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    The Long Way
    The Long Way
    The Long Way
    Ebook43 pages40 minutes

    The Long Way

    By Bernard Fancher

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    He could not help... recall the day he stopped his bike on the bridge intending only to look over the thin spreading creek beyond the falls to the gorge and the green water pooled below. It was then he found himself looking upon the private scene of a girl climbing the falls hand in hand with a young man—neither of whom, so entranced were they with one another, detected his presence. Continuing to look, he revised his opinion, and determined she was no mere unformed girl but rather a shapely and quite desirable young woman.

    From Jordan’s elevated position, her contours seemed more revealed than hidden by the short cut-off jeans and long-tailed shirt which, partially unbuttoned, afforded a tantalizing glimpse into the descending cleft of her décolletage. Further, he remembered her demure smile from an all-too-brief encounter one night at a local bar. And so he waited, with whetted longing, hoping she might look up and smile again, until she disappeared, perhaps forever, underneath the bridge deck where he stood. After waiting a moment more in indecision, he rode off unseen, suddenly aware he was entirely unsure of his destination.

    How many years ago would it be now? He told himself a dozen, wondering if the truth wasn’t closer to half again as many years as he imagined. And yet all this time later, he still entertained the possibility he might, one day, ride to the same place and look down to find the young woman—a little older, yes, but also still almost eagerly compliant—once more climbing the falls, this time alone.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBernard Fancher
    Release dateMar 26, 2011
    ISBN9781458147387
    The Long Way
    Author

    Bernard Fancher

    I live on a small and mostly defunct farm in western New York, where the events of a typical day include writing and walking my dogs--items not necessarily listed in order of priority. (At least not from the dogs' point of view.)

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      Book preview

      The Long Way - Bernard Fancher

      The Long Way

      by

      Bernard Fancher

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2011 Bernard Fancher

      All Rights Reserved

      Smashwords License Statement:

      This ebook is licensed by Smashwords, and may not otherwise be reproduced or disseminated without the author’s permission.

      Disclaimer:

      The story that follows is fiction. Except where clearly historical, the people, places, and events portrayed are works of the imagination.

      *********

      The Long Way

      Nearly a mile past the Roger Mills Bridge it occurred to him he was going the wrong way. Rather than turning left onto the dirt Pond Road going level alongside the stream, he’d turned right and kept to the paved road, climbing away from the deep green water in the gorge below the high falls he had only too briefly glimpsed crossing over. But once over, perhaps drawn that way by the possibility he might one day again park at the old RG&E access and descend the long grassy path to the water, he’d glanced first to the old Mills House before taking a quick look sharply left, catching a brief peripheral blur of red he knew without entirely seeing to be the Beardsley Place sitting to the rear and well back.

      As he moved his head a little that way, he remembered Betty Mills recounting a story from her girlhood about old Daddy Rood standing astride the water sluice that powered the ancient mills. But he wondered now if she were mistaken. It seemed more likely she remembered her father’s recollection as her own, and that passing thought combined with the fleeting sight of five paired pairs of jeans strung leg-up and stiffly splayed on parallel lines along the low side of what he mistakenly took to be the old schoolhouse drew his eyes back until he turned them fully on the next house, beyond the borderline of the old Mills place and double line of hung laundry. He glanced from the ground to the sunrise windows looking for an old school-bell hanging tarnished and attached at a doorframe or standing alone, or contained within a slatted belfry, at the highest peak. While his gaze moved ever upwards, the car climbed steadily as well, advancing towards a low wall of neatly laid stone bordering the high side of the next house, which he rejected as being too sleekly built and well-kept to be the building he sought. He discovered the mistake one Sunday when he rode his bike to the back door of the gray-shingled house; before he could knock a pleasant young woman waved through a window and emerged, first smiling at the question, then gently shaking her head.

      He of course knew none of that now, though he would dream of it later. And as in a dream he forgot each house in turn as he looked to the next; the passing world played on his windshield like an ever-changing yet still familiar movie. Briefly he considered yet another, last house, on the hill before this stretch of road, affixed with the Armison name since before the Civil War, finally rounded and leveled, still curving, as it transitioned from the nearly defunct community of Mills Mills into high open country.

      Beyond that small cluster of dwellings, the land broadened into hayfields. A few houses yet dotted the landscape, here and there, next among them a white

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