The Farmhouse We Painted in Nine Days
The Ag Class and the Church Ladies
The ag teacher at the high school was a young man named Jeff Holloway who had been a Marine before he was a teacher. He brought eleven kids from his FFA chapter out on Saturday and four more on Sunday afternoon after church, and they scraped siding and patched plaster and sanded every window sash in that house.
They were sixteen and seventeen, and they had their blue jackets on at first because it was cold, and then they took them off and hung them on the porch rail. I remember looking at that row of blue jackets and having to look somewhere else.
Mr. Holloway told them it counted for their community service hours. It did. But a lot of those kids kept coming after their hours were filled, in the evenings after school, until the light was gone.
The church ladies came at noon on Saturday and every evening after.
The Methodist women brought chicken spaghetti and green beans with bacon and three kinds of pie. The Baptist women, not to be outdone, brought a roaster full of brisket on Sunday and a sheet cake that said Welcome Home in blue icing, even though nobody was home yet.
June followed Mrs. Pauline Ward around the kitchen all afternoon because Mrs. Ward had cookies in her apron pocket.
I kept a list on a legal pad of everybody who came and what they brought. By the end of the week the list ran to three pages. I still have it. I keep it in my Bible.
The Paint
Day by day the house came back.
On Sunday the front room went from water-stained gray to a soft white with a little yellow in it, the color Grandma used to call buttermilk. On Monday the kitchen, and the FFA boys took down the old calendar and asked me if I wanted it. I did. It’s in a drawer.
On Tuesday the two downstairs bedrooms. On Wednesday the stairwell, which was the worst job in the house because the ceiling went up two stories and Walt would not let anybody but Dale on the tall ladder.
“Dale painted water towers in the Air Force,” Walt explained.
On Thursday and Friday the upstairs. Addie and Wyatt got to pick the colors for their own rooms. Addie picked a pale green like the inside of a honeydew. Wyatt picked the brightest blue on the card, a blue you could see from the road. Dad bought it without a word.
The front of the house was the last thing. Saturday, day eight, Walt’s pressure washer had taken the loose paint off the siding, and the men started rolling white on the front from the porch roof down. By late afternoon the front of Roy Talley’s house was white again for the first time in nine years.
Mr. Holloway’s wife took a picture of me that afternoon, on the end of an extension pole in a paint-covered gray T-shirt, Addie and Wyatt on the porch steps behind me with their little brushes.
I look exhausted in that picture. I look happy.