The Footbridge Grandpa Built Twice

Cedar and Savings

I am a veterinary technician. I make about what you’d think. I had a little over three thousand dollars saved for a newer truck, and on Friday I drove out past Beulaville to a sawmill a man runs behind his house off Highway 24.

He had juniper, not much, from a load of logs off a cutover in Pender County. He had two timbers sawed six by eight and eighteen feet long, and planed red cedar for the decking.

He figured it out on the back of a feed store receipt with a carpenter’s pencil. Two stringers, two sleepers, forty decking boards cut four feet long, and posts for one side. “Call it eleven hundred and I’ll bring it out Saturday morning,” he said. “That’s with hauling.”

I wrote him a check. It was the most money I had ever spent on anything that wasn’t a vehicle or a vet bill.

Daddy called from Florida that night. Mama and Daddy moved down near Ocala when he retired from the maintenance shop at the hog farm, and Brett had called him. Daddy doesn’t talk on the phone much, and he didn’t say much now.

“I’m sending you two hundred dollars,” he said. “Don’t argue with me. I crossed that thing four thousand times.”

The First Saturday

The sawmill man brought the cedar out at seven. He laid the two stringers in the grass by the branch and stacked the decking on the bank. The whole bank smelled like a cedar chest just opened.

Grandpa came out in my truck with his lawn chair, the old webbed kind Grandma Loretta bought at the Rose’s in Warsaw around 1985. He unfolded it on the bank six feet from the near sill and sat down like a man taking his seat at a ballgame.

He had a canvas bag in his lap. In it were a brace and an inch auger bit older than my daddy, a drawknife, a coffee can full of white oak pegs he’d been shaving every night that week on his carport, and a folding rule.

“You’re going to do the work,” he said. “I’m going to tell you when you’re doing it wrong.”

“That’s fine.”

“It’s going to be often.”

“That’s fine, too.”

“First thing is the landing,” he said. “A little platform on this bank in front of the sill, so you’ve got somewhere to stand that isn’t mud. You build it first, and you learn the pegs where falling down only costs you your pride.”

So I built the landing. Two cedar sleepers set level in the dirt, and a dozen boards across them, right there on the bank beside the water. I knelt on the boards and drove a white oak peg into every end while he leaned out of his chair and pointed at the next one.

“Hit it like you mean it,” he said. “Not like you’re knocking on a door.”