The Tools He Worked Off
Some weeks he put in forty hours and some weeks it rained and he put in twenty-two, and I did not pad it and I did not shave it. Carol, my bookkeeper, is a woman in town who will catch a nickel out of place, and I ran it clean because I wanted it clean. If this was going to work, the number had to be real.
July came in hot the way it does. We did a church reroof, the First Methodist out on the county road, and the whole congregation kept bringing us sweet tea and sitting in lawn chairs to watch, the way old folks will watch men work.
An old woman named Dorothy, must have been eighty, ran the kitchen in the church basement and fed us at noon every day of that job. She took to Cody the way old women do to a young man who says thank you and means it. She did not know a thing about the pawn ticket. She just knew he carried her a case of water up a ladder without being asked, and she told him he had a good heart, and I watched that land on him like rain on dry ground.
He did not know what to do with a kind word. That was the thing I kept noticing. Praise made him duck his head like he was waiting for the catch. Somewhere back down the line somebody had taught him that nice words came with a hook in them, and it took most of a summer for him to quit flinching.
Cody got stronger. You could see it. The shingles stopped stopping him. He learned to run the bundles up two at a time by August, which I never asked him to do, and the weight came back on him as muscle instead of the hollow it had been.
He learned the trade, too. Pete took to him. Pete will not talk to a man he has not decided on, and by the end of July Pete was showing him how to cut a valley and how to set a drip edge so water goes where you want it and not where it wants to go.
I watched the two of them one afternoon on the Hendricks place, a steep ten-twelve pitch that will put your heart in your throat if you are new to it. Pete had Cody on the chalk line, snapping courses, and he kept making him pull it tight and snap it again until the blue line was dead straight across the deck.
“A crooked first course and the whole roof lies to you all the way up,” Pete told him. “You lay the bottom true, the rest takes care of itself.”
Cody nodded like a man being handed scripture, and snapped it a fourth time though it had been straight the third.
I did not say anything from the ground. There is a thing that happens to a man when somebody expects good work out of him and he finds out he can give it. You cannot buy it and you cannot preach it into him. He has to feel the chalk snap true under his own hand. I just stood there holding the ladder and let him feel it.
By the second week of August he was setting starter strip faster than I could, and hiding how pleased he was about it.
“He’s got hands,” Pete told me one evening, loading the truck. “Kid’s got good hands. Shame nobody ever told him.”
I had not thought about that. That maybe nobody ever had.