The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson

shaking.
    “I have work to do.”
    She was crying. He couldn’t see her and she made no sound, but he knew. He didn’t care. He imagined what tomorrow was going to bring, and the next day, and the next, as the people of Struan heard the news.
    She said, struggling to control her voice, “Darling, how can I go if you won’t say good-bye?”
    “Good-bye,” he said.

 
     
    FOUR
     

    WHEAT CROP IS BIGGEST SINCE 1932

    THE AVERAGE PRODUCTION OF A COW
     
    —Temiskaming Speaker, September 1938
     
    A ll the way through high school Arthur didn’t have a girlfriend.
    There were plenty of girls in his class at school and he liked the look of many of them, but he didn’t know how to approach them. What were you supposed to say? Hello, my name’s Arthur? They already knew his name! He should have approached them back in grade nine, when some of them—the ones from the small communities out in the sticks—were still strangers. But back in grade nine he hadn’t been interested.
    Sometime during his first year in grade ten that had changed almost overnight. One minute girls were irrelevant, and the next, he couldn’t stop looking at them. He and his friends would hang about during recess and lunch hour, watching the girls walk by in little gabbling groups. That was one of the problems—females didn’t come individually—they came in packs. You’d have to walk up to a whole pack, which was out of the question.
    By the time he was sixteen (legally old enough to leave school, but of course his mother wouldn’t let him) most of the boys he knew had worked it out and were at least able to talk to girls, if nothing more. Some of the more advanced, more confident ones even professed to be fed up with “wimmen” already. “They ain’t worth the trouble, Art. Take it from me, they just ain’t worth the trouble.”
    Arthur would have liked the chance to find that out for himself, but there was no way. His friend Carl urged him on. “Go on, Art, what you waitin’ for? Just go up and ask her.” But it was no use. He didn’t know how.
     
     
     
    Jake, on the other hand, was born knowing. As with schoolwork, Jake had no trouble with girls at all.
    When Arthur was seventeen and just entering grade eleven (having taken two years over grade ten), Jake started high school. He was twelve. Five years behind Arthur in age, two years behind him in school, ahead of him already in the matter of girls. Arthur would see him chatting to them in the schoolyard, easily, casually, as if they were friends instead of a different species. In fact, Jake had more friends who were female than male. Other boys were a bit suspicious, maybe even a little afraid of him. He had the ability to get people into trouble—anyone who had been through primary school with him knew that.
    Arthur had forgotten how bad it was having Jake in the same school. When he started high school he’d had two glorious years without him, and now, looking back, he saw that he hadn’t appreciated those years enough. Jake took to high school as if it had been invented just for him—all those new subjects to excel in, all those new teachers to impress! He talked about the things he was learning at the supper table every night. “They don’t teach you arithmetic anymore, they teach you mathematics, and there are three different mathematics. There’s algebra, and geometry, and trigonometry. Geometry’s all about lines and stuff. And trigonometry’s about triangles and how to work out angles and stuff. And algebra’s where you use letters instead of numbers….”
    Arthur was sure Jake’s enthusiasm was fake, put on to impress their parents, but still it stuck in his throat and made it difficult for him to swallow his supper.
    “See, in Latin, nouns have different forms and they have different endings— loads of different endings—and we have to learn them all. So I wondered if someone could test me after supper?”
    Jake kept slipping sideways looks at their