The Spring My Brother Closed Our Bridge
“Spreading fill on the east side,” he said. “Same as always.”
He went down on the bank and worked. Wade had called the engineer’s office himself at six that morning from the cab of the loader, and a man in a white pickup with a state seal on the door drove out Thursday at four, walked the abutment, put a level on the beam seat, and signed a form on his clipboard. Everything else was rock and gravel. We set the rock by the ton and packed the fill in lifts, and Wade ran the compactor himself. Alan worked harder than any man on that bank, and he never looked up to see who was watching. His hands blistered through his gloves by ten the first morning. At noon Thursday, Josh Vogt walked down the bank without a word and handed him a sandwich, and Alan ate it standing in the creek mud.
I worked beside him most of the first morning. We did not talk. Once, when he was reaching for a boulder too heavy for him, I took the other end. He grunted. We set it. He nodded.
“Dad would’ve said we put it in crooked,” he said.
“Dad would’ve told us to use a level.”
And my brother laughed. A short surprised bark of a laugh, the first I’d heard from him in twenty years. It echoed off the water.
It took two and a half days, start to finish. By Friday at 2:15 in the afternoon, the barricade came down.
Verna crossed it first.
Tonya had brought her out in the same borrowed wheelchair, and Colton would not let anybody else push her. Wade and his crew, Josh and Ashley, and two of the Lutheran ladies with a casserole stood back along the bank. Colton rolled her up to the end of the new gravel and stopped.
“Is it safe, Mr. Wade?” he asked.
“Safe as church, son.”
“All right then.” And he took a breath and pushed Verna Hollister over the Creek Road bridge for the first time in seventy-six days. The wheels clattered on the steel deck. She held on to the arms of the chair with both hands. When they reached the middle she put up one finger, and Colton stopped.
She looked down at the creek. She looked at the brass plate.
“Henry would have liked this,” she said. “He’d have stood right here and said nothing and been proud.”
Colton patted her shoulder like a grown man. “Mrs. Hollister,” he said, “I carried your mail today. It’s on your porch.”
There is one more thing I did, and it was the hardest.
That evening, after the trucks left and the dust settled, I took a screwdriver out of my glove box and walked to the rail of the bridge. The brass plate had been there seventeen years. It was bright as a new penny. I knelt on the deck and backed out the four screws, one by one, and held it in my hand.
Ostrander Creek Bridge. Built 2009. F. Ostrander, County Road Commissioner.
My brother had come up behind me. I did not hear him.
“Frank,” he said. “Don’t. I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I know you didn’t. I’m not doing it for you.”
I turned the plate over in my palm. I had nothing planned. I just knew.