Covered Bridge by Brian Doyle Page A

filtering into the tunnel of tall sumac and poplar trees. The road turned and dipped into gloom.
    I turned back and went home to wait.
    I stuck my head in the big stone crock and pulled out a chunk of homemade bread.
    O’Driscoll hit the door open and looked behind himself and said, “There’s a lot of talk goin’ about a missing goat Hubbo me boy. What’s goin’ on?”
    â€œThat’s it!” I said. “That’s what happened! I heard the hammering last night! I heard the hooves! I’m sure the goat got out! She ran through the bridge! Met Father Foley coming home from his rounds with the sick. The timing is perfect. I heard the goat hooves last night when I was half asleep! We left the gate open. The goat ate part of the dress off the line, got tangled up in it, ran out the gate and met Father Foley in the bridge. And she was wearing that hat! There’s fresh tracks on the road. Let’s go! The goat came down our road. I heard her!”
    â€œLet’s go and get the policeman to come with us,” said O’Driscoll.
    I guess everybody must have told the policeman with the wart on his nose what Father Foley was like becausehe seemed to enjoy the idea of coming with us to follow the goat tracks.
    On our way, I explained to him about the hat and the dress and Oscar’s ghost trick and the open gate.
    â€œQuite a place, this Mushrat Creek,” said the policeman with the wart. “Ghosts and goats and covered bridges and devils and dead priests.”
    His wart was starting to look kind of cute.
    We were walking down the slope over the stinkhorn fungus and edging our way down the bank.
    And there she was. Tangled up in some branches. Looking pretty lost. She gave a little bleat to us.
    The hat was still over her horns.
    The dress tangled over her body so that running through a covered bridge towards you in the dark, the dress flying and those eyes behind the hat brim and the thundering hooves could be pretty scary all right.
    Specially if you were Father Foley with his light.
    Poor Father Foley!

Man Laughs For Whole Week!
    T HREE WEEKS LATER , on one of my cloux days, I went up on Dizzy Peak to pick some blueberries. While I picked I spoke to Fleurette as though I was writing more of the letter. I tried to make it dramatic. I tried to make it sound like she was reading it.
    From up here on Dizzy Peak you can see the whole world. To the east, the dam and the big flooded country above it and below it the narrow fast river the way it used to be when only the first Canadians lived here.
    North there is the town of Low and then Venosta, and in the mist of the mountains, maybe, Farrellton.
    West, rolling humpbacked mountains and lakes here and there like broken bits of mirrors.
    And the covered bridge down there, with its new paint job.
    And the new bridge just above it, a cement slab.
    I could hear her voice reading it. And her sighing.
    I already wrote in her letter how it was that the bridge didn’t get torn down after all.
    It was Mrs. O’Driscoll who figured it out. And Prootoo.
    At a county council general meeting Mrs. O’Driscoll got Prootoo to get up and make a motion. Mrs. O’Driscoll told her to move that the covered bridge be dedicated as a monument to the late Father Foley. It was seconded by the biggest farmer of them all.
    That way Ovide Proulx got the contract to paint the bridge instead of tearing it down.
    How could anybody vote against that? Even Old Mac Gleason, who actually went to the meeting, had to put his hand up!
    Business was business.
    O’Driscoll laughed for almost a week about it until Mrs. O’Driscoll finally got sick of the whole story and shut him down by giving him the silence.
    Now as Oscar McCracken traveled the bridge four times a day and paused each time inside, in the quiet there, he could, if he wanted to, read at each portal, a brass plaque.
    The plaque said these words:
    Let this covered bridge be dedicated