The Footbridge Grandpa Built Twice

Notches and Pegs

The stringers sit in notches cut into the top of each sill, so they can’t slide or roll. Grandpa’s old notches were still there in the lightwood, worn smooth and dark, and the new stringers had to be cut to fit them exactly.

He made me measure four times. He made me mark with a knife instead of a pencil, because a pencil line is a sixteenth wide. He made me cut the shoulders with a handsaw and chop out the waste a little at a time.

“Not yet.”

“It’s close.”

“Close is for horseshoes. Take another shaving.”

When the first stringer finally dropped into its notch, it went down with a sound like a door closing in a quiet house. Grandpa just nodded at it, and my eyes stung for no reason I could explain.

Then the pegs.

You bore a hole through the stringer and down into the sill, an inch wide. Grandpa made me bore the first one by hand with the old brace and bit. It took twenty minutes. After that he looked at my cordless drill and sighed.

“Use the drill for the holes,” he said. “I’m old. I’m not a fool.”

But no screws. Not one.

There’s a trick the chief taught him called a draw bore. You bore the hole in the stringer about an eighth of an inch off from the hole in the sill, toward the joint. When you drive the peg, it bends to go through both, and it pulls the joint tighter than any clamp.

“Same as the landing,” he said. “Only now it matters.”

I knelt on the stringer and drove the first peg with a wooden mallet. It went in tight, and tighter, and then it stopped, and the joint under my knees drew together and closed. I felt it close.

“There,” Grandpa said. “Now it’s a bridge. Everything after this is just boards.”

The Second Saturday

It rained most of the week, and on Saturday the branch was running brown and fast right up under the stringers. I parked by the woods and carried the decking boards down a few at a time and stacked them on the bank closer to the work.

I was about halfway through the stack when I looked up and saw the twins standing at the top of the slope.

Sam and Jack are nine. They have Brett’s dark hair and Kristen’s freckles. Sam reads everything and Jack climbs everything. They had their hands jammed in their pockets, watching us the way boys watch a fishing cork.

Grandpa saw them too. He didn’t call them. He waited.

They edged down the slope about ten feet. Then another ten.

“Morning,” Grandpa said finally, without turning around.

“Morning, Granddaddy,” Sam said.

“Your mama know you’re down here?”

They looked at each other. “She said we could watch,” Jack said. “She said don’t get in the way.”

“Well,” Grandpa said. “Boards don’t carry themselves. Either one of you in the way?”

They both said no at the same time, very fast.

“Then those boards need to come down here to Aunt Leanne, one at a time, and you walk them, you don’t run them, because if you run with a board on this bank you’ll be in the branch with it. Go on.”

They went. Sam carried his boards like they were made of glass. Jack carried his like they had personally insulted him. Every board that came down, Grandpa checked for a split before he let me lay it.

Somewhere in the middle of it, Jack stopped on the bank with a board on his shoulder and looked at the new stringers, and then at the pile of old gray ones by the woods.

“Mama said the old one was rotten,” he said. “She said I almost fell through it.”

I set my mallet down. I’d heard about it from Brett on the phone, but not the whole thing.

“Did you?” I asked.

“Last fall.” He pulled up the leg of his jeans and showed me a white scar on his shin about three inches long. “My foot went through a board, the one at the end. I had to get four stitches. Mama cried more than I did.”

Grandpa had gone very still in his chair.

“Which end?” he asked.

Jack pointed to the far bank.

Grandpa looked at that far sill a long time. “That’s where the soft end was,” he said quietly. To me, not to the boys. “On the far stringer. I knew that board was getting thin. I meant to change it last year and I didn’t.”

He didn’t say anything else about it. But he made me double up the pegs on the last three boards on the far end, and he leaned out of his chair to check every one.