The Bridge to Cutter Gap

by Catherine Marshall

“He loves everything He’s made—every bird, every animal, every flower, every man and woman, every single one of you,” Christy said. “Loves you extra-specially.”

  Little Burl didn’t answer. Suddenly quiet, he stared off at something only he could see. I’m trying too hard, Christy thought. Will I ever be able to reach these children?

  Just then the background hum of high-pitched voices was shattered by a screech of pain and then violent crying. Christy ran around the corner, her shoes slipping in the snow.

  Vella Holt, a tiny five-year-old with auburn pigtails, was crumpled up on the ground, sobbing. The other children had gathered in a circle around her.

  “Has a pump knot on her head,” a voice volunteered as Christy took the child in her arms.

  The little girl did have a large bump. It was going to be a nasty bruise. What was worse, the blow had been dangerously close to her temple.

  “What happened?” Christy asked.

  No one answered. Christy looked up. The circle of faces looked too grave, too careful. “Someone has to tell me,” Christy persisted. “Did Vella fall down?”

  “No’m,” Ruby Mae said softly. “She got hit.”

  “How? With what?”

  Someone thrust a homemade ball into Christy’s hands. It was so much heavier than she expected that she almost dropped it. It seemed to be made of strips of old cloth wound round and round and then bound with thread. But when she pushed a thumb through the cloth, she found a rock at the center.

  “Vella got hit with this?” Christy cried. “No wonder she has a bump on her head! Who threw this?”

  Again, the silence. Then, out of the corner of her eye, Christy caught a movement. She turned to see Lundy Taylor and another older boy, Smith O’Teale, slinking into the empty schoolhouse.

  “Did Lundy or Smith throw this?”

  The children did not say a word, but their eyes told Christy the truth. She felt chilled and frightened. Could either boy have done such a thing on purpose? As she comforted Vella and put cloths wrung out in fresh snow on her bump, Christy struggled with the problem. She decided to make the boys stay after school and get to the bottom of things, rather than talk to them before all the other pupils.

  The rest of the day did not go well. To begin with, Christy was running out of ideas. She’d had big plans for lessons, but now it was clear that much of what she’d arranged was impossible with this many mismatched students. She was glad David would be helping with the math and Bible classes in the afternoon.

  What subjects had they not touched on today? Penmanship. Happy thought! Christy was proud of her handwriting. It was a nice script. She would enjoy putting some sentences on the blackboard to be copied.

  As she headed for the cracked blackboard, she almost stepped on several marbles. Automatically, she stopped to pick them up. But at that moment a child hurled himself toward her in a flying tackle.

  “Teacher, don’t touch them!” It was Little Burl, hanging onto her arm, shrieking at her.

  She was startled by his ferocity. “Why not? I can’t leave them on the floor. Someone will step on them and go scooting.”

  The little boy looked at her, his face flushed and contorted. “Teacher, them marbles are hot. They’ll burn you!”

  “Hot?” What was he talking about?

  Some of the pupils looked embarrassed. Obviously, there was something Little Burl did not know how to explain. In the back of the room, the laughter started again—Lundy Taylor and some of the older boys.

  John Spencer, the fifteen-year-old son of Fairlight and Jeb, stepped forward. “Teacher, I’d thank you to let me pick up the marbles for you. Little Burl was afraid you’d burn your fingers. He’s right. Them marbles are red hot.”

  “How’d they get so hot?”

  “They was put in the stove, ma’am.”

  “You . . . Did you . . . ?”

  “No, ma’am. Not me. Guess it was just foolery.”

  Calmly, John took a rag from his pocket, gingerly picked up the marbles one by one, and then left them on the rag on Christy’s desk.

  This was too much. A low-down prank—ingenious, but mean, almost as bad as the one on the playground. “Look, a prank’s a prank,” Christy said. “But this wasn’t funny. There are tiny children in this room. What if some of them had stepped on red-hot marbles with bare feet? They’d have gotten badly burned. You see, glass holds heat—”

  “It sure does,” a self-assured masculine voice said from the doorway. “And your teacher’s right.”

  As David strode toward the teacher’s desk, Christy realized how drained she was. The marble trick had been one problem too many.

  “Recess time for you, Teacher,” David said.

  Christy smiled gratefully. She hated to admit it, but she was as relieved as any child would be at the end of the school day.

  She couldn’t wait to leave.

  The creek was running even faster than it had been the day she’d fallen in. It had warmed up slightly over the week, enough to melt some of the jagged ice that rose like frozen miniature mountains from the stream.

  The log bridge swayed like a baby’s cradle, back and forth, back and forth, in the steady wind. Here, from the bank of the creek, the scene wasn’t nearly as frightening—just a few logs over a stream that glistened in the winter light. It hardly seemed like a likely place to come face to face with death. But then maybe that’s how many things were. Up close, things that seemed simple and straightforward could become complicated and frightening.

  Coming to Cutter Gap had been like that. She’d known it would be hard, teaching poor children in the mountains. But not this kind of hard. She hadn’t bargained for mean students nearly as old as she was. She hadn’t counted on sixty-seven barefooted pupils, most of whom had never seen a book in their lives. She hadn’t planned for the difficulties she would have in communicating.

  She remembered, with a shudder, the pump knot on little Vella’s head and the hot marbles on her classroom floor. She certainly hadn’t bargained for that kind of meanness.

  Christy brushed the snow off a boulder and sat down. She had her diary with her. She’d retrieved it from the mission house before coming here this afternoon. She opened to her list of goals and laughed out loud. Teaching French? Etiquette lessons? What had she been thinking?

  She heard footsteps and turned, her heart pounding.

  “I’d have thought you’d want to stay as far away as possible from this bridge,” David said, laughing as he approached.

  “You know what they say: when you fall off, you need to get right back up on the horse.”

  David frowned. “You didn’t cross—”

  “No, I’m afraid it may be spring before I cross that bridge again. I think I should let that particular horse thaw out a bit.” She moved over, making room on the boulder. “Were you looking for me? I didn’t forget a meeting, did I?”

  “No. I just happened to notice you when I came out of my bunkhouse to chop some wood. Thought you might need a little moral support.”

  “Why’s that?” Christy asked lightly. Had she done such a bad job that he’d already heard stories from the children?

  “First days are always hard. And this is no easy job.” David tossed a rock into the stream. It landed with a musical splash, like a tiny fish.

  “Somehow I pictured—” Christy hesitated. There was no point in telling him. He’d just laugh.

  “Pictured what?” David asked. When she didn’t answer, he said, “Let me guess. You thought it would be easy. That the children, all of them, would welcome you with open arms. That they would be poor, but it would be a nice, clean, easy poor, not one that came with ignorance and filth and smells and superstitions and feuds.”

  Christy met his eyes. They sparkled with humor, but there was something deeper there too. “How did you know?”

  “You forget. I haven’t been here that long myself. I came to Cutter Gap with lots of high hopes about bringing the Word of God to these people, about c
hanging their lives overnight.” He laughed. “I suppose I expected them to be grateful. Instead they’ve been resentful and slow to accept me. That’s when Miss Alice helped me out.”

  “She did?”

  “She told me I couldn’t change the world overnight. That this place belonged to the mountain people and that I was the stranger. That it was up to me to understand them, not the other way around.”

  “And do you?” Christy asked hopefully.

  “Nope.” David shook his head. “But I’m learning.”

  “Did you—” Christy gazed up at the bridge, which was shimmering colorfully in the sunlight like an earthbound rainbow. “Did you ever think about going home, giving up?”

  “Sure. I think about it every day.” David said it lightly, but Christy thought she heard uncertainty too. “Sometimes I wonder if I can ever really be a part of this place, the way Miss Alice is. The way Doctor MacNeill is.”

  “He told me you were still learning,” Christy said.

  David rolled his eyes. “I suppose he’s right,” he said. “Although I might point out that the doc’s more than a little set in his ways.” He shrugged. “Anyway. Take your time, Christy Huddleston. It will get easier.” He stood and touched her lightly on the shoulder.

  She was grateful for the warm smile that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him.

  “Oh, by the way, I heard about the incident with Vella.”

  “I’d planned to talk to Lundy about it—”

  “I see you’ve quickly figured out where the trouble’s likely to start. I tried talking to Lundy and Smith myself this afternoon. Couldn’t get anything out of them, so I guess we’ll just have to keep an eye on things.” His face went grave. “I don’t want to worry you, especially when you’re feeling nervous enough, but Lundy and his friends are bad news. This won’t be the only time you’ll have to confront them, and next time it may be worse. If that happens, I want you to come to me, understand?”

  Christy nodded. But as she watched David trudge back up the hill, she remembered some advice Miss Alice had given her about taking charge of the classroom. Christy knew she couldn’t run to David every time there was trouble.

  She gathered up her diary and started to leave. But after a few steps she turned around. Slowly, methodically, she began to search the bank of the creek, hoping she might find the locket her father had given her. She knew it was crazy. The necklace must have caught on something during her fall or broken when she was underwater. It was probably miles down the stream by now, lost forever. Lost forever like her old life. And in its place was the new life she had chosen: a hard, demanding, terrifying, complicated, lonely life in Cutter Gap.

  It’s an adventure, she told herself. This was what she’d wanted, what she’d dreamed of. She was doing God’s work.

  But what if I can’t do it well enough? a doubting part of her heart asked.

  She gazed up at the bridge. She remembered wondering if Bob Allen’s accident and her fall off the bridge had been signals that coming here was a mistake. It would be nice to have a sign that she was on the right track, but so far, God had not delivered one.

  Christy trudged back and forth along the creek’s bank until the sun began to melt behind the farthest blue-black ridge. In her heart, she’d known all along that the locket was lost. So why was it she couldn’t seem to stop crying?

  “You’re not eating a thing,” Miss Ida scolded the next morning.

  “I’m sorry,” Christy apologized, staring unhappily at her eggs. “I haven’t got much of an appetite this morning.”

  “Had plenty of one every other morning,” Miss Ida grumbled, pulling Christy’s plate away.

  Christy got up from the table. “I thought I’d go over to the school a bit early this morning to get things ready.” Like myself, she added silently.

  “May I have a word with you, Christy?” Miss Alice asked.

  “Of course. If it’s about my lesson plans, I know they still need some work—”

  “No, no,” Miss Alice said, laughing. She gestured to the porch.

  They put on their wraps and headed outside. Their breath hung in the air. The sun was just rising and cast a pink glow over the school.

  “Have you ever watched a baby learning to walk, Christy?” Miss Alice asked. “He totters, arms stretched out to balance himself. He wobbles and falls, perhaps bumps his nose. Then he puts the palms of his little hands flat on the floor, hikes his rear end up, and looks around to see if anybody is watching him. If nobody is, usually he doesn’t bother to cry, just balances himself . . . and tries again.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That baby can teach us. You can’t expect immediate perfection in your schoolroom. It’s a walk, and a walk isn’t static but ever changing. We Quakers say that all discouragement is from an evil source and can only end in more evil. Feeling sorry for yourself is worse than falling on your face in the first place.”

  Christy felt unexpected tears sting her eyes. “I came here to do God’s work,” she whispered. “But what if I can’t? What if I’m no good at it?”

  Miss Alice draped her arm around Christy’s shoulders. “So you fall, like that baby. Maybe you even bump your nose. So you’re human. Thank God for your humanness!”

  Christy took a deep, steadying breath. “I’ll try, Miss Alice,” she said.

  “That’s all you can do, child. ‘Give, and it shall be given unto you,’ ” Miss Alice said softly. “You’ll see.”

  Christy squeezed Miss Alice’s hand. As she headed off across the boardwalk toward school, she could feel the woman’s gaze upon her, warmer than the dawning sunlight peeking over the mountains.

  The schoolroom was cold, even though David had already started a roaring fire in the potbellied stove. Christy walked back and forth across the empty room, straightening desks, cleaning off the blackboard, fussing and fidgeting. Her heart hammered in her chest. Her hands were shaking like leaves in a breeze.

  “Give, and it shall be given unto you,” Miss Alice had said. But what if she didn’t have enough to give?

  She heard the thump of little steps and turned to see Little Burl in the doorway. He was wearing a coat two sizes too big for him. One elbow had been patched a dozen times it seemed. The sleeves were rolled up, yet still his little hands were hidden. His feet, again, were bare. His nose was running.

  “Teacher,” he said, “I came early.”

  “You certainly did,” Christy said, trying to force lightness into her voice.

  “I was a-thinkin’ all last night.”

  Christy sat down in her chair and motioned for Little Burl to join her. He climbed up into her lap. “What were you thinking about, Little Burl?”

  “About what you said. About the birds and all.”

  “The birds?” Christy flashed through yesterday’s lessons. Had she mentioned birds? No. Raccoons, yes, but no birds. Well, there you had it. She really wasn’t reaching these kids.

  “I don’t remember about the birds,” Christy said gently. “We talked about Creed’s raccoon. I remember that—”

  “The birds, outside,” Little Burl insisted loudly. “The chickadees!”

  “Oh, you mean at lunch! The birds you fed. Of course.”

  Little Burl’s funny little face held a look of intense concentration. “Teacher, you said that God loves everybody, right?”

  “That’s right,” Christy said.

  “Well, then, ain’t it true that if God loves everybody, then we’uns got to love everybody too?”

  Christy looked at the little boy in astonishment. “Yes, Little Burl,” she encouraged, “it is true.” Forever and forever and forever, she added silently.

  He broke into a smile, relieved. “Thought so.”

  Christy watched as he scampered back out the door. One comment, an offhand remark during noon recess, had set this little boy to thinking. Something she’d said had mattered. Something she’d said had made a difference.

  Perhaps God�
��s work started in small ways.

  She’d wanted a sign. Maybe this, after all, was the one she’d been waiting for.

  Christy went to the door. The children began to appear as the day broke. In twos, in clumps, dancing, skipping, running, their faces filled with hope and joy. And sometimes, yes, filled with darker things—loneliness, hunger, fear, even anger.

  She was surprised when she saw Fairlight Spencer walking toward the school, her children by her side. She was carrying a little leather pouch in one hand. The other held the toddler named Little Guy.

  “Fairlight!” Christy exclaimed. Strangely, when Fairlight returned her smile, Christy felt like she was seeing an old, very dear friend.

  “I tell you, these children hardly slept a wink last night, they were so excited about school,” Fairlight said. She handed the leather pouch to Christy with a shy smile. “John found this a couple days back, over yonder by the bank of the creek.”

  Christy opened the pouch and reached inside. At the bottom, she felt the cool smoothness of metal.

  “My locket?” she whispered.

  Slowly she removed the necklace. The chain was gone. In its place was a thin braid of the softest yarn, in blues and greens and blacks and violets.

  “I spun and dyed the yarn myself. I know it ain’t the same. I sent John and Clara back to look for the chain, but it must have fallen in the creek when you fell in.”

  Christy grinned. “You heard about that?”

  “Word travels fast around these here parts.”

  “So I hear.”

  Fairlight peered at Christy, her face lined with worry. “The braidin’ is all wrong, I know—”

  “It’s beautiful,” Christy insisted. “More beautiful than before. All the colors of the mountains.” Her eyes overflowed with tears. “Thank you, Fairlight. It means more to me than you can know.”

  Gently, Christy opened the locket. The pictures were damp but unharmed. Her loving family gazed back at her. Christy closed the cover and slipped the braid over her head. She felt the silver heart, close to her own heart again. It was part of her old life. And now, with Fairlight’s gift, part of her new one as well.