Roger Hart

From “The Bridge”

“Don’t do it,” my dad said.

I was driving the family pickup, a rusted-out Ford with bald tires and a cracked windshield, that had won the “Ugliest Truck” contest at the Junior Gallia County Fair the previous two years. A cold December wind blew across the river.

My mother elbowed me in the ribs. “Go on.”

Caught between their opposing commands, I listened to my mother and turned toward the bridge.

My father leaned against the passenger side door, his finger tracing a jagged crack in the window. “It’s going to kill me,” he groaned.

My mother, squeezed between my father and me, patted my knee and lifted her chin forward. “Ignore him,” she said. His refusal to cross the Silver Bridge annoyed her, and his two-footed driving scared her even when he was sober. That afternoon he’d had more than a few drinks with my Uncle Orville.

“I’m jumping out,” he said, reaching for the handle of the passenger-side door.

My mother yanked him back. “You’re not jumping out, and we’re not driving all the way to Pomeroy, so you can avoid this bridge.” She shook her head. “I never,” she said.

He buried his face in his hands. “Dying runs in our family,” he mumbled. Then he pressed himself against the door as the bridge clamored, groaned, banged, shook, and shimmied under the weight of cars and trucks it was never designed to hold. The light on the Ohio side turned red and we stopped, stranded high above the Ohio River.

My father twisted in his seat and looked at the suspension cables and checked his door and mine to make sure they were unlocked. “Oh,” he said, clutching the dash after a particularly hard bump shook the truck.

“Jim!” my mother said. “Enough!”

He opened his mouth, started to say something, and stopped.

“Go on,” I said.

The bridge shook again.

He mumbled, but the bangs and clanks prevented me from hearing him.

“What?” I asked.

A barge loaded with coal slowly passed beneath us. Red and green Christmas lights draped across Front Street were barely visible through the shroud of coal-stoked brown haze that had settled over the river.

“Dying,” he said.

I took my eyes off the car stopped in front of us long enough to glance across the front seat. “Dying? What dying?”

“You know, Charlie,” he said.

We were on our way home from the funeral of Aunt Bessie, my father’s oldest sister, who had died of a cracked skull after getting kicked by a Holstein heifer. My grandfather and Uncle Lou had died four years earlier in a roof fall in Kittany 3, a Foster coalmine in West Virginia. My cousin Bobby, suffering the final stage of Hodgkin’s disease, died sitting in a bowling alley while my aunt and uncle argued who could best pick up a 6-10 split. Uncle Roy was leaning against the potbelly stove in his hunting shack on Big Toe Knob when lightning hit the chimney, ran through Roy, and left a six-foot long melted groove in the linoleum floor. But, as my Aunt Lucy always said, It wasn’t lightning that killed Roy. It was his choking on the plug of Mail Pouch after getting lightning struck. And my cousin Bruce, perhaps the saddest case of all, was poaching deer one cold January night when he bled to death after trying to unzip his coat while forgetting he held his razor-sharp skinning knife.

My father moaned with each rattle of the suspension cables and clang of the decking as cars and trucks heading into West Virginia passed in the opposite lane. “This bridge,” he said.

My mother pressed her hand to her breast, and said pshaw, not a word so much as a sound of disapproval. She shook her head slightly to let me know I had nothing to worry about. Other than her deep Baptist convictions, she didn’t buy into premonitions, curses, or the supernatural. She called my father’s idea that the bridge was going to kill him utter nonsense.
The light at the end of the bridge turned green, and we began to move forward.