“The Lord giveth,” we say.
“The Lord giveth.”
That boy is not there. Peabody told about how he come into the kitchen, hollering, swarming and clawing at Cora when he found her cooking that fish, and how Dewey Dell taken him down to the barn. “My team all right?” Peabody says.
“All right,” I tell him. “I give them a bait this morning. Your buggy seems all right too. It ain’t hurt.”
“And no fault of somebody’s,” he says. “I’d give a nickel to know where that boy was when that team broke away.”
“If it’s broke anywhere, I’ll fix it,” I say.
The womenfolks go on into the house. We can hear them, talking and fanning. The fans go whish, whish, whish and them talking, the talking sounding kind of like bees murmuring in a water-bucket. The men stop on the porch, talking some, not looking at one another.
“Howdy, Vernon,” they say. “Howdy, Tull.”
“Looks like more rain.”
“It does for a fact.”
“Yes, sir. It will rain some more.”
“It come up quick.”
“And going away slow. It don’t fail.”
I go around to the back. Cash is filling up the holes he bored in the top of it. He is trimming out plugs for them, one at a time, the wood wet and hard to work. He could cut up a tin can and hide the holes and nobody wouldn’t know the difference. Wouldn’t mind, anyway. I have seen him spend a hour trimming out a wedge like it was glass he was working, when he could have reached around and picked up a dozen sticks and drove them into the joint and made it do.
When we finished I go back to the front. The men have gone a little piece from the house, sitting on the ends of the boards and on the sawhorses where we made it last night, some sitting and some squatting. Whitfield ain’t come yet.
They look up at me, their eyes asking.
“It’s about,” I say. “He’s ready to nail.”
While they are getting up Anse comes to the door and looks at us and we return to the porch. We scrape our shoes again, careful, waiting for one another to go in first, milling a little at the door. Anse stands inside the door, dignified, composed. He waves us in and leads the way into the room.
They had laid her in it reversed. Cash made it clock-shape, like this 
with every joint and seam bevelled and scrubbed with the plane, tight as a drum and neat as a sewing basket, and they had laid her in it head to foot so it wouldn’t crush her dress. It was her wedding dress and it had a flare-out bottom, and they had laid her head to foot in it so the dress could spread out, and they had made her a veil out of a mosquito bar so the auger holes in her face wouldn’t show.
When we are going out, Whitfield comes. He is wet and muddy to the waist, coming in. “The Lord comfort this house,” he says. “I was late because the bridge has gone. I went down to the old ford and swum my horse over, the Lord protecting me. His grace be upon this house.”
We go back to the trestles and plank-ends and sit or squat.
“I knowed it would go,” Armstid says.
“It’s been there a long time, that ere bridge,” Quick says.
“The Lord has kept it there, you mean,” Uncle Billy says. “I don’t know ere a man that’s touched hammer to it in twenty-five years.”
“How long has it been there, Uncle Billy?” Quick says.
“It was built in … let me see … It was in the year 1888,” Uncle Billy says. “I mind it because the first man to cross it was Peabody coming to my house when Jody was born.”
“If I’d a crossed it every time your wife littered since, it’d a been wore out long before this, Billy,” Peabody says.
We laugh, suddenly loud, then suddenly quiet again. We look a little aside at one another.
“Lots of folks has crossed it that won’t cross no more bridges,” Houston says.
“It’s a fact,” Littlejohn says. “It’s so.”
“One more ain’t, no ways,” Armstid says. “It’d taken them two-three days to got her to town in the wagon. They’d be gone a week, getting her to Jefferson and back.”
“What’s Anse so itching to take her to Jefferson for, anyway?” Houston says.
“He promised her,” I say. “She wanted it. She come from there. Her mind was set on it.”
“And Anse is set on it, too,” Quick says.
“Ay,” Uncle Billy says. “It’s like a man that’s let everything slide all his life to get set on something that will make the most trouble for everybody he knows.”
“Well, it’ll take the Lord to get her over that river now,” Peabody says. “Anse can’t do it.”
“And I reckon He will,” Quick says. “He’s took care of Anse a long time, now.”
“It’s a fact,” Littlejohn says.
“Too long to quit now,” Armstid says.
“I reckon He’s like everybody else around here,” Uncle Billy says. “He’s done it so long now He can’t quit.”
Cash comes out. He has put on a clean shirt; his hair, wet, is combed smooth down on his brow, smooth and black as if he had painted it on to his head. He squats stiffly among us, we watching him.
“You feeling this weather, ain’t you?” Armstid says.
Cash says nothing.
“A broke bone always feels it,” Littlejohn says. “A fellow with a broke bone can tell it a-coming.”
“Lucky Cash got off with just a broke leg,” Armstid says. “He might have hurt himself bed-rid. How far’d you fall, Cash?”
“Twenty-eight foot, four and a half inches, about,” Cash says. I move over beside him.
“A fellow can sho slip quick on wet planks,” Quick says.
“It’s too bad,” I say. “But you couldn’t a holp it.”
“It’s them durn women,” he says. “I made it to balance with her. I made it to her measure and weight.”
If it takes wet boards for folks to fall, it’s
