Free Covered Bridge by Brian Doyle

hear about the new bridge? Are you in favor of tearing down the old one or leaving it there for posterity? Do you think the devil will get you for not going to church? Does living beside a graveyard bother you at night? Do you know everybody’s business in Mushrat Creek? Do you think you’ll go to hell for making fun of Father Foley? Is your pipe empty again? Is that why it makes that sucking noise? When you spit off the veranda, do you always spit in the same place? Or do you wait to see which way the wind is blowing? When you were young, did you ever cry? Did anybody ever say, ‘be a man’? Does your rocking chair squeak the same way each time? When it was new, did it squeak? Did you ever write a letter to a girl when you didn’t know her address?”
    Nerves could say quite a bit with a little wag of his ear.
    Cloux days came in handy.
    I went for a walk up the road and talked for a minute to Mrs. Brown over the fence.
    She was in her hollyhocks.
    You could hardly see her.
    You could hardly hear her.
    She was Ophelia Brown’s mother.
    In my letter I tried to explain to F3 about Ophelia’s mother, Mrs. Brown.
    I said in the letter that Mrs. Brown looked like a cup and saucer that you only used on Sunday. Then I said she looked like meringue on the top of a lemon pie. That sounded even more silly than the cup and saucer one. But I left them both in anyway. Then I tried to say that Mrs. Brown looked like a little glass statue of a ballet dancer. I liked the sound of that one so I left that in, too.
    Later on I decided to try that she looked like a ripe milkweed pod. And, like ripe milkweed in a wind, if you blew on her, she’d come all apart and float away. And there’d be monarch butterflies all around you.
    I smiled at Nerves while I thought about F3 reading this letter (if I ever found her address), and what a picture she would have of Ophelia Brown’s mother: a cup and saucer, lemon pie, glass ballet dancer, milkweed with monarchs.
    Then I told her in the letter how sad it was aboutOscar and his dead lover Ophelia Brown, and I even tried to talk about F3 and me and about our love affair and how we were apart, sort of like Ophelia and Oscar. I knew I was getting a little too dramatic but I couldn’t help it. Then I said our love affair was sort of like two potato bugs, one on one leaf at one end of the potato field and the other on a potato plant leaf way down at the other end of the field. I knew how dumb it all sounded so I read the whole thing out to Nerves. When I got to the part about the potato bugs, Nerves ran into the kitchen and hid behind the stove.
    Then I wrote that F3 and I were like fire and wood. She was the fire and I was the wood and the flames were our love and the sparks were the love words we said to each other and the smoke was the fights we had. Then I wrote that
she
was the wood and I was the fire and that the heat from the flames was the ache in my heart and the ashes were the rest of the cruel world when we were apart and by this time I was so mixed up that I tried to change it all to where she was a squirrel and I was a nut.
    But I didn’t say in the letter what was on my mind all the time. About the bridge. And about Oscar McCracken.
    And if they tore down the bridge, what would he do. Poor Oscar. If we could only help him!
    But O’Driscoll had his petition ready.
    Maybe something was going to happen.

Tree Grows Out of Boy’s Nose!
    E VERYBODY WAS TALKING and arguing about the covered bridge. Some wanted to keep it. Some wanted to tear it down. Some thought Prootoo was going to get a lot of profit from the contract for ripping it down. Some said maybe they should burn it down. Have a big corn roast!
    Some didn’t care. A job is a job.
    Some wanted to leave it there for future generations. For Posterity.
    â€œFuture generations?” said the biggest farmer of them all. “What would you want to do that for? I suppose if you built