Short story · 4 min read ·
The Painter of the Second Span
A bridge painter is paid to keep one span of the Calder river bridge in fresh cream, and the paint on it never once goes off.
The council pays Harlan Voss by the square metre, and for eleven years he has been paid for the same forty-two of them. They are the second span of the Calder bridge, the one that carries the tram rails over the deep channel, and every spring he goes out along the cradle with a brush and a tin of cream gloss and paints the same iron. By June the paint is dry, and by the next spring it has gone chalky and brown, and he comes back with a fresh tin. That is the job. Nobody has ever asked him to do anything else.
He does not mind the work. He likes the cradle at dawn, when the river is flat and the mist lies in the channel like milk left out. He likes the hum of the tram cables overhead and the way the iron is warm to the touch by eight, even in March. What he minds is the paint.
It goes off in a week. Not in the way gloss fails, by cracking or lifting. It goes off as though something had taken the colour out of it while he was looking away. He has tried every supplier on the coast. He has tried a primer that costs more than his van. He has tried painting at night, and in the rain, and once in a thick fog when he could not see his own boots, and every time the second span comes back the colour of old teeth within a week of its last coat.
The foreman, a patient man called Dessler, showed him the inspection sheets. The sheets for the second span have been stamped every quarter for fifty years. Each one reads the same. Surface sound. Coating adequate. Corrosion none observed. The inspectors, Dessler said, were not lying. They looked at the iron and found it sound, and they could not have found anything else, because the iron under the paint has never once rusted through in all that time.
"So why paint it?" Harlan asked.
Dessler shrugged. "Because it's on the contract. Because the tram company wants a span that looks maintained. Because if we stopped, somebody on the other bank would notice, and then somebody would send a letter."
In his fourth year Harlan began to scrape the old coats before he recoated, the way he had been trained to. He found that each layer came away clean, with a sharp edge, the way paint does from a surface that has been well prepared. Under the last coat he found the coat before, and under that the one before, and under those the grey of the original iron. He counted eleven coats on one stanchion. Under the eleventh, at the bottom, there was a faint pencilled line, a little higher than the rest, as though someone had marked where the water had once stood and meant to repaint up to it.
He did not know what the mark meant. He traced it with his thumb and it was cold.
That autumn the tram company asked for a survey of the bridge's lighting. A young engineer named Ince came out on the cradle with a clipboard and asked Harlan why he kept painting the span.
"It goes off," Harlan said.
"Paint does," said Ince, not unkindly. "It's the weather."
"It isn't the weather. It's the same weather on the first span, and the first span holds."
Ince wrote something on his clipboard and then looked at the second span for a long time, the way engineers look at things they have decided not to understand. "The contract is for the second span," he said at last. "It's been for as long as the records go back. We're not in a position to change it."
Harlan thought about that over the next few weeks, while the mist came and went in the channel and the trams rattled overhead. He thought about the eleven coats, and the line under the eleventh, and the way the cream had gone grey on the iron each time, not in the air but in the metal, as though the metal had wanted something else.
In the spring he did not buy a tin. He went out along the cradle at dawn with his brush and sat on the bottom rail above the water, where the pencilled line was. He put his palm flat against the iron, the way he would against a horse's flank, and waited.
The iron was warm. By eight it was warm enough to burn, and the river below was quiet, and nothing came up out of it, and nothing needed painting. He sat there until the first tram went over and shook the whole span, and then he climbed back up and went home and did not come out again. The council sent a letter. Then, after some months, it stopped sending them. The second span has not been painted since. Nobody on the other bank has noticed, and the iron, the inspectors say, is still sound.