Across the River

My grandfather on my father’s side was a man of few words, but I remember that when he hugged you, you stayed hugged. He died in December 1995 and was buried the following spring, after the ground thawed. He was one of those small-town people whom one can still encounter in rural life but less and less often now: he helped start the fire department and build various public buildings and worked at the cemetery. His fingerprints are all over South Londonderry, Vermont, even if his name is not.

After my grandfather’s funeral, I saw my father and his two surviving brothers share a laugh in the living room of the home they grew up in back in the 1930s and 40s; it was the only time I saw the three of them together. Each was in his early 60s. My father outlived them both.

Later, I walked down the hill from the family home to town with my dad, still in our suit jackets and ties. We approached the bridge over the West River at the town center.

The West River is a tributary of the Connecticut River, and at South Londonderry, where my father was from, it is usually shallow and narrow and rocky; the days one can call it a river are the days it is about to wash out the bridge. This spring day in 1995 was not one of those days. It was more stone than running water.

Like his father, my father was a man of few words, and when we approached the river he simply told me to continue on the bridge. He was going to cross it from stone to stone, like when he was a boy. He didn’t tell me this was what he wanted to do; he just did it. No words were exchanged. He loosened his tie, took off his suit jacket, and tucked it under his left arm. I guess he trusted himself with his blazer on the possibly slippery rocks more than he trusted me with it, a twenty-six-year-old newspaper editor. He crossed the river, dry stone slab top by dry stone top, and met me on the other side.

The riverside mill that had replaced a mill that had burned down was still there, but it had ceased operations years ago, before I was born. A company sign on one wall still greeted employees who no longer worked there. The schoolhouse he attended was on the other side of the river from the farm, up a hill a similar steepness to the hill the Aldrich farm was on. The Baptist church that the Aldriches attended was on the same hill; you could see the steeple from my grandparents’ home, and you could see my grandparents’ red barn from the churchyard.

We met on the other side of the bridge and wordlessly crossed the corner of Route 100 and Main Street to the country store which was still also the post office. This always served as a glimpse of a previous century for me: the post office that was also the general store. It always seemed to me that my dad was a child of the 40s, whether the 1840s or the 1940s. The building is a French restaurant now.

Our twenty-minute walk was a glimpse in 1995 for me of my dad in his own childhood, complete with a walk across the river stone-by-stone. I know that now; I didn’t then.

His father was no longer there to hug him, after all, and I was too young to know what that meant.

William Robert Aldrich died of Covid-19 on May 10, 2010. He was 84.