The Footbridge Grandpa Built Twice

Watching It Go

The man looked from Kristen to me and back. “Ma’am?”

“Finish it,” Kristen said.

I didn’t argue. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t going to come out ugly, and I didn’t want Grandpa to hear his granddaughter and his grandson’s wife going at each other in the yard he used to mow.

So we watched. The man pulled the last six boards. He hooked his chain around the downstream sill and tried to pull it, and the loader’s tracks spun in the wet clay, and the sill didn’t move one inch.

He tried again. Nothing.

“That’s lightwood,” Grandpa said quietly. It was the first thing he’d said since I got there. “It’s set three feet down on a bed of rock. You’ll not pull that.”

The man unhooked his chain and wiped his face. “I’ll leave them, then. They won’t hurt anything.”

He loaded what he could onto his trailer and hauled it off. The stringers and the old decking stayed in a pile by the woods, because he said he’d come back with a bigger trailer and nobody had paid him extra for the burning.

Kristen went back up the steps and inside. I heard the screen door, and then nothing.

Grandpa stood there another minute. Then he walked down to the edge of the branch and put his hand on top of the near sill, flat, the way you’d put your hand on a horse’s neck.

“Well,” he said. “That’s that.”

I drove him home. He didn’t say a word the whole eleven miles. When I pulled into his little driveway in Warsaw he sat in the passenger seat a long time with the door open and the pollen blowing in.

“It was a good bridge,” he said finally.

“It is a good bridge,” I said. “The sills are still there.”

He looked at me then. He has very pale blue eyes, and there is something in them when he is thinking about a job that I have seen my whole life and never had a name for.

“Sills are the hard part,” he said.

The Call From the Parking Lot

I called Brett that night from the clinic parking lot. I’d gone back to finish my shift, and I sat on the tailgate under the security light with moths banging into it and dialed my brother in Mississippi.

He answered on the fourth ring. I could hear a generator and men talking behind him.

“Lee. What’s wrong.”

I told him straight, without making Kristen sound worse than she was. When I finished, he didn’t say anything for so long I thought the call had dropped.

“Brett?”

“I’m here.” His voice was flat and tired. “She told me she was going to have it looked at. She said a man told her it was rotten. I said wait till I get home.”

“She didn’t wait.”

“No.” He let out a breath. “Was it? Rotten?”

I thought about that before I answered, because I had walked over to the pile before I left and looked. “One stringer had a soft end where it sat on the far bank. About a foot of it. The rest was sound. The decking was gray but it was sound.”

“So she wasn’t all the way wrong.”

“She wasn’t all the way wrong,” I said. “But she wasn’t right to do it without you, and she wasn’t right to do it in front of him.”

Another long quiet. A truck backed up somewhere behind him with its beeper going.

“Can I put it back?” I asked. “On your land. With Grandpa. My money, my time. I won’t ask Kristen for a thing.”

“Lee.” I heard him swallow. “Put it back. Take Grandpa with you. I’ll be home in two weeks and I’ll talk to her before then.”

“Don’t fight with her over the phone.”

“I’m not going to fight with her,” he said. “I’m going to tell her my sister and my grandpa are coming out Saturday, and they’re welcome, and I expect them treated that way.”