Covered Bridge (10 page)

I hoped he didn't know the answer.

“Those plants? You didn't pull one up, did you? Because if you pull one up by hand, all alone, you'll die a horrible death by strangulation within the next twenty-four hours. Why would you want to pull one up? I'll tell you why.”

You could tell O'Driscoll was glad to talk about something that would take his mind off his torn-up petition.

Mrs. O'Driscoll eased back in her chair to get comfortable. She was going to try to enjoy this one.

“Did you learn this in your travels?” she said and shut her eyes like she always did when she didn't expect an answer.

“They're called mandrake plants. People take the mandrake root and grind it up and make a powder and mix it with pig's blood and drink it. It can make a woman have as many babies as she wants and a little touch of it once and a while can make a man very handsome indeed. But too much of it has been known to drive a lad right around the corner and out of his mind. Julian, one of the emperors of the Roman Empire, took so much of it that he thought for a while he was turned into a goat and nearly died after he ate most of his blanket one night.”

Mrs. O'Driscoll sighed.

“How do you pull it up without getting strangled within twenty-four hours?” O'Driscoll went on.

“I'm glad you asked that, Hubbo me boy. You
don't
pull it up. You get a small rope, tie one end of it to the base of the stem of the mandrake and tie the other end of the rope around the neck of a
dog
.”

I looked down at Nerves, who was studying some ants in the sweetgrass.

He glanced up at us with a sarcastic look on his face.

“Then,” said O'Driscoll, “you
chase
the dog!”

“Where did you say you learned all this, again?” said
Mrs. O'Driscoll, trying to trap O'Driscoll. She kept her eyes closed this time, which meant she knew she wasn't going to get an answer and that she didn't really want one anyway.

“And when the mandrake is uprooted, you'll notice two remarkable things,” O'Driscoll kept on. “One: you hear a small, blood-curdling scream. Two: you'll see that the root is shaped exactly like a little statue of a man!”

I was right. O'Driscoll didn't know what those plants were at all.

After dark, Nerves and I went out to trim the lamps on the covered bridge. The moonlight sparkled on the water of Mushrat Creek and pierced through the openings of the bridge, sending bars of softness onto the carriageway inside.

The moonlight turned the red side of the bridge into silver.

It was sad to think that the covered bridge would soon be gone forever.

After the lamps, Nerves and I took a walk. Behind the church in the sexton's cottage there was a light shining out the curtained window.

The door was open a bit. I politely opened it some more.

“Oscar?”

Oscar, sitting at the table, with his sad eyes.

“I can't go home. My family won't talk to me. I'll stay
here tonight or with Mrs. Brown. Hello, Nerves. How are you tonight?”

Nerves sat with his head up and his paws together. Best behavior. He liked Oscar McCracken. He liked riding in the rumble seat of Oscar McCracken's coupe car.

“I shouldn't have spoke like that in church. I shouldn't have shouted them things.”

Oscar let out a long, long sigh.

“Everything's over,” he said.

Then he looked at Nerves a while and smiled a little bit.

“I met you before you met me, you know,” he said, leaning over to Nerves.

Nerves, sitting even straighter.

Oscar turned to me.

“You know, Hubbo, I never did in all my born days ever see a dog faint, so help me God, until that night.”

My mouth must have fallen open, because there was a moth trying to fly into it.

“You?” I said. “That night?”

“Come out, I'll show you.”

In the goat pen, on a little clothesline, hung a long white dress and a blue hat with a wide brim.

“I did it to try and make Father Foley move Ophelia's grave inside the graveyard fence. It was the second stupidest thing I ever did. This morning in church was the stupidest. Now she'll never get in.”

“That was you?”

“That was me. I thought I'd meet Father Foley coming back from visiting the sick. Turned out it was you.”

“I should have known it was no ghost,” I said.

“Why?” said Oscar.

“The splash!” I said. “Ghosts don't splash when they hit the water. A big splash!”

“I know.” Oscar was almost laughing. “I did a belly flop. Stupid me!”

Then we both laughed.

And then we stood for a while until the goat poked her head out of her little barn.

Nerves got around behind my legs.

“I'm goin' to leave this place forever,” Oscar said quietly. “But there's one thing I got to do before I go. And that thing I got to do, I got to do tonight.”

Oscar went into the sexton's cottage.

There was clanging and rattling around in there.

Oscar came out with a roll of page wire. And a post-hole digger. And a shovel. He had wire-cutters and a carpenter's belt full of tools and nails.

“Do you want to give me a hand?” he said.

Up in the graveyard Oscar already had a cedar post cut and hidden in the long grass a little away from Ophelia Brown's grave.

He was all ready. He knew exactly what to do. He had been thinking about it for years.

Ophelia's grave was just outside the fence right between two fence posts.

The first thing he did was cut the page wire away from the two posts and leave an open gateway in the fence.

Then we dug a hole on the other side of Ophelia Brown's grave and we sank the post and tamped it down with rocks and earth. This was a strong post.

Then we cinched the new page wire to the first original post, brought it out around the new post and stapled it there, then brought it back to the second original post.

We cleaned up around the job and walked back a bit to look.

The grave of Ophelia Brown, Oscar McCracken's lover, was now inside the graveyard fence.

In fact, it looked kind of special.

It looked like the fence went along and then said, whoops, let's jog out here a bit, we don't want to forget to include our Ophelia Brown, now do we?

Back at the sexton's cottage we sat on the grass and drank cold water. Nerves seemed glad to get out of the graveyard.

Oscar was calm now, and in a sort of a good mood.

“Maybe I'll wait a few days before I leave. See what happens. I'm not mad at Father Foley. It's not his fault. It's the rules.”

Then, Oscar, just for a joke, pulled the wide-brimmed hat off the line and put it carefully over the goat's horns.

“This looks good on you, do you know that?”

We both laughed. The goat bleated.

Even Nerves looked at the goat without hiding because she looked so harmless in that hat that she wouldn't hurt a fly.

Oscar said he was tired and went in. I noticed he didn't shut the goat pen gate, but I was too tired to care. He could do it later when he went up to Mrs. Brown's to sleep.

Nerves and I went home.

I fell onto my straw mattress, mud and all. And I drifted and rode off into a sleep.

There was a big dance in the covered bridge.

I was dancing with the biggest farmer of them all. Fleurette was there, dancing with Father Foley. She was wearing a white dress with lace, blue shoes and a blue hat with a broad brim. She had a white rag tying up her black hair. Some of the farmers were tearing down the bridge during the dance. There was hammering, with the sound of little hammers like the hoofbeats of a goat. Oscar was up in the rafters trying to hang himself and underneath us Mushrat Creek was boiling, spurting redhot lava. O'Driscoll came riding through the bridge on a dolphin while Mrs. O'Driscoll, floating, played the fiddle, her face the face of an angel.

Then the music gets faster and Old Mac Gleason has got Nerves and he's throwing him out the wind-vent and Mushrat Creek is full, like in the spring, but it's not water that fills the creek and lashes against the sides of the
bridge, it's potato bugs! And Ophelia Brown is trying to stop Old Mac Gleason and my feet are nailed to the deck and I can't move! I've got my nail puller but I can't move! No...! No...! No...!

“Hubbo! Hubbo me boy! Wake up, lad! It's me, O'Driscoll. Get up. Get up. Quick!”

It was. It was O'Driscoll, shaking me awake.

“Come quick, boy! Something terrible has happened! It's Father Foley! They found him in the bridge! He's dead! They say somebody must have killed him. Get your pants on!”

E
VERYBODY
working on the new bridge was saying that Father Foley didn't just die, he was murdered. They weren't saying it very loud, mind you. Maybe only whispering it, or saying it without saying it at all.

For instance, you wouldn't actually hear somebody come right out and say, “I think so-and-so murdered Foolish Father Foley last night in the covered bridge.” Oh, no, you wouldn't hear that. But you might hear somebody say this: “They say that there's rumors going around that some people have heard others say that they've been told that there's a suspicion that something bad that you wouldn't like to say out loud happened to Father Foley in the covered bridge last night.”

And the other person would maybe say, “Well, he died in there, we all know
that
for sure.”

And the first person might say, “Yes, we do know that
for sure, but they say that maybe they know
how
or why he died.”

And the other person would say, “Well, what
is
it that they say is what maybe happened?”

And then the person who started it all would probably say, “Oh, I wouldn't like to say.”

And then some other people would stop working on the new bridge and put down a hammer and lean on a shovel and then start talking about who it was who maybe
killed
Foolish Father Foley from Farrellton in the covered bridge last night.

One might say, while he was leaning on his shovel, “They say that people have heard people say that somebody, who maybe even some of us
know
, might be the one to be the
cause
of Father Foley's death.”

And the other, while he was putting down his hammer, “Yes, and they say, now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this but they say that
that
person who was maybe
in
on the Father's horrible death the other night in the covered bridge was somebody we know that has something to do with delivering the mail around here in this part of the country.”

We all carried steel rods for about three hours.

Before noon two policemen drove up with Oscar and Mrs. Brown in the back.

The policeman asking the questions had a big wart on his nose.

“This is the young gentleman here,” said Mrs.
Brown, showing me to the policeman. You could hardly hear Mrs. Brown.

The policeman with the wart on his nose was very quiet and polite and friendly. He asked where I was last night, what was I doing, what time was it, when did I last see Oscar?

I told him.

“And this graveyard business. What were you doing there?”

“We were fixing the fence.”

The policeman's wart seemed to swell up a bit.

He got back in the car and they drove quietly away.

We carried steel rods until noon.

I was so tired I could hardly talk.

Lunch hour came at last.

“They're saying Oscar could have sneaked out of Mrs. Brown's after she was asleep and waited for Father Foley inside the bridge,” O'Driscoll said. “And hit him over the head.”

“I know,” I said. “But it's not true. He couldn't have!”

“Pretty strange, all right, Hubbo me boy,” O'Driscoll sighed. “Everybody heard Oscar threaten the Father. That's a very serious thing, Hubbo. Are you sure you didn't see Oscar do anything last night?”

Now O'Driscoll thought
I
was holding something back. That maybe
I
was a witness to something. I'd probably spend the rest of my life in jail.

Or be hanged by the neck until I was dead.

O'Driscoll all of a sudden gave me a hug.

He must have realized he made me feel bad.

“I'm sorry, Hubbo me boy. Listen now, don't worry. I know you're telling the truth, and when you tell the truth, everything always turns out fine!”

I wondered what Mrs. O'Driscoll would say if she heard O'Driscoll talk that way about the truth.

The rest of the hour we spent half listening to Mickey Malarkey telling us a pack of lies about his father and his ancestors.

It's hard to imagine, when your muscles are aching and your bones are sore and your eyes are full of dried sweat and your stomach is so full of food and tea that there's steam coming out of your mouth; it's hard to imagine somebody as old as Mickey Malarkey having a father.

He told us his father, Justin,
also
lived to be 114 years of age and had a head bigger than a large pumpkin. He said that his father Justin's great-
grandfather
whose name was Brendan and was born in the year 1695, the year before the discovery of
peppermint
also lived to be 114 years of age!

Later in the afternoon but long before quitting time, Prootoo rang her bell and when we all were around, Ovide Proulx made an announcement:

“Everybody will report to the church at five o'clock. The town council has got the coroner over dere from Wakefield because he wants to tell everybody personally
what ‘appened to da body of Poor Father Foley. Also, de police are dere too and dey want to question everybody about what dey can tell after dey hear what the coroner is going to tell. Work is finish for today.”