Read Online Covered Bridge by Brian Doyle - Free Book Online

“Hang on, kid!” he said.
    His sweater was covered with mud so you couldn’t see his number. But I knew what it was. It was 72.
    And there was blood on his cheek.
    The biggest farmer of them all reminded me of Tony Golab.
    Another one of the farmers liked to sing.
    He had only one song but it had hundreds of verses. They were all about some ancient guy named Brian O’Lynn.
    The verses sounded like this:
    Oh, Brian O’Lynn and his wife and wife’s mother
    Tried to go over the bridge together
    The storm it was howling, the bridge it fell in.
    â€œWe’ll go home by water,” says Brian O’Lynn.
    But our most famous farmer was not working on the bridge at all.
    He was a visitor who came over during our lunch hour and entertained us while we lay on the ground, sprawled out on the ground, full of food and resting.
    Everybody said that Old Mickey Malarkey was the biggest liar on the Gatineau River. The Gatineau River runs from north of the town of Maniwaki right down to Ottawa. There are lots of little towns and villages in the Gatineau River Valley and lots of farms and houses along the river.
    There were lots of liars living between Maniwaki and Ottawa. Maybe hundreds of liars. And so to be the biggest liar in the whole valley you had to be very good at it. There was quite a lot of competition.
    Old Mickey Malarkey was the best.
    He was also the one who had the most practice because he was the oldest. Old Mickey Malarkey was 112 years old and the farmers all said that he’d been lying since he was a little baby. Some of the farmers working on the new bridge said that Old Mickey Malarkey was lying before he learned to talk, if you can imagine that.
    Old Mickey Malarkey was lying away back in the 1840s. Before Canada was even a country—before Confederation. Before the invention of the radio, the telephone, the car, before electricity. Old Mickey Malarkey was telling lies when my favorite writer, Leo Tolstoy, who wrote
War and Peace
, was only about twelve years old.
    Whenever anybody asked Old Mickey Malarkey about being the biggest liar in the Gatineaus, he would say that he never told a lie in his life, which, of course, was one of the biggest big lies he ever told.
    You could see the top of Old Mickey’s house from where we were building the new bridge.
    About a quarter to twelve Old Mickey would leave his house, and by the time Prootoo rang the bell at twelve noon, he was already shuffling along the road. By thetime most of the farmers were finished eating, Mickey would finally arrive.
    Most everybody would be sprawled out on their backs with their arms and legs spread out and their mouths open and their eyes half shut. And their stomachs swelling up and down, trying to digest all the food they ate and all the tea and water they drank.
    It would take Old Mickey about forty-five minutes to walk that far. I could probably walk from his house to where we had our dinner in about thirty seconds.
    I told O’Driscoll one day that I could probably throw a stone that far.
    â€œBut, Hubbo, you’re young. You know, he’s pretty near a hundred years older than you. They tell me around here that fifty years ago, when your covered bridge was built, Old Mickey was sixty-two years of age. In fact, he was the foreman on the job. He’s built many barns in his day, and so building a covered bridge is almost the same. Now, Hubbo, when you’re—what is it he is, let’s see—when
you’re
one hundred and twelve years of age, I hope you can do as well!”
    When Old Mickey finally got there he sat on a saw-horse or a bag of cement and got his breath and then he got up and walked around through the bodies of the farmers. He was bent over quite a bit and his hands were holding each other behind his back.
    Then he started. It was a game they all knew. A conversation game.
    â€œWent out last night after dark on the river. Stayed about an hour.
Filled
the boat with