The Footbridge Grandpa Built Twice

Why I Couldn’t Stop It

I know the question some of you are already asking, because I asked it myself all the way out there. Why didn’t I just make a phone call and stop him? There was nobody to call. Grandpa sold the homeplace to Brett and Kristen two years ago.

He sold it, house and six acres, at a price that was more gift than sale, because Grandma Loretta died the winter before and he couldn’t keep up the place alone. He moved into a little brick house on the edge of Warsaw.

So it was their land. It was their bridge. Kristen had every right in the world to pay a man nine hundred dollars to tear it out, and I had no right at all to stand in her yard in my scrubs and tell the man to stop.

And my brother was in Mississippi.

Brett runs a line crew for the electric co-op out of Burgaw. A string of tornadoes had laid down poles for forty miles in north Mississippi, and co-ops all over the South had sent crews. Brett had been gone nine days, working sixteen hour shifts in red clay.

He didn’t know. I could tell from Kristen’s face that he didn’t know.

The Bridge My Daddy Crossed

Grandpa built that bridge in the summer of 1971.

He came home from Vietnam in 1969, a Navy Seabee, a builder third class with a bad ear and a habit of measuring everything twice. He married Grandma Loretta in 1965 before he shipped out, and by 1971 they had two children, my daddy Elwood, who was five, and my aunt Inez, who was three.

The homeplace sits on the far side of the branch from the state road. The farm path goes the long way around, almost a mile, with a low spot that flooded every spring. Daddy was starting first grade that fall, and the bus stopped on the paved road.

So Grandpa built a footbridge across the branch, sixteen feet bank to bank, out of juniper.

That is what we call Atlantic white cedar down here in eastern North Carolina. Juniper. The old boatbuilders over on Harkers Island built their boats out of it because it doesn’t rot and it doesn’t swell much and it smells like a closet your great aunt kept her good linens in.

He set two lightwood sills, one on each bank, cut from the heart of an old longleaf stump so full of resin you could light it with a match. He laid two juniper stringers across them and pegged the decking down with white oak pegs he split and shaved himself.

“A screw rusts and lets go,” he used to tell us. “A peg swells and holds.”

He learned that from a chief petty officer in his battalion, an old man from Harkers Island who had built boats before the war. When the bolts didn’t come on the supply run, the chief taught the young builders to peg a timber joint the way his daddy pegged boat frames.

Daddy crossed that bridge to the bus every school morning for twelve years, with Aunt Inez right behind him. Brett and I crossed it every summer we stayed with Grandma Loretta, to catch tadpoles and fall in.

Grandpa replaced the decking once, in 1994. He replaced the handrail twice. The stringers and the sills were the ones he put down in 1971.