The River Burns (24 page)

“My God,” he prayed, because he needed a miracle here. “Please. Let it be somebody else. It's got to be somebody else.”

■   ■   ■

The change in a depressed
Willis Howard that took him from the calm of his television set late on a warm summer evening to a full-blown distemper was so swift, chaotic, driven, and arbitrary that he barely recognized himself and certainly not the vehemence that compelled him. He'd drummed through this rant before but never when he stood so precariously balanced on the cusp of such wrath, as though he was seized by a nausea so intense and crippling that it reduced him to a bodily reflex, one blithering scold upon another.

“MOTHERFUCKMOTHERS!” Language like that never crossed his lips and he felt that he jumbled them up somehow but he never spoke words laced with such venom. To merely hear any such utterance, offhand in a teenager's diction, or rough and senseless from the tongue of someone old and embittered, or a foul-mouthed logger, caused Willis to cower within himself, uncomfortable with the expression of crudity. And yet, he was the one uttering profanity and doing so having lost all modicum of self-control.

For they'd done it, the bastards. Always they got their own way, they ran the town and ran and ruined people's lives. Whether he was a child sucker-punched by a vile, rude boy or an adult contending with the animosity and gainful superiority of loggers, their slurs, their slights, which conceded no respect for the opinions of others and only niggling concern for the
lives
of others and what meagre attention they could muster came couched in mockery and disdain. No matter his station in life, the rabble reduced him, they brought him low. Damn loggers. Damn them to hell's bottommost sewer. Now they'd done it, burned
burned!
the old covered bridge that solicited thousands of customers nearer to his doorstep every year to spend their money in his shop and now they cut the town off from that resource so that their own precious resource
their goddamn trees
could be better served. They might as well have taken his own heart and soul but nonetheless his bank account along with a multitude of body parts and ripped that bloody stew from his entrails.
“FUCKERS!”

He longed to burn each and every damned logger slowly on a spit with forks through their eyelids.

Willis Ephraim Howard, Esq., needed to pull on his shoes and tie up the laces before stepping out. On his front porch he could smell the old covered bridge, the smoke and more than a hundred years of sedate composure, faithful service, and pastoral peacefulness burning—­history and ancestry, memory and fable, vanishing—a stench made disparate by the taunting lust of the fire seen from his eyrie above the treetops, and he heard the menace of the roaring, as though from the bellows of a great subterranean furnace. That roaring.

■   ■   ■

Hidden amid trees, Denny settled.
The august fury of the fire spooked him, knocked him off his stump. He needed time alone to recover, to resume his posture, to remember why the action was taken, to recall that he'd been shoved into an untenable position. The fire entered a phase when the gasoline was consumed and the blaze retreated. A spontaneous lull. Tucked behind protective brush he imagined that the fire might simply go out, a charred remains the net result, the bridge still standing, still functional. His heart slumped then as abject failure loomed. Yet the fire fanned itself on a breeze, the heat imbued in the timbers assumed command, and the fire this time was no longer artificially inspired but fully legitimate as it fed upon the timbers, soon beyond control, the sage old wood wildly consumed.

This emotional slippage, from fear of failure to the restoration of the action's success, confirmed for Denny O'Farrell his own righteous intent, and while he took no solace in the vanity of the flames or in the destruction of the beautiful old bridge, he reaffirmed that this needed to be done and the weight fell upon him to stand as the man for the job. The bridge burned and he took no pleasure in that ecstatic flurry but reaffirmed his choices here.

Then that still, quiet reverie broke.

In a twinkling, as though the soul of his life buckled.

But it was not him. The bridge just snapped.

Denny spent his life amid the noise of harvesting timbers, so he knew the sound to be that of wood breaking. But he did not know how, where. The outcry came as concussive, like cannon fire, the initial stammer and dull thump of the shot followed by the rupture and chaos of explosion. A thunder, yet as quick as lightning, and that decisive. The render of the sound was accompanied by a chorus from the throng of spectators, both those nearby and those on the run to soon arrive. A reaction to the sound. Denny needed to see what occurred, and risked being spotted to nip through the woods closer to the river and the flames. He arrived at the riverbank in time to see what he never perceived, the near edge of the bridge, having broken from its moorings, falling into the Gatineau River.

The river will douse the flames!

In one illogical instant, he feared that the bridge might be saved by the river, and returned to its rightful position.

The rush of water carried one end of the burning carcass downstream, twisting the far side of the bridge so that the attachment points there were bent beyond their capacity to sustain the weight, breaking away in a slander of great guttural cries. Upright, one end a bow, the opposite a stern, the boat-like bridge artfully sailed upon the surface. The gargantuan flames appealed to the crisp black air, sparks rampant as though the river itself burned in sympathy, as this fiery proud ship sailed on down the stream.

Ashore, townsfolk were rapt.

Denny could move from his lair now, and in keeping with his plan join the throng. He'd set the fire but with no visible means to do so. And so he was free to mingle, to pretend that he'd arrived, like the others, from afar, to act the part of an astonished onlooker.

And he
was
astonished as the bridge slowly wended its way downstream, and in the current perfectly followed the contours of the shore. The sky lit up, the riverbanks aglow. He was not sure when his brother joined him, as people constantly milled around, changing positions to alter their perspective. He became aware that Ryan stood beside him.

The brothers exchanged a glance.

“I thought so,” Ryan said. A moment ago he was asked by the shopkeeper, Willis Howard, if he intended to arrest his brother.

Denny minded his peace awhile. Then he said, “Hey, Ry, Dad said you were on a date tonight. How'd that go?”

Ryan remained beside him awhile, passively observing the fire. “I better not find out that my date was part of your plan,” he said, “that it had anything to do with your timing.” The two brothers stared at each other briefly, both unyielding, then Ryan walked off. He wanted to get the Fire Department—able volunteers who were allowing themselves to be mere spectators—on their toes. They needed to follow the bridge downstream in case it came ashore. He needed to avert that greater disaster, should the bridge set a forest, or the town, ablaze.

■   ■   ■

She hums to dispel the
dark, her fright, this outlandish fire.

Unnoticed in its dark patch of firmament, a slim sliver of moon is eclipsed by a burst and roar as flames catapult into the night sky, illumining the broad bend of shore. Air erupts in a scintillation of light, while across the water hillsides glimmer a reddish hue. Some people are electric, a few are in a daze, awakened by the dirge of shouts, sirens, and ringing telephones as townsfolk swarm to the riverbank, most mystified, all stunned, to take in this apparent cataclysm in their lives.

Mrs. McCracken hums.

the beautiful the beautiful river!

Gather with the saints by the

Alone in the dark in her nightgown she seems particularly diminutive on this occasion. Perhaps more elderly, also, and more frail than usual, as if not being fully clothed accentuates the vulnerability of an older age. She sits upon a boulder in the shoreline park as the bright burning bridge slowly passes by, yet to thwart the gravitational pull of a dawning heartache her posture remains oak-straight. Did she ever intend to live so long to bear witness to an event this crude? A scurrilous act.
Arson. The culprits deserve not a single stitch of mercy. Not one stitch. Hang them.
She concludes what more than a few farther away are whispering,
Oh, they did it now. This time. Set the river ablaze. Those men. Those boys!
Her back taut, yet she feels herself go wonky, a trifle cockeyed, as if rather than being aroused from sleep she's been shaken from a groggy stupor.
The river, can you—? In flames. Right before our very own eyes!

Sparks ignite on the crackling air.

that flows by the throne of

Her gaze remains transfixed upon the floating blue womb of the inferno and to her surprise Mrs. McCracken begins to feel strangely invigorated. She quits her song. Thoughtful now, somehow less furious. An odd idea crops up—
I might linger awhile
. She has not dwelled on such a thing in a very long time, there is simply no value to the exercise, but she is thinking now that she just might stay. Here. On earth. In this town.
Awhile.
For the first time in ages her life is possessed by genuine purpose, for she needs to ascertain how this conflagration will revise her study of the world, who might be uplifted, who brought low to lie seared or mangled or ruefully destroyed.

Oh my,
she winces as the thought strikes home,
gossipy tongues will wag!

The river. In flames.
Oh!
Burning. As though water combusts.

Overhead, ash drifts, settles on trees. Specks bloom crimson an instant, then cool on the palms of darkened leaves.

The old lady intermittently attempts to resume her hum.

Her new friend, such a perplexing young woman—
A vision that girl, oh!—
aglow in the river's firelight, also wears white on this night albeit with a fashion sense appropriate to her youth and beauty.
Yes! We shall gather by—
Tara approaches down the well-trammelled couples' path as if stepping on air, or upon a ribbon of shimmering dust. Arms meditatively entwined. She moves more slowly than the others who so urgently converge. Her heels kick up a shy trace of ash.
Why yes now.
Mrs. McCracken interrupts her hymn as a measure of boldness mixes with her familiar cunning, although she admits to an abiding confusion. Saddened by the grief of this hour, she still feels quite capable of looking forward. Despite a wish to remain circumspect, she smiles, and repeats, more as affirmation than as an afterthought,
Why yes now. You know? This might make a dollop of sense, in a strange way, in the longer long run.

If Tara Cogshill arriving on the shore appears uniquely resplendent, perhaps angel-like, to Mrs. McCracken, then the woman sitting upright on a rock in her shimmering white nightgown, radiant in the glow of firelight under a canopy of undulating smoke looks positively otherworldly to Tara, as though transported from another realm. Amid the horde, she is the only person to have segregated herself off as solitary. The swirl of smoke that on occasion dips to touch the ground reflects a ruddy tinge of fire, and the woman's white gown mirrors the brightest flames off the blazing river.

Mrs. McCracken is watching her, Tara sees, not the fire.

Coming closer, she detects the blaze caught in the wash of those eyes.

Tara stands beside her while the old woman remains seated upon the rock. The younger one places a hand upon the senior's shoulder, and the frail-looking old lady covers that hand with her own.

They remain that way, gazing out.

Mrs. McCracken says, “My storm.”

A reference that derives from a conversation they shared at the cemetery, but Tara does not know why she's mentioning it now, so asks, “Why say that?”

“Raine,” Mrs. McCracken answers obliquely, “with an
e
.”

Tara wonders if her friend has not lost her senses in the trauma of this event, or perhaps she's sleepwalking, in a way. Or she's merely being difficult or oddly sentimental or she's confused and disoriented. She's worried about her. The two women turn their attention back to the old covered bridge as it sails on downriver. “It's like the river is burning,” Tara remarks, and given the flames' dancing reflections off the oily black surface that is exactly true.

“Yes,” Mrs. McCracken agrees. “It's on fire, isn't it?” To Tara, she seems a long way off.

“It's like a burning ship. It's lying in water, in
water
! It's a fire on water. Amazing how it plain refuses to burn out.”

“That makes sense,” Mrs. McCracken contends. “It wants to carry on.”

“How do you mean?” Tara asks, but she's a long way off herself and isn't really thinking about her question.

The older woman, though, takes it seriously. “The bridge,” she divulges slowly as the thought takes hold, “would rather be a fire than extinguished.”

And yet the old covered bridge, true to an ingrained dignity long nurtured, does eventually burn itself out upon the waters, quietly vanishing miles downstream into nothing forevermore.

II

RECKONING

16

W
ell-kempt, his home did show a few anaemic signs of ageing. Broad-planked oak floors, which he laid himself, and adored, for he felled the trees as well, reflected a patina only time could stain. Here and there the scuff of constant feet left them gently scooped. The north side of the dining room floor dipped to meet the wall, as though all material gravitated towards and down the riverbank and to the water on that side of the house. As if everything secretly drained away. For reasons that he could not readily decipher, although he suspected that either shadows cast by the tallest pines or meandering fair-weather cloud were the culprits, the room seemed a tad dreary today, given the brightness of the morning. As he hung up the telephone, he listened to a cardinal's clear whistle, high on the fir out back, which ordinarily might cheer him, and yet today the ensuing silence felt grim.

A phone call bid him come in from garden work, so now he washed his hands under the kitchen taps. He scoured his palms thoroughly and, looking up, was hooked by his reflection in a small mirror off to the side. So the house was not alone in showing its age. Alexander Gareth O'Farrell leaned back against the counter while he worked the towel, and continued to wipe his hands long after they were dry.

A neighbour called, virtually kicking herself with suppressed delight to be the first to fill him in on the details, such as they were.
They burned the bridge!
The tone of conversation shifted, and Alex believed she was fishing, to see if he'd stoop to accusing his son, which apparently was going around.

“Why on earth,” he asked at last, still dealing with her news, “would my son burn the old covered bridge? Anyway, which son do you mean?”

“Not Ryan!” the batty neighbour retorted with some consternation.

“Denny is not a pyromaniac either. What are you insinuating?”

“I'm just saying. It's going to be difficult for Ryan, don't you think, if he has to . . . he may have no choice . . . if he, you know, investigates his brother. Do you think he will?”

“Will what?”

“Arrest him!”

No one slammed a receiver down, but the two extricated themselves from their discourse and hung up and that's when Alex noticed the age of the house and went into the kitchen to scrub his hands. He felt an odd subliminal relief that his wife was not alive to hear such distressing talk about her second child. If she was, Alex reflected, the report might've killed her.

If she was alive
, he reconsidered along a different vein,
he never would have done it.
That's when he realized that he himself believed, on no evidence, just suspicion and intuition, that Denny was responsible.

He repeated his son's name twice aloud, both times softly. “Denny.” A quiet, loving, forgiving sound. “Denny.” This time rife with dismay.

Then he went around the house trying to locate his car keys, and after that drove into town. Assuming the tale was true, that the old covered bridge burned and sailed on down the river in flames, then he wanted to observe the gap for himself before he considered any subsequent move. He needed to observe the evidence firsthand, despite having been forewarned that absolutely nothing remained to be seen.

■   ■   ■

Arriving at work, many of them late, truckers were advised not to start their engines. “You'll be going nowhere soon,” the dispatcher's assistant let them know. Off and on they caught sight of the dispatcher through the window of his office, on the phone and pacing, and whenever he hung up he was obviously expecting the blessed thing to ring again. He was giving out no further information.

The men were remarkably subdued.

In pairs, a few of the younger guys balanced on a hefty log and endeavoured to wrestle one another off it. Denny considered the sport silly, given that the log lay flat on dry land. Float that thing in the river and then see who could stay upright on it and for how long. This is what they should have been doing with their lives, riding logs downstream. Any battle for supremacy then would not have been a mere logger sport but a life-and-death daily activity that determined their worth, and a skill that aided their ability to survive. Instead, number 2 diesel fuel ran through their veins and a few younger guys thought that balancing on a log
on dry land
meant something. Denny quashed an urge to yell, or even step right up to the fellow who apparently won that absurd contest and punch his lights out. He exhaled, to let his unbidden rage subside.

Older guys smoked and kicked around a few ideas about what would happen now, and out of that discussion one wizened, diminutive fellow started up a pool in which the object was to guess the date a new bridge would open to traffic.

“One thing wrong with that idea,” Big Bill Fournier touted.

“What's that?” a sidekick asked.

“Who says a new bridge will ever get built?”

He spoke loudly, as though he knew whom he was talking to, but Denny didn't rise to the bait. For the time being, he let it pass. If Big Bill thought that burning the bridge was a bad idea, he could suck his own tailpipe, and Denny was on the verge of saying so. He'd offer to help shove it down his gullet.

Those few comments aside, the morning was remarkable for the lack of references to the fire. People kept their opinions to themselves, and no one was willing to publicly harangue, or celebrate, the arsonists, whoever they might be. By the same token, no one was so foolish as to speculate that the fire might have been an accident. Truckers knew what happened. They believed they'd be the beneficiaries, eventually, so it stood to reason that a few of their number were guilty of the crime.

Silence, then, was a form of thanks, rather than misgiving.

Denny came close to asking André Gervais for a cigarette but caught himself, realizing how bad that would look, the two of them huddled around a lit match. An image that snuffed out the craving.

The dispatcher ventured out at last and men came away from their logs and rigs and huddled groups to form a semicircle around him. Denny found himself in the front row. Not that it mattered a whole hill of beans, but he'd prefer being farther back. He respected the dispatcher, a muscular fair-haired man in his forties with a punched-in nose who'd never been a driver. He once worked in the woods felling trees until a bad back helped him graduate to a desk job, a task he performed well and with equanimity under pressure.

“Listen up, guys. I just got the word, okay? This is not my doing, so don't complain to me. We're going up north, east of Maniwaki. We'll haul timber there for the next few weeks until we get this figured out. The haul times won't be so bad, you should be able to get your loads in, except for today, because today we have to drive up. Tomorrow, you'll start up there in the morning. A longer drive to get to work for you guys, but that's just how it has to be.”

“You mean we're leaving our rigs up there?” a voice inquired.

“That's it,” the dispatcher said.

“Where exactly do we go?” Denny couldn't see Samad in the gathering, but caught the sound of his voice somewhere behind him. He didn't know why but wished he'd shut up. They'd not spoken since separating the night before, but he had lain awake afterwards thinking that Samad's wife, Joce, was the only person who could put the four of them together at the same time prior to the fire. He could not articulate why, but he just wanted Samad to stay completely quiet. In that way, to follow his lead.

“Be ready to bug out in twenty minutes,” the dispatcher replied. “A company pickup is on the way. A lead truck will follow it. Then everybody, just follow the truck in front of you. I'll be in the pickup. I'm setting up in a tent for our spell there. What a joy that will be. Tonight, a bus will drive you guys back here to your personal vehicles.”

Satisfied, the men began to disperse, but the dispatcher whistled for the resumption of their attention. Everyone returned to being quiet.

“One more thing, okay? We're going up there as one long line of trucks. Spread yourselves out for safety's sake so cars can pass, okay. Keep in touch by radio. Nobody goes off course, okay. Don't get lost. Understand?”

Few did.

“Look. Face it. We're not in everybody's good books right now. More than a few people are pissed off. I'll let you guess why, but we've received some threats already. At head office, and apparently, down at city hall.”

“What kind of threats?”

A legitimate question, but it caused the dispatcher to examine his clipboard. He didn't want to reply.

Denny fully expected to remain silent himself, as he wished Samad had done. But after putting his hand up to get the dispatcher's attention, he repeated the question that another man initially raised.

“What kind of threats?” he asked in a quiet and calm voice.

The dispatcher looked at him, eye to eye, and reluctantly he shrugged.

“Crank calls, man,” he said.

“What threats?” a stronger voice asked, now for a third time.

The dispatcher looked around. “Potshots. Fires. Shit like that there.”

The men absorbed the unwelcome report. If somebody wanted to pick a fight, that was one thing, bring it on, but a shot out of the trees into a windshield was something to fear.

“They better be cranks,” somebody near Denny muttered.

He was not alone in being surprised by what was relayed. Crank calls. Like everyone else he hoped that that was the case. He hadn't thought about dealing with anything more than that when plotting to do this. But everybody knew that plenty of sharpshooters lived in the hills.

■   ■   ■

After visiting the site of
the old bridge, now a mere gap, a glimpse of the rapids, Alex O'Farrell needed a pick-me-up. As did others, he walked along the road to where yellow police tape and a few sawhorses barricaded the steep drop into oblivion. A visit that did not go unnoticed. Whereas others could look out over the stretch of water and not believe their eyes, he couldn't believe his ears.

“If you got something to say about me or my family,” he finally challenged the flock of people behind him who were demonstrating a propensity for whispers and remarks, “say it to my face. Come on. Who's got the guts?”

He'd turned slowly to face them in a manner vaguely threatening, which he expected was enough to forestall any reply, while forgetting that he was no longer a young, lithe, and muscular logger whom people naturally feared to cross. That he might actually fight someone was nonsensical, and consequently a man even older than himself dared respond. “Did Denny do it or what?”

“How the hell should I know?” he fired back, then realized in an instant that that was not the reply his son might expect from him. But he had nothing more to add, and with two dozen people watching he walked off. For once he was grateful for his aches and pains from old logging injuries, as they prevented him from stomping away in a snit. Instead, he deployed a simple, if somewhat out of sync, amble. Elegant enough. Proud enough. He wouldn't call his stride a limp, but being self-conscious about his exit from the fray he admitted that he was probably a touch more disjointed recently, and hoped his hips were not on the cusp of giving out.

Time to see a quack, perhaps.

Although his car was handy, he chose to leave it parked and gave his legs and hips and restless sciatic nerve a workout. Never a man to just take a walk—he required a destination—he nurtured now a hankering for raspberry pie. Raspberry in particular, but he'd accept blueberry, and if he still remained bereft of a choice, an apple or maybe a rhubarb-apple would do. He wanted pie, that's what he knew. And if he happened to eat the whole damn thing by midafternoon he wasn't going to get on his own case.

This was a day to consume a pie.

So he walked across town to Potpourri, where he could pick up one of Mrs. McCracken's, as he preferred hers to the bakery's. Besides, if he went into the bakery he'd also buy donuts and cookies and then be obliged to actually give himself a good talking-to.

Due either to a mild absentmindedness these days or because he was disheartened and preoccupied, he completely forgot who was working down at the gift shop when, pie in hand, a waft of raspberry enticing his nostrils, he paid Willis Howard the discount rate for a day-old pie as Mrs. McCracken hadn't shown up that morning. “I was craving one of her fresh ones.”

“I called,” Willis told him. “She's taken the day off to mourn the bridge. Personally, I don't blame her, and anyway she was probably up half the night. You're celebrating, I suppose.”

Alex stifled an urge to swat him. In an earlier decade he might have done just that. Instead, he turned to leave and at that moment, a woman emerging from the front corner alcove snagged his attention. She was quietly chatting with a second woman whom he knew from the bank. A light went on for Alex. He recognized the first one from the town meeting, the one his eldest had taken a tumble for, and remembered now that this was where she worked.