The Covered Bridge I Swept for Twelve Years

The Thursday phone call

Corliss called on a Thursday night, the tenth of April, nine days before the wedding. I was on the line with Bernadine about the cake knife. I clicked over.

“Mama, are you sitting down?”

“I am standing at the counter with a pot of beans. What is it?”

“I am getting married on Saturday.”

I thought she meant the nineteenth. I actually said, “I know, honey, I wrote it on the calendar.” And she said, in the steadiest voice I had ever heard come out of her, “Not that Saturday. This one. Ten in the morning, at the Hale Creek bridge.

“Mayor Stiles will do it. Daddy is going to walk me across. About twenty people, and then a picnic. It will take fifteen minutes.” I heard her breathe. “I want you there more than anybody. Will you come?”

The beans were boiling over onto the burner.

What I said, God forgive me, was this:

“The bridge. Your father’s bridge and mine. You want to stand on the one place in this county that means something to this family and rush through your vows in fifteen minutes like you were paying a parking ticket.”

“Mama.”

“A bridge wedding is a picnic with a license, Corliss. You cheapened your own vows, and you cheapened ours. If you want to throw away the wedding I made for you, you can do it without me.”

She was quiet so long I thought the line had gone dead. Then she said, “Then I won’t ask you again, Mama,” in exactly the voice her father had used in the kitchen doorway. And she hung up.

I clicked back to Bernadine and said I would call her back. I did not, and by Friday noon all of Marrow Ford knew.