The River Burns (46 page)

III

REDEMPTION

25

O
n a Saturday morning in midsummer, Dennis Jasper O'Farrell drove his beloved blue Ford down to the riverbank and parked off the community walking path on a grassy slope. He took a few moments to gaze across the water, both hands pressed to the steering wheel. Miniature waves, frolicking in a wily breeze, sparkled in the sunlight, hinting at their power to induce a trance. Momentarily lost to his reflections, Denny studied the vacant space where the old covered bridge once stood.

After a while he stepped down from the cab, proceeded to the rear of the pickup, and lowered the tailgate. From the truck bed he hauled tools—a cant hook, a crowbar, a peavey, a timber hook, and a pair of log carriers—which he placed in a neat row on the ground. While a poor workman might blame his tools, Denny believed that a good workman granted them exceptional care. Climbing onto the truck bed, he lifted heavy chains that he dropped into a single heap alongside his equipment on the ground. Next, he gathered lengths of rope, stuck his arms through the hoops they formed, and jumped down.

Pairs of pedestrians slowed their progress to observe him. Individuals may have wondered what he was up to, although one elderly gent could not care less, as any diversion to his daily routine was most welcome. Vehicles were not commonly permitted to park on the lawn and a couple of old-timers discussed this aberration as though it mattered. Their debate grew heated for a spell.

Close by, high on the roof of his raft, Gordon “Skootch” Skotcher lowered the financial section of his morning paper to his lap in order to watch Denny lug gear across rough terrain amid the trees to where waves lapped the shoreline, a distance of some thirty feet. He made several trips. Once all the tools and chain were brought down, Denny returned and opened the passenger-side door, pulling out a one-piece fly fisherman's wading suit, the leggings affixed to the boots, the jacket zipping up the front. More people were watching him now as he squeezed into the cumbersome outfit. He returned to the shore walking with something of a waddle, and without a rod, reel, or hook on a line, stepped into the river.

People discovered straightaway that he wasn't there to fish.

Instead, he circled a length of chain around a deadhead, pulled the loop taut and flung the bitter end towards the shallows near shore. One end of the log stuck out two feet above the surface, the other sunk in mud at a thirty-degree angle to a depth unknown. He tied rope to the chain and came back ashore to knot it to a stout tree that overhung the waterway. The log hadn't budged since last winter's ice broke, but now lay doubly secured. For what reason, no one knew.

Then Denny undertook to float the heavy timber.

He got under it and heaved and used his peavey to try spinning it and pulled and pushed and grunted with considerable exertion. He tried it from one side and then the other. All his efforts seemed in vain. Still, he struggled on.

Over time, his labours elicited advice.

“Denny. Denny. Try a chain saw. Cut the damn thing into sections first.”

“Oh yeah,” a second wag commented. “That'd be smart. Put on scuba gear. Start up a chain saw underwater. Say a prayer for the poor fucking fish.”

“No worse off than what he's doin' now.”

“Lease a 'dozer, Denny. That'll do the trick.”

“Try a crane first. Lift it straight up that way.”

The discussion expanded as the number of onlookers increased.

“My advice, if you asked me, I know you didn't, but if you did, I'm just saying, if you asked my advice, I'd tell you to just give up. Quit.”

“Listen to the man, Denny. That thing's waterlogged. The tree won't float.”

Denny groaned and pushed with his shoulder and wrestled the timber as though it was a creature from another world bent on his destruction.

“Who knows how deep it dug itself in? That could be one mighty trunk.”

“What's wrong with you, Denny?”

“Why are you doing this again? Anybody asked you that yet?”

Dozens had, and the man knew it, too. Denny paused to take a breather. The day was not that hot and standing to his hips in cool water he was reasonably comfortable despite his toil. But this one log required more than the sum total of his strength, and more help than his tools could muster.

Still, he returned to the labour undeterred. More people were coming by and the growing crowd attracted others. Finally, a logger whom Denny only vaguely knew suggested, “I got a pickup with a front-end winch on it, Den. Want to try that?”

Nothing else would do, and Denny said yes, with thanks. The first words he spoke since entering into combat with this log.

“Hang on. I'll be back in a few,” the man let him know.

■   ■   ■

Hand in hand, Tara and
Ryan strolled along the shore path. They stopped near the scene of Denny's activity. Tara chose to sit on one of the park's boulders, positioned as strategically as a landscape architect might locate a sculpture, serving lovers to sit upon, children to play upon, and daydreamers to absently admire or even stroke. During the river's fire, Tara found Mrs. McCracken seated upon this very rock, having resorted to the stone in her dismay and sorrow, a memory that comforted her now.

Ryan kissed her, then they nudged in closer to each other.

“Look,” he said. He did not mean for her to gaze elsewhere, rather, he was directing her attention upon himself. He did not usually indulge in this sort of preamble.

“What?” she asked him.

“I have a story, too,” he explained.

“So if you tell me yours, I have to tell you mine, is that what this is about?” She smiled and squeezed his knee.

He shrugged. “Look,” he said again. “No deals. I'll just tell you mine.”

“Okay,” she agreed. She expected little more than a tale of woe about his love life. Bless him, he was a simple man.

“So, my first big crush came early. If I fell for this girl later on in high school, maybe we'd write a different chapter, but that's something I just like to imagine, I guess. Anyway, kids' stuff, too early to be anything but hapless. I should have tried again a couple of years later, but the first experience was so fraught with ineptitude and embarrassment that I wasn't ready to go there. But I never really stopped being attracted either, so I did try again, only this time we were all grown up and in our twenties.”

He intended only a brief pause to organize his story, but Tara seized the chance to offer up her own speculative shorthand. “So she broke your heart.”

He smiled. “She didn't give me that chance, at least not to be deeply heartbroken. Over before I could blink. Since those innocent days of high school she became what even you might call a complicated girl. In every way. Take that to mean whatever you want because she lived up to the billing. Neurotic in so many ways I couldn't keep track. And a party animal. Always into the latest thing no matter what it was. Pretty, though. But one date with me and the public attention that that fanned, which wasn't so sensational, really, warned her not to get involved with a cop. Certainly not this cop. She didn't want to be in the public eye, or seen as somebody expected to be a do-gooder, like me. I noticed on our first date that the bottom of her purse was littered with twigs and seeds and I said something. Which was dumb. No big deal, but our second date consisted entirely of her explaining to me why there was never going to be a third date. But there was a third, and a few more, I was a bear for punishment, but it kept coming around to the same issue. I was into her, she wasn't reciprocating, while she was crazy and I wasn't. So I was getting the message but not acting on it and then she lowered the boom. Not quite a broken heart because early on I'd come to the conclusion that we were impossible. But it was a ride and then, you know, afterward I did feel bruised. I missed her. But the problem was, I came out of it feeling discouraged, in a real way, especially seeing that my job diminished my chances with certain girls. To counter that disappointment, I got involved with someone almost right away, the first girl who would have me, and this time it was with someone I should definitely have left alone.”

“Because it was a rebound?”

His expression was noncommittal on that. “If I took my time, I might've figured things out sooner rather than later. By the time I caught on, I was in too deep. Not to be mean, but
she
was mean. Hard to detect, at first.”

Tara thought to add a lighthearted remark, but a cautionary intuitive notion caught her tongue. He suddenly seemed quite far away.

“Her name was Maria—the girl I had the schoolboy thing for. She was killed in a traffic accident, driving to Hamilton to see a friend.”

Tara leapt to the story that Mrs. McCracken told in the cemetery over a young woman's grave. She tried to pull up the name on the marker in her mind's eye. “I'm sorry, Ryan. For her, of course. For you. Did Mrs. McCracken tell me about her? Something about a delayed autopsy?”

Ryan nodded. “Ten years ago. You should have known Mrs. McCracken then. A firebrand. I helped her out a bit. Gave her my counsel on some things she knew nothing about—jurisdiction, protocol, what you could say without being hauled into court for slander, that sort of thing. She thanked me for that, then she thanked me for helping her out the time she cracked her head on ice. I didn't know what she was talking about, and she thought I was demented for not remembering. But one day I had a flash. I checked with Denny. Sure enough, she was mixing us up.
He
had helped her, although he said he didn't know she cracked her head, only hurt her hip. I think that was the first time she mixed us up, but since then she's never kept us straight.”

Gently, Tara stroked his forearm.

“So what happened with you and your new girl?”

“Never meant to be. We weren't happy from the get-go. Certainly I wasn't. We fell apart, as though, after Maria's death, I had no reason to be with this other woman, since I'd only gotten involved with her on the rebound from Maria in the first place. Stuff surfaced at home. What we kept on the side reared up. Recriminations all around. Antipathy. She said a few things I'd call slander, that's for sure. I found out what it means to be a compulsive liar. In one sense, it was just a breakup, but in another it was so messy and mad and so damned
public
that it wrecked me. I still can't believe I stayed so long with someone so controlling and so basically
unkind
, to me and to everyone else. I lost confidence in my choices. So that's all there is to it. Small-town heartstrings. No biggie.”

Tara looked at the man she once considered simple, who was not only that but also more complicated, and injured, than she'd surmised.

■   ■   ■

A second pickup parked illegally
on the grass. No one actually complained, and as it happened the community's top policeman was sitting on a boulder nearby with his girlfriend, so most people assumed that this activity, whatever it might be, had merit or, at least, was sanctioned.

Skootch climbed down from his aerie in his usual scant garb.

And went closer.

He watched as two large, muscled men lugged a winch cable down to the shore. Denny affixed the cable's hook to his chain. People were commanded to stand to one side, and they acquiesced. Denny himself stood off to one side in the water as the winch took up the slack then strained against the weight. Little occurred. Perhaps nothing occurred. The waves lapping around the timber made it difficult to agree if the timber shifted at all. A few thought so. Most did not. Denny took up a cant hook and while the winch pulled with its full force he tried to turn the log at the same time. The task appeared hopeless and he might have given up on this first log when the timber suddenly released from the river bottom and slid free as smoothly and yet as slowly as an arrow being nudged back out from its target.

The timber was not so waterlogged as many supposed, floating just below the surface but an inch or two higher after Denny scraped off excess mud. Like an alligator out of its climate, the old wood lurked in the stream, a dark, menacing, and inexplicable thing. Few observing the ritual understood the purpose of this battle, but they gave a timid cheer anyway, and Denny received a scattered round of applause.

He accepted their approbation with a smile.

When he moved down to the next timber closest to him, the crowd grew more fervent in its demand for answers.

“Oh, come on! You're not at it again!”

“Just say why, Denny.”

“What's this all about?”

“Denny! Hey,
Denny
! What are you
doing
?”

And so he told them.

He announced, “I'm building a new old covered bridge.”

Most of the men on shore simply stared at them, a few with their mouths slack, while the women's tendency was to look at the men, as if they could or should explain this, then back again at Denny.