Covered Bridge Read Online Free PDF Page A

talking.
    â€œHere’s how Lake Pizinadjih got its name.
    â€œYears 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.
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œThe singing continued, however...”
    â€œOf course,” sighed Mrs. O’Driscoll.
    â€œ...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.
    â€œBut 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.
    â€œDays 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.
    â€œBefore 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.

Adolf Hitler Makes Joke!
    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, onceFather 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