“Once,” he said, “there was a woman, and she came with a lot of names.”
She smiled but kept her eyes closed.
She smiled and slowly corrected him.
“No—” she said, and her voice was the voice of dying.
“Like this—” and the voice of surviving.
A momentous effort to stay with him.
There was refusal to open her eyes again, but she turned her head to speak: “Once, in the tide of Dunbar past, there was a many-named woman,” and it came a great distance from next to him, and Clay now called toward it; he had something to add of his own.
“And what a woman she was.”
In three more weeks, she was gone.
Soon there was nothing else left:
They finished but were never finished—for they knew there was something to come.
As far as building the bridge went, though, construction and cleanup were over; they watched it from every angle. In the evening it seemed to shine longer, as if charged by the heat of the day. It was lit, then faded, then gone.
The first one across was Achilles.
He looked ready to bray, but didn’t.
Lucky for us no pacts had been made with bad or corrupting spirits; he walked gingerly first, examining it, but by the middle he’d taken ownership:
Backyards, suburban kitchens.
Fields and handmade bridges.
They were all the same to Achilles.
* * *
—
For a while they didn’t know what to do with themselves.
“I guess you should go back to school.”
But that time had surely passed. Since the death of Carey Novac, Clay had lost the will to count. Now he was just a builder, without a single certificate. The proof was all in the hands.
* * *
—
By the time a month had gone by, Clay came back to the city, but not before Michael showed him.
They were in the kitchen, with the oven—and this was no ordinary boy. People didn’t build bridges this quickly, and certainly not of such magnitude. Boys didn’t ask to build arches; but then, boys didn’t do so many things—and Michael thought of the morning that flooded them, in the last of the waters to come.
“I’m going home to work with Matthew,” said Clay, and Michael said, “Come with me.”
* * *
—