The Other Side of the Bridge

by Mary Lawson

  Her lips were quivering. You’d have thought that after suffering such a loss nothing else would matter to her but that didn’t seem to be how it worked. She was fearful about everything now. It was as if she had finally seen the awful power of fate, its deviousness, the way it could wipe out in an instant the one thing you had been certain you could rely on, and now she was constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to work out where the next blow might fall.

  Arthur said, trying to be gentle but still firm, “I can’t do it, Mum. I’ve tried. I just can’t cover the ground. Come fall, if Otto doesn’t do somethin’ I’m gonna have to sell the sows. We’re not gonna be able to feed them through the winter. We’re not even gonna be able to feed our own cows. Anyway, I can hardly milk ’em all—it’s taking me hours.”

  She said tearfully, “I’ll try to help you more, Arthur. I know I haven’t been much help.”

  That was for sure. She couldn’t seem to get herself together. She would start milking and half an hour later Arthur, working his way down the row of patient animals, would find her still in the same place, sitting on the milking stool, face vacant, hands in her lap. Even her own jobs, tasks she’d been doing all her life—the row crops, the farm accounts, the chickens, collecting the eggs—seemed to be beyond her. Even cooking the meals. “Oh, goodness,” she would say when Arthur came in at the end of the day. “Goodness, Arthur. Your supper…”

  She seemed to have lost her mind. That felt like the right expression. She looked permanently bewildered, as if she had just put something down and now couldn’t find it. Arthur would get himself bread and cheese. Or not bother. Just go to bed.

  If only she would see the truth of what he was saying now, if only she wouldn’t argue. He didn’t have the strength to argue with her. He was exhausted to the point of despair.

  But she was going on. “We can’t let them down like that, Arthur. Not after all they’ve been through. We must find another way.”

  “There ain’t no other way!” He stopped. She’d jumped and was staring at him, wide-eyed. He took a deep breath and tried to collect himself. “There ain’t—isn’t…there isn’t no other way, Mum. There’s only me to do it all, and I can’t.”

  “You should get yourself a POW,” Jake said, not looking up from his comic. Superman was raising his fist to the sky.

  “What?” Arthur said, impatiently. All he needed was Jake sticking his oar in. There was no reason on God’s earth why Jake couldn’t help with the milking, but of course he didn’t. Jake did nothing. Jake did nothing so consistently, so defiantly, that it was almost as if their father were still alive and Jake was still fighting him, still refusing, as a matter of principle, to do one single thing his father would have approved of.

  “A POW,” Jake said. “A prisoner of war.”

  “What about him!” Arthur said, almost shouted, exasperated beyond endurance. What did he care about lousy stinking POWs? They could all drown themselves as far as he was concerned.

  Jake looked up at him. “You should get yourself one,” he said. “Lots of farms have them—they’re all over the place. There are about a dozen of them working at the sawmill. They’ve got them down the mines and everything.” He went back to his comic.

  Arthur sat there, staring at him. “They let POWs work on the farms?” he said at last.

  Jake flipped a page. He said, “Why don’t you ever know what’s going on, Art? Are you deaf or blind or what?”

  Arthur looked at his mother.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she said instantly. He could tell she’d known about it. Deliberately hadn’t told him. “Enemies, working on your farm. It’s not safe!”

  “They don’t let the dangerous ones do it, Mum,” Jake said.

  “How do they know who’s dangerous?” their mother cried. “They wouldn’t know until it was too late! Until we’re all dead in our beds!”

  Arthur was trying to take it in. A prisoner of war, working for you. Helping out in the fields.

  “Don’t they run away?” he said at last.

  “Where to?” Jake said. He tossed the comic aside and reached for the bread. “Anyway, they’re too scared of bears.” He grinned. “They wear this uniform—blue with a big red circle on the back, like a target—and somebody told them the bears really go for the red circle, like bulls. A couple of them broke out the first week, someone said, and after two days they were back. Asked to be let in.”

  Arthur turned it over in his mind, looked at it this way and that.

  His mother said, “Arthur! I won’t have them here! They’re Nazis! Murderers!”

  Arthur said, “Can you have more than one?”

  “Dunno,” Jake said.

  “Arthur,” his mother said, her voice low and trembling, “we are not going to have murderers on our farm.”

  Their names were Dieter and Bernhard—Arthur didn’t catch which was which at the time and never did know for sure—and they were delivered bright and early one Saturday morning, dumped out of the back of a truck like a couple of young bullocks.

  “There ya go,” the guard said. He was a scrawny little guy with wispy white hair and a rifle bigger than he was. He must be one of the veterans from the last war: they were the ones who guarded the prisoners. “They’re all yours. You can keep ’em here, or we can take ’em back to the camp at night, up to you. Course, you lose a couple of hours’ work if you do that, so if I was you I’d keep ’em here. They get thirty cents a day, twenty cents bonus if they do a real good job, don’t give it to them, give it to us, we keep it for them. They get three meals a day. If you keep ’em here, they can sleep in the barn till it gets cold, then you gotta take ’em into the house. What’s it to be?”

  They were about sixteen, Arthur guessed. Younger than Jake, but strong-looking, both of them, not thin and weedy like Jake was. They looked scared to death. They were watching him as though they thought he was going to stab them in the belly with a pitchfork. It made him uncomfortable.

  “So what’s it to be?” the guard said again, sucking his teeth.

  Arthur couldn’t see them slitting anybody’s throat. They were just kids. His mother was hiding in the house, cowering behind the sofa, probably, or crouched inside a cupboard; it troubled him to add to her fears, but it couldn’t be helped. Anyway, she’d be okay once she saw them. He wasn’t going to waste two hours’ working time a day.

  “I’ll keep ’em here,” he said.

  “You can’t mistreat ’em,” the guard said warningly. “Geneva Convention, for one thing, and for another, if you mistreat ’em the Krauts’ll mistreat ours. Tit for tat. So don’t knock ’em about and don’t starve ’em. Somebody’ll check up on ’em from time to time, check they’re workin’ all right and you’re treatin’ ’em okay.”

  “I ain’t gonna hurt them,” Arthur said. “Tell them that.”

  “I don’t speak no Kraut,” the guard said, “and they don’t speak no English. Some do but these two don’t.”

  That was fine by Arthur; he didn’t speak it much himself. Though he would have liked the boys to know that he meant them no harm.

  “They know anythin’ about farming?” he said hopefully. “Like, do ya know what they did before?” What did people do in Germany? Fought wars, mostly. Probably these two had been in the regular army or a weapons factory or something.

  “They were at school,” the guard said, consulting a sheet of paper. “But they both grew up on farms. That’s what it says here anyways.”

  “Yeah?” Arthur said, hardly daring to believe it. He looked at the boys, who were watching him apprehensively. He waved his hand at the fields, raised his eyebrows inquiringly. The boys looked at each other, shifted their feet uneasily, whispered together. Then they shook their heads violently.

  “Ah,” said Arthur. He’d known it was too good to be true.

  “They didn’t understand you,” the guard said. “I reckon they thought you was sayin’ were they goin’ to try to escape. Try somethin�
� else.”

  “Like what?” Arthur said.

  “I dunno what. Whaddaya do on a farm? Show ’em a tractor or somethin’. Show ’em a cow.”

  The boys were looking apprehensively from the guard to Arthur and back again. Arthur pointed to the cows, grazing peacefully two fields away. The boys looked bewildered. Arthur made milking motions with his hands. The boys looked at each other…and you could see the light dawn, you could literally see it. They both grinned and looked back at Arthur and made milking motions to match his own. Beautiful, firm, graceful milking motions, you could hear the milk hissing into the pails. Arthur felt himself smiling, felt relief flowing through him like a wave of cool cream. He loved those two boys. He even loved the guard. He wanted to fall on his knees and thank somebody, but he wasn’t sure who. God? The government? Jake?

  They knew how to work, those boys. Up at five to milk the cows (doing the job properly, giving the cows a little something to munch on to keep them happy, washing down their udders well, milking them swiftly, giving them a quick pat of thanks and moving on down the row) then into the kitchen, bright and eager, for a quick breakfast of porridge and bread and butter, then out to the fields till noon. In for dinner, pork from Otto’s pigs, or maybe a chicken, with vegetables from the garden (served with much clucking and wordless urging by Arthur’s mother, who had been converted within ten seconds of seeing their scared young faces). Back out to the fields until sun-down. It turned out that neither of them was all that good behind the plow, but they were trying hard and getting better. They worked as if their lives depended on it. Worked until Arthur wondered if maybe they were still afraid he’d beat them, or maybe afraid he’d say they weren’t good enough and send them back to the prison camp, and then they’d be sent somewhere worse. But then, seeing one of them lean his face into the warm neck of a cow one morning and straighten up a minute later with his eyes suspiciously moist, he figured it out: they were homesick. Homesick, and the cows and the pigs and the heavy soil were as near as they could get to home. It was their fathers’ fields they were seeing all day as they worked Arthur’s land. Arthur could understand that. He’d have been the same.

  And in fact, in some vague way quite apart from their usefulness, their presence here on his father’s farm was a comfort to him too. Even the fact that they couldn’t communicate with words seemed right.

  They were definitely good for his mother. She liked having them to fuss over. “Such nice boys,” she said. She was still anxious and distracted, but she was better than she had been. At least she had meals ready on time. “They’re so polite.” They said “Danke schön” when she set their dinners down in front of them and carried their plates over to the sink when they’d finished. “Their parents must be good people. Like Otto and Gertie. Brought their boys up to be polite and hardworking.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said, tipping his chair back on its hind legs. “They straighten the straw in the barn every morning when they climb out of it. Sweep it into nice straight lines. Polish the cows.”

  “I wish they’d sleep in the house,” his mother said, not noticing Jake’s tone. She’d made up beds in the parlor—put pillows on the floor and folded blankets for mattresses—and shown them to the boys, but they’d shaken their heads politely and indicated that they liked the barn.

  “Probably used to barns,” Jake said. He rocked back and forth, looking vaguely out the window. “Probably live in barns at home. It would be nice if they washed now and then, but you can’t have everything.”

  She noticed that. “Jacob,” she said reprovingly. “They wash at the pump every single morning.”

  Jake kept on rocking, gazing at nothing. “Do they? Must be just part of them, then. Maybe Nazis just stink like that naturally.”

  Funny how much he disliked them, Arthur thought, when he was the one whose idea it had been to get them in the first place. But who knew what went on inside Jake’s head? Arthur had seen him out in the fields one evening—it was such a rare sight that he had stopped and looked again to be sure it was Jake. He was standing at the edge of the ditch where their father had died. Not doing anything, just looking down into the ditch. It had seemed to Arthur that he looked rather a forlorn figure standing there. Which was odd, because the last word you would ever use to describe Jake was forlorn.

  Arthur took one team of horses and either Dieter or Bernhard over to the Luntz farm. The fields were in a bad state, thick with weeds, but if they plowed them under they might just get a little barley in and hope for a longer than usual summer. It was worth a try. But in the farmyard Dieter, or maybe Bernhard, suddenly stopped in his tracks, staring at the ground in front of him.

  “What?” Arthur said.

  The boy pointed down at his feet, looking at Arthur, eyes wide.

  Arthur looked down. There was nothing there, not so much as a blade of grass. They were outside the barn where Otto kept the tractor and the ground was packed hard from the tractor’s weight, the tread marks set in there like concrete.

  “What?” Arthur said again. The boy knelt down and traced his finger around one of the tractor treads. He looked up at Arthur and pointed to the barn, eyebrows raised in question. He stood up and went to the barn and pulled the door open, the hinges already creaking with rust from lack of use. The tractor was standing where Arthur had left it the day after his father’s funeral. The sight of it made him feel sick. The boy climbed nimbly up onto it, sat himself down and gripped the steering wheel with both hands, grinning from ear to ear.

  So. In Germany they had tractors. Probably the other boy drove one too. Which explained why neither of them was much good at plowing with the horses.

  The boy pointed past Arthur to the fields beyond, and raised his eyebrows hopefully.

  “No,” Arthur said. It came out flatter and harder than he’d intended and the boy stopped grinning and got down off the tractor. He came out and closed the door of the barn and stood with his back to it, looking puzzled and a little bit scared.

  “It’s okay,” Arthur said. “We just don’t use it, that’s all.”

  The boy nodded vigorously, as if he understood and agreed. He went to the horses and led them over to the gate.

  Arthur stood where he was, looking past the boy to the sprawling fields of weeds. He thought of his father, not as he had been in the final, terrible moments of his death but as he had been in life. He’d been stubborn, sure, but not to the point of downright foolishness. Not to the point where he’d allow a neighbor’s land to be ruined when it was in his power to save it. Not when there was a war on and the country needed every last mouthful of food it could produce. Using the horses it would take Dieter/Bernhard, inexperienced as he was, a whole day, sun-up to sun-down, to plow half an acre of land. Arthur could do double that, but according to Otto, with a tractor you could do four to five acres in that time. And here was a boy who knew how to use it. Arthur could guess what his father would say, up there in heaven, if he happened to be looking down at the moment. “Stoopid,” he’d say, spitting the word out like he did when he was really disgusted by something. “Just plain stoopid.” If Arthur tried to argue with him, if he said, “But I hate it, Dad,” his father would snap, “So what!”

  The boy had opened the gate and was leading the horses through. Arthur cleared his throat. “Well, just a minute.”

  The boy looked around at him.

  “Maybe you could use it here,” Arthur said reluctantly.

  Dieter/Bernhard craned his head forward a little. Both boys did that when they were trying to guess Arthur’s meaning.

  “Just here, though,” Arthur said warningly, spreading his hand across Otto’s fields and then bringing it down sharp to mark the boundary between the two farms. “It ain’t comin’ on our land. I don’t want to see it. Just keep it here.”

  He didn’t see it—the boy took care of that—but sometimes he heard it. Sometimes when the wind was in the right direction the heavy growling of it drifted across from Otto’s farm. Strangely,
though, it wasn’t his father Arthur saw when he heard the sound. It was Carl. Carl, sitting high up there on the tractor, eyes narrowed against the sun, churning his way down the field as if the past four years had never been. As if the whole bloody mess of the war and everything that followed from it had been nothing but a bad dream.

  It was the summer of 1944 when Reverend March and his daughter came to Struan. Reverend Gordon was still overseas with the troops, and in the interim his place had been filled by a succession of clergymen who had come out of retirement to fill the gap, then found the rigors of life in the North too much for them and left again. But Reverend March was from North Bay, so, the people of Struan reasoned, he should know what he was letting himself in for.

  He was an old man, coming on for seventy, stern-looking (but kindly, beneath it, everyone agreed on that), gray-haired and slightly stooped. He was recently widowed—his wife had died of influenza—and had welcomed the move to Struan for his daughter’s sake, hoping that a new environment would help her get over her loss. The daughter’s name was Laura. She was seventeen or eighteen, very young to be the child of such an old man. She was in church the first Sunday after they arrived, sitting by herself in the pew at the front. Before the service began her father introduced her, speaking from the pulpit, and she stood up and turned around to smile at the congregation. Arthur saw her and fell in love so hard that he felt bruised all over for a week.

  It couldn’t have been her beauty that triggered his fall, because she didn’t look beautiful that day. Her eyes were red and her face was pale and the smile she gave the congregation was apprehensive and unhappy.

  “Poor little soul,” Arthur’s mother said on the way home. “It’s only been a few months since her mother died. I don’t think it was right to uproot her so soon.”

  Arthur wasn’t listening. He was busy trying to still the chaos within. He felt as if something huge had grabbed him and swung him around half a dozen times and then dropped him on his head.