The Sidewalk We Poured Twice

Gus

The truck came up Elm Street at nine-twenty, ten minutes early. Gus backed it up to the end of the walk the way he always does, slow and sure, watching the mirrors and not me, and set the brake.

He climbed down from the cab and did not go to the controls.

He walked over to the forms and stood there with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the clean dirt and the fresh stakes. His face was red from the cold and from something else.

“I saw it happen,” he said. “Yesterday. I was coming back up Elm empty from a footing job on the north side. I saw the pickup go up over the apron. I saw it go down your walk. I was behind it at the stop sign after.”

I did not say anything. Brody stood very still.

“I wasn’t going to say anything to you,” Gus said. “It’s not my business who’s married to who. But this morning, Clint was at the plant at six-thirty, picking up a ticket for a garage floor out by Rothsay. There were eight or nine contractors in the scale house waiting on tickets.”

He took his hands out of his pockets and looked at Brody. Not at me. At Brody.

“I walked in there and I said it out loud, so everybody could hear. I said, Clint, that was your pickup on the Brandvold walk yesterday. I watched you do it. That boy is nineteen years old, and that was his first job, and that walk was for a widow who broke her wrist on the old one.”

“What did he say?” Brody asked. His voice cracked a little at the end.

“Nothing,” Gus said. “Not one word. He stood there with his ticket in his hand. Then he walked out to his truck and sat in the cab for about ten minutes before he left. Nobody in that room said a thing to him. Not one of them.”

Gus looked down at the forms again.

“I have poured for that man for twenty years,” he said. “I knew his dad before him. His dad would have taken a belt to him. I figured somebody ought to say it to his face, and I figured it shouldn’t be you.”

Then he went back to the truck and swung the chute around. “Where do you want it, son?” he called, and Brody pointed at the far end, and we poured.

The second pour

The second pour was better than the first. I have thought about why. Part of it was that the base was compacted twice now.

Part of it was that Brody had done it all once already, a day before, and his hands remembered.

Mostly, I think, it was that he was not nervous anymore. Something had been taken from him and he had gotten up at dawn and taken it back.

A man who has done that does not shake when he runs a bull float.

He screeded. I ran the chute. Gus fed it out slow, a few feet at a time, the way you do for a finisher you respect.

When the drum was empty, Gus washed his chute off at the curb, shook Brody’s hand, and drove away without another word.

We floated it. We edged it. We cut the joints every four feet, straight as a fence line.

The sun was still low enough in the trees that it came across the wet surface flat and gold and showed every ripple.

I knelt on my knee board at the end by the street, my gray cap pulled down against the sun, and steel troweled the last few feet while Brody stood behind me with the bull float.

Ilse was back on her step with her coffee. The pile of broken chunks by the curb was the only sign there had ever been a first pour.

Then the broom finish. Then we waited, because you have to wait for the concrete to tell you when it is ready.

About an hour after the last trowel pass, the surface had firmed up to where it would take a mark and hold it. I handed Brody a sixteen penny nail out of my apron.

He knelt by the corner nearest Ilse’s front step, where the walk turned in toward her door.

He wrote his initials first, slow and careful. Then the date. He went over each letter twice so it would be deep enough to last.

Ilse came down off her step with her cane to look. She bent over it, slow, and read it out loud.

Then she straightened up, put her free hand on Brody’s shoulder and left it there.

“My husband would have liked you,” she said.

Brody did not answer her. He could not. He just nodded, and wiped his face with the back of his glove, and left a streak of gray across his cheek that he did not know about until I told him that evening.