Covered Bridge (4 page)

Father Foley and his light bobbed up the gravel road and round the bend and out of sight, now and then the long shadows of the plum trees darting out of the dark.

I turned up the wick in my lantern and by feeling with my fingers trimmed the burnt end square.

I shook the lantern and when I heard the slopping sound decided that there was enough coal oil in it for now and that it was too dark to pour oil anyway.

I wiped the inside of the globe which was cool enough to touch by now and lit the lamp again and raised it to its position.

I walked slowly into the gloom of the other end, my arms and my sides tight with gooseflesh.

The other lamp hung there, dark in the rafters.

I lowered it.

It was cold. It had been out for quite a while.

I filled it by the faint light from the other end and trimmed it and wiped it and lit it and raised it.

Back home in my bedroom I looked out the window up at my bridge.

It was a dark shape that cut a horizontal line across the star-filled sky.

I went to sleep and dreamed of Sin.

T
RYING TO
write the letter to Fleurette was getting harder and harder.

Every time I would try to tell her something, to explain something to her, I'd start to compare things to other things: I'd start to say that that thing was like this or that: or that other thing was like this.

The covered bridge is like a tunnel, I told her. But it isn't really because a tunnel goes under something and a bridge goes over. So how could you have a tunnel be like a bridge?

That's what always happened in my writing. I'd start saying one thing was like another thing but then I'd have to say that it wasn't really like that, not altogether like that, anyway, because there was always some part was maybe a little bit different.

Or the covered bridge is like a long barn with the
front and the back missing and a road running through it. But there's no hay up in the loft, of course, and it's not quiet like a barn is because you can hear the water gurgling underneath and also it doesn't smell like a barn because there isn't a huge pile of cow shit out the back and I started imagining a manure pile out the South Portal with a car buried in it.

But if you're standing in the covered bridge looking out one of the vents and if it's raining and if you're watching the water passing underneath, you might feel like you're in a big tug boat on the river, but the sound of the rain on the shingles above you makes you feel like you're very cozy in a cabin somewhere in the bush beside a lake, but you have to close your eyes so you don't see the water moving under you or you'll still think it feels like a ship.

It seemed impossible to find something that was exactly like something else. Something that was exactly like a covered bridge.

In the world, there were many things that seemed to be a lot like many other things but not totally. There was always some small difference that would sort of spoil it.

Or make it not perfect.

Then I changed the subject.

I wrote to her about a habit O'Driscoll had.

O'Driscoll had a habit of turning around a bit and looking back over his shoulder just before he started to talk to you.

He didn't do it every time he said something, only when he first started to talk.

Or if he was walking up to you, meeting you on the road, just before he started to talk, he'd look behind himself, as though there might be somebody following him.

Even though he knew and the other person knew that there might not be anybody else come walking up or down that road for a half a day or more. Maybe the next person who'd come walking along that gravel road was just leaving Wakefield now and wouldn't be here until next Wednesday but O'Driscoll looked around anyway, just in case.

I don't think he knew he was doing it; it was just a habit.

He'd even do it in our kitchen when he came down for breakfast in the morning.

Mrs. O'Driscoll and I would be there and in he would come, look back over his shoulder and then start talking.

There definitely was nobody behind him because everybody who lived in the house was now in the kitchen.

Once, when O'Driscoll wasn't there, Mrs. O'Driscoll said that he probably got the habit after he was supposed to be drowned in the war and ran away and lived with that Indian Princess on Lake Pizinadjih.

She said this out of the corner of her mouth while the other half of her mouth was smiling.

I tried later to do it in the mirror; couldn't.

Didn't have the right mouth muscles, I guess.

Just then, O'Driscoll came marching into the kitchen, looked behind himself, and started talking.

“Here's how Lake Pizinadjih got its name.

“Years ago, the lake was then called Manitou, meaning Great Spirit, two Algonquin families lived across the water from each other. The son of one family fell in love with the daughter of the other family when, one evening, he heard the sound of her singing float across the sparkling moonlit surface of Manitou.”

O'Driscoll was being very dramatic and Mrs. O'Driscoll was rolling her eyes which meant she'd heard this before.

O'Driscoll went ahead anyway.

“The two families hated each other for many generations and so, of course, the parents forbade the son to paddle his canoe across the water to be with his new-found love.

“The singing continued, however...”

“Of course,” sighed Mrs. O'Driscoll.

“...however and after the fire died down and the family went to sleep, the son walked into the water, and began to swim, silent as a fish, to the other side and to his love.

“But it was late and the singing had stopped and the moon was now covered by cloud and the young man lost his way and swam until, exhausted, he sank and drowned.”

Mrs. O'Driscoll looked at me. She had definitely heard this before.

“Days later, when they discovered his body stuck in the falls, and they figured out what happened, the two families patched up their differences and moved on together to a different place, far away, so they could forget.

“Before they left, in a carefully performed ceremony, they renamed the tragic water ‘Pizinadjih.'”

Mrs. O'Driscoll
—Pizinadjih. My, that's beautiful, O'Driscoll.

What does it mean, exactly, Pizinadjih?

O'Driscoll
—(Pause) It means...(O'Driscoll looks behind himself). It means
“LAKE STUPID”
!

So it was the first time I talked about love in my letter to Fleurette. I decided that maybe I'd try more of it.

I told her about the ghost and O LVS O in the bridge. I told her about the priest, Father Foley, and about Sin. And about Lake Stupid.

And I told her about Old Mac Gleason, who I will tell you about now.

And about how I started going to church.

T
HE PERSON
after Oscar McCracken that I met in Mushrat Creek was Old Mac Gleason. He sat on his veranda across from the church and sucked on his pipe. Sometimes we would talk to him in his chair on his broken veranda. Nerves and I sometimes took a walk past there after we started going to church.

Sometimes we first went home and changed into our old clothes and we separated the milk. Of course, Nerves didn't change his clothes; he wore the same furry little suit no matter what the occasion was. But he did go to church with us sometimes. On hot summer days when there was a bit of a breeze and not too many flies, Father Foley would get the altar boys to prop the big entrance doors to the church open so the breeze would circulate while he roasted us with his sermon. But no matter how much breeze there was, once
Father Foley got going about Hell, he'd be sweating like a pig.

I don't know why people say that about pigs because I don't think pigs sweat. They grunt and drool and roll around in the mud but they don't sweat much. Not nearly as much as Father Foley, especially when he got very deep into the subject of Hell.

On those hot breezy days when the doors were propped open with two rocks, Nerves would walk in very quietly and respectfully and sit in the middle of the center aisle near the back with his paws neatly in front of him and his head up, looking at Father Foley and the boys going about their business.

During Communion, when people started getting up and filling the aisle, Nerves would back himself out the doors and go over on the lawn and take a holy little snooze there under the lilac bushes.

Old Mac Gleason could see the church and the graveyard from his chair on the veranda. Everybody knew Mac never went to church. It was pretty obvious. Everybody in Mushrat Creek, everybody in Low and everybody in Brennan's Hill who went to church got a good look every Sunday at Old Mac Gleason sitting on his veranda,
not
going to church.

And people used to say that everybody up the River in Venosta and Farrellton and Kazabazua and everybody down the River in Alcove and Wakefield probably knew that Old Mac Gleason didn't go to church.

And Old Mac Gleason himself would often say, “I betcha there's people as far south as Ottawa who know I never been to church in my life and that there's people as far north as Maniwaki that know that I, Old Mac Gleason, have no intention of ever goin' to church in the future either.

“There's people who travel miles and miles to go to a church and here's me, livin' right across the road from one—and I never been inside it. Oh, I was inside it a couple a times to fix a door or a window for that Foolish Father Foley from Farrellton but I never prayed inside there and I never will!”

This Sunday, Father Foley was at the top of his sermon about Hell.

The altar boys had the doors propped wide open with the rocks, and Nerves was in his position in the aisle.

Father Foley was at the part about how thick the walls of Hell were and what a foul-smelling prison it was and the lost demons and the smoke and the sulfur and the fire and the never-ending storms of brimstone and stink of the putrid corpses and vomit and boiling brains and the screaming of the tortured and cursing victims and the puddles of pus that you had to lie in if you were bad.

Father Foley had a wild look in his eyes. He looked like he was scaring himself with his own sermon.

I took a look back at Nerves.

He was staring straight up at Father Foley with a look of hopeless terror in his eyes. Was there a Hell for dogs?

It was near the end of his speech. Father Foley was sweating so much that when he threw his head to one side and then the other to say NO! NO! to the Devil, the drops of sweat flew from one side of the church to the other. The heads of the people turned this way, then that, to watch the sweat fly across.

After Mass, Nerves and I crossed the road and strolled through the graveyard. The earliest dates on the gravestones were 1848 and 1850. According to Mrs. O'Driscoll, the first Irish settlers came here in 1847. “Some of them just made it in time,” she said, out of the corner of her mouth.

Other gravestones were marked 1893 and the ages were all of babies and kids. There were whole groups of them, some all from one family.

There must have been a fire or a disease.

All the names were Irish.

We went to the edge of the graveyard near the fence.

Nerves and I stopped to look for a while at one interesting gravestone with flowers on it that were pretty fresh. Maybe put there just yesterday.

The name on it was Ophelia Brown.

Ophelia Brown

Lord Have Mercy on Her
, the stone said.

All around the grave were special plants and perfectly cut grass.

But there was one thing wrong.

The grave was on the other side of the page wire fence. As if the graveyard was too crowded for Ophelia Brown and they had to put it outside the fence. But the strange thing was, there was lots of room in that part of the graveyard for Ophelia Brown.

In fact Ophelia Brown was outside the section of the graveyard with hardly any graves in it at all.

I heard a cowbell ding from a field nearby and somewhere, far off, a dog barked.

Nerves was looking like he was going to burst into tears and when he gave out a little whine I decided it was time to get out of there.

We walked by Old Mac Gleason's veranda to see if he'd invite us up for a chat and a drink of water.

He did.

He gave me the pail and the dipper and I pumped some ice-cold well-water for us from his well at the side of his house.

“That Foolish Father Foley was at it again this morning, was he?” said Old Mac Gleason. “I guess he knows that Hell speech off by heart by now.”

“How did you know he was talking about Hell?” I said. “Were you at church today?”

“No, I was not,” said Old Mac Gleason. “Nor will I ever set foot in that place as long as I live. I don't care if it is only just across the road! But I'll tell you, there's two ways you can tell a thing like that. First of all, you watch the people coming out. The looks on their faces. Some of
them look like they've just dirtied their pants and some are kind of blue around the gills and some are so guilty-looking you'd think they just took an ax to their whole family.”

I waited a little bit while we listened to a heat bug singing that one note about the heat.

“What's the other way you can tell?” I said.

“The other way you can tell,” he said, leaning right over to Nerves and me, “is that you can hear the old fool from all the way over here!”

Then he looked up and over at the graveyard so steadily that Nerves and I looked over too.

There was a man at Ophelia Brown's grave, kneeling there, with flowers in his hands. He crossed himself and then he got up and replaced the flowers that were there with the new ones.

Then he knelt again and kissed the ground.

“Know who that is?” asked Old Mac Gleason.

It was too far away to make out the man's face but the way his back was humped over looked sort of familiar.