The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson

From the Publisher

From the author of the beloved #1 national bestseller Crow Lake comes an exceptional new novel of jealously, rivalry and the dangerous power of obsession.

Two brothers, Arthur and Jake Dunn, are the sons of a farmer in the mid-1930s, when life is tough and another world war is looming. Arthur is reticent, solid, dutiful and set to inherit the farm and his father’s character; Jake is younger, attractive, mercurial and dangerous to know – the family misfit. When a beautiful young woman comes into the community, the fragile balance of sibling rivalry tips over the edge.

Then there is Ian, the family’s next generation, and far too sure he knows the difference between right and wrong. By now it is the fifties, and the world has changed – a little, but not enough.

These two generations in the small town of Struan, Ontario, are tragically interlocked, linked by fate and community but separated by a war which devours its young men – its unimaginable horror reaching right into the heart of this remote corner of an empire. With her astonishing ability to turn the ratchet of tension slowly and delicately, Lawson builds their story to a shocking climax. Taut with apprehension, surprising us with moments of tenderness and humour, The Other Side of the Bridge is a compelling, humane and vividly evoked novel with an irresistible emotional undertow.

Arthur found himself staring down at the knife embedded in his foot. There was a surreal split second before the blood started to well up and then up it came, dark and thick as syrup.

Arthur looked at Jake and saw that he was staring at the knife. His expression was one ofsurprise, and this was something that Arthur wondered about later too. Was Jake surprised because he had never considered the possibility that he might be a less than perfect shot? Did he have that much confidence in himself, that little self-doubt?

Or was he merely surprised at how easy it was to give in to an impulse, and carry through the thought which lay in your mind? Simply to do whatever you wanted to do, and damn the consequences.
–from The Other Side of the Bridge

The Washington Post - Frances Taliaferro

There's an almost Sophoclean momentum as events rush to their end. The reader prays that inescapable harm will not come to good people. But the novel's true literary antecedent is in Genesis: the story of Esau and Jacob, brothers in a dysfunctional family where each parent has a favorite child and the younger son can think circles around the older. Lawson honors these archetypes by using them discreetly; biblical undertones simply add to the story's richness.

The Other Side of the Bridge is an admirable novel. Its old-fashioned virtues were also apparent in Crow Lake—narrative clarity, emotional directness, moral context and lack of pretension—but Lawson has ripened as a writer, and this second novel is much broader and deeper. The author draws her characters with unobtrusive humor and compassion, and she meets one of the fiction writer's most difficult challenges: to portray goodness believably, without sugar or sentiment.

Publishers Weekly

In this follow-up to her acclaimed Crow Lake, Lawson again explores the moral quandaries of life in the Canadian North. At the story's poles are Arthur Dunn, a stolid, salt-of-the-earth farmer, and his brother, Jake, a handsome, smooth-talking snake in the grass, whose lifelong mutual resentments and betrayals culminate in a battle over the beautiful Laura, with Arthur, it seems, the unlikely winner. Observing, and eventually intervening in their saga, is Ian, a teenager who goes to work on Arthur's farm to get close to Laura, seeing in her the antithesis of the mother who abandoned his father and him. It's a standard romantic dilemma who to choose: the goodhearted but dull provider or the seductive but unreliable rogue? but it gains depth by being set in Lawson's epic narrative of the Northern Ontario town of Struan as it weathers Depression, war and the coming of television. It's a world of pristine landscapes and brutal winters, where beauty and harshness are inextricably intertwined, as when Ian brings home a puppy that gambols adorably about and then playfully kills Ian's even cuter pet bunny. Lawson's evocative writing untangles her characters' confused impulses toward city and country, love and hate, good and evil. (Oct. 3) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

At the center of Lawson's follow-up to her lauded debut, Crow Lake, are the antithetical personalities of two brothers the handsome and insidious Jake and Arthur, who's diffident and diligent. This stark contrast bursts into dangerous sibling rivalry when a girl named Laura comes between them. Lawson composes the novel in mutually enlightening chapters that vacillate between two different periods: the brothers' adolescence and early adulthood during World War II and a setting 20 years later, when Arthur and Laura are married, Jake has returned to Arthur's farm after a long absence, and Ian, a local boy who also is attracted to Laura, is working with Arthur. Lawson ingeniously uses this narrative structure to create immense tension by gradually disclosing the past Ian walks into and the unresolved hostility he unwittingly reignites in his adoration for Laura. The suspense of Arthur's impending explosion is a double-edged sword, though, as along the way his reticence depletes many events of their emotional impact. Despite this flaw, Lawson proves herself an adept chronicler of the conflicting dispositions and priorities that divide a family. Recommended for most fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/06.] David Doerrer, New York Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Another note-perfect take on coming of age in northern Canada, as beautiful as the landscape is stark, from Lawson (Crow Lake, 2002). Jake and Arthur are as dissimilar as brothers can be. Arthur, stolid and strong, takes after their farmer father, which is a great help as the Depression hits even their self-sufficient village of Struan. Quicksilver younger brother Jake is their mother's favorite. She admires his good looks and wit, but is blind to his selfishness. The brothers are so different that the story's crisis feels inevitable. Assigned to walk cows to a neighbor's farm, Arthur patiently leads a nervous heifer over a rickety bridge, while Jake fools around on the bridge's underside. When Jake calls out that the cow's movements might make him fall, Arthur responds with one rare word, "Good," that will haunt him throughout life. Cut to 20 years later, and Arthur is in charge of the family farm, still silent, still suffering, despite a healthy family and lovely wife. This second story focuses on young Ian, the son of Struan's doctor, who obsesses over Arthur's wife. As he wrestles with his own legacy, he becomes more involved with Arthur's, bringing about an event that will lay bare several secrets. With all the elements of melodrama, Lawson instead crafts a deftly interwoven story of family and loss. Jake's not evil, just bored. He, like Ian's mother, isn't valued in this hardscrabble climate, where his father and brother miss his school play due to errands. "Farming's important. Work's important. Time he knew what matters and what doesn't." The calm and beauty of the setting pervade Lawson's second novel, intensifying the heartfelt pull of its simple human drama. Agent: FelicityRubinstein/Lutyens & Rubinstein

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The Other Side of the Bridge

The Dial Press

All right reserved.

ISBN: 0-385-34037-0

Chapter One

Lost Bear Hunter Located by Plane: In Bush 40 Hours
-Temiskaming Speaker, May 1957

On a small farm about two miles outside Struan there lived a beautiful woman.
She was tall and willowy with a lot of fair hair that she drew back into a thick
plait and tied with whatever came to hand-a bit of frayed ribbon, an elastic
band, an old piece of string. On Sundays she rolled it into a shining ball at
the nape of her neck and fastened it somehow so that it wouldn't fall down
during church. Her name was Laura Dunn. Laura, her own name, soft and beautiful
like she was; Dunn, her husband's name, solid and lumpen like her husband.
Arthur Dunn was a farmer, a big, heavyset man with a neck at least twice the
width of his wife's, and to Ian, sitting with his parents three pews behind, he
looked about as exciting as dishwater.

Ian had first noticed Laura Dunn when he was fourteen-she must have been around
all his life but that was the year he became aware of her. She would have been
about thirty at the time. She and Arthur had three children, or possibly four.
Ian wasn't sure-he'd never paid any attention to the children.

For a year he made do with watching her in church on Sundays-the Dunns came into
town for church every Sunday without fail. Then, when hewas fifteen, Ian's
father said that he should get a job working Saturdays and holidays and start
saving up for his further education, the theory being that you appreciated
things more if you'd helped to pay for them yourself. Ian couldn't recall anyone
asking him if he wanted more education-it was another of the many assumptions
people made about his life-but in this particular case he didn't argue. He got
on his bike and cycled out to the Dunns' farm.

The farm was an oddity in the Struan area because Arthur Dunn still worked his
land with horses. It wasn't because he couldn't afford a tractor-the farm was
prosperous enough-and it wasn't through any religious convictions like the
Mennonites farther south. When asked about it Arthur would study the ground
thoughtfully, as if the question had never occurred to him before, and then say
that he guessed he liked horses. No one bought that explanation, though. They
all believed that Arthur had been put off tractors years earlier, when his
father got one and drove it down to the lower forty, where he rolled it into a
ditch and killed himself, all within two hours of its arrival on the farm. Even
the youngest and least intelligent of the plow horses would have known better
than to fall into a ditch. The day after the funeral Arthur got rid of the
tractor and harnessed up the team again and he'd been plodding along behind them
ever since.

He was out in the fields when Ian cycled up to the farm. Ian saw him, off in the
distance, being towed along by two great heavy-footed animals like a picture
postcard of a time gone by. Ian leaned his bike up against the pump, which he
guessed would only be used to fill the water trough-all but the most remote
farms in the area had running water, and electricity too; they'd been connected
up to the grid two years ago, when the power lines were run in for the sawmill.

Ian picked his way between the chickens to the back door. There was a front door
on the other side of the house, but he figured no one ever used it. It would
lead into the sitting room, where probably no one ever sat, whereas the back
door led into the kitchen, which was where life would be lived. He could hear
Laura Dunn talking as he climbed the three steps to the door. The inner door was
open, letting the sound of voices out, but the screen door was closed, making it
difficult to see in. She was scolding one of the kids, by the sound of it,
though Ian couldn't make out the words because a baby was crying. Her voice
wasn't sharp and sarcastic, as Ian's mother's voice tended to be when she was
annoyed about something. It was exasperated, but still gentle and light, or so
it seemed to Ian.

There was a lull in the baby's crying and Ian, standing on the top step with his
hand lifted, ready to knock on the door, heard Laura Dunn say, "Well for
goodness' sake, Carter, couldn't you share it? Couldn't you let her have a
turn?" And a boy's voice said, "She never shares hers!" and a little girl's
voice wailed, "I do so!" and the baby started to howl again. There was the sound
of a chair being scuffed along the floor and then the screen door was flung
open, nearly knocking Ian off the step, and a boy charged out. He gave Ian a
startled, angry glance before jumping off the steps and disappearing around the
side of the house. He looked about twelve years old and had the sort of face,
Ian thought, that made you want to hit him. The sullen, sulky face of a kid who
thinks the world's against him.

The screen door slammed closed again and Laura Dunn appeared behind it. She gave
a start when she saw Ian standing there and said, "Oh! Oh ... hello! It's Ian,
isn't it? Dr. Christopherson's son?"

"Yes," Ian said. "Um, yes ... um, I've come to talk to Mr. Dunn ... about a
job. I wondered if he'd be taking on anyone this summer. I mean, full-time this
summer, but maybe Saturdays right away, and then full-time once the holidays
start."

He felt himself flushing. He was gabbling, because she was so near, just inches
away behind the screen door, and she was looking at him, directly and only at
him, with those wonderful soft eyes, eyes that he'd noticed always seemed
shadowed, as if they contained deep, unfathomable mysteries, or-the possibility
occurred to him now, what with the crying of the baby and the behavior of the
kids-as if she were tired all the time.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, well yes, I'm sure he'd be glad of some help. Just a
minute, Ian.... I'll come out. Just a minute."

She disappeared. Ian heard her say something to somebody and then she reappeared
with a baby in her arms. A little girl was behind her, but she shrank back when
she saw Ian standing there. He moved down off the steps and Laura came out,
bouncing the baby gently up and down on her hip. The baby was fat and sexless,
like all babies, and had round, unconvincing tears rolling down its cheeks. It
and Ian looked at each other and the baby gave a sort of snort, as if it didn't
think much of what it saw, and put its thumb in its mouth.

"There, now," Laura said, brushing the top of its head with her lips. "That's
better. This is Ian. Say hello to Ian."

"Hi," Ian said. He smiled warily at the baby. It stared back and then curled up
and buried its face in the folds of Laura's dress, its free hand clutching
possessively at her breast. Ian quickly looked down at his feet.

"The thing is, you'll really need to speak to Arthur," Laura was saying. "He's
plowing at the moment." She nodded in the direction of the picture-postcard view
of her husband. "If you'd like to go out and have a word with him ... just
along that track there." She looked doubtfully at 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 sawmill? A sorry bunch of stores lined up
along a dusty main street, with nothing in them anyone would want to buy. A
couple of churches. The Hudson's Bay Company. A post office. A bank. Harper's
Restaurant. Ben's Bar. A hotel-because, incredibly, some people chose to come to
Struan for their holidays-and a little clutch of holiday cottages down by the
lake. The lake was the town's only asset, in Ian's opinion. It was large-fifty
miles long, north to south, and almost twenty miles across-and deep, and very
clear, surrounded on all sides by low granite hills studded with spruce and
wind-blasted pines. Its shore was so ragged with bays and inlets and islands
that you could spend your life exploring and never find half of them. When Ian
dreamed of leaving the town, which he did all the time nowadays, the thought of
leaving the lake was the only thing that bothered him. The lake and Laura Dunn.

He parked his bike up against the veranda of the house, climbed the wide wooden
steps to the porch, and went in. The door to his father's office was closed and
he could hear voices behind it, but the waiting room was empty, so Ian sat down
on one of the dozen or so battered old chairs lining the walls and flicked
through a two-year-old copy of Reader's Digest while he thought about Laura
Dunn. The wavy strands of her hair escaped from their elastic band and drifted
around her face. Those shadowed eyes. Her breasts. He'd noticed-he couldn't help
noticing-that on the front of her dress there had been two wet circles where her
breasts had leaked milk.

The door to the office opened and Ted Pickett, owner of Pickett's Hardware, came
out with his arm in a sling. He nodded at Ian and grimaced and Ian grimaced
back. Patients entered the house by a side door but both the office and the
waiting room were right off the hall, so all his life he'd been used to seeing
people going in and out in varying degrees of anguish, and he'd got his
responses down pat.

"He doesn't think it's broken," Mr. Pickett said.

"That's lucky," Ian said.

"He thinks it's just sprained. Hurts like hell though."

Ian nodded sympathetically. "Did you fall off the ladder?" There was a ladder on
wheels in the hardware store that Mr. Pickett scooted around on, reaching for
nails or nuts or brackets or hinges, an accident waiting to happen.

"Yeah," Mr. Pickett said, looking surprised. "How did you know?"

"I just ... kind of ... wondered," Ian said politely.

When Mr. Pickett left he knocked on his father's door and went in.

"I've got a job," he said. His father had his back to him. He was rolling
bandages and placing them neatly back in their drawer. His desk was littered
with papers-patients' notes, medical journals, bills-but the tools of his trade
were always properly put away.

"That was quick," he said.

"Arthur Dunn's farm," Ian said. "He said I could start Saturday."

His father turned around and took off his glasses and blinked at him. "Arthur
Dunn's farm?"

"Yes, you know ... doing ... farm work."

"Farm work." His father nodded vaguely, as if trying to imagine it.

"I thought I'd like something outdoors," Ian said.

Dr. Christopherson put his glasses back on and looked out the window. It had
just started to rain. "Yes," he said doubtfully. "Well ... if that's what you
want. Arthur's a nice fellow." He looked dubiously at Ian. "It'll be hard work,
you know."

"I know," Ian said.

"Did you see the horses?"

"Yes."

"Magnificent animals."

"Yes," Ian said, though he had barely noticed them. He and his father smiled at
each other, glad to be in agreement. They were usually in agreement, unlike Ian
and his mother.

Next he went and told his mother, who was watching I Love Lucy in the living
room. Television had finally-finally!-reached Struan a couple of months earlier,
proof, if more were needed, of how backward things were up here. Ian's mother
had disapproved of it at first, but now she watched it more than he did. In
fact, just lately she seemed to watch it all the time. She was supposed to be in
with his father-she was his nurse-but apart from the odd emergency, Ian hadn't
seen her in the office for weeks.

"Mum?" he said, standing in the doorway. She was in one of her absent moods-he
could tell even though he couldn't see her face. She had two moods nowadays,
absent or annoyed, and whichever one she was in he invariably found he preferred
the other.

"Mum?" he said again. She turned her head a few degrees, not taking her eyes off
the screen.

"I've got a job," Ian said.

She turned a little more and met his eyes, and he saw the glazed look fade as
she focused on him.

"What was that?" she said.

"I said I've got a job."

"Oh," she said. She smiled at him. "That's good." She turned back to the
television. Ian waited a minute but there was no further response, so he went
into the kitchen to get a reaction from Mrs. Tuttle instead. She was breading
chicken pieces for supper, dipping each piece in a bowl of beaten egg and then
slapping it back and forth in a dish of bread crumbs.

"I've got a job, Mrs. Tuttle," Ian said.

"Have you now?" she said, placing a breaded breast down on the baking tray and
taking a pale, slippery-looking chicken leg from the hacked-up carcass on the
chopping board. "That's exciting. What is it?"

"Helping Mr. Dunn on his farm."

She paused, then turned her head to look at him. Her glasses were splattered
with the day's cooking-a dusting of flour from the tea biscuits, a little smear
of butter, a scattering of crumbs-even what looked to be a shred of carrot peel.
"Goodness!" she said, ducking her head in order to look over the top of them.
"Whatever did you want a job like that for?" Which was what he'd expected her to
say, and therefore satisfying in its way, so he smiled at her and left.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Other Side of the Bridge
by Mary Lawson
Copyright © 2006 by Mary Lawson.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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