The Porch Wood The Contractor Took

But Walt used to say that the law is for when people will not do right on their own, and that a man you take to court is a man you have decided is done being a neighbor.

I was not ready to decide that about anybody. Not even Cal Brandt. Not yet.

What settled it was Roger Haaland.

That man set his coffee mug down on the rail and he stood there a long minute looking at the pale deck he had been so proud of.

Then he said, quiet, that he had worked forty years to afford a house on this water, and he would be damned before he would sit out here on a dead man’s porch and call it his own.

He told Cal, right there, that every board with that WK on it was coming up. All of it. Back to the lady it belonged to.

And then Roger did a thing I did not expect from a stranger. He told Cal that he, Roger, would still pay him fair wages to tear this deck out and lay a new one, out of lumber Cal would buy honest, because Roger did not want a man to have no work and no way to make anything right.

A chance to earn it back, he said, not a hole to drown in.

That is a rich man I will think well of until I die.

Then the thing happened that I did not plan and could not have bought, which is that word got around.

Dewey Shaw must have told it at the feed store, because by that evening my phone would not stop. Not with gossip. With men.

Lon Petrie called first. Lon ran a sawmill with Walt forty years ago and the two of them stayed close as brothers. Lon is seventy-one and his hands shake now, but his voice did not shake.

He said, Nadine, you are not pulling one board off that lake house by yourself, and you are not finishing that porch alone either. We are coming Saturday.

Then Harlan Voss called, who taught shop at the high school thirty years and knew Walt from the Lions Club. Then Dewey himself. Then two of Walt’s old county road crew.

That Saturday eight men I did not ask drove out to Clearwater Lake with pry bars and cordless drills and gloves.

They took that deck up board by board. They worked slow and careful, because every one of those men understood they were handling Walt Kessler’s year of evenings, and not one board got cracked coming up.