The Roof Done by Dark

Another long silence. Then the line went quiet, and I realized he had set the phone down without hanging it up. I heard a door close. After a minute Marlene picked up.

“He went outside,” she said. “He’s just standing in the driveway looking at those pallets. Ryan, honey, what are you doing?”

“Putting a roof on,” I said. “Tell him to get some sleep. It’s going to be a long day.”

I got the girls up at a quarter to five. They had both slept in their clothes because I had told them we were having an adventure and adventures start early.

Josie fell back asleep in her car seat before we made it to the end of our road.

Gordon and Marlene’s place was quiet when we pulled in, but the kitchen light was on.

By the time I had the girls out of the truck, the front door opened and Marlene came out in her house shoes with a coffee can full of something and set it on the porch.

The crew came in right behind us. Dusty’s flatbed first, then three pickups, then Cody in his old Ford that you can hear coming from a mile away.

Seven men and me. Dusty had told them what it was. None of them made a joke, which for that bunch was a kind of speech.

Gordon came out last. He had his seed cap on and his work boots laced, and he stood at the bottom of the porch steps and looked at us.

He did not say good morning. He did not say anything. He just nodded at me, once, and walked around to the back of the house.

I did not know what that nod meant. I spent a good part of the day not knowing.

We had the ladders up and the tear-off started by six. If you have never seen an old roof come off, it is loud and filthy and faster than you would think.

Seven men with shovels and pry bars can strip a ranch house down to the boards in a few hours when they are not arguing about anything.

The old shingles came down the chute into the dump trailer in a steady rain of grit. The red dirt in the yard turned gray with it.

The trees around the house, two big elms and a pecan that Gordon’s father had planted, had been stripped half bare by the hail, and the light came through them strange and thin.

For the first two hours Gordon did not come near the ladders. He stayed out back.

When I went around the side of the house to check the valley, I found him with a magnet sweeper on wheels, walking it slowly back and forth across the yard, picking up the old nails we were throwing off.

He did not look up when I came around the corner. He just kept walking that magnet in straight lines, the way you mow a pasture, and every few passes he stopped and pulled the nails off it into a bucket.

I went back to work. I figured if he wanted to talk, he would.

Gordon Ruhl was a man who had worked thirty-one years at the grain co-op in Cordell, loading trucks in the heat and climbing the elevator ladders in the wind, and he was not a man who said a thing until he had decided to say it.