The Bridges of Madison County Read online

  Her heart nearly stopped when the phone began to ring. She heard the receiver being picked up and almost put the phone back on the hook. A woman’s voice said, “McGregor Insurance.” Francesca sank but recovered enough to ask the secretary if she had dialed the correct number. She had. Francesca thanked her and hung up.

  Next she tried the Information operator in Bellingham, Washington. Nothing listed. She tried Seattle. Nothing. Then the Chamber of Commerce offices in Bellingham and Seattle. She asked if they would check the city directories. They did, and he was not listed. He could be anywhere, she thought.

  She remembered the magazine; he had said to call there. The receptionist was polite but new, and had to get someone to help her with the request. Francesca’s call was transferred three times before she talked with an associate editor who had been at the magazine for twenty years. She asked about Robert Kincaid.

  Of course the editor remembered him. “Trying to locate him, huh? He was a hell of a photographer, if you’ll excuse the language. He was cantankerous, not in a nasty way, but persistent. He was after art for art’s sake, and that doesn’t work very well with our readership. Our readership wants nice pictures, skillful pictures, but nothing too wild.

  “We always said Kincaid was a little strange; none of us knew him well outside of the work he did for us. But he was a pro. We could send him anywhere, and he’d deliver, even though he disagreed with our editorial decisions most of the time. As for his whereabouts, I’ve been checking our files while we talked. He left the magazine in 1975. The address and phone number I have are…” He read off the same information Francesca already had. She stopped trying after that, mostly because she was afraid of what she might discover.

  She drifted along, allowing herself to think more and more about Robert Kincaid. She was still able to drive well enough, and several times a year she would go to Des Moines and have lunch in the restaurant where he had taken her. On one of those trips, she bought a leather-bound book of blank pages. And on those pages she began recording in neat handwriting the details of her love affair with him and her thoughts about him. It required nearly three volumes of the notebooks before she was satisfied she had completed her task.

  Winterset was improving. There was an active art guild, mostly female, and talk of refurbishing the old bridges had been going on for some years. Interesting young folks were building houses in the hills. Things had loosened up, long hair was no longer cause for stares, though sandals on men were still pretty scarce and poets were few.

  Yet except for a few women friends, she withdrew completely from the community. People remarked about it and how they often would see her standing by Roseman Bridge and sometimes by Cedar Bridge. Old folks frequently become strange, they said, and contented themselves with that explanation.

  On the second of February 1982, a United Parcel Service truck trundled up her driveway. She hadn’t ordered anything she could recall. Puzzled, she signed for the package and looked at the address: “Francesca Johnson, RR 2, Winterset, Iowa 50273.” The return address was a law firm in Seattle.

  The package was neatly wrapped and carried extra insurance. She placed it on the kitchen table and opened it carefully. Inside were three boxes, packed securely in Styrofoam peanuts. Taped to the top of one was a small padded envelope. To another was taped a business envelope addressed to her and carrying the law firm’s return address.

  She removed the tape from the business envelope and opened it, shaking.

  January 25, 1982

  Ms. Francesca Johnson

  RR 2

  Winterset, IA 50273

  Dear Ms. Johnson:

  We represent the estate of one Robert L. Kincaid, who recently passed away….

  Francesca laid the letter on the table. Outside, snow blew across the fields of winter. She watched it skim the stubble, taking corn husks with it, piling them up in the corner of the wire. She read the words once more.

  We represent the estate of one Robert L. Kincaid, who recently passed away….

  “Oh, Robert… Robert… no.” She said it softly and bowed her head.

  An hour later she was able to continue reading. The straightforward language of the law, the precision of the words, angered her.

  “We represent…”

  An attorney carrying out his duties to a client.

  But the power, the leopard who came riding in on the tail of a comet, the shaman who was looking for Roseman Bridge on a hot August day, and the man who stood on the running board of a truck named Harry and looked back at her dying in the dust of an Iowa farm lane—where was he in those words?

  The letter should have been a thousand pages long. It should have talked about the end of evolutionary chains and the loss of free range, about cowboys struggling with the corners of the wire, like the corn husks of winter.

  The only will he left was dated July 8, 1967. His instructions about having the enclosed items delivered to you were explicit. If you could not be found, the materials were to be incinerated.

  Also enclosed inside the box marked with the word “Letter” is a message for you he left with us in 1978. He sealed the envelope, and it has been left unopened.

  Mr. Kincaid’s remains were cremated. At his request, no marker was placed anywhere. His ashes were scattered, also at his request, near your home by an associate of ours. I believe the location was called Roseman Bridge.

  If we may be of further service, please do not hesitate to contact us.

  Sincerely yours,

  Allen B. Quippen, Attorney at Law

  She caught her breath, dried her eyes again, and began to examine the remaining contents of the box.

  She knew what was in the small padded envelope. She knew it as surely as she knew spring would come again this year. She opened it carefully and reached in. Out came the silver chain. The medallion attached to it was scratched and read “Francesca.” On the back, etched in the tiniest of letters, was: “If found, please send to Francesca Johnson, RR 2, Winterset, Iowa, USA.”

  His silver bracelet was wrapped in tissue paper at the bottom of the envelope. A slip of paper was included with the bracelet. It was her handwriting:

  If you’d like supper again when

  “white moths are on the wing,” come

  by tonight after you’re finished.

  Her note from the Roseman Bridge. He’d kept even that for his memories.

  Then she remembered that was the only thing he had of hers, his only evidence she existed, aside from elusive images on slowly decaying film emulsions. The little note from Roseman Bridge. It was stained and curved, as if it had been carried in a billfold for a long time.

  She wondered how many times he had read it over the years, far from the hills along Middle River. She could imagine him holding the note before him in the thin light of a reading lamp on a nonstop jet to somewhere, sitting on the floor of a bamboo hut in tiger country and reading it by flashlight, folding and putting it away on a rainy night in Bellingham, then looking at photographs of a woman leaning against a fence post on a summer morning or coming out of a covered bridge at sundown.

  The three boxes each contained a camera with a lens attached. They were battered, scarred. Turning one around, she could read “Nikon” on the viewfinder and, just to the upper left of the Nikon label, the letter F. It was the camera she had handed him at Cedar Bridge.

  Finally she opened the letter from him. It was written in longhand on his stationery and dated August 16, 1978.

  Dear Francesca,

  I hope this finds you well. I don’t know when you’ll receive it. Sometime after I’m gone. I’m sixty-five now, and it’s been thirteen years ago today that we met when I came up your lane looking for directions.

  I’m gambling that this package won’t upset your life in any way. I just couldn’t bear to think of the cameras sitting in a secondhand case in a camera store or in some stranger’s bands. They’ll be in pretty rough shape by the time you get them. But, I have no one else
to leave them to, and I apologize for putting you at risk by sending them to you.

  I was on the road almost constantly from 1965 to 1975. Just to remove some of the temptation to call you or come for you, a temptation I have virtually every waking moment of my life, I took all of the overseas assignments I could find. There have been times, many of them, when I’ve said, “The hell with it. I’m going to Winterset, Iowa, and, whatever the cost, take Francesca away with me.”

  But I remember your words, and I respect your feelings. Maybe you were right; I just don’t 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, I 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 further 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 serv
ice, 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.”