Covered Bridge (11 page)

Everybody was walking and packing up and asking questions and guessing what the coroner was going to say.

We headed up the road in small groups towards the church. It was going to seem funny being in there without Father Foley yelling about Hell.

The singing farmer sang part of his song behind us:

Brian O'Lynn and his wife and wife's mother

All went up to the church together

The church it was locked, and they couldn't get in

“We'll pray to the Devil,” says Brian O'Lynn!

I ducked behind the church and took a look around the sexton's cottage.

The gate was open to the goat pen.

The dress hanging on the line was gone.

The goat was gone!

Could it be? Could that be what happened?

N
EWS THAT
the coroner was coming up from Wakefield spread fast, and when he arrived there was quite a crowd waiting for him in the church to hear what he had to say about Father Foley's death. Just about everybody was there. Even Oscar.

And beside him, the policeman with the wart.

Mrs. O'Driscoll slid in beside us in the pew we were in.

“Oscar's goat's gone!” I whispered to her.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“I think I know what happened,” I said.

“Shh,” she said.

“Ladies and gentlemen. The autopsy showed that Father Foley did not die of a blow to the head. That wound was superficial and probably was caused by his fall. Nor did he die of a heart attack or of a brain tumor
or a blood clot or any other such normal causes of sudden death. No, the cause of death in this case is much more rare.”

The coroner waited. He thought that everybody standing around would look at each other and say words like “rare” and “normal” and go “oooh” and “ahhh.” But they didn't. They just sat there.

Then the coroner said some more.

“Father Foley died of a mysterious and sinister condition sometimes called Neurogenic Shock or Vasovagal Collapse. Vasovagal Collapse is due to a loss of peripheral arteriolar resistance resulting from reflex dilation in areas of skeletal muscle. The pooling of blood in peripheral vascular beds with loss of vascular tone results in inadequate venous return, a fall in cardiac output and subsequent reduction in arterial blood pressure. The heart has not sufficient fluid on which to contract. The lost blood of Father Foley did not pour out of him. It disappeared into his vastly dilated capillary bed and into his tissues.

“Something paralysed the vast capillary bed of Father Foley's body, causing extreme dilation. His blood then disappeared into it as if sucked up by a sponge!” He waited again. He was waiting for people to start asking questions. They didn't. They just sat there.

“What could have paralysed Father Foley's capillary bed, you ask? All he was doing was passing through the covered bridge.” The coroner seemed mad. The audience was not cooperating.

“There is only one answer to that,” said the coroner slowly. “And that answer is FEAR!

“FEAR!” he repeated. Nobody moved.

“Yes, my friends. I have to conclude that Father Foley dropped dead because someone, or someTHING, SCARED him to DEATH!”

Now the audience co-operated.

This made sense! Now everybody started talking at once.

Of course Father Foley could have been scared to death!

Didn't he almost scare himself to death just about every Sunday during his sermon about Hell?

What about when he just about jumped out of his skin the time the goat came into the church that time?

“He certainly was the
jumpiest
priest we've had around here for a while,” said Old Mickey Malarkey.

They were all talking now.

“I knew it!” I said to myself.

I knew it.

W
HEN THE CORONER
was finished his report, the policeman and his wart took over and a discussion started.

I slipped out the small north door that Oscar always used. Nobody saw me.

I ran down the road, through the covered bridge, up our side road, under the red chandeliers of our rowan-wood trees, around the house, past the woodpile and the summer kitchen, past the log stable and around by the manure pile and the pig pen, up through the pine bush and turned onto the old logging road towards the Gatineau River.

Beyond the corduroy there was a section of road where a purplish brown mat of dead pine needles stretched back as far as you could see into the bush.

This part of the road was damp clay and would show tracks.

I found what I thought I'd find.

Small cloven hoofprints!

I looked down the road. The evening light was slanting and filtering into the tunnel of tall sumac and poplar trees. The road turned and dipped into gloom.

I turned back and went home to wait.

I stuck my head in the big stone crock and pulled out a chunk of homemade bread.

O'Driscoll hit the door open and looked behind himself and said, “There's a lot of talk goin' about a missing goat Hubbo me boy. What's goin' on?”

“That's it!” I said. “That's what happened! I heard the hammering last night! I heard the hooves! I'm sure the goat got out! She ran through the bridge! Met Father Foley coming home from his rounds with the sick. The timing is perfect. I heard the goat hooves last night when I was half asleep! We left the gate open. The goat ate part of the dress off the line, got tangled up in it, ran out the gate and met Father Foley in the bridge. And she was wearing that hat! There's fresh tracks on the road. Let's go! The goat came down our road. I heard her!”

“Let's go and get the policeman to come with us,” said O'Driscoll.

I guess everybody must have told the policeman with the wart on his nose what Father Foley was like because
he seemed to enjoy the idea of coming with us to follow the goat tracks.

On our way, I explained to him about the hat and the dress and Oscar's ghost trick and the open gate.

“Quite a place, this Mushrat Creek,” said the policeman with the wart. “Ghosts and goats and covered bridges and devils and dead priests.”

His wart was starting to look kind of cute.

We were walking down the slope over the stinkhorn fungus and edging our way down the bank.

And there she was. Tangled up in some branches. Looking pretty lost. She gave a little bleat to us.

The hat was still over her horns.

The dress tangled over her body so that running through a covered bridge towards you in the dark, the dress flying and those eyes behind the hat brim and the thundering hooves could be pretty scary all right.

Specially if you were Father Foley with his light.

Poor Father Foley!

T
HREE WEEKS LATER
, on one of my cloux days, I went up on Dizzy Peak to pick some blueberries. While I picked I spoke to Fleurette as though I was writing more of the letter. I tried to make it dramatic. I tried to make it sound like she was reading it.

From up here on Dizzy Peak you can see the whole world. To the east, the dam and the big flooded country above it and below it the narrow fast river the way it used to be when only the first Canadians lived here.

North there is the town of Low and then Venosta, and in the mist of the mountains, maybe, Farrellton.

West, rolling humpbacked mountains and lakes here and there like broken bits of mirrors.

And the covered bridge down there, with its new paint job.

And the new bridge just above it, a cement slab.

I could hear her voice reading it. And her sighing.

I already wrote in her letter how it was that the bridge didn't get torn down after all.

It was Mrs. O'Driscoll who figured it out. And Prootoo.

At a county council general meeting Mrs. O'Driscoll got Prootoo to get up and make a motion. Mrs. O'Driscoll told her to move that the covered bridge be dedicated as a monument to the late Father Foley. It was seconded by the biggest farmer of them all.

That way Ovide Proulx got the contract to paint the bridge instead of tearing it down.

How could anybody vote against that? Even Old Mac Gleason, who actually went to the meeting, had to put his hand up!

Business was business.

O'Driscoll laughed for almost a week about it until Mrs. O'Driscoll finally got sick of the whole story and shut him down by giving him the silence.

Now as Oscar McCracken traveled the bridge four times a day and paused each time inside, in the quiet there, he could, if he wanted to, read at each portal, a brass plaque.

The plaque said these words:

Let this covered bridge be dedicated to the memory of Father Francis Foley of Farrellton who gave his life herein for the people of his parish.

God Love Him

May He Rest Peacefully.

Up on Dizzy Peak, I pretended to write some more.

And here on Dizzy Peak, the sun beats on the rock and in between, the tough blueberry bushes growing in the moss, loaded with blueberries, powdered and fat, wait.

You lean over the edge, hanging by one hand to a ridge of rock a million years old and strip a handful of berries from a plant growing out of the side of the peak. Your pail on the ledge beside your hand is almost full, so you jam the handful of berries into your mouth instead.

The berries are hot and firm and sweet and you can feel them burst and pop in your mouth and the blue juice overflows down your chin.

You are eating the sun and the earth and the rain.

Fleurette would like that writing. If I could ever write it that way.

I got home with a pailful of blueberries, washed them and cleaned them, and put them on to simmer in some sugar for Mrs. O'Driscoll.

Later I met Oscar in the bridge, sat with him during his quiet time, and drove down with him to meet the train.

Sitting there on the fender of Oscar's car, my feet on the wooden station platform, my arms folded across my chest. I was feeling the muscles in my arms with my fingers. My muscles were hard and bulging from the work on the bridge.

My hands were rough and leathery from carrying the
steel and the bags of cement. The fingers feeling my muscles that were strong and hard felt like steel hooks.

The train came howling around the bend in a cloud of soot and smoke and steam at exactly five to six and screamed and cried and moaned and chugged and grunted and sighed and farted and then stopped.

The bell was ringing and clanging and stabbing clean through the air and into the hills and up and down the track and off the station walls. The station master and his helper pulled a big red wagon by the tongue alongside the baggage car. I waited and watched Oscar sort his mail.

Some people were getting off the train carrying their bags and suitcases.

You could always tell when the last person was off the train because the conductor would pick up the little step and put it back inside between the cars where he kept it.

I watched the conductor pick up the little step and get up into the train with it.

The train belched and started to move.

I looked over at Oscar.

He was wearing a big smile.

He had a letter in his hand.

He gave it to me, turned upside down.

I flipped it over and right away, the handwriting!

It was from Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell.