The Covered Bridge I Swept for Twelve Years

The twelfth of April

Now I have to tell you about the sweeping, and the date.

I told the township I did the big spring clean in the second week of April, thaw permitting.

It was the twelfth of April. Every year, twelve years running, I was on that bridge before the sun cleared the Harlow ridge with a push broom and a thermos of coffee.

A woman can fool herself on a surprising scale if she gets up early enough and keeps her hands busy.

I would sweep from the east end to the west, and at the window I would stop at the ring plank and look down at the water, and not allow myself to think about anything, and think about everything.

There is something else I have to confess.

On the west side, across the creek from my house, there is a small gravel pull-off where the Harlow road bends.

Hunters park there in the fall. Some years, on the morning of the twelfth, a white hatchback sat in that pull-off with its engine running, a pale shape behind a fogged windshield.

It was there when I started and gone when I looked up from my last row of planks.

I noticed it five times, maybe six. I thought: someone up early with a camera. A courting couple. And I went back to my broom.

I never walked over. It would have taken a minute and a half. I will not excuse that. I had made myself a person who could not do it, the way you can talk yourself out of a doctor’s appointment year after year until you are no longer sure you have the right to make it.

Fifth grade

In March a woman called the house. Her name was Odessa Larkin, she taught fifth grade in Harlow, forty minutes up the highway, and her class was doing Ohio history.

One of her students had begged for a field trip to a covered bridge, a very particular one, and the county tourism office listed me as caretaker of Hale Creek.

Could she bring the class the third Tuesday in May? Perhaps I could give a little talk?

I said bring them in two groups of eleven so the floor isn’t carrying too much weight. I did not ask which student had begged.

So there I was that Tuesday, finishing the ring plank, a fresh piece of white oak, still pale and a little proud of itself. The bus doors folded open and I heard a lot of voices at once, the sound of children let out of a box.

I got up, brushed my knees, and took off my gloves.

Miss Larkin was a thin young woman with a lanyard and a clipboard, and she shook my hand and thanked me. Behind her came the children in two ragged lines, and a few chaperones in sweatshirts and sunglasses.

That is how I missed her. I did not see the woman in the green jacket who stepped down last and stood by the back wheel with a canvas bag over her shoulder and her face turned toward the creek.

Her hair was cut shorter than I remembered. She stood very still. I did not look at her at all.

I did look at the girl.

She was near the back of the first group, eleven years old, with a mop of chin-length curls and ears that stuck out and red rain boots on a day with no rain in it.

Her hands were pushed into the pockets of a yellow coat. She was looking at nothing but me, not smiling, the way a person looks when she is adding something up.

And her ears stuck out a little from under her hair, in a way I knew.

A thought went through me and I put it out the way you put out a match. There are plenty of children with ears.

“Good morning, boys and girls,” I said. “My name is Mrs. Prewitt, and I look after this bridge.”

I told them about the oak that came down the creek by raft in 1869. I had them put their palms against the old timber and feel how smooth it was, polished by a hundred and fifty years of weather and elbows.

Then I walked them to the middle.

“This,” I said, and put a hand on the south wall, “is the window. Now, the old story says that if you go to a covered bridge with someone you are sweet on, and you stop at the middle window…”

“My mom got married right here,” a voice said.