The Covered Bridge I Swept for Twelve Years

The ring

We did not fix everything that day. Stories like this tend to end at the embrace, and real life does not.

Corliss and I talked on my back porch that afternoon after the bus left, while Josie and Denby, who had driven down on his lunch break looking like a man walking into a hearing, sat at my kitchen table eating pot roast sandwiches.

A good deal of what she said was hard to hear. She told me what it was to have a baby without her mother, to stand in that church with a child on her hip and be offered ham.

She told me about the night her water broke at thirty-one weeks and Garland drove forty miles in twenty-six minutes and sat in the hospital hallway with his hat in his lap.

I took all of it. I did not defend myself. It was the hardest work I have done, harder than hauling oak for the deck.

At the end she said, “I don’t know if I’m ready for Sunday dinners every week, Mama. I need to go slow.”

“Slow is fine,” I said. “I have spent twelve years being fast and wrong.”

She looked out across the yard toward the sycamores and the dark ridge of the bridge roof. “I’d like to come Saturday. To the bridge. Not to talk. Just to sweep.”

“Bring your own broom,” I said. “I’m particular about mine.”

She laughed, her father’s laugh, which comes up from the stomach.

They came that Saturday and the next. By June Josie was spending every other weekend in the room that used to be Corliss’s, where the pillowcase veil still lay folded in the bottom dresser drawer.

Denby came one evening with a ladder and a wrestling coach’s forearms, and by the Fourth of July the shingles on the north slope were tight as the day they went on.

He waits for the end of your sentence. I like him very much, and I told him so in a plain sentence in the middle of the yard, and he went red to the tips of his ears, and I saw where Josie got hers.

Mayor Lucan Stiles is eighty-one now and his hands shake. But I called him and asked whether he would say the words one more time, for a couple who had been married twelve years.

He said, “Ivalee Prewitt, I have been waiting twelve years for you to call me about that bridge.”

So on the last Saturday in June, at ten in the morning, there were nine of us on the Hale Creek bridge.

Corliss and Denby stood on the ring plank. Josie stood beside her mother with a bunch of orange daylilies from my yard in both fists.

Denby’s cousins came, and Bernadine Ames in a hat. Harlan Aubrey stood at the west portal, to make sure the township was represented.

And I stood at the front in my good blue dress, on a floor I had swept at five that morning with a broom I now share.

I had one thing to do before the Mayor began. I took the ring out of my coat pocket, the thin gold band from Heller’s Jewelers that went into Hale Creek and came out shining.

I had worn it every day for more than forty years and taken it off the night before. I gave it to Denby.

“This one has been in the water once,” I said. “It knows how to come back.”

Denby looked at it a long time. Then he held out his hand for Corliss’s and slid it onto her right hand, a snug fit, a thin gold line beside the plainer band she already wore.

And Josie, who cannot keep a thing to herself, said loud enough for everyone, “Grandpa would be so happy,” and the old Mayor said, “Hush, child, I haven’t started.”

He started.

When it was finished Corliss turned and held out both arms, and I stepped into them, and over her shoulder I saw the window, that square of morning light the size of a cookie sheet, and the creek gleaming beneath it, brown and quick and high.

I sweep on Saturday mornings now with no one to hide it from. I start at the east end and work toward the west, and somewhere around the window I hear a car door at the pull-off across the creek.

Not a hatchback anymore. A blue truck with a wrestling sticker in the back glass.

I do not look up from my broom. I do not need to. I know who is coming across.

She knows where I live. And I have learned, a little late, to leave every door open and to cross the creek myself.