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

hot, but as soon as it dipped down behind the trees the warmth dropped out of the air like a stone.
    Like the boys on other farms, Arthur headed for the fields as soon as he got home from school in the afternoons in order to get a couple of hours of harvesting in before dark. It had been bone-dry right through June and July, and then just as they were coming up to the corn harvest there’d been a solid week of rain and they’d had to wait for the crop to dry out. Now it was dry and Arthur’s father was out in the fields sunup to sundown. He came in at night covered in dust and sweat and tired almost past eating. Arthur would gladly have played hooky and worked beside him all day, but his mother forbade it and his father let on that he agreed with her.
    Jake helped when he was told to. Then, and at no other time. And he worked so slowly and ineptly and with so much complaint that his father said it was hardly worth the bother, though he bothered anyway as a matter of principle. Jake might as well have been growing up in the town for all the interest he showed in the farm.
    “Dad says do you want to come and help with a calving,” Arthur said. His father had sent him to fetch Jake, thinking calving at least would interest him. Surely anyone would be interested in a new life beginning.
    “Do what?” Jake was playing with a pack of cards he’d found somewhere. His hands moved swiftly, fanning the cards out and folding them together again. They made Arthur think of birds’ wings.
    “Come and help. Jessie’s having her calf.”
    “Can’t she do it herself?” Jake asked. “She must be able to or there wouldn’t be any cows in the world, they’d all have died out like the dinosaurs.”
    It was a good thing it was Arthur that Jake said it to, and not their father. Arthur knew that Jake was just being logical, and meant the comment seriously, but their father would consider it a smart remark and Jake’s smart remarks made him mad.
    “Don’tcha want to come and watch, even?”
    “Not right now.” Jake slipped all the cards with faces into a certain order so fast you could hardly see his hands move. “I’m kind of busy. Later, maybe.”
    It was school he lived for. School and all the goings-on there, triumphs and disasters, friends and enemies. Especially enemies.
    “Look at it!” Jake said as they walked home together. He pulled a book out of his schoolbag and brandished it at Arthur. It was covered in mud. Under the mud you could just make out a dark-green cover and the title, in gold print. English History . Arthur remembered it, dimly. Kings and queens, dozens of them. Wars, dozens of those too, and all of them with dates, as if anyone cared. Miss Karpinski said the purpose of studying history was that if you didn’t you were doomed to repeat it, but as far as Arthur could see the history books proved that you were doomed to repeat it anyway, so what was the point?
    “Look at the state it’s in!” Jake opened the book more or less in the middle. It looked as if someone had placed it facedown in a puddle and leapt up and down on it half a dozen times. “Miss Karpinski’s going to kill me.” He sounded really worried.
    “No she won’t,” Arthur said. Miss Karpinski loved Jake. He was the last person in the school she would kill.
    “She will! You know what she says about books!”
    “What?”
    “That they’re sacred! That you’re supposed to treat them with respect and stuff, because they’re the keys that unlock doors.”
    Arthur couldn’t remember Miss Karpinski saying those things, but it sounded like her all right. He must have been not concentrating at the time. A failure to concentrate was apparently one of his problems. He was fourteen now and still in grade eight—he should have gone up to the high school, on the other side of Struan, with Carl and the rest of his class a year ago, but he’d failed the exams. Jake, on the other hand, had skipped a year, so now he and Arthur were