COUNCIL
SCAFFOLD
THE OLD PLAN (TRESTLE)
THE NEW PLAN (ARCHES)
RIVER
and
CLAY
Clay sat down.
He let the couch devour him.
He spelt Carey’s name out in his toast crumbs, then reached for the pile called SCAFFOLD.
* * *
—
From there, he read all day.
He didn’t eat or go to the bathroom.
He just read and watched and learned everything about the bridge in Michael Dunbar’s mind, and it was a great mess of charcoal and thick-set pencil. Especially THE OLD PLAN. That stack was 113 pages (he counted them), full of wood costs, techniques, and pulley systems, and why the previous bridge might have failed.
THE NEW PLAN was six sheets altogether—composed the night before. The first page of that small stack of paper said only one thing, several times.
PONT DU GARD.
The pages that followed were littered with sketches and drawings, and a list of definitions:
Spandrels and voussoirs.
Springing and falsework.
Crown and keystone.
Old favorites like abutment and span.
In short, the spandrels were standard stone blocks; the voussoirs were contoured for the arching. The springing was the final pressure point, of arches-meeting-pier. His favorite was somehow the falsework, though—the mold the arches were built on; a curvature of wooden construction. It would hold, then be taken from under it: the first test of each arch and survival.
* * *
—
Then CLAY.
He kept his eye on that CLAY stack, many times, as he read through everything else. The thought of picking it up excited him, but also held him just short. On top, its paperweight was a rusty old key, and below, a single sheet.
When Clay finally read it, it was evening.
He removed the key and held it slackly in his palm, and when he turned the title page, this was written beneath:
Clay—