The Spring My Brother Closed Our Bridge
“So I do nothing?”
“No,” she said. “You do what your daddy would have done. You don’t fight. You bring the people.”
I sat there a good while.
“The ones it landed on,” she said. “The ones with no say. Let them say it.”
The next morning I drove to the Vogt place. I did not ask Josh and Ashley to go to war. I asked them to come to the county board meeting, where the public is allowed to stand up for three minutes and say what happened to them. The April meeting was the 28th, and Verna was still in the rehab in the next county. If she wanted to be there, I wanted her home first. So I picked the fourth Tuesday in May, and I hated every week of the wait.
“What do I say?” Ashley asked. “I’m no speaker.”
“Say what happened. That’s all.”
Josh was in his coveralls on the porch, scratching the back of his neck. “I kept a record,” he said slowly. “Since the first week. I didn’t know what for. Just seemed like somebody ought to.”
He went inside and came out with a green spiral notebook, and it was the neatest accounting of misery I ever saw. Date, miles, gas, what for. A line in the margin for the tire he had shredded on Dutch Hollow.
“That,” I said. “Bring that.”
Verna came home from the rehab on the fourth of May, learning to walk with a frame, with her niece Tonya staying on to cook for her. I went by the next afternoon. When I came up the porch steps, Colton Vogt was already on the glider beside her with her mail in his lap, sorting the envelopes by size like a postmaster.
“In case nobody told you, Mrs. Hollister,” he was saying, “the bridge is still broken.”
“I know it, honey,” Verna said. “I can hear the quiet.”
He went home when his mother whistled from the lane. Verna told me she was being a trial to everyone, and I told her she wasn’t.
“Verna,” I said. “There’s a meeting on the twenty-sixth. I’d like you to come, if Tonya can bring you. Nobody will ask you to say a word.”
“Is it going to hurt Alan?”
I could have lied. I did not.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not trying to. But I don’t think it will be easy for him.”
Tonya had already put the question to the therapist, who said the ride was fine in the church van with the lift as long as Verna kept her feet up. Tonya said, in the doorway, that nobody would think less of her aunt if she stayed home.
“I’d think less,” Verna said. She patted my wrist. “I’ll come. Somebody ought to sit there who loved him when he was small.”
I gave my brother one more chance before the meeting.
A week before, on the nineteenth, I drove into town and walked into the county shop at 7:00 in the morning. Alan was alone in his little glass office with a stack of invoices.
He stood when he saw me. He is a tall man, taller than I am, and he has Dad’s forehead and Mama’s stubborn mouth.
“Frank,” he said. “I’m busy.”