The Footbridge That Beat the Toll Gate

Vance

I want to be fair to Vance Tolliver, because I have lived down the road from him for nine years, and I am not going to tell you he is a monster.

He is sixty-one. He runs about forty head of cows and puts up hay on the bottom ground along the creek. His wife passed three winters ago, and he has been sharper since then, or maybe just lonelier.

Five years back, in the big flood, the old crossing was closed for two months while they replaced the culverts. Vance let everyone drive through his hay meadow that whole time.

By the end of it the meadow was rutted so bad he could not run a swather over it. He lost a cutting. Maybe two. Nobody offered to pay for it, and nobody came back with a tractor to smooth it out.

I know that because he told me. He told me on Friday morning, standing at his gate with his coffee can.

“I’m not doing it for the money, Tamsin,” he said. “I’m doing it so I’m not the only one paying for that creek this time.”

“Those kids didn’t rut your meadow,” I said.

“Their daddies did.” He looked at the coffee can. “Some of them.”

“Ardith Pyle’s kids don’t have a daddy at home,” I said. “And that’s twenty dollars out of a thirteen-dollar-an-hour job.”

He didn’t look at me. “Then she can go around.”

I gave him my twenty and drove through. I had a reason, and so did he. But mine was a four-year-old asking if she was poor, and his was a hay meadow from five years ago.

That is not the same size reason, and I think he knew it.

Coy

My husband, Coy, was working a fourteen-day hitch on a pipeline job out by Pecos, in West Texas. He had ten days left on it. I called him Friday at lunch, sitting on the tailgate of my rig truck.

“How wide is the creek at the crossing?” he said first. That is Coy. No speeches. Just numbers.

“Sixteen feet bank to bank at the narrow spot. Just upstream from where the slab was. Good rock on both sides.”

“Whose ground?”

“Ours on this side. Hub’s on the far side. Right below his mailbox.”

“Hub’ll say yes,” Coy said. “What are you going to build it out of?”

“Drill pipe,” I said. “There’s a rack of junk joints at the yard in Seminole. Four and a half inch. The pusher’s been trying to get rid of them for a year.”

He was quiet a second. I could hear trucks behind him and the wind out there, which never quits.

“Range two?” he said.

“About thirty-one feet a joint.”

“Four of those for stringers,” he said. “Lay a rig mat on each bank for your footing. Weld your cross-pieces every three feet. Deck it with oak. Rails at forty-two inches, and put uprights close enough that the little ones have something to hold.”

“I know how to build a bridge, Coy.”

“I know you do,” he said. “I’m just wishing I was there to hold the other end.”

That was as close to sweet as Coy gets on the phone in front of a pipeline crew. I sat on my tailgate and smiled at a mesquite tree like a fool.

“Call Hub,” he said. “Have him check every weld. Not because you need it. Because people will ask.”