would kill.