The Covered Bridge I Swept for Twelve Years

The yellow bus

The school bus from Harlow turned into the gravel lot at twenty minutes to ten on a Tuesday in May, and I was on my knees on the bridge floor with a pry bar in one hand and a square nail in my teeth, which is where I have spent most of the last twelve springs of my life.

I want to say that first, because of what happened next. If you had asked anyone in Marrow Ford, Ohio, what kind of woman Ivalee Prewitt was that morning, they would have said the bridge lady.

Sixty-four years old, good knees for her age, a hand broom in her apron pocket and a coffee can of nails by her hip.

Dependable. A little sharp. Sweeps the Hale Creek covered bridge every week until the first hard freeze.

Nobody would have said: the woman who has not spoken to her only child in twelve years. In a town of eleven hundred you know a thing like that the way you know which farm has the bad well.

You do not bring it up at the Dollar General.

I am going to tell you what a girl of eleven in red rain boots said to me in front of twenty-two fifth graders, and I am going to tell it the way it happened and not the way it makes me look. It does not make me look good.

The bridge

The Hale Creek bridge is ninety-one feet long, built in the spring of 1869 by a man whose name is on a brass plaque I polish with vinegar on the first of every month.

It is a Burr arch truss, two great curved ribs of oak along each side holding up the roof like a pair of folded hands, and the siding has weathered to the color of a dried brick.

It sits a quarter mile from my back door, and I can see the east portal from my kitchen window in winter.

Halfway across, a window is cut into the south side, a square of daylight about the size of a cookie sheet, so a person can look down at the creek. The old people call it the kissing window.

My husband Garland was one of those boys.

I was twenty-one the spring he asked me. He was twenty-three and drove a county grader out of the road garage, and he had saved eleven months for a ring from Heller’s Jewelers in the county seat.

He walked me out to the window on a Sunday in April with the creek running high and brown underneath us, got down on one knee in his good gray slacks, took the little box from his pocket, and dropped it.

The ring slid out and rolled across the planks and fell through the gap between the third and fourth boards west of the window. We both heard it go. One small sound in the water, nine feet down.

Garland looked at the gap. Then, still in his good slacks, that man went over the rail, lowered himself down the stone abutment, and waded into Hale Creek in April up to his belt and felt through the gravel with his bare hands for twenty-two minutes by my watch.

When he came up the bank his lips were blue and his teeth were going like a sewing machine, and he held the ring up between two fingers over his head.

I said, “I will say yes when you are dry.”

He said, “I’m not asking again till I’m dry.”

We were married the next June in the Marrow Ford United Methodist Church, and for forty years that story got told at every wedding, funeral, and Fourth of July picnic in the county.

The third plank west of the window became the ring plank in our family. It is the loosest one. It wears out first, because every soul who crosses that bridge stops there to look down.

Garland replaced it himself with leftover county oak. And I have replaced it myself, every spring, for twelve years.

I will tell you why in a minute. The truth is I did not know why myself until that Tuesday in May.