The Other Side of the Bridge Read Online Free PDF Page B

crying.
    Then old Dr. Christopherson came, and with him Mrs. Luntz, Carl’s mother, from the next farm. Mrs. Luntz patted Arthur on the head and told him to go downstairs and she and the doctor went into his mother’s room and shut the door. Later, cries came from the room. During all of this, Arthur’s father sat in the armchair in the kitchen with his large lumpy hands spread flat on his knees. His hands looked very strange, lying still like that. Normally if he was sitting down they were busy mending something.
    In his memory Arthur had only the one picture of this scene, but from piecing things together later he knew that it must have happened more than once. Three times at least.
    Then there was a long spell when his mother was in bed though she didn’t look sick, during which time his father got the supper after coming in from the fields in the evening. Most days Mrs. Luntz and other ladies from neighboring farms dropped by with food in big covered dishes, so all he had to do was heat things up. This wasn’t a bad time, as far as Arthur could recall. He remembered his father giving him a dish towel and passing plates down for him to dry, and telling him he was doing a good job. He remembered carrying his mother’s supper very carefully up the stairs and taking it in to her, and her smiling at him and thanking him.
    He couldn’t remember what he did during the day, while his mother lay in bed and his father was out in the fields. He was too young for school so he must have played by himself. But he clearly remembered the day he heard his mother calling him from her room. He would have been just five at the time. He remembered hearing the panic in her voice, and the feeling in his stomach—a cold tightness, like the grip of a hand—as he ran up the stairs. His mother had her knees drawn up under the blankets. She looked afraid. Arthur had never seen fear on an adult’s face before, but he had no difficulty recognizing it for what it was. “Go get your father,” she had said. “Tell him it’s coming! Run!”
    Here there was a picture as well as a memory: a picture of himself, flying along the edge of the fields, his feet stumbling on the clods of heavy rain-soaked earth. “Dad! Dad!” Terror in his voice. What was coming? Something terrible, terrifying, and his mother all alone in the house with no one to protect her.
    And then some hours later, when it was dark and the doctor had come, along with Mrs. Luntz again, and they were with his mother, it became apparent from the screams that echoed down the stairs that they could not protect her any more than he or his father could. Arthur wanted to go to his father and climb onto his lap but he was afraid of the look on his father’s face and of the appalled silence between the screams. He wanted to go to his room and get into bed and cower there, but to do that he would have to go up the stairs and pass the door with the dreadful sounds behind it. So instead he curled into a tight ball in the other armchair and stayed there, until many hours later the screaming finally stopped. And then there was another sound, a bawling, like a cross between a crow and a sheep, and he knew that whatever it was had come at last, and had triumphed, and his mother was dead.
    Except that in the morning there she was, not dead at all but sitting up in bed, smiling, holding a bundle and saying to him, “Come and see, Arthur! You have a brother! This is your brother! His name is Jacob—isn’t he lovely? You can call him Jake.”
     
     
     
    Was that where it all started, then? Before Jake was even born, with the loss of those other babies? So that when Jake finally arrived, the outcome of all that pain and fear and grief, he would be so precious to his mother that she could hardly bear it? She carried him around with her all day, holding him tightly, fending off death with the crook of her arm. She loved the new baby—oh, Arthur knew that!—but her love seemed to consist mainly