The Footbridge That Beat the Toll Gate

Monday Morning

The bus comes at seven-thirty. By seven-ten on Monday morning, there were fourteen children standing on our side of the creek.

Ardith’s three. Easton. The grandmother’s boy. Two little sisters from the house with the blue shutters. The brothers from the double-wide. And the rest, in their bright backpacks, the color of every crayon in the box.

It was a beautiful morning. The sun was up over the oaks, the banks had gone green almost overnight with the rain, and the creek was down to a muddy trickle under the planks.

The parents stood up on the road behind us with their coffee. Nobody said much. A couple of them had their phones out, but mostly they just watched.

Across the creek, on the gravel road, the yellow bus came around the bend and stopped by Hub’s mailbox. Wanda, who has driven that route for twenty-two years, set the brake and opened the doors and just sat there with her hands on the wheel.

Hub was standing at the mailbox with his heeler and his can of dog biscuits, the same as every morning.

I was wearing my navy work shirt, the fire-resistant one. My hood was still flipped up on my head from habit, because I had touched up one last plate at first light. My braid was down my back.

I walked to the end of the bridge and turned around.

“Single file,” I said. “One hand on the rail. Nobody runs.”

The First Crossing

Easton went first. He was supposed to, because he is mine and because he had asked me every night that weekend if he could.

But he stopped at the first plank and turned around.

Josie Pyle was standing right behind him. Four years old, with a pink backpack nearly as big as she was, and her lip pushed out the way it does when she is deciding whether to be brave.

She was looking at the water through the cracks in the deck.

Easton held out his hand.

He didn’t say anything. He just held it out, the way you’d hold out a hand to a colt. Josie looked at it for a long second. Then she took it.

And my nine-year-old son walked her across that creek one plank at a time, with her little hand in his and her other hand on the rail, talking to her the whole way. I couldn’t hear what he said. I asked him later, and he wouldn’t tell me.

I heard Ardith make a sound behind me on the road. Just one, like something caught.

The rest of them came after. Fourteen kids, in a line, with their bright backpacks bobbing, their sneakers loud on the oak planks, walking across a bridge their parents and neighbors had built out of junk pipe and a busted rig mat in one weekend.

At the far end Hub stood by the bank and gave every one of them a dog biscuit for the heeler, the same as always. Then they climbed the bank and got on the bus.

Wanda didn’t close the doors right away. She leaned out and looked at me across the creek. She lifted two fingers off the wheel the way people do out here when they pass you on a dirt road.

Then the bus pulled away, and it was quiet.