第16章 The Repairing

The mill sent its flatbed at seven on the Saturday with four men in the back and the racks of oak roped down with the same rope that had been on them for three years. Miles had spent four days telling the town what was going to happen and four days being told that he was a seventeen-year-old with a torch and a bad attitude, and the four days had ended on Thursday afternoon with a man at the feed store saying, out loud, in a queue, that if anybody could get the bend mended it was that lad, and after that it had gone the way water goes down a channel. They started at the west end because the west end was the good end, and because the far bank was flat and you could get a lorry to within six feet of it, and because nobody had ever said out loud that the far bank was the mill's side and the near bank was nobody's, and everybody understood it. Miles had the order in his head and wrote it on the back of the council notice with a stub of pencil. Take up the two dark planks. Cut the fourth one out. Splice the two stringers where they had gone soft at the waterline, four feet of new oak each, bolted through and lagged. The rail posts were sound, so the rail posts stayed, and the rail came off and went back on new. New ropes, new decking, eleven feet of it, and the whole thing recorded in a book afterward because it was going to be a thing on a map now and things on maps are written down. The old man from the mill with the file sat on the bank with a pencil behind his ear and wrote the measurements out loud as they were called, and after an hour he had a page of numbers and a page of swear words, and after two hours he had neither and was helping carry. They took the two dark planks up at half past eight, and the smell came off them, and there was a silence across the whole bank that Miles felt in his teeth. Forty years of waterlogged oak comes up smelling of a swamp. The fourth plank came out whole. They cut it in two on the bank and put the two halves in the fire, and it burned the way green wood burns, all smoke and no flame, and every man on that bank stopped what he was doing and watched it go. The stringers took until the middle of the second day. The bolt holes were a problem, because the old holes were threaded out of true by fifty years of somebody leaning on a rail, and you cannot put a bolt into a hole that is not straight. Miles and the man from the mill yard fought that for three hours with a brace and a drift and a lot of language, and the solution, in the end, was a length of pipe and a lot of patience and one broken rib that the man from the mill yard did not mention and Miles did not either, sitting afterwards on the bank with the pipe in his lap, both of them breathing hard. They got a stringer in on the Monday. By the Wednesday the deck was framed and the whole shape of the thing was there, and it stood over the water higher and squarer than the old one had ever been, and people came to look at it, which is the point of a bridge. Wren's father turned up on the Tuesday with a coil of hemp and a folding rule he had had since he was a boy, and worked the ropes, and did not speak to anybody for two days, and then on the Wednesday he asked the man from the mill yard a technical question about seizing, and they were friends again by Thursday. Miles's father turned up on the second day. He came down the mill road at a quarter past seven in the morning with his own tool roll, on foot, past forty men who were standing about waiting for a truck that was not coming because somebody had put a bed in the road, and he set the roll down on the bank, unrolled it, and picked up a hammer, and worked. He worked from the far bank. That was the arrangement, and nobody queried it, and it held for six days, and on the sixth day the far side of the job came round to the middle and there was no arrangement left to hide behind. On the sixth day his son gave him a bar with a cracked handle, and the old man turned it over, looked at the crack, and handed back the sound one without a word, and they worked side by side for two hours. At half past three on that Friday, with the deck open and the rain coming in from the west, Miles put his hand flat on the middle of the near stringer and felt it move a little under his palm, and his father, on the other side of the gap, watching the same thing happen, said one sentence. "Rope it off at both ends and leave the rope up a week." Miles stopped with his hand on the wood. "Twelve inches of slack on the near post, one turn and a half hitch, and a weight in the bottom so that nobody can lift it in passing." His father did not look up. "And then it is finished, and we can lay the deck and forget about it. It is what I have always said to you about that plank and you never once listened to me." "You have never said that to me before." "No," his father said, and set the wrench down on the bank, and picked up a different one, and did not look at him again that afternoon. They laid the deck from the middle out, because that is the only way to lay a deck and get the gap where you want it. Eleven boards, six each side of the middle joint, and the old boards that came up at the west end, the sound ones, went back in at the sides, and the two dark ones went in the fire. And at the end of the second board from the east end they put back the last dry plank of the ruin, the one that had stayed dry through the flood, the one that had held the bottles. It was the only board on the whole bridge that had never been wet, and there was no argument about it, and the old man from the mill with the pencil wrote RETAINED ORIGINAL in the book and said, out of the side of his mouth, that a board like that was worth writing down. Wren took the book off him and wrote SEDGWICK in the margin underneath, in her own hand, the name of the boy who had gone off his rope in the water under the bridge fifty years before. The old man looked at it, and looked at her, and did not ask her to take it out. They were finished on the twenty-eighth of April, four days early, in weather that had turned unkindly cold, and the last afternoon there was nobody working at all. The town had emptied out over the two weeks and then stopped coming, the way a thing does when it is finished, and there were four men left on the bank doing nothing in particular, and the mill men had gone to the yard, and the rain was coming down in a straight line on the water. The bank on the far side was empty. The bank on the near side was empty, except for the two of them, and Miles's father was standing in the middle of the bridge with his back to them both, not doing anything at all, just standing, the way a man stands when he has come a long way inside and has not yet found the door. He stood there for four minutes. Then he said, to nobody, in a voice with no volume in it at all, "I never knew he built it." Wren put her hand flat on the rail beside her. "Say it to him now," she said. Miles stepped up onto the middle board. He was two paces away from his father's back when the old man turned round. He did not shout. He put one hand up, palm out, in the gesture that men at a bench make when they want a room to go quiet, and it was the most frightening thing Miles had ever seen him do, because it worked, in the rain, on a bridge, at seventeen, from a welder who had never once in his life asked a room for anything. "Get off that bridge," his father said. "Both of you. Off it. Go up the bank and wait at the top until I am finished." Wren looked at Miles. Miles looked at the deck, and at the eleven feet of new oak, and at his father's boots, and he went. They waited forty minutes under the eaves of the mill yard with the rain coming off the gutter in a rope, and neither of them said anything, and then they came back down to the top of the bank and their father was not on the bridge. "He has gone up to the shed," Miles said.