Bridge of Sighs

away with service to the West End, where people would want to save a penny or two at the supermarket. West Enders were famous for their willingness to burn a tank of gas searching out the lowest prices, as if gas were free, but my father credited East Enders and Borough residents with being smarter than that. My mother, predictably, saw things differently. Wanting to save a penny, to her way of thinking, was human nature, and she urged my father to prepare for a future that didn’t include milk trucks or, for that matter, milk bottles.
    As usual, she was right. “The Old Man,” who owned the dairy and liked my father, swore he’d never sell, but then did so and promptly moved away. The new owner immediately curtailed deliveries in the West End and let it be known that our East End might be next. Publicly my father didn’t waver in his stated belief that his lucrative route through the Borough was in no danger, but the milk boxes continued to disappear until finally there was no denying his route was shrinking. By midmorning he’d be back home, where he’d change out of his all-white uniform and head down to the Cayoga Diner for coffee with the seasonally unemployed men who loitered there, many of them laid off from the tannery. These were stoical men who went on unemployment every spring and patiently awaited the inevitable call back to work, a summons that came later and later each autumn.
    Those days, talk at the diner was increasingly about the future of Thomaston and whether there was one. Many thought not, and my father took it upon himself to cheer up these defeatists. People had tanned leather in Thomaston since before the Revolution, he liked to remind them, so he expected they’d continue awhile longer. These things ran in cycles, like the moon, waxing and waning and waxing again. Another year and everybody’d be back working full-time, even overtime, probably. Weren’t famines followed by feasts? That he was willing to spring for a cup of coffee or float a small loan to a fellow who’d be good for it come the end of the week, along with his jovial good nature, made him popular at the lunch counter, where his optimism for the most part went unchallenged, except, ironically, for his younger brother, Declan. Uncle Dec always had answers for my father’s rhetorical questions. What followed famine? Death. What followed death? Decomposition. In Uncle Dec’s opinion, which he offered loudly whenever he ran into his brother in public, Lou Lynch would be next in the unemployment line. “I hope you’ve saved up, Biggy,” he’d say, clapping my father on the back. He never called him by his name, preferring Big Brother or, more often, Biggy, which he knew my father hated. “You
do
know what happened to the dinosaurs, don’t you?” Death. Decomposition.
    Much as my father enjoyed the company of men, he wouldn’t step foot in the diner, the barbershop or the cigar store if Dec was inside. He had little use for his brother, who was constantly in and out of trouble, in and out of the newspaper, in and out of jail, giving us Lynches, my father said, a bad name. Though he was a year younger, Uncle Dec, at age sixteen, had left the doomed family farm and joined the army (from which he was later discharged for dealing in contraband), leaving my father trapped there until he finished high school and turned eighteen. According to my mother, he still resented his brother for escaping, and if he saw Uncle Dec holding court over by the diner’s cash register, he’d just return home and take his ease on the front porch. If somebody down the block happened to be painting or doing repairs, he’d visit with them and offer advice, standing at the bottom of the ladder and carrying on a vertical conversation, or saunter down the street to Tommy Flynn’s and shoot the breeze there. By midafternoon he’d finish his rounds and return to the front porch, where he and I would spend a contemplative hour or so, me with a book, my father with the
Thomaston Guardian,
which was always delivered about this time. Through the screen door, we could hear my mother starting dinner in the back of the house, and for me this was the most peaceful time of day, when everything felt right with the world.
    But all was not right, and I knew it. As milk boxes continued to disappear from porches throughout Thomaston, my father became quieter and less social. He never changed his public stance, maintaining to all who would listen that his