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By Root 183 0

feet wet, some gum off a low pine on my hair as I’d leap the creek. Shoulder-high cattails and ferns, then into the longhouse of cedars. Spring crows in the cedar branches! Needles on the earth half a foot deep! When we made love there he would bury something, a small bottle, a pencil, a handkerchief, a sock. He left something everywhere we made love. Such sexual archaeology. There was a piece of wood that looked like the roof of a doghouse. When we got lost we’d always have to look for that – when snow changed the shape of trees or fall made skeletons of everything, or in summer when everything was overgrown chaos. We would go there all through the year, every season, and winter was strangely easier than summer with its bugs and deer flies. We could make hollows in the snow, we were protected from wind by the trees. It is important to be close to the surface of the earth.

He began to like it, I think, us not being lovers indoors. Still, we always fought. I told him once if he ever broke up with me and said we were ‘crazy’ and that we had to stop, I would knife him.

– You told me that too.

– I feel charmed, Patrick, that I knew him as well as I know you.

– I feel jealous. No. I don’t feel jealous.

– Because he’s dead? You listen to me so calmly, all this intimacy.…

– Hana showed me the pictures. Who were the men on the bridge?

– That’s the past, Patrick, leave it alone. Anyway, you should get Hana to talk to you about Cato and the socks. That’s her favourite story.

“They were in the woods and came into a field to get away from the bugs. It was summer. Lots of bugs, my mom said. So they took off their clothes and went for a swim in the river. When they came back, there were all these young bulls where their clothes were. About five of them in a circle around the clothes. Only they were not interested in the clothes except for his socks! They were sniffing them up in the air and tossing them back and forth. It really embarrassed Cato. My mom told me he didn’t want to talk about it to others. I just love that – all those serious bulls throwing his socks back and forth. Mom thinks they were very excited.”

Patrick had the photograph from Hana’s suitcase in his pocket. In books he had read, even those romances he swallowed during childhood, Patrick never believed that characters lived only on the page. They altered when the author’s eye was somewhere else. Outside the plot there was a great darkness, but there would of course be daylight elsewhere on earth. Each character had his own time zone, his own lamp, otherwise they were just men from nowhere.

He was in the Riverdale Library looking for any reference to the building of the Bloor Street Viaduct. He collected the newspapers and journals he needed and went and sat in the Boys and Girls Room with its high rafters and leaded windows that let in oceans of light. He revelled in this room, the tiny desks, the smell of books. It was how he imagined the dining hall of a submarine would look.

He read the descriptions of the bridge’s opening on October 18, 1918. One newspaper had a picture of a cyclist racing across. He worked backwards. It had taken only two years to build. It had taken years before that to agree on how it was to be done, Commissioner Harris’ determination forcing it through. He looked at the various photographs: the shells of wood structures into which concrete was poured, and then the wood removed like hardened bandages to reveal the piers. He read up on everything – survey arguments, the scandals, the deaths of workers fleetingly mentioned, the story of the young nun who had fallen off the bridge, the body never found. He read about the flooding Don River underneath, ice dangers, the decision to use night crews and the night deaths that followed. There was an article on daredevils. He heard the library bell. He turned the page to the photograph of them and he pulled out the picture he had and laid it next to the one in the newspaper. Third from the left, the newspaper said, was Nicholas Temelcoff.

Leaving the library, Patrick crossed Broadview Avenue