The River Burns (47 page)

“Skootch,” Denny requested, “toss me one of those ropes, will you?”

The man did so, and Denny lashed the floating timber to the shore then removed the chain around its bark. He dragged the chain over to the next log and secured it, and this time when he went to fetch the winch cable he found that four others formed a line to pass it to him and that the driver of the vehicle was altering its position slightly to improve the angle of attack. Everyone automatically stood back this time without a word being said as the winch took up the strain and this time, after seemingly being stuck as stubbornly as the first, the log launched out of the water with a surge and collapsed back down with a terrific splash that caught Denny full in the face. That gave everyone a chuckle and the smallest kids were beside themselves with laughter. Denny was grinning, too, but he had work to do and indicated with his chin that he wanted a line again and Skootch tossed him another length. A perfect throw. Denny lashed the two big floating timbers together with just the one line securing them to the shore. He then heaved himself up and sat on the logs, taking a rest. People observed him. They were quiet a minute. While the current held this small raft in place, Denny slowly, always careful to secure his balance, stood upon the two trees, the first logger to stand upright upon logs on this river in a generation.

“You can't,” a woman addressed him, “rebuild the old covered bridge.”

He heard her very well, but failed to verify exactly who spoke. Denny was preparing his reply when she added an important addendum to her point.

“Not by yourself.”

He was glad to concur. “Lady, after my work this morning, I'm inclined to agree with you on that wholeheartedly.”

An older man proved more severe. “It's a harebrained idea.”

“Why?” Denny asked him back, but he did not await his reply. He forged on with a prepared argument, contending, “This river is jammed with deadheads, don't you see? Boats can't navigate, our kids can never swim here. As it happens, they can't jump off the old bridge anymore either, since there is no old bridge. And when the government builds the new one, the traffic will be fast and furious. Nobody, not even kids, will want to play on it. So the river has gone useless to us, but only because we choked the life out of it. Pull these deadheads out, and there are thousands, and thousands, shave away the outer wet, what you get inside is beautiful, clear, sound timber. Do you know why it's so beautiful? It's been seasoned but that's not all. It's such damn beautiful wood because it's all
free
.”

Denny moved back judiciously on his logs to let them manage his weight more evenly. He was cautious, for to topple into the river now would not only make him a laughingstock but more important scuttle his plans before they were given a proper airing. He spoke louder when he spoke again, perhaps cognizant not only of the people lining the shore but of those sequestered in the woods and of those farther back on the grass or strolling by on the couples' walk. He wanted his voice to reach as far as his brother and Tara Cogshill sitting on a rock, not to speak to them necessarily, but to make use of their presence there to gauge the distance he needed to project his voice.

“The wood lying in this river is everybody's wood, right? No one else has claimed ownership. The forestry industry has ignored it for years. But as we found out this morning, no one man or two or three can pull out a single log. Not without help. But if we help each other, then we can harvest this wood, and with that lumber we can build a new old covered bridge. It's not a harebrained idea at all, although I once thought so myself. The two biggest costs to building the bridge are material and labour. But the river can be harvested for our timber, and if the whole town is willing to pitch in, the people will supply the labour.”

Bystanders continued to stare out at the man standing on the water as though he meant business. They couldn't look away from him.

“You mean like volunteers?”

“Yes, but don't say it that way. I'm not asking you to join the army.”

He got the laugh he wanted. Then a voice mentioned engineering costs and legal feels and administration expenses of various sorts and he was going to go on with his dismal accounting when Denny interrupted him, not to argue but to agree. “As far as the milling goes, you're right, it's costly, except maybe we can ask a mill to do it for free as a worthy donation and maybe it just might. We can arrange the work to be tax deductible. Fund-raising will be necessary, there's no getting around it. But we have people in this town, I suspect you're one of them, who can take that on and be successful at it. Think about this, folks. We can build a new old covered bridge that can stand where the old one stood, only this one might remain for centuries after we're gone, so long as no hotheads set it on fire. Nowhere on this earth is anyone building old covered bridges anymore. We can build ours the old way, with old tools and mostly old methods. Old materials only. To partake of that, to help build such a thing, I don't know about you, but to me that sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and personally, as you can plainly see, I'm onboard with it.”

Somebody asked, “I thought you loggers wanted a fancy bridge, a four-lane job or something like that.”

“Yeah, we do. And the thing is, we're getting it now, because no bridge exists and the government has no choice but to build one. They have to keep the road open. But that doesn't mean we can't build another one that's a replica of the old bridge but doesn't serve trucks or buses or cars anymore. It no longer needs to. We can build one that's damned nice to look at, too, so we can all be proud of it and proud of this town.”

Denny knew that he was tempted to say, “proud of this town again,” but that implied old grudges, many rightfully held against him, that he preferred not to resurrect.

On shore, most people harboured the thought that he had destroyed the original bridge, that he was one of the bastard hothead loggers. For that reason they withheld any immediate approval, but as they mulled the project's feasibility they also considered its import. What dawned on many of them was that this could be a way to broker the very peace they were having so much trouble imagining. On different levels they knew what Denny was doing, and saw that he benefited, but they did not necessarily, or uniformly, disapprove.

■   ■   ■

Ryan and Tara observed the
proceedings from their distance. Sometimes they heard Denny quite well, more often his voice was carried off on the breeze, or was muffled by a chatter of leaves. Knowing the gist of it, they preferred to grant him the space and time to begin his recompense on his own.

Ryan stood on the boulder briefly, then leapt down again.

“What?” Tara asked him.

“He's standing on the logs. The way they sink under him, he looks like he's walking on water.”

She smiled. “Denny's no Christ figure.”

“Around here, who is? I'll hand it to him, though, he has a flair for the dramatic. The bridge when it burned, who's seen anything like that? Now this.”

“The oratory's not half bad either. Watch out, Ryan. He might run for mayor some day. Be your boss.”

Ryan chuckled at the thought, but admitted he'd vote for him anyway.

Seated, Tara reached out her hand. Her boyfriend, standing, took it in his. This time, responding to her glum expression, he was the one to ask, “What?”

“Want to know what happened to me? How I got here?”

“Sure I do. But I wasn't trading before, with my story.”

“Maybe you were. Maybe you weren't. But I'm ready now. Anyway, now that I know you're a whole lot more complicated than I thought, I'm more comfortable letting you in on this.” To help him be more comfortable with that, she playfully stuck her tongue out at him.

He sat beside her again and placed an arm around her side to tuck her more closely to him.

“Don't worry,” she assured him. “It's only strange. I'm shy about it but you won't want to arrest me. I'll come across as goofy. Worst case, you'll think I'm off another planet and want to ship me back there.”

“Okay,” he said. “I'll keep NASA on standby. Tell me.”

She gazed down the river first, as though to find certain rhythms and connections to her memories. “I was aware, and my older man was aware, that our time was up. I loved the sea, I always loved the sea, and I first became involved with him when I was crewing on his yacht. We raced. Usually just outside Halifax harbour, around the buoys, but on occasion we were on longer races, and this one time, heading home, we put into a small harbour along the coast to duck a storm. I noticed a man there. A very handsome young man. Standing on another boat. A fishing boat. So virile-looking, so Marlboro man–looking, I admit, I went a little weak in the knees. He was repairing nets as the sky darkened and lightning came our way. A sight. I could tell that the attraction was spontaneous in both directions.”

“I've experienced that. With you.”

He tried to make light, but Tara paid no attention. Yet the sound of his voice seemed to interrupt her train of thought, as though she was projecting herself back in time and now was abruptly returned to the present. She kissed him, a peck on the cheek, perhaps to remind herself of the company she kept.

“I bought a little red truck for myself, really old, nothing much more than scrap metal really. Full of rust holes, but it got me around town. I could have afforded more but I didn't need much. I was a downtown girl, I walked to work, so the truck was perfect. Frankly, I thought it was cool. I thought I looked cute in it. Cute in a good way. Okay, sexy, whatever. So I checked the nautical chart just to find out the name of the harbour I was in, which I committed to memory, and about a week later I drove back in my little red truck. The gorgeous man wasn't there. I made four trips before I found him.”

“Persistent.”

“In love with an impression of a man. When we met, impression and reality diverged. I went through with it anyway. In making the break from my old guy it was easier to say that I'd met someone else. I know that sounds bad. It was bad. It was. I knew it from the start. Still. I liked the guy enough.”

Ryan was relaxing into the story, as he was beginning to feel that he might not have a rival out there of mythological proportions, which was worrying him. He drew slow gentle circles on Tara's back.

“So we had a thing. He was a fisherman. A lot of those guys have educations now. Not because they need them. But they go to school, graduate, then go back to what they grew up doing and love. Fishing. I loved that about him. Primitive work but a degree in English lit. Sometimes I went out to sea with him, usually I stayed home. Did my own work. Went to visit him in my little red truck when I felt like it. I knew I was hurting him and I knew I was suiting myself. But I got the breakup I wanted from my old guy and at the same time I wasn't completely high and dry, if you know what I mean. So I stayed on.”

Ryan easily imagined her driving that poor boy mad.

“But then one day I went to see him and he wasn't back when he should've been. A big storm was making landfall. Bigger than the one that brought us together. Apparently he'd gone out farther to help another craft in jeopardy. He radioed in that everybody was fine, but the rescue kept him out in the storm longer than was safe. So. You know. I was worried. The rains came, and they were unbelievably fierce. I parked my truck facing the sea to wait for him and the waves, crashing the shore—I was mesmerized and petrified to the core. People urged me to come back into town to wait, but somehow, I just couldn't. I didn't want to. I knew what this guy faced from time to time and there I was, seeing him only at my convenience.”

Laughter broke from the shoreline where a repartee ensued between Denny and many of the onlookers taking an interest in his proposal. Denny was reeling them in, for he really was on a fishing expedition.

“Did he make it back?” Ryan asked.

“He stayed out at sea a lot longer. I got reports. The second boat was in tow and the storm was intensifying. People told me that the waves hitting the shore always look far worse than they are in open water, and that might be true but they were big and I was scared. I ate in my truck, I slept in my truck, I peed in the wind and the rain and got soaked while the waves created these giant plumes all around me. I don't know what it was, Ry, but at a certain point I got it that things were going to change. Not just with this pleasant but bogus relationship I found myself in, but with me. About how I conducted myself. How I moved through life. Even my work. It wasn't merely the relationship that was bogus, you see. And that's when I really felt it, Ryan.”

He waited a moment. “It?” he asked.

“The storm. The wind and rain, the huge crashing waves.” She turned to look at him, to make sure that he understood this part. “I felt the storm inside me. Not outside. Inside. I became that storm. Or that storm took me over somehow. Entered me. Whatever. I felt it. The storm was determined to claim someone, that's how I was thinking about it, that's what I believed then and I still do. Instead of taking my lover and his boat, that storm took me. Never a day goes by when I don't feel the wind, or the calm afterwards, or I don't feel the waves, or the ripples afterwards. Whatever I do in this world, I'm partly that storm. It's in me now.

“See,” she added, after a pause. “Complicated.”

“Okay,” he said, but she knew that he did not wholly understand. Moreover, that he could not. Still, he repeated himself, “Okay.”

“Do you know what the most amazing thing is? I told Mrs. McCracken, and that old gal, she understood me. She totally got me.”

Tara required a moment to collect herself then, and Ryan granted her that. He kept his questions to himself, trusting that she was committed to revealing those things that precipitated her arrival in his life.