The best scrawl of our dad’s I could manage:
My wife is quite sick, as you know….
But I know I should have done this:
Dear Miss Cooper,
Please excuse Tommy for being absent yesterday. He thought his mum might die, but she didn’t, and to tell you the truth, he was actually a bit hungover….
Which technically wasn’t true.
As the oldest, it was only me who made it through my drink, and it was quite an effort, I’m telling you. Rory and Henry had half each. Clay and Tommy managed the froth—and still, none of it mattered, not remotely, for we watched Penny Dunbar smile to herself; a girl’s white dress and bones. She’d thought she might make men of us, but this was every woman for herself.
The Mistake Maker made no mistake of it.
She stayed till she’d finished them off.
When they spoke of Pont du Gard again, it was to herald the beginning of the end.
They walked and started work again.
They worked and Clay wouldn’t stop.
* * *
—
As it was, Michael Dunbar counted a hundred and twenty consecutive days that Clay worked on the bridge, and very little sleep, very little eating—just a boy who could work the pulley, and heave stones he had no right to carry. “There,” he would say to his father. “No, not there, up there.” He’d stop only to stand with the mule for a while; Clay and the faithful Achilles.
Often, he slept in the dirt out there.
He was covered by blankets and falsework.
His hair was matted flat to him.
He asked if Michael would cut it.
It fell to his feet in clumps.
They did it outside by the bridge, in the looming shadows of arches.
He said thanks and went back to work.
* * *
—
When Michael would leave for the mines, he made Clay promise to eat.
He even called us here, to make sure we rang to check on him, and it was something I did religiously; I called him three times a week, and counted twenty-four rings till he made it in: the length of the sprint to the house.
He spoke only of the bridge and building it.
We shouldn’t come, he said, till he’d finished.
The bridge and making it perfect.
* * *