The Footbridge Grandpa Built Twice

What I Saw That Day

I had come out that first Saturday feeling about as right as a person can feel. But a little boy had put his foot through a board, and his mama had sat in the emergency room in Kenansville while they sewed him up. Then a man stood on her bank and told her the whole thing was rotten.

I would have believed him, too, if I’d been her. I would have been scared enough to pay him twice.

That doesn’t make what she did right. She should have waited for Brett, or called Grandpa, who would have fixed that one board for the price of a board. But it made her a scared mother, not a mean woman.

By the end of that Saturday, half the decking was down. The boys were filthy and soaked to the knees and arguing about who had carried more boards. Sam had counted. Jack had not, and said so.

Before they went up to the house, Grandpa reached in his canvas bag and gave each one of them a peg. Just a white oak peg, shaved smooth.

“Those are spares,” he said. “Next Saturday you bring them back and you can drive them yourself.”

They walked up the slope holding those pegs like they’d been handed a dollar each.

The Third Saturday

Brett came home on Wednesday. He called me Thursday night and said he and Kristen had talked, and that I should just come on Saturday like always.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

“It went,” he said. “She’s not proud of it. Let her come at it her own way, Lee.”

Saturday morning, Brett was waiting on the bank in his work boots and a co-op shirt, looking like a man who’d slept four days out of fourteen. He hugged me hard and then hugged Grandpa, who let him for almost three whole seconds.

“I’ll do the rail posts,” Brett said. “You do the boards.”

“Posts set into the outside of the stringer,” Grandpa said. “Notched, pegged twice, with a knee brace. Don’t you set them in the ground. Ground rots a post.”

“Yes, sir.”

That is the thing about my brother. He climbs poles in lightning storms for a living, and he still says yes sir to Grandpa like he’s twelve.

The twins came down without being asked, each holding out his peg. Grandpa marked them each a board on the far end and let them drive their own pegs while I held the board and Brett held their collars.

Sam hit his peg nine times, very carefully, counting out loud. Jack hit his four times so hard the mallet bounced out of his hands and went in the branch. Brett fished it out with a rake.