The Other Side of the Bridge

by Mary Lawson

“It’s okay,” Arthur said, unable to look at him directly because of the images swimming about in his head. “Just dirt in the carburetor, that’s all.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Reverend March said. “It is very good of you to rescue us once again. We always seem to be appealing to you.”

  Arthur dropped another nut. This time he managed to slam his hand down on it before it could roll off the tarpaulin. He wondered if he could warn the old man that his daughter was in danger. How would you go about saying it? However he put it, Reverend March wouldn’t believe him. Jake had charmed him as he charmed everyone else: Arthur had watched him do it and it was something to behold. Jake listened seriously to every word the old man said, deferred to him, asked his opinion, laughed at his jokes. He even asked questions about things Reverend March had said in his sermons. The seriousness, the studiousness with which he asked them made Arthur want to puke, but you could see how impressed the Reverend was. If Arthur tried to tell him it was all an act, that Jake was out to seduce his daughter, the old man would think he’d gone mad. The same would be true if he tried to warn Laura herself. She wouldn’t believe him either. Jake’s lies were far more convincing than the truth.

  He was going to have to deal with Jake directly. It made him sweat to think about it but he could see no other course of action. He would tell him straight out that if he touched Laura he would kill him. He would make sure that Jake believed him. He saw himself making sure, slamming Jake’s head against a wall. The thought made his hands shake.

  A movement caught his eye: Laura, carrying something out to the clothesline. Reverend March saw her too. She began pegging out a tablecloth, stretching the sides so that it would dry flat. Watching her, Arthur felt rage swelling up inside him again, hot and acid as bile. He bent over the generator, afraid that the old man would see the state he was in.

  “She isn’t quite herself today,” Reverend March said absently. “We’ve been trying to make a decision. We’ve been trying to decide whether or not to settle here. In Struan, I mean. When this dreadful war is over and Reverend Gordon returns to his flock, we’ve been wondering whether or not we should stay. It’s a decision we have to make, but I’m afraid it is upsetting her.”

  Arthur paused in the act of threading a screw.

  “Personally I am in favor,” Reverend March said, watching his daughter walk back to the house. “I have been overwhelmed by the kindness of the people here, the way you have all, in the midst of your own troubles and sorrows, welcomed us into the fold. But it’s a difficult decision for Laura. She has friends back home, whom she misses.”

  Laura disappeared around the corner of the house and the old man sighed. He bent down and picked up Arthur’s screwdriver and examined it curiously, turning it over a time or two.

  “Initially the plan was simply to come for the duration of the war,” he said, testing the sharpness of the screwdriver cautiously with his finger. “To fill a need and to get Laura away from things for a while. We intended to go back. Not to the same house—the memories there are too painful—but back to North Bay. But of course, in the interim she has also made friends here. Very good friends.”

  He smiled down at Arthur and gave him the screwdriver. “I don’t know why I am burdening you with this, Arthur. Burdening you yet more. It’s just that Laura seems rather cast down at the moment, and I’m afraid that the issue has brought back both the memories and the sorrow. She was so much better; it is painful to see her unhappy again.”

  He seemed to expect a comment of some sort. Arthur stood up, wiped his hands on his overalls, and managed to mumble something about everyone being real pleased if they settled here. His head was spinning. He’d been so sure. So sure. And now it seemed it might not concern Jake after all.

  Reverend March was thanking him for his kind words. Arthur nodded. He squatted down again and finished cleaning the carburetor. Reverend March kept talking and Arthur nodded from time to time to show that he was listening, although he wasn’t. He put the generator back together, reconnected the fuel line to the gas tank, and started the engine. The generator shuddered into life.

  Reverend March stopped in midsentence and stared at it. “Miraculous,” he said. “Completely miraculous. I don’t know how you do it.”

  After supper he went to visit Ted Hatchett. He sat beside him for an hour, saying nothing. He kept seeing Jake, wedged between the rocks under the bridge, the water rushing over his face. His fault. Arthur’s fault. He saw Jake the day he got home from the hospital, lying on the bed in the kitchen. His face, as he asked, “Did you mean what you said, Art? When we were on the bridge? Did you want me to fall?” And then the months during which Arthur had waited, sick with dread, for Jake to tell their parents what had really happened on the bridge. Sure that he would. But he never did.

  He saw that it was impossible to be sure of anything, where Jake was concerned. He would never know what Jake was thinking or intending, never know his motives, never understand the first thing about him.

  So now he couldn’t think what to do. How much to trust his own gut feelings, how much weight to give to what Reverend March had said. He was sure Jake was pressing Laura. Maybe she was upset about the question of where they were going to live, but he was sure there was more to it than that. Almost sure.

  What could he do? He could warn Jake off, but that was dangerous because it might backfire. If Jake was playing games, courting Laura just to torture him—otherwise, surely, he would have given up on her by now—then it would definitely spur him on.

  A sound, a kind of creaking, near at hand, broke in on his thoughts. He looked around, trying to figure out where it was coming from, and then realized it was Ted. He was trying to say something. Arthur leaned forward to hear him better. Ted had another couple of goes and finally managed to get it out.

  “How’re the pigs?” was what it sounded like.

  “The pigs?” Arthur said, his mind still on Jake.

  Ted nodded.

  “They’re good,” Arthur said, sitting back in his chair. “They’re real happy. We put ’em out last week. In the orchard. You remember the Luntzes’ orchard? Little patch, don’t produce much in the way of apples but it looks nice. They’re rootin’ away there. Look real happy.”

  Ted nodded again and Arthur suddenly realized that he’d actually spoken.

  He said cautiously, “Hey, Ted, you spoke,” but that seemed to be it as far as Ted was concerned, and he didn’t say anything more.

  The eighth of May, 1945. Someone got hold of a copy of the Toronto Daily Star only one day out of date and stuck the front page up in the window of the post office. You could read the headline from across the street: it said UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER in letters four inches high. The town was jammed with people: farmers and shopkeepers, men from the sawmill and the lumber camps and the mines, servicemen home on leave, veterans from the last war, mothers, grandmothers, schoolkids, and babes in arms. Finally it was over, or at least the European war was over: there were still the Japanese to deal with, but surely that wouldn’t take long.

  Flags appeared out of nowhere and so did the hooch. There was no liquor store in Struan, but Ben’s Bar was cleaned out before noon and there must have been plenty more stashed away because by midafternoon things were getting a little out of hand. Men were reeling down the street, drinking straight from the bottle, and here and there scuffles were breaking out. Arthur had driven his mother into town for the occasion but when the drinking started he took her home again. She was upset. She didn’t hold with liquor at the best of times.

  “It’s disgusting,” she said. “Just disgusting. I can understand people being happy, but carrying on like that isn’t right. It’s not respectful to the families who’ve lost their sons. Which is almost all of them. I saw Marjorie Black there and she was crying, and so was Anna Stubbs.”

  Her mouth was set in a straight line but the soft skin under her chin was trembling. Arthur wondered if she’d seen Jake and if that was part
of the reason she was so mad. Jake and Laura had been sitting on the steps of the bank with a group of kids from the high school and Jake was drinking something from a Coke bottle that was the wrong color for Coke. He wasn’t the only one, and Arthur wouldn’t have thought anything more about it if he hadn’t seen Jake offer the bottle to Laura, and her take a sip before handing it back. Her face was flushed, which caused Arthur to wonder if maybe that wasn’t the first sip she’d had. The minute the idea entered his head he felt his guts clench up. Was Jake plying her with drink? Was he seizing the occasion to get her drunk so that he could seduce her? He pushed the thought away, forced it back into whatever dark cave it came from. Probably Jake was simply celebrating, like everybody else, and had no sinister motive at all.

  He took his mother home but then came back into town. It seemed important to be there. He parked the truck around the back of the post office and walked through the alleyway to Main Street. Someone had built a bonfire right in the middle of the road outside the post office and there were a dozen or so men gathered around it, their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders, yelling “Roll out the barrel” at the tops of their voices. Arthur recognized them as miners. They’d been stuck underground for the past six years: the war consumed so much coal that men who’d been working down the mines when war broke out hadn’t been allowed to leave, and there was a resentful tone to their singing, which surged whenever someone in uniform walked by. It looked to Arthur as if all the makings of a brawl were there and he decided to move on.

  He made his way along Main Street and then slowly back, pretending to himself that he wasn’t looking for Laura. There was no sign of the high-school crowd. Maybe they’d all gone to someone’s home, or down to the lake to have their own party on the beach.

  He stood by the corner of the bank and watched the crowd. There were a fair number of men in uniform, some of them bandaged up, some on crutches or with an arm in a sling, others just home on leave. They looked so happy. Happy, and proud of their victory. Their victory, not his.

  Suddenly he saw himself as others in the crowd must surely see him: a silent, solitary figure, standing apart from the rest. He looked out at the hordes of singing, laughing people and felt more alone than he’d ever felt in his life. Was this how it was going to be, then? Was this who he was? A man apart from his fellows, making the journey through life alone?

  Two men in air force uniform supporting a third between them suddenly veered away from the rest, dragged their companion over to the side of the road, and held him while he spewed up into the gutter. “’Atta boy!” one of them said. “Now ya got room for more!”

  The one who’d spewed up had only one arm, and abruptly Arthur was reminded of Ted. He turned, disgusted with his own self-pity, and made his way through the crowd back to his truck.

  Mrs. Hatchett must have seen him pulling into the drive because she opened the door as he came up the steps. She said, “Arthur,” and smiled tremulously, ushering him into the living room. He sat down in his usual chair beside the bed. Ted’s one eye was closed and Arthur thought he might be asleep, but after a minute, without opening his eye, Ted said, “You been into town?” He was talking more or less normally nowadays.

  “Yeah,” Arthur said.

  “What’s it like?”

  “Noisy. Lots of people. Most of ’em drunk.”

  Ted nodded. After a while he said, “It’s just Europe that’s surrendered? Hitler and that lot?”

  “Yeah,” Arthur said. “Japs are still fightin’.”

  He wondered if Ted wanted to go in to see the celebrations for himself. His mind shrank from the thought of picking up that truncated, mutilated body, carrying it out to the truck, trying to prop it up somehow so that Ted wouldn’t fall over. He suddenly saw himself and Carl, carting Ted home between them, one arm each, dragging him along the frozen road. Ted’s loquacious, cheerful drunkenness. An owowownly child. So sad, so sad.

  He cleared his throat. “You want to go see what’s goin’ on?”

  Ted opened his eye and looked at him. “No,” he said.

  Which was a relief.

  Mrs. Hatchett brought in two cups of tea and set them down on the table beside the bed and went out again. A minute later she reappeared in the doorway. She said, “I have to go out for a while.” There was something in her voice, and Arthur looked at her and saw that her face was twisted with grief. He looked away quickly. Maybe the ending of the war had brought it all home again.

  Ted said, “Okay, Mum.”

  His mother came over to the bed and kissed his forehead, and then she left. They heard the car pull out of the drive.

  “Mothers,” Ted said apologetically.

  “Yeah.”

  Arthur picked up his tea. Mrs. Hatchett made it way too weak and didn’t put half enough sugar in it, but he didn’t like to ask for it different.

  “You want your tea?” he asked. He wasn’t sure Ted could reach it where it was.

  “No, thanks.”

  They sat in silence, Arthur thinking about nothing much.

  “Got a favor to ask,” Ted said after a while.

  “Sure,” Arthur said.

  “That chest of drawers?” He nodded at the chest that stood on the other side of the room. “My dad’s service revolver is in the top drawer. Check it’s loaded and put it in the bottom drawer?”

  It seemed an odd request and Arthur nearly asked why, in fact was on the very point of asking when a reason—the only possible reason—occurred to him, and a chasm seemed to open up inside him. He sat motionless, Ted’s voice echoing inside his head. He was aware of his own heartbeat. Of the teacup in his hand. He was aware of Ted waiting. Another memory came to him: himself and his father, in the barn one night in the dead of winter, a blizzard howling outside. A horse, frantic with pain. He licked his lips, which had gone dry, and put down the teacup and got up and crossed the room and opened the top drawer of the chest. The gun was lying there as Ted had said. Arthur took it out and checked that it was loaded. Then he bent down and opened the bottom drawer and put the gun inside and closed the drawer again.

  “Leave it open.”

  Arthur opened the drawer. He straightened up, keeping his face turned away.

  Ted said, “Somethin’ else. Little bit awkward. I could do it but it would take a long time and if I passed out or something an’ didn’t make it, and my mum came back and things weren’t finished with, it would be kinda hard on her. So if you could just give me a hand to get over there on the floor I’d be grateful.”

  Arthur licked his lips again. In the silence he could hear the birds outside, singing away.

  “She won’t say you’ve been here,” Ted went on as if they were discussing the weather, “so you won’t get in trouble or nothin’. Anyway, they’d see it would be possible for me to do everythin’ myself.”

  Somewhere in the distance Arthur could hear a plane, or maybe more than one. Maybe they were taking part in the celebrations.

  Ted said, “Not a great thing to be asked to do, I know that. If you don’t want to, that’s okay. I could manage myself.”

  Arthur found he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t even open his mouth. All he could manage was a nod.

  “Thanks,” Ted said. “There’s no hurry, she’ll stay out for a good while. Finish your tea first if you like.”

  Jake got home very late that night, well after two in the morning. Arthur was still up, sitting at the kitchen table. His mother had gone to her room at some stage but after a while she came down again and sat at the other end of the table, worrying about Jake.

  Arthur was barely aware of her presence. Earlier in the evening Reverend March had dropped by to tell them that Ted Hatchett had shot himself. Arthur dimly heard him say that Mrs. Hatchett’s sister was with her. There was no mention of suspicious circumstances and Arthur wouldn’t have cared if there were. He was past caring about anything. He scarcely noticed his mother’s increasingly frantic state as the hours ticked by, and when
Jake finally rolled in, wreathed in smiles and alcohol fumes, he barely noticed that either. The row between Jake and his mother, her tears, Jake’s defiance, raged right over his head and for all he heard of it they might as well have been a hundred miles away.

  Even the note of triumph in Jake’s voice, which a few hours earlier would have set the alarm bells clanging inside his head, made no impression upon him at all.

  The boys left three weeks later, at the end of May. It was another loss, in a way. As far as Arthur was concerned they were more a part of the family than Jake had ever been. The two of them began their good-byes in a properly dignified manner (the prison camp truck had arrived and other POWs were looking on), standing side by side and almost at attention, but then Arthur’s mother started crying and undid them both. “Ve tank you very much that you have so much kindness,” Dieter said, blowing his nose on a handkerchief ironed lovingly by her the evening before, and Bernhard said, “Ve vill remember always. And Canada always.” And they hugged her, and shook Arthur’s hand so earnestly that he was almost undone himself.

  He missed them badly, for more reasons than one. Reverend March and Laura had decided to stay in Struan and were buying the Luntzes’ house; Otto and Gertie had finally decided to sell the farm. The farm land was being sold separately, though, and Arthur had undertaken to look after it until the sale went through. Once again he was trying to run two farms on his own, and there weren’t enough hours in the day. It didn’t worry him as it had before the boys came though. Ted’s death had put things in perspective in a way that the war itself had not: what was the loss of a crop or two beside that? Also, there was a restless, uncertain feel in the air at the time which made everything seem unreal. He noticed it most when he went into town; it felt like the end of something—not just the war, which in fact wasn’t over yet, but something more. It was as if the whole country, maybe the whole world, was wondering what came next and didn’t know who to ask.