The Other Side of the Bridge Read Free

Ian’s bike. “Only I think you’d be better to walk. The horses cut up the path a bit…. But I’m sure he’ll be pleased—it’s so hard to get help. Men nowadays don’t know how to deal with horses, you see.” She smiled at him. “But maybe you like them. Is that why you’ve come?”
    “Well, sort of,” Ian said. He hadn’t given the work of the farm—the actual job he was applying for—a thought. Arthur Dunn could have hitched his plow to a moose, for all he cared. At the moment all his attention was taken up with trying not to look at the baby, which had now, unbelievably, wormed its hand inside its mother’s dress and was tugging at what it found in there, all the while making fretful smacking noises with its lips.
    Laura gently disengaged the small hand. “Shush,” she said to the baby. She smiled at Ian again, seeming not to notice his embarrassment. “Come back and let me know what he says, all right?”
    Ian nodded, and turned, his mind filled to the brim with the nearness of her, her overwhelming presence, and made his way down the muddy track to where Arthur Dunn was plodding up and down the furrows behind his horses. Arthur Dunn, so solid, so dull, so obviously unworthy of such a wife. Arthur Dunn, who, when he saw Ian approaching, halted his team and came across the field to meet him, and said yeah, sure, he could use a hand, and would Ian like to start this coming Saturday?

    Ian’s grandfather had been Struan’s first resident doctor, and when he’d answered the “Doctor Wanted” advertisement they’d put in a Toronto medical journal, the grateful townspeople built him a house just a block west of Main Street, a couple of hundred yards from the lake. It was a handsome wooden structure, white-painted and green-trimmed, with lawns on all four sides and a white picket fence surrounding the lawns. In the early days there was a neat white stable for the horse and buggy twenty yards from the house. Later the first Dr. Christopherson acquired a Buick Roadster, which became as much a part of him as his old black leather medical bag, and a garage was added beside the stable. He kept the horse for use in winter, when the back roads around Struan were impassable by anything except a sled. His son, the present Dr. Christopherson (who also drove a Buick, though his was the sedan), was sometimes heard lamenting the absence of the sled even now, given the state of the town’s one and only snowplow.
    As much as anything else, the building of the house had been a statement of faith on the part of the people of Struan. Until then they’d had to go to New Liskeard if they required a doctor, and if you needed medical help badly enough to make the journey to New Liskeard, the odds were that you were in no state to make the journey. Getting their own doctor was a sign that the town had arrived. In the brief interval between applying the final coat of paint and the arrival of Dr. Christopherson, the people of Struan found excuses to walk past the house and admire it. You looked at that house and you thought, this is no fly-by-night northern settlement sprung up around a sawmill; any town that can afford to build its doctor a house like this is here to stay.
    Ian was aware of most of this personal and civic history, and as far as he was concerned his grandfather must have been raving mad. Imagine voluntarily leaving a city like Toronto to come to a hick town like Struan. And though you could excuse his grandfather’s mistake on the grounds of ignorance—he couldn’t have had any real idea what he was coming to—there was no such excuse for Ian’s father. He had been born and brought up in Struan, and had then escaped, but after living in Toronto for almost a decade while he took his medical degree and worked in the Sick Children’s Hospital, he had returned to Struan to take over his father’s practice. Ian couldn’t understand it. Why would anyone do such a thing? What was Struan, apart from a