The Footbridge That Beat the Toll Gate

The Gate

I turned around to walk back up to the road, and that’s when I saw him.

Vance was standing at his gate. Not on his tailgate. At the gate, on foot, with one hand on the top bar.

He had watched the whole thing.

Nobody drove through his pasture that morning. Nobody pulled up to his gatepost. Nobody had a twenty in hand. The coffee can just sat there on the post in the sun, empty.

The parents started walking back up our road toward their houses. Not one of them looked over at him. Not one waved. Out here, that is about the worst thing you can do to a man. Just not see him.

I didn’t feel good about it. I want to be honest about that. I had wanted the kids to get to the bus, and they had. That was all I wanted.

But I didn’t feel bad enough to walk over there either. Not that morning.

Tuesday

Tuesday morning, the coffee can was gone from his gatepost.

Wednesday morning, the chain was off the gate and the gate was standing wide open. A few trucks went through slow, and nobody stopped at the post. The road crews from the county had already come out and put a barricade up on the old crossing, and everyone with a truck was taking the long way around until the county could get something temporary in.

The kids walked across the bridge every morning. Hub stood at the mailbox with his dog biscuits. Wanda lifted two fingers off the wheel.

Thursday afternoon, Vance walked down to Ardith’s place.

I know because Ardith called me. She was crying a little, the angry kind.

“He gave it back,” she said. “Every bit of it. Forty dollars. In an envelope, with my name on it. He didn’t say anything. He just handed it to me in my own yard and walked off.”

“Did you take it?”

“Course I took it,” she said. “I’ve got three kids. But Tamsin, I didn’t want to. I wanted to throw it at him.”

“I know.”

“Josie asked him if he was poor too,” she said. “Because he had to give it back.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. And after a minute, so did Ardith.

The Meadow

That Saturday, I took the long way around and drove up to Vance’s hay barn. He was sitting on his tailgate.

“I didn’t come to fuss at you,” I said.

“Didn’t figure you did.” He looked down at his boots. “I gave everybody their money back. All of it. Took me most of the week to figure out who paid what.”

“I heard.”

“I was wrong,” he said. He said it to his boots. “I’m not going to stand here and say I wasn’t. That meadow’s been eating at me five years, and I took it out on a bunch of kids.”

I looked over at his bottom ground. You could still see the old ruts from five years ago, grown over in grass, like scars under a shirt.

“Coy gets home Monday,” I said. “He’s got a buddy with a box blade. If you’ll let us, we’ll come smooth that meadow out for you before you cut it.”

He looked at me then. Really looked.

“What’s that going to cost me?” he said.

“Same as the bridge,” I said.

He was quiet a long time. Then he nodded, and he wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist like he had dust in them, and I let him have the dust.

Coy and his buddy smoothed the meadow the next Saturday. Vance stood out there with them the whole afternoon and pointed at every low spot. Then he cooked hamburgers for everybody on a grill made out of a cut-down propane tank, and he didn’t charge a soul.