Covered Bridge

Covered Bridge

COVERED BRIDGE

Brian Doyle

Copyright © 1990 by Brian Doyle
New paperback edition 2003

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We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Ontario Book Initiative.

National Library of Canada
Cataloguing in Publication
Doyle, Brian
Covered Bridge
ISBN 0-88899-603-9
I. Title.
PS8557.O87C6 2004    jC813'.54    C2003-906498-0

Cover photograph by Tim Fuller
Map by Megan Doyle
Design by Michael Solomon
Printed and bound in Canada

Thanks Patsy Aldana, Fay Beale, Stan Clark, Keith Clarke, Jackie Doyle, Megan Doyle, Mike Doyle, Ryan Doyle, Paul Kavanagh, Marilyn Kennedy, Dorothy McConnery, Cathy McGregor, Mike Paradis, Dr. Peter Premachuk, Rita Premachuk, Gene Rheaume, and Alan Wotherspoon, for your expertise and support.

M
Y DOG
N
ERVES
and I stood in the almost dark inside the portal of the covered bridge. My eyes were squinting, trying to see what was coming slowly, floating through the bridge towards us from the other end. I could feel one of Nerves' knees knocking against the side of my shoe.

The moon put a patch of silver-yellow through the open wind space in the lattice onto the deck about halfway between us and the white thing gliding towards us. The rafters above were off in the dark. The carriage-way under our feet was dark except for the patch of moon.

Mushrat Creek burbled and gurgled quietly under us. Nerves' teeth were grinding and chattering politely beside my ankle.

Somewhere else, two crickets were arguing.

The thing took more shape as it approached the wind space. The shape of a woman. And a voice, saying words.

“Please, Father, let me in? Please let me in, Father! May I please go in? Can't I please get in?”

She wore a moonlight-colored dress and a wide-brimmed dark hat.

There was no face showing under the hat.

Nerves stopped knocking and went stiff against me.

Then the woman turned in the moonlight and hurtled through the space and disappeared into Mushrat Creek.

Then we heard a big splash.

That is, I heard a big splash.

Nerves didn't hear a thing.

He was passed out.

That was the first night of my new job on the covered bridge.

The next day I was fired.

But we're going too fast.

I'd better go back a bit.

Y
OU PROBABLY HEARD
about how my father was run over by a streetcar. How he lay down on the streetcar tracks for a rest during a snowstorm. I never knew him because that happened when I was just a baby.

My mom died when I was born. I lived with Mrs. O'Driscoll. She was married to a distant cousin of my dad's. I thought of her as my mother and I loved her. But I called her Mrs. O'Driscoll. It was a warm little joke we had between us.

And you probably heard about all that stuff that happened to me at Glebe Collegiate and at the Uplands Emergency Shelter where we lived and about Easy Avenue and my job with Miss Collar-Cuff and the mysterious money and about Mr. Donald D. DonaldmcDonald and about O'Driscoll showing up from the War almost five years late.

And about the fight I had with Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell and how we made up after and went on a picnic with everybody.

But I definitely didn't yet tell how I wound up on a little farm up the Gatineau at Mushrat Creek in charge of a covered bridge and what happened about the bridge.

But before any of
that
happened I guess I didn't tell you how Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell moved away in the middle of the night one night, and the next morning there was nothing left of her except a short note to me pinned to our door. It was in a sealed envelope.

The note said this:

Dear Hubbo:

My
Dear Hubbo:

I will always, all my life, love you.

Dad is back and we're leaving now.

Right now.

Everything is going to be better from now on, he said.

                                xxxxx in the middle of the night.
                                     F3

And I also didn't tell you about how I couldn't write her back because she didn't tell anybody where she was going. I asked all the neighbors if they knew, I asked the post office across the parade square, I phoned the office
where we paid our rent. Nobody knew what Featherstone Fitchell's new address was. They were just gone. Vanished. Fleurette, into thin air.

There was so much I wanted to tell her, to talk to her about.

I started a letter to her that I couldn't send. Not now, anyway. But you never know. She might show up. O'Driscoll, he was supposed to be drowned, dead, vanished in the War, and he came back. So maybe I would find her address or maybe she would get in touch with us sometime. I guess, then, it was because of the miracle of O'Driscoll showing up that I started the letter to Fleurette.

I told her that I couldn't send it, which seemed to be a pretty stupid thing to say, because, if I couldn't send it, she wouldn't hear me say that, and if I could send it, I wouldn't have to say what I just said.

Then I asked her if she remembered that afternoon we had the picnic at the sand pits and how O'Driscoll came down the hill of sand and how he stopped in front of us? And how he took a look back over his shoulder? And how, then, he spoke? And, after nine years away, what was the first thing he said?

“Well, now,” says O'Driscoll, “what were we talking about before this interruption? Where were we, anyway?”

Then I reminded her, in the letter, how Mrs. O'Driscoll never said a word, just took a step forward, stomping on her sherry glass lying in the sand, and fell
against his chest and put her cheek on his shoulder and her nose in his neck and her arms around him, and closed her eyes, squeezed her eyes shut.

But O'Driscoll's eyes weren't shut. He was looking at me. I remembered him from his picture, not from real life.

“You're young Hubbo,” he said over the top of Mrs. O'Driscoll's head. That made me feel good. He made me feel like he'd be disappointed if I wasn't young Hubbo. O'Driscoll was like that. He could make you feel good.

Then I told Fleurette all about O'Driscoll and the chipwagon. And how, after we'd had the wagon only three days, something awful happened. We were crossing the train tracks that crossed Ottawa along Scott Street. Right on the tracks, a wheel fell off our wagon. We got the horse unhitched just in time.

The Scott Street line is pretty straight so we had time to unbuckle the traces and get the horse out of the shafts. The train didn't even try to slow down at the last minute. It was in the morning and the train was coming in from the west so I guess the sun was in the engineer's eyes. At least that's what they said afterwards.

O'Driscoll said he thought they did it on purpose. He said he heard the old engineer saying to the fireman that he'd hit a lot of things in his long career—cows, buffalo, a truck full of turkeys, a tramp who'd frozen to death, a
house on a trailer—but never a chipwagon, and he was glad he did because he always wanted to see what it was like. See how high the wagon would go.

He wasn't disappointed.

O'Driscoll said that it was probably the best hit that engineer ever had in his long years as a rotten train driver. The air was full of potato chips and paper plates and toothpicks for about a half an hour. It poured salt.

And it rained grease.

The main part of the wagon turned over and over in the air and the unpeeled potatoes were flying and bouncing around like hail the size of baseballs.

I told Fleurette some other stuff about O'Driscoll's insurance and how he put a down payment on a little farm up here in a place called Mushrat Creek. Then I told her about how the dog, Nerves, was ours now because his family didn't want him anymore.

Then I wrote a letter to the Uplands Emergency Shelter post office.

Dear Sir:

Please send me the address of Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell who moved out of Building Number Eight, Unit 3 at the end of June, 1950.

We don't know where she went.

Yours truly,
          Hubbo O'Driscoll