I WAS LEARNING a lot on my new job.
One of the first things I learned was that I wasn’t going to earn forty-four dollars a week because I wasn’t going to be able to work every day.
When I ran out of nails to pull, Prootoo would come up and say, “You’re laid off. Come back tomorrow. We might ‘ave some more cloux for you!” She would laugh when she said that. Then, I noticed that she was calling me “Cloux,” which is the French word for nail. But it wasn’t in a mean way.
“Hey, Cloux! You’re laid off! Come back tomorrow. See if dere’s any cloux for you!” I was the only one on the job she joked with.
Mrs. O’Driscoll said she didn’t have any kids of her own and she liked me because I was adopted.
“How did she know I was adopted?” I asked Mrs. O’Driscoll.
“Why I told her, of course,” said Mrs. O’Driscoll out of the corner of her mouth.
Another thing I learned was about whistling. One of the smaller farmers was helping with the pulling of the nails one day. Actually, he was banging the dried cement off the wood so I could get at the nails. He was whistling a song. He was whistling “I been workin’ on the railroad.” Just to be friendly, I started whistling the same song. Whistling “I been workin’ on the railroad” right along with him. He stopped whistling and stopped banging the cement off his board and stared at me.
“You don’t whistle the same song at the same time another person is whistling the song. Don’t you know that?”
I apologized. I didn’t know that.
You can learn a lot while you’re building a bridge.
On one of my laid-off days (I called them cloux days), Mrs. O’Driscoll and I sat under her two rowan-wood trees and watched a monarch butterfly chase Nerves around the yard. As soon as Nerves got settled down again and curled up for a snooze, the monarch was back right at his nose and Nerves was on his feet showing his teeth and being pretty ferocious. Then the monarch went out and came in again, this time not fluttering and playing but gliding and diving straight for Nerves, and Nerves took off across the sideroad until he realized he was heading right for the potato field and 10,000 potato bugs. He screeched to a stop and made a quick right and headed down towards the ice house and Mushrat Creek, and we waited for the splash.
I went again to the covered bridge to wait for Oscar to come by in his coupe. Lately I had gone part way with him. We even talked together a couple of times. He always seemed to be going to say something but he’d never say it.
If he didn’t have stuff piled in the rumble seat I could sometimes ride back there. You felt like a king riding back there. Riding through your kingdom. Waving at the farmers along the road. The breeze flapping your shirt. You reach up sometimes, try to slap the leaves. You see a red-winged blackbird showing off his dive. You try to catch a handful of chokecherries when Oscar is rounding a curve close to the edge. Your hand is purple and sticky from the chokecherry juice. You watch the groundhogs praying in the fields, sitting up straight, just like in Foolish Father Foley’s church. You are blinking at the sun flashing through the trees, following you along. Listening to the crows complaining about nothing. Smelling the sweetgrass and the clover. Hearing the heat bugs.
The King of Mushrat Creek.
Until you stop. Then the dust swirls up around you and you’d better hold your breath for a minute.
The trouble with riding outside like that though was that I wouldn’t be able to talk to Oscar, find out more about his life, about his dead lover Ophelia, about what happened.
Ophelia dead.
Sometimes I walked down to Brennan’s Hill for a small can of white paint maybe to touch up our milk separator shack. Past Old Mickey Malarkey’s house, the road was lined with chokecherry trees and plum. Some of the plums were ripe enough to eat but were a bit hard, but the chokecherries were soft and juicy. Trouble was they turned your mouth purple and made you feel after like you just ate a cardboard box. I timed it so I would get to the General Store in Brennan’s Hill at half past five. That gave me time to get the paint, talk for a while (this is where I learned to tell the different evergreen trees apart), and then walk over to meet the train from Ottawa at ten to six.
I stood beside Oscar McCracken’s mail car and watched the train. The whistle echoed all over the valley between the hills and then the train rounded the curve out of the trees and roared and coughed and chuckled and burped and farted and screeched and stopped.
And the steam floating across the platform there tasted like metal.
Some people got off.
Nobody I knew, though.
One cloux day, Nerves and I strolled over to see if Old Mac Gleason had any news. It was fun watching Nerves try to stroll.
Old Mac sucked on his pipe for a while.
Then Nerves and Old Mac started a long staring contest.
Nerves often did this to people. Especially strangers. I never saw him lose one of those staring matches. I think that Nerves, in his other life, must have been a hypnotist. Old Mac looked away finally and Nerves lay down for a little snooze.
“And how’s little Nerves today? You’re looking well, Nerves. Keeping busy, are you?” Old Mac didn’t like Nerves. Too much competition.
Nerves opened one eye. Then he wagged one ear as if to say, “I’m fine, Old Mac Gleason. And how are you this fine morning? How’s your veranda doing? Do you think we’ll get some rain? What do you hear about the new bridge? Are you in favor of tearing down the old one or leaving it there for posterity? Do you think the devil will get you for not going to church? Does living beside a graveyard bother you at night? Do you know everybody’s business in Mushrat Creek? Do you think you’ll go to hell for making fun of Father Foley? Is your pipe empty again? Is that why it makes that sucking noise? When you spit off the veranda, do you always spit in the same place? Or do you wait to see which way the wind is blowing? When you were young, did you ever cry? Did anybody ever say, ‘be a man’? Does your rocking chair squeak the same way each time? When it was new, did it squeak? Did you ever write a letter to a girl when you didn’t know her address?”
Nerves could say quite a bit with a little wag of his ear.
Cloux days came in handy.
I went for a walk up the road and talked for a minute to Mrs. Brown over the fence.
She was in her hollyhocks.
You could hardly see her.
You could hardly hear her.
She was Ophelia Brown’s mother.
In my letter I tried to explain to F3 about Ophelia’s mother, Mrs. Brown.
I said in the letter that Mrs. Brown looked like a cup and saucer that you only used on Sunday. Then I said she looked like meringue on the top of a lemon pie. That sounded even more silly than the cup and saucer one. But I left them both in anyway. Then I tried to say that Mrs. Brown looked like a little glass statue of a ballet dancer. I liked the sound of that one so I left that in, too.
Later on I decided to try that she looked like a ripe milkweed pod. And, like ripe milkweed in a wind, if you blew on her, she’d come all apart and float away. And there’d be monarch butterflies all around you.
I smiled at Nerves while I thought about F3 reading this letter (if I ever found her address), and what a picture she would have of Ophelia Brown’s mother: a cup and saucer, lemon pie, glass ballet dancer, milkweed with monarchs.
Then I told her in the letter how sad it was about Oscar and his dead lover Ophelia Brown, and I even tried to talk about F3 and me and about our love affair and how we were apart, sort of like Ophelia and Oscar. I knew I was getting a little too dramatic but I couldn’t help it. Then I said our love affair was sort of like two potato bugs, one on one leaf at one end of the potato field and the other on a potato plant leaf way down at the other end of the field. I knew how dumb it all sounded so I read the whole thing out to Nerves. When I got to the part about the potato bugs, Nerves ran into the kitchen and hid behind the stove.
Then I wrote that F3 and I were like fire and wood. She was the fire and I was the wood and the flames were our love and the sparks were the love words we said to each other and the smoke was the fights we had. Then I wrote that she was the wood and I was the fire and that the heat from the flames was the ache in my heart and the ashes were the rest of the cruel world when we were apart and by this time I was so mixed up that I tried to change it all to where she was a squirrel and I was a nut.
But I didn’t say in the letter what was on my mind all the time. About the bridge. And about Oscar McCracken.
And if they tore down the bridge, what would he do. Poor Oscar. If we could only help him!
But O’Driscoll had his petition ready.
Maybe something was going to happen.