The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson Read Free Book Online

maybe he was just too old, that only little kids could do that sort of thing. But Jake didn’t stop doing it as he got older; the hugs got less intense and less frequent but he still hugged her from time to time and it still had the same effect. It was as if he flicked a switch and a light came on inside her. She would glow for half an hour afterward.
     
     
     
    “Time Jake started helpin’ out,” Arthur’s father said when Jake was seven years old.
    They’d just finished supper. Arthur’s father was sitting sideways in his chair at the table, mending a harness. He had a leather-needle, fearsomely sharp—he’d already stabbed himself with it twice, which was maybe what had given him the head of steam necessary to bring up the subject of Jake—and he was forcing it through the leather with the help of a pair of pliers.
    Arthur’s mother was washing the supper dishes. Arthur was at the far end of the table cleaning the shotgun, a job his father had entrusted to him on his twelfth birthday and of which he was hugely proud. His father had taught him to use the gun as well, and said he’d give him five cents for any rabbit or crow he shot, rabbits being good for the pot and a real nuisance around the row crops, and crows being just plain evil.
    Jake had disappeared the minute his plate was empty, like he always did. They could hear him outside. He’d created so much fuss when Arthur was allowed to shoot the gun and he was not that his mother had bought him a bow and arrow set, a small one, from the Hudson’s Bay. He’d painted a big round target on the side of the barn and every now and then there was a thwack as an arrow landed. Arthur knew that during the day, when their father was out in the fields and their mother was safely occupied elsewhere, Jake had a different sort of target. He would heap a couple of handfuls of dry grass and twigs around the bottom of a fence post, and half-fill an empty tin can with gasoline from the tank in the barn. Then he’d set the can on top of the fence post, light his heap of dry grass with a match, and attempt to shoot the can off the post. When he succeeded there would be a gratifying whoosh and flames would leap up the sides of the post. He was usually pretty quick to douse it with water, but even so a number of fence posts were getting badly charred and one of these days their father was going to notice.
    Arthur worried about this. In the past couple of years his role as his brother’s protector had widened to include protecting him from the consequences of his own actions. Their father was an even-tempered man and it took a lot to make him wrathful but Jake could provide a lot, and when their father really got going it was an awesome sight. Arthur had been thrashed by him only once, for leaving a stump fire unattended, and he’d taken care not to give him cause again. Jake had been whipped several times. He’d made the most of it, walking with a limp for days, but it had been their mother who really suffered, and so Arthur suffered too. Moreover, he suspected that their father did as well; he had no wish to hurt his wife and would have spared her if he could, and that made him madder at Jake than ever. So Arthur started going out after each of Jake’s arson attacks and surreptitiously scraping away the charred wood from the base of the posts. Sometimes he had to sand them down to get rid of the black.
    Now Arthur could hear the reluctance in his father’s voice as he brought up the subject of Jake helping with the chores. He hated a confrontation with his wife more than he hated crows.
    “Oh, I don’t think he’s big enough yet, Henry.” Arthur’s mother turned around from the sink. “You only have to look at him.”
    “I did look at him,” Arthur’s father said, reluctance dragging his voice down to a mumble. “He looks big enough to do chores. Feed the chickens. Take out the swill bucket. Things like that.”
    Jake chose that moment to bound in from the