PROOTOO AND I were getting along fairly well. At least when she looked at me, her eyes seemed kinder than before. And the day that Mrs. O’Driscoll brought her the homemade black currant jam, she almost smiled at me.
There were farmers of all sizes working on the bridge. Small farmers, medium-sized farmers, big farmers.
The biggest farmer of them all looked like he was wearing shoulder pads under his shirt. He reminded me of a football player who played for the Ottawa Rough Riders named Tony Golab. We used to wait outside the little door in the green fence at half time for the players to come back on the field. There was a cement ledge you could stand on, and when Tony Golab came by I once jumped on his back and rode him into the park without paying.
“Hang on, kid!” he said while the security guard was trying to pull me off him. “Hang on, kid!” he said.
His sweater was covered with mud so you couldn’t see his number. But I knew what it was. It was 72.
And there was blood on his cheek.
The biggest farmer of them all reminded me of Tony Golab.
Another one of the farmers liked to sing.
He had only one song but it had hundreds of verses. They were all about some ancient guy named Brian O’Lynn.
The verses sounded like this:
Oh, Brian O’Lynn and his wife and wife’s mother
Tried to go over the bridge together
The storm it was howling, the bridge it fell in.
“We’ll go home by water,” says Brian O’Lynn.
But our most famous farmer was not working on the bridge at all.
He was a visitor who came over during our lunch hour and entertained us while we lay on the ground, sprawled out on the ground, full of food and resting.
Everybody said that Old Mickey Malarkey was the biggest liar on the Gatineau River. The Gatineau River runs from north of the town of Maniwaki right down to Ottawa. There are lots of little towns and villages in the Gatineau River Valley and lots of farms and houses along the river.
There were lots of liars living between Maniwaki and Ottawa. Maybe hundreds of liars. And so to be the biggest liar in the whole valley you had to be very good at it. There was quite a lot of competition.
Old Mickey Malarkey was the best.
He was also the one who had the most practice because he was the oldest. Old Mickey Malarkey was 112 years old and the farmers all said that he’d been lying since he was a little baby. Some of the farmers working on the new bridge said that Old Mickey Malarkey was lying before he learned to talk, if you can imagine that.
Old Mickey Malarkey was lying away back in the 1840s. Before Canada was even a country—before Confederation. Before the invention of the radio, the telephone, the car, before electricity. Old Mickey Malarkey was telling lies when my favorite writer, Leo Tolstoy, who wrote War and Peace, was only about twelve years old.
Whenever anybody asked Old Mickey Malarkey about being the biggest liar in the Gatineaus, he would say that he never told a lie in his life, which, of course, was one of the biggest big lies he ever told.
You could see the top of Old Mickey’s house from where we were building the new bridge.
About a quarter to twelve Old Mickey would leave his house, and by the time Prootoo rang the bell at twelve noon, he was already shuffling along the road. By the time most of the farmers were finished eating, Mickey would finally arrive.
Most everybody would be sprawled out on their backs with their arms and legs spread out and their mouths open and their eyes half shut. And their stomachs swelling up and down, trying to digest all the food they ate and all the tea and water they drank.
It would take Old Mickey about forty-five minutes to walk that far. I could probably walk from his house to where we had our dinner in about thirty seconds.
I told O’Driscoll one day that I could probably throw a stone that far.
“But, Hubbo, you’re young. You know, he’s pretty near a hundred years older than you. They tell me around here that fifty years ago, when your covered bridge was built, Old Mickey was sixty-two years of age. In fact, he was the foreman on the job. He’s built many barns in his day, and so building a covered bridge is almost the same. Now, Hubbo, when you’re—what is it he is, let’s see—when you’re one hundred and twelve years of age, I hope you can do as well!”
When Old Mickey finally got there he sat on a saw-horse or a bag of cement and got his breath and then he got up and walked around through the bodies of the farmers. He was bent over quite a bit and his hands were holding each other behind his back.
Then he started. It was a game they all knew. A conversation game.
“Went out last night after dark on the river. Stayed about an hour. Filled the boat with catfish!” said Old Mickey Malarkey.
“Filled the boat, Mickey?” said one farmer who was lying on his back with his arms out and his legs apart.
“Well, filled a tub and a couple of buckets.” “A tub and a couple of buckets, Mickey?” said another farmer, lying on his stomach with his face on his arm.
“O.K., a tub then. A tub full,” said Mickey.
“A tub full, Mickey?” another farmer said, steam rising from him.
“Well, it was half full,” said Mickey.
“Half full, Mickey?” another farmer said, pouring water over his head to cool off.
“Well, it was dark. But there were a lot of fish in there.”
“A lot of fish, Mickey?” said the biggest farmer of them all.
“O.K. Some fish. Some.”
“Some fish, Mickey?” said O’Driscoll.
“Well, say, half a dozen or so.”
“Or so, Mickey?” said the first farmer.
“O.K. Two. Two nice big catfish.”
“Two, Mickey?” said farmer number two.
“All right. One. One huge catfish. The biggest catfish I ever saw. Huge.”
“Huge, Mickey?” said the wet farmer.
“A good size, a fair-sized fish.”
“Fair size, Mickey?” said O’Driscoll.
“O.K. It was a small one. They weren’t biting, it’s the moon or something. I threw it back.”
“Did you catch any fish Mickey?” I felt like saying, but the singing farmer beat me to it.
“No! I didn’t catch one damn fish. Are you satisfied?” “Did you even go fishing, Mickey?” somebody finally said.
“No! I didn’t go fishing. I hate fishing. And I hate catfish. They’re ugly and they scare me. As a matter of fact I’ve heard tell that they’re poison. The Devil put them there in the river!”
“You’re an awful liar, Mickey Malarkey. An awful liar!”
Just then Prootoo came along and announced that we were going to tear down the covered bridge as soon as one lane of the new bridge was laid.
It was in the contract.
It couldn’t be helped.
The way she said that it couldn’t be helped, you could tell she was sort of sorry.
But business was business.