The Footbridge Grandpa Built Twice

When I set one crooked, he made me pull it with the claw and drive it again. By the time the landing was done it was nearly noon, and my peg holes were straight.

Then he pointed at the stringers. “Next thing. Those weigh about a hundred and eighty pounds apiece wet. You can’t carry them across, and you’re not going to drop them in the branch and wade them over and wreck your back. How do we get them there.”

That was how he taught me everything, my whole childhood. He never told me how. He asked me how, and then he waited.

I looked at the branch. It was running slow and brown, the color of strong tea, about twelve feet across at the water and sixteen bank to bank, under the tall loblollies that grow all along it. The light came down through the pines in patches and moved on the water.

I looked at the biggest pine on the far bank.

“Come along,” I said. “Chain it to that pine. Lay two poles across from sill to sill, grease the tops, and skid the stringers across on the poles.”

He didn’t smile, because he doesn’t, but he nodded once. “Where’s your come along?”

“In the truck.”

“Then why are you still standing here?”

It took me all afternoon. I cut two straight sweetgum poles, laid them across from sill to sill, and greased the tops with axle grease. I waded across in my rubber boots and wrapped the chain twice around the big pine with a scrap of carpet under it to spare the bark.

Then I hooked the come along to the end of the first stringer and started cranking.

It moved three inches a pull. It took two hundred and forty pulls to get the first one across, and twice the stringer slewed sideways on the poles and I had to lever it straight with a pry bar.

Grandpa never got up out of that chair. But he never stopped talking, either.

“Ease off. Ease off. Let it settle. Now take it.”

“Your chain’s walking on the tree. Fix it before it walks off.”

“Don’t stand there. If that hook lets go, where’s it going? It’s going right where your head is. Stand to the side, Leanne.”

I stood to the side.

Kristen came out on the porch once in the middle of the day with a basket of laundry. She looked down the slope at us for a long minute. Then she went back in without hanging anything.

By the time the second stringer was across, the sun had gone over toward the far pines and the pollen was drifting down through it like snow. I sat on the bank next to Grandpa’s chair with my arms shaking and drank half a jug of water without stopping.

“Now,” he said. “The notches.”