Treenail

The footbridge over the garden stream had worked loose at the near end, one plank lifting a little each time a boot came down on it. Nyra knelt on the bank with a handful of oak pegs she had whittled that morning, each one dry and a touch too fat for its hole. The apprentice crouched beside her, turning one of the pegs over and frowning at it.

“It will not fit,” the girl said. “It is wider than the hole.” “That is the whole of it,” Nyra said. “A nail is driven and that is the end of the matter. A treenail is driven dry into a snug hole, and when the stream throws its damp up into the wood, the peg swells and the plank swells, and they take hold of one another and will not let go.”

She set a peg to the hole and drove it home with a wooden mallet, a few sure blows, until the head sat flush with the plank and the point stood out beneath. The bridge, which had given a little under her knee, now gave nothing. It was not iron that held it. It was two pieces of the same patient wood agreeing to stay.

“How long will it hold?” the girl asked. Nyra answered that a treenail will outlast the hand that drove it, that there were barn frames pegged this way a hundred autumns gone and standing yet. Then she pared the point flush with a chisel and wrote in the book the day, and the three planks, and that the near end of the footbridge was pegged.

A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. It could hold the number of the planks and the name of the stream. It could not hold the slow swell of oak taking up the damp, or the way a crossing stops speaking the moment it is sound. The book keeps the crossing, and you keep the pegging of it.