The Bridges Of Madison County (10 page)
Read The Bridges Of Madison County Online
Authors: Robert James Waller
know. I do know that driving out of your lane
that hot Friday morning was the hardest thing
I’ve ever done or will ever do. In fact, I doubt
if few men have ever done anything more difficult
than that.
I left National Geographic in 1975 and have
been devoting the remainder of my shooting years
mostly to things of my own choosing, picking
up a little work where I can get it, local or
regional stuff that keeps me away only a few
days at a time. It’s been tough financially, but
I get along. I always do.
Much of my work is around Puget Sound.
I like it that way. It seems as men get older they
turn toward the water.
Oh, yes, l have a dog now, a golden retriever.
I call him “Highway,” and he travels with me
most of the time, head hanging out the window,
looking for good shots.
In 1972, I fell down a cliff in Maine, in
Acadia National Park, and broke my ankle.
The chain and medallion got torn off in the fall.
Fortunately they landed close by. I found them
again, and a jeweler mended the chain.
I live with dust on my heart. That’s about
as well as I can put it. There were women before
you, a few, but none after. I made no conscious
pledge to celibacy; I’m just not interested.
I once watched a Canada goose whose mate
had been shot by hunters. They mate for life,
you know. The gander circled the pond for days,
and more days after that. When I last saw him,
he was swimming alone through the wild rice,
still looking. I suppose that analogy is a little
too obvious for literary tastes, but it’s pretty
much the way I feel.
In my imagination, on foggy mornings or
afternoons with the sun bouncing off northwest
water, I try to think of where you might be in
your life and what you might be doing as I’m
thinking of you. Nothing complicated– going
out to your garden, sitting on your front porch
swing, standing at the sink in your kitchen.
Things like that.
I remember everything. How you smelled, how
you tasted like the summer. The feel of your skin
against mine, and the sound of your whispers
as I loved you.
Robert Penn Warren once used the phrase
“a world that seems to be God-abandoned.” Not
bad, pretty close to how I feel some of the time.
But I cannot live that way always. When those
feelings become too strong, I load Harry and go
down the road with Highway for a few days.
I don’t like feeling sorry for myself. That’s
not who I am. And most of the time I don’t feel
that way. Instead, I am grateful for having at
least found you. We could have flashed by one
another like two pieces of cosmic dust.
God or the universe or whatever one chooses
to label the great systems of balance and order
does not recognize Earth-time. To the universe,
four days is no different than four billion light
years. I try to keep that in mind.
But, I am, after all, a man. And all the
philosophic rationalizations I can conjure up do
not keep me from wanting you, every day, every
moment, the merciless wail of time, of time I can
never spend with you, deep within my head.
I love you, profoundly and completely. And
I always will.
The last cowboy,
Robert
P. S., I put another new engine in Harry last
summer, and he’s doing fine.
The package arrived five years ago. And looking at the contents had become part of her annual birthday ritual. She kept his cameras, bracelet, and the chain with the medallion in a special chest in the closet. A local carpenter had made the box to her design, out of walnut, with dust seals and padded interior sections. “Pretty fancy box,” he had said. Francesca had only smiled.
The last part of the ritual was the manuscript. She always read it by candlelight, at the end of the day. She brought it from the living room and laid it carefully on the yellow Formica, near a candle, lit her one cigarette of the year, a Camel, took a sip of brandy, and began to read.
Falling from Dimension Z
Robert Kincaid
There are old winds I still do not understand, though I have been riding, forever it seems, along the curl of their spines. I move in Dimension Z; the world goes by somewhere else in another slice of things, parallel to me. As if, hands in my pockets and bending a little forward, I see it through a department store window, looking inward.
In Dimension Z, there are strange moments. Coming around a long, rainy, New Mexico curve west of Magdalena, the highway turns to a footpath and the path to an animal trail. A pass of my wiper blades, and the trail becomes a forest place where nothing has ever gone. Again the wiper blades and, again, something further back. Great ice, this time. I am moving through short grass, in furs, with matted hair and spear, thin and hard as the ice itself, all muscle and implacable cunning. Past the ice, still farther back along the measure of things, deep salt water in which I swim, gilled and scaled. I cannot see more than that, except beyond plankton is the digit zero.
Euclid was not always right. He assumed parallelness, in constancy, right to the end of things; but a non-Euclidean way of being is also possible, where the lines come together, far out there. A vanishing point. The illusion of convergence.
Yet I know it’s more than illusion. Sometimes a coming together is possible, a spilling of one reality into another. A kind of soft enlacing. Not prim intersections loomed in a world of precision, no sound of the shuttle. Just… well… breathing. Yes, that’s the sound of it, maybe the feel of it, too. Breathing.
And I move slowly over this other reality, and beside it and underneath and around it, always with strength, always with power, yet always with a giving of myself to it. And the other senses this, coming forward with its own power, giving itself to me, in turn.
Somewhere, inside of the breathing, music sounds, and the curious spiral dance begins then, with a meter all its own that tempers the ice-man with spear and matted hair. And slowly– rolling and turning in adagio, in adagio always– ice-man falls… from Dimension Z… and into her.
At the end of her sixty-seventh birthday, when the rain had stopped, Francesca put the manila envelope in the bottom drawer of the rolltop desk. She had decided to keep it in her safe deposit box at the bank after Richard died but brought it home for a few days each year at this time. The lid on the walnut chest was shut on the cameras, and the chest was placed on the closet shelf in her bedroom.
Earlier in the afternoon, she had visited Roseman Bridge. Now she walked out on the porch, dried off the swing with a towel, and sat down. It was cold, but she would stay for a few minutes, as she always did. Then she walked to the yard gate and stood. Then to the head of the lane. Twenty-two years later, she could see him stepping from his truck in the late afternoon, trying to find his way; she could see Harry bouncing toward the county road, then stopping, and Robert Kincaid standing on the running board, looking back up the lane.
A Letter from Francesca
Francesca Johnson died in January of 1989. She was sixty-nine years old at the time of her death. Robert Kincaid would have been seventy-six that year. The cause of death was listed as “natural.” “She just died,” the doctor told Michael and Carolyn. “Actually, we’re a little perplexed. We can find no specific cause for her death. A neighbor found her slumped over the kitchen table.”
In a 1982 letter to her attorney, she had requested that her remains be cremated and her ashes scattered at Roseman Bridge. Cremation was an uncommon practice in Madison County– viewed as slightly radical in some undefined way– and her wish generated considerable discussion at the cafe, the Texaco station, and the implement dealership. The disposition of her ashes was not made public.
Following the memorial service, Michael and Carolyn drove slowly to Roseman Bridge and carried out Francesca’s instructions. Though it was nearby, the bridge had never been special to the Johnson family, and they wondered, and wondered again, why their rather sensible mother would behave in such an enigmatic way and why she had not asked to be buried by their father, as was customary.
Following that, Michael and Carolyn began the long process of sorting through the house and brought home the materials from the safe deposit box after they were examined by the local attorney for estate purposes and released.
They divided the materials from the box and began looking through them. The manila envelope was in Carolyn’s stack, about a third of the way down. She was puzzled when she opened it and removed the contents. She read Robert Kincaid’s 1965 letter to Francesca. After that she read his 1978 letter, then the 1982 letter from the Seattle attorney. Finally she studied the magazine clippings.
“Michael.”
He caught the mixture of surprise and pensiveness in her voice and looked up immediately. “What is it?”
Carolyn had tears in her eyes, and her voice became unsteady. “Mother was in love with a man named Robert Kincaid. He was a photographer. Remember when we all had to see the copy of National Geographic with the bridge story in it? He was the one who took the pictures of the bridges here. And remember all the kids talking about the strange-looking guy with the cameras back then? That was him.”
Michael sat across from her, his tie loosened, collar open. “Say that again, slowly. I can’t believe I heard you correctly.”
After reading the letters, Michael searched the downstairs closet, then went upstairs to Francesca’s bedroom. He had never noticed the walnut box before and opened it. He carried it down to the kitchen table. “Carolyn, here are his cameras.”
Tucked in one end of the box was a sealed envelope with “Carolyn or Michael” written on it in Francesca’s script, and lying between the cameras were three leather-bound notebooks.
“I’m not sure I’m capable of reading what’s in that envelope,” said Michael. “Read it out loud to me, if you can handle it.”
She opened the envelope and read aloud.
Dear Carolyn and Michael,
Though I’m feeling just fine, I think it’s time for
me to get my affairs in order (as they say).
There is something, something very important,
you need to know about. That’s why I’m writing
this.
After looking through the safe deposit box
and finding the large manila envelope addressed
to me with a 1965 postmark, I’m sure you’ll
eventually come to this letter. If possible, please
sit at the old kitchen table to read it. You’ll
understand that request shortly.
It’s hard for me to write this to my own
children, but I must. There’s something here that’s
too strong, too beautiful, to die with me. And
if you are to know who your mother was, all
the goods and bads, you need to know what
I’m about to say. Brace yourself.
As you’ve already discovered, his name was
Robert Kincaid. His middle initial was “L,” but
I never knew what the L represented. He was a
photographer, and he was here in 1965 photographing the covered bridges.
Remember how excited the town was when
the pictures appeared in National Geographic
You may also recall that I began receiving the
magazine about that time. Now you know the
reason for my sudden interest in it. By the way,
I was with him (carrying one of his camera
knapsacks) when the photo of Cedar Bridge was
taken.
Understand, I loved your father in a quiet
fashion. I knew it then, I know it now. He was
good to me and gave me the two of you, who
I treasure. Don’t forget that.
But Robert Kincaid was something quite different, like nobody I’ve ever seen or heard or
read about through my entire life. To make you
understand him completely is impossible. First
of all, you are not me. Second, you would have
had to have been around him, to watch him
move, to hear him talk about being on a dead—
end branch of evolution. Maybe the notebooks
and magazine clippings will help, but even those
will not be enough.
In a way, he was not of this earth. That’s
about as clear as I can say it. I’ve always
thought of him as a leopardlike creature who
rode in on the tail of a comet. He moved that
way, his body was like that. He somehow coupled enormous intensity with warmth and kindness, and there was a vague sense of tragedy
about him. He felt he was becoming obsolete in
a world of computers and robots and organized
living in general. He saw himself as one of the
last cowboys, as he put it, and called himself
old fangled.
The first time l ever saw him was when he
stopped and asked directions to Roseman Bridge.
The three of you were at the Illinois State Fair.
Believe me, I was not scouting around for any
adventure. That was the furthest thing from my
mind. But I looked at him for less than five
seconds, and I knew I wanted him, though not
as much as I eventually came to want him.
And please don’t think of him as some Ca—
sanova running around taking advantage of
country girls. He wasn’t like that at all. In fact,
he was a little shy, and I had as much to do
with what happened as he did. More, in fact.
The note tucked in with his bracelet is one I
posted on Roseman Bridge so he would see it the
morning after we first met. Aside from his photographs of me, it’s the only piece of evidence
he had over the years that I actually existed,
that I was not just some dream he had.
I know children have a tendency to think of
their parents as rather asexual, so I hope what
I’m going to say won’t shock you, and I certainly hope it won’t destroy your memory of
me.
In our old kitchen, Robert and I spent hours
together. We talked and danced by candlelight.
And, yes, we made love there and in the bedroom
and in the pasture grass and just about anywhere
else you can think of. It was incredible, powerful,
transcending lovemaking, and it went on for
days, almost without stopping. I always have
used the word “powerful” a lot in thinking about
him. For that’s what he had become by the time
we met.
He was like an arrow in his intensity. I
simply was helpless when he made love to me.
Not weak; that’s not what I felt. Just, well,
overwhelmed by his sheer emotional and physical
power. Once when I whispered that to him, he
simply said, “I am the highway and a peregrine
and all the sails that ever went to sea.”
I checked the dictionary later. The first thing
people think of when they hear the word
“peregrine” is a falcon. But there are other meanings of the word, and he would have been aware
of that. One is ‘foreigner, alien.” A second is
“roving or wandering, migratory.” The Latin
peregrinus, which is one root of the word, means
a stranger. He was all of those things– a
stranger, a foreigner in the more general sense of
the word, a wanderer, and he also was falconlike,
now that I think of it.
Children, understand I am trying to express
what cannot be put into words. l only wish that
someday you each might have what I experienced; however, I’m beginning to think that’s not
likely. Though I suppose it’s not fashionable to
say such things in these more enlightened times,
I don’t think it’s possible for a woman to possess
the peculiar kind of power Robert Kincaid had.
So, Michael, that lets you out. As for Carolyn,
I’m afraid the bad news is that there was only
one of him, and no more.
If not for your father and the two of you, I
would have gone anywhere with him, instantly.
He asked me to go, begged me to go. But I
wouldn’t, and he was too much of a sensitive
and caring person to ever interfere in our lives
after that.
The paradox is this: If it hadn’t been for
Robert Kincaid, I’m not sure I could have stayed
on the farm all these years. In four days, he
gave me a lifetime, a universe, and made the
separate parts of me into a whole. I have never
stopped thinking of him, not for a moment. Even
when he was not in my conscious mind, I could
feel him somewhere, always he was there.
But it never took away from anything I felt
for the two of you or your father. Thinking
only of myself for a moment, I’m not sure I
made the right decision. But taking the family
into account, I’m pretty sure I did.
Though I must be honest and tell you that,
right from the outset, Robert understood better
than I what it was the two of us formed with
each other. I think I only began to grasp its
significance over time, gradually. Had I truly
understood that, when he was face to face with
me and asking me to go, I probably would have
left with him.
Robert believed the world had become too
rational, had stopped trusting in magic as much
as it should. I’ve often wondered if I was too
rational in making my decision.
I’m sure you found my burial request incom—
prehensible, thinking perhaps it was the product
of a confused old woman. After reading the 1982
Seattle attorney’s letter and my notebooks, you’ll
understand why I made that request. I gave my
family my life; I gave Robert Kincaid what was
left of me.
I think Richard knew there was something in
me he could not reach, and I sometimes wonder
if he found the manila envelope when I kept it
at home in the bureau. Just before he died, I
was sitting by him in a Des Moines hospital,
and he said this to me: “Francesca, I know you
had your own dreams, too. I’m sorry I couldn’t
give them to you.” That was the most touching
moment of our lives together.
I don’t want to make you feel guilt or pity
or any of those things. That’s not my purpose
here. I only want you to know how much I
loved Robert Kincaid. I dealt with it day by
day, all these years, just as he did.
Though we never spoke again to one another,
we remained bound together as tightly as it’s
possible for two people to be bound. I cannot
find the words to express this adequately. He
said it best when he told me we had ceased being
separate beings and, instead, had become a third
being formed by the two of us. Neither of us
existed independent of that being. And that being
was left to wander.
Carolyn, remember the horrible argument we
had once about the light pink dress in my closet?
You had seen it and wanted to wear it. You
said you never remembered me wearing it, so
why couldn’t it be made over to fit you. That
was the dress I wore the first night Robert and
I made love. I’ve never looked as good in my
entire life as I did that night. The dress was my
small and foolish memory of that time. That’s
why I never wore it again and why I refused
to let you wear it.
After Robert left here in 1965, I realized I
knew very little about him, in terms of his family
history. Though I think I learned almost everything else about him– everything that really
counted– in those few short days. He was an
only child, both his parents were dead, and he