The Porch Wood The Contractor Took

He got the posts set that fall. He poured the piers himself and set six oak posts and ran the floor joists across.

It looked like a porch that was holding its breath. A frame waiting on its skin.

The decking and the rail were going to come off that stack of drying oak, the next summer, once the wood was ready.

Walt did not make it to the next summer.

He went out to the mill one February morning to sweep it out, and I found him sitting against the sawhorse with his cap still on. The doctor said his heart just quit. Sixty-six years old.

I will not spend your time on that winter. You have had your own, or you will.

I will only say that the unfinished porch out my east door became a hard thing to look at, and the drying oak behind the barn became the only thing I wanted to touch.

Here is where the contractor comes in, and I need to be fair to how it started, because I said yes to him with my whole heart.

His name is Cal Brandt. He is somewhere in his forties, a framer, and he had put up half the houses on our road over the years.

Walt thought the world of him. Called him a good hand, which from Walt was about the highest a man could be called.

The spring before Walt died, the two of them had shaken hands on it. Cal would do the decking and the rail and the roof on the porch, using Walt’s oak, once it cured. Walt would pay him as it went.

So when Walt was gone, finishing that porch was not just a home improvement to me. It was the last thing my husband and I had planned together, and Cal Brandt was the man who was going to help me keep it.

I paid him. I want to be plain about the money because the money is part of the wrong.

Across that last year, between what Walt had already paid and what I paid after, Cal Brandt had nine thousand dollars of ours. A deposit on the decking and the rail and his labor.

Nine thousand dollars is a great deal of money to a widow on a fixed check. I did not have it to lose. I handed it over because Walt had trusted the hand that took it.

For a while Cal was kind. He came by in March, walked the frame, told me the oak would be ready by summer and he would start the first week of June.