The Spring My Brother Closed Our Bridge
“I’ll be quick.” I shut the door behind me. “There’s a board meeting Tuesday week. I’m bringing the Vogts and Verna Hollister. I wanted you to hear it from me.”
His jaw worked.
“If that bridge is open before then,” I said, “I won’t say a word. I’ll drive the Vogts home. I won’t ask for anything. It stays between us. You have my word on Dad’s grave.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No,” I said. “That’s all it is. I’m telling you what I’ll do either way.”
He looked at me for what felt a long time. Something went across his face, and I thought for a second he might say it. I thought he might sit down and tell me the thing he’d carried since 2006.
“It’s on the list, Frank,” he said instead.
I nodded. I opened the door myself.
Pastor Jay Eide of the Creek Valley Lutheran Church lent me the van, the one with the wheelchair lift that groans. He did not ask me why. He just handed me the keys on the Sunday before and said, “Take a full tank. The back way eats gas.”
Tonya drove Verna over to meet us at the church. That is how I came to be standing in the gravel lot on the evening of May 26, lifting an 86-year-old woman’s wheelchair into a church van, with Colton Vogt standing so close behind me I almost stepped on him.
Colton had put on a clean shirt. His mother had slicked his hair with water. He was holding Verna’s black purse in both hands in front of his belly like a boy carrying the offering plate down the aisle.
“I got it, Mrs. Hollister,” he said. “I won’t let it fall.”
“I know you won’t, honey,” said Verna.
It took 31 minutes to reach town. We bounced across the washboard of Dutch Hollow with the wheelchair strapped to the floor and the dust boiling up behind us. At every pothole Colton reached out and steadied Verna’s elbow.
At the Hollow’s worst turn, a stretch of rutted red clay, Verna said quietly, “It took them forty-one minutes.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Josh from the second row.
“I counted,” she said. “Lying there. Like counting the rosary.”
No one said anything to that.
We pulled up to the courthouse at 6:52. The commissioners’ room holds fourteen folding chairs, and by seven every one of them was full, with four more people standing along the back wall. I had told no one but the Vogts and Verna. Word travels in a county of 6,000 people. I saw two of the Lutheran ladies, Doc Sawyer in his tie, a man from the county paper with a notepad, and Tracy Boyle in her EMS jacket, standing at the back with her arms crossed. Josh pushed Verna’s chair up the courthouse ramp, because the concrete there is cracked and Colton was too small for the slope. Colton took the handles back at the door.
Faye Ketchum chairs the board. She is 71, ran the school lunchroom for thirty years before she ran the board, and brings a thermos to every meeting and a stare that has reduced grown men to tears. Rob Rademacher and Jackie Beale sat on either side. At the far end, in his county cap, sat my brother, because the commissioner reports to the board and sits with it.