I had the steel and I had the oak. What I didn’t have was a second set of eyes.
Every weld I’d ever made on a pipeline got X-rayed. Every single one. An inspector would come along behind me and look at the film, and if there was a void or a crack or a little bit of slag trapped in the metal, he’d mark it, and I’d cut it out and do it again. That’s how you keep a pipeline from blowing up under somebody’s house.
There’s no X-ray machine for a footbridge in the country. But there was Hub McCready.
Hub lives a quarter mile down the road from us, in a little white house with a big garden and a blue heeler named Buster who thinks he’s a person. Hub welded on drilling rigs for forty years. He’s seventy-seven now. His hands shake a little when he holds a coffee cup. But when he looks at a weld, they don’t shake at all.
I walked down to his house that afternoon. He was out in his garden pulling up the last of the tomato plants the flood had knocked flat.
“Hub, I need help.”
“You need help with what?”
“I’m going to build a footbridge across the creek. Out of drill pipe. For the kids.”
He set down his tomato plant. He pulled off his work gloves one finger at a time. Then he looked at me for a long time, the way he used to look at Travis when Travis was a nineteen-year-old roughneck who didn’t know anything.
“Because of Vance?”
“Because of Vance.”
“Who’s welding it?”
“Me.”
“Who’s checking it?”
“I was hoping you would.”
He looked down the hill toward the creek. Then he looked at Buster, who was sitting by the gate, wagging.
“Well, Buster,” he said. “I guess we’ve got a job.”
That night I sat at my kitchen table with a pencil and a pad of graph paper and drew out the whole thing. Four joints of pipe laid side by side across the creek, about a foot apart, resting on concrete footings poured into the bank on each side. Cross-bracing welded underneath every four feet so the pipes couldn’t spread. The rig mats cut down into planks and laid across the top, bolted to steel straps welded onto the pipe. Pipe handrails on both sides, three and a half feet high, so the little ones would have something to hold.
Hub looked over my drawing the next morning with his reading glasses on the end of his nose.
“Your footings,” he said. “How deep?”
“Three feet.”
“Make them four. That bank’s soft after this rain.”
“Four.”
“Your cross-bracing. Every four feet?”
“Every four feet.”
“Make it every three. Kids jump. You’ll see.”
I made it every three.
Wednesday, I paid Vance twenty dollars and drove Easton through his meadow and dug footings on our side of the creek. Thursday, I paid him twenty dollars and dug footings on the far bank, wading across the creek where it shallowed out above the crossing with the water up to my thighs and a shovel over my shoulder. Friday, I paid him twenty dollars, and a neighbor named Royce Gentry came down with a mixer on a trailer, and we poured the concrete.
Every morning, Vance tapped the can twice. Every morning, I pushed in a twenty. And every morning, he looked down the hill at the hole in the bank and the stack of gray pipe and didn’t say a word.
That was $80 I’d paid him by Friday.
Ardith had paid him $80 too.
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