The Ramp With Four Names on the Rail

My Buick had a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it and a transmission that made a sound like a coffee grinder going into second gear. I had eleven thousand four hundred dollars in that account.

I sat there with the statement and the cornea doctor’s prescription pad note, and I thought about Mom’s hands on the armrests going down those steps.

Then I wrote at the top of the legal pad, “Ramp.” And I underlined it twice.

The next morning I called Odell Bice.

Odell is seventy-two.

He was a finish carpenter in Fort Payne for forty years and he goes to Mom’s church, a little white Baptist church out on the county road with a gravel lot and a cemetery behind it where Daddy is buried.

He and Daddy used to fish together on the Tennessee River below Guntersville.

He came out to the house that afternoon in his old Ford with a tape measure clipped to his belt. He did not come in at first.

He walked around the porch three times and measured the steps and squatted down in the yard and looked along the ground the way a man looks down a gun barrel.

“Thirty-two inches,” he finally said, when he came up on the porch where Mom and I were sitting. “From the yard to the porch floor. That’s a long ramp, Charlene. Thirty-two feet of ramp, at the least, plus landings.”

“Why so long?” Mom asked. She had her face turned toward his voice.

She could not see him well with the patch on and her bad eye, but she knew his voice from forty years of Wednesday night prayer meeting.

“One inch of rise for every foot of run, Miss Alma,” Odell said.

“That’s what the government says and that’s what I say too. You make a ramp any steeper than that and it’s not a ramp. It’s a sled.”

Mom laughed. It was the first time I had heard her laugh since the transplant.

He drew it out for me on the back of a feed store receipt. A landing at the top, five feet by five feet, so the chair could turn coming out of the door.

A run down along the front of the house. A landing at the turn. Another run back the other way, and a gravel pad at the bottom where it met the yard.

“And this door’s got to go,” he said, rapping on Mom’s front door with his knuckle. “It’s thirty inches. She’s been getting through it with her elbows tucked in. You want a thirty-six inch door and a low threshold, or she’ll be hung up on it every time.”

I went to the lumberyard in Fort Payne with Odell’s list on Monday. Treated posts rated for ground contact, two-by-sixes for the joists and decking, two-by-fours for the rails, galvanized hangers and structural screws by the box.

Lumber is not cheap anymore. The lumber and hardware came to sixty-four hundred dollars. The concrete for the footings and the gravel for the pad came to seven hundred.

The new prehung steel door with the low threshold was fourteen hundred. The auger rental and the grit paint for the decking were five hundred more.

Nine thousand dollars, almost to the penny. I paid it out of the car account.

I came home with two thousand four hundred dollars left and a Buick that still sounded like a coffee grinder, and I did not care one bit.

Odell came that Saturday at seven in the morning, and he did not come alone.