The new low-water crossing opened in April. Five months after the flood. A month early.
It’s a concrete slab with two big culvert pipes underneath, so the water can run under the road instead of over it. Gerald Pruitt stamped the drawings. Hub and Vance and I sat at Vance’s kitchen table three Saturdays in a row arguing about where to put the culverts, and Vance won two out of three arguments, which I still haven’t forgiven him for.
The county didn’t tear down the footbridge.
Gerald said it was too good to tear down. So they made it permanent. It’s still there, a little ways upstream from the new crossing. The county put a little green sign on a post at the end of it. Somebody at the road department must have a sense of humor, because the sign says: MERCER-McCREADY FOOT CROSSING. EST. BY NEIGHBORS.
Hub cried when he saw it. He told everybody it was allergies. It was April. Nobody believed him.
The kids still walk across it some mornings even though they don’t have to. They say it’s faster to the bus than going around by the road. That isn’t true. It’s about the same. They just like it.
Ardith got a new job in the spring, cleaning offices for the county courthouse. Sixteen dollars an hour, with health insurance. Gerald Pruitt’s wife told her about the opening. She says the first thing she bought with her first paycheck was new tires for the Buick. The second thing was a pair of light-up sneakers for Tilly, pink, just like Maddie’s.
Vance’s gate stays open. He took the chain off entirely and hung it in his barn. The coffee can, the red Folgers one with NEIGHBORS painted on the side, sits on his kitchen windowsill next to his wife’s picture. He keeps Tilly’s drawing folded inside it.
In June, the hay came in thick and green in his meadow. There wasn’t a single rut in it. That Saturday, about twenty people from our road showed up at his place with work gloves and pickup trucks and helped him get the whole first cutting in before a storm rolled through. Easton and Bryce threw bales onto the trailer until they could barely lift their arms. Ardith brought sandwiches. Pastor Dorsey drove the truck.
Nobody asked to be paid. Nobody kept a ledger.
Well. Vance did. He wrote every single name down in his little spiral notebook, the one that used to say TOLLS on the cover.
He’d crossed it out. Now, in black marker, it says OWED.
“What’s that mean?” I asked him, when he showed me.
“Means I owe every one of you,” he said. “And I intend to pay it back. One favor at a time.”
That evening, after the hay was in, I walked down to the creek alone. The sun was going down. The water was low and clear and gold, running over the rocks.
I stood in the middle of the bridge, right over the weld Hub made me do over. I put my hand on the low rail. The one I’d built at the height of a four-year-old’s hand.
I thought about Tilly asking her mama if they were poor now, because they had to pay to go to school. I thought about Vance tapping that coffee can twice every morning. I thought about my son standing on the first plank with his hand held out, palm up, waiting.
People out here like to say a bridge is just a way to get from one side to the other.
That’s true, I guess. But it isn’t the steel that gets you across. It isn’t the oak. It isn’t even the welds, though Hub would argue with me about that.
It’s whoever’s standing on the first plank, holding out their hand.
Up the hill, Vance’s porch light came on. A minute later, so did Ardith’s, on the far side of the road. Then Hub’s. Then mine, where Travis and Easton were waiting with a steak on the grill. Medium rare.
I walked home across the bridge.
One plank at a time.
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