The Roof We Closed in One Day

“He never told me he wrote that,” she said.

“He wasn’t one for speeches.”

“Twenty-nine years.” She traced the letters with one finger without quite touching the wood. “He’s been up here the whole time.”

That was all she said about it. I held the ladder and looked at the sky, because there was nowhere else to look.

After a while she put out her hand, and I gave her the pencil back, and she wrote under his capitals in her round teacher’s hand, small, the way you would sign the bottom of a card.

R.H. 10 25 25. Dry.

“There,” she said, and came down the ladder one rung at a time.

I laid the new deck sheet over it myself before anyone arrived. Once the shingles go on, nobody sees that rafter again, which is how it is with most of what holds a house up.

At 6:30 the first truck turned onto her gravel. Then another. Duane Lundquist pulled in with a trailer of tools, and Dirk Ostrow came with his compressor and a generator, and two young framers I used to work with, Gus Eberle and a kid named Cody, shook my hand like I had called them to a wedding. I stopped counting at eleven trucks, parked along the gravel and out onto the road, a little before seven-thirty. Ned Neuhaus brought the shingles himself on his own flatbed, stacked three high and strapped down.

And Floyd Lundquist sat down in a folding lawn chair in the middle of the yard with a thermos and a clipboard, like a general, and started giving orders.

“Tarps off. Gus, you and Cody, rip every wet sheet. I want that deck clean down to dry wood. Duane, set up the starter at the north eave. Loren, you’re the nailing foreman, because you’re the one who knows the roof.”

“I’m a framer, Floyd.”

“You’re a man who can read a layout. Read it.”

I had not expected so many people. The Methodist women came at half past eight with two roasters of beef and a card table. Monte Pelzer showed up with a push broom and started sweeping the yard for nails, and kept at it until noon. Vera Gerber came in her church coat, carrying a plate of cinnamon rolls, and sat down on a kitchen chair on the porch beside Rosalind with a blanket over both their laps. Josie Nagel came with her baby, and Vera took the baby up onto the porch, well back from the ladders and the falling debris, so Josie could carry bundles to the foot of the ladder with both hands.

Rosalind watched all of it from the porch, a yard filling with people she had mostly never met.

“Loren,” she said, when I came down for a drink of water. “Who are these people?”

“Men who worked with your husband. And with me. And with Floyd. And some folks who needed what you need.”

“I can’t pay them.”

“Nobody asked you to.”

The north slope, three layers of curled old shingles, came off in a landslide under flat shovels and into Ned’s dump trailer. Gus and Cody replaced the soft boards on the south slope and put new strand board on the addition, and Floyd made them hold a chalk line on every course. Underlayment was down by ten, rolled out in long lines and nailed with plastic caps. Ice and water shield went three feet up from every eave, to stand up to the freeze that was coming. Drip edge on the rakes. Duane ran the starter strip like a man playing the piano.