Arrival

Harriet woke abruptly. She’d been dreaming she was hurrying across a frozen field under a darkening sky. She was being chased by something unseen and dangerous. A portentous dream voiceover told her she wouldn’t like what lay ahead any better.

Patricia, sitting kitty corner to her in the facing seat, where they had spread themselves large for the trip from the regional mother house, didn’t seem to have noticed anything. Anyway, her square impassive face gave nothing away.

Sister Harriet smoothed her habit, feeling unsettled. She blamed her summer bug, with its fitful fever. She’d have a few days, thank God, to get over it. But did she thank God? That was the problem, beside which her secret weakness in mathematics paled. Although not entirely since she would be teaching upper year science at Saint Reginald’s. She darted another furtive look at Sister Pat.

The train, on this muggy day in the late summer of 1962, was approaching their destination, a midsize river city where Harriet had lived twice before. And here she sat, going to Bothonville for the third time, to embark on her teaching vocation at swanky Saint Reginald’s. How the city of her birth had changed, with all this prosperity you kept reading about, was one question she had. How she had changed was less a question than a fact.

“Bothonville,” she said, feeling the need to engage the other nun. “I’ve always wondered, Sister, how it got its name.” For a non-teaching sister in a drab brown habit, its unflattering short sleeves revealing arms you associated with convent chores, Patricia had a curiously subtle face.

Patricia wiped her forehead with a handkerchief, giving Harriet the time to feel guilty. Goodness knows, her own origins had been humble enough, and her post-secondary credentials hard won. However, someone always had to mash the potatoes.

“It was settled in the seventeenth century by the notorious Sieur de Bothon, after they kicked him out of New France. He made his way to this upriver wilderness with his retainers. Sounds to me like they didn’t want him back in the old country. Who knows, though, there used to be a big button factory around here. Bothonville, Buttonville.”

Harriet digested this unexpected reply. “A button factory? I don’t remember that.”

“Oh, before your time, Sister, it’s been shut for decades. It was big.” Patricia placed a strange emphasis on the word. She leaned forward, pointed. “Look, you can see the ruin on the horizon.”

The countryside had become wilder. The train was taking a curve along the flank of a hill and Harriet could see the locomotive and cars, with a vista of rugged valleys beyond. Far away and strange that you could see it at all, sprawling against the misty horizon and endless storeys high, loomed improbably the Ontario Button Manufacturing Company.

“There’s always this gap where it appears, although it’s got to be a good ten miles away.” Patricia’s non-explanation struck Harriet as smug.

Harriet looked again. Perhaps due to the tricky haze of declining summer, the ruin seemed to swell, and how she could see its hundreds of windows and age-stained brickwork at such a distance was bizarre. She blinked and refocused. But they were now around the curve and shaggy woodland hid the mill. Sister Pat looked as stolid as ever, but Harriet was left with a sense of hallucination.

***The Suspension Bridge*** by Anna Dowdall.

About The Suspension Bridge:

A literary whodunit set in an unreliable 1962, The Suspension Bridge takes place in a Canadian river city dreaming of fame as it sets about building the world’s biggest bridge. The newly-arrived Sister Harriet navigates a chaotic first year at upscale Saint Reginald’s Academy, where the mysterious disappearance of boarding students complicates her ongoing identity crisis. The sinister bridge is meant to usher in a new era for Bothonville (pronounced Buttonville), but the inner lives of several characters, including Harriet’s, fall victim to its supernatural influence. Part comic allegory and part fairy tale, The Suspension Bridge takes the reader, with dark humour and occasional sympathy, into a midair world of bridges of many sorts, that don’t always hold up as well as they promise.

About Anna Dowdall:

Anna Dowdall was born in Montreal and, like her protagonist in The Suspension Bridge, moved back to the city of her birth twice. Again like the peripatetic Sister Harriet, she’s lived all over, currently making the Junction neighbourhood of Toronto her home. Occupationally just as restless, she’s been a reporter, a nurse’s aide, a graphic artist, a college lecturer, a planner, a union thug, a translator, a baker, a book conservator, a pilot and a horticultural advisor, as well as other things best forgotten. Raised on fairy tales, she began by writing two young adult fantasy novels. These manuscripts made the long lists for the American Katherine Paterson Prize and the Crime Writers of Canada’s unpublished novel award. After being told by an agent her words were too “big,” she shifted to adult fiction. Her three genre-bending literary mysteries, April on Paris Street (Guernica 2021), The Au Pair (2018) and After the Winter (2017), feature evocative settings and a preoccupation with the lives of women. A lover of prose, she once wrote a poem, which ended up on an electricity pole on Montreal’s rue de la Poésie