The Ramp With Four Names on the Rail

Four more men from Mom’s church came up the gravel drive behind him in two pickups, with a generator and a cement mixer on a trailer and coffee in a thermos.

There was Harold, who is seventy and retired from the water department. Ray and Bobby, who are brothers and both still farm, chickens and some cattle.

And Curtis, the youngest of them at fifty-eight, who drives a gas truck and had taken the Saturday off his route.

I tried to pay them. Of course I tried. I had an envelope with what I could spare. Odell would not even look at it.

“Gene Mott helped me roof my house in 1988 and would not take a dime,” he said. “Put that back in your pocket before Harold sees it and gets his feelings hurt.”

They worked like men who have done it all their lives, which they had. Ray ran the auger and Bobby followed behind him with the post hole digger cleaning out the holes.

Harold mixed the concrete. Curtis and Odell set the posts and plumbed them and braced them, and checked every one of them twice with a level before the concrete went in.

I wheeled Mom out onto the porch at mid-morning with a glass of sweet tea and a dish towel over her knees against the wind.

She could not see much of anything with the patch, but she could hear every sound. She knew the auger and the mixer and the screw guns, and she knew every one of their voices.

“Harold, is that you?” she called out once. “Did you ever get that bad tooth pulled?”

“I did, Miss Alma,” Harold called back. “And I’ll be paying for it till Jesus comes.”

They came back the next Saturday to finish. They put down the decking and the second landing and the second run.

They hung the new door, which took Odell and Curtis most of the morning, cutting out the old frame and fitting the new one plumb and square.

Then they started on the rails.

Two rails on each side, a low one and a high one, the way Odell said a wheelchair ramp ought to have, so Mom could pull herself along by the low rail if she ever wanted to.

The top rail he made from a better grade of two-by-six, sanded smooth so there was not a splinter anywhere on it.

At noon I carried out sandwiches on a cookie sheet. Pimento cheese and ham on white bread, a bag of chips and a jug of tea.

The men sat on the tailgates and on the new landing with their legs hanging over. Odell sat on an upturned bucket by the top rail.

I sat down next to him on the decking. The wood was still warm from the morning sun. I ran my hand along the top rail he had just sanded, and I asked him for one more thing.

“Odell,” I said. “Can you carve something into this rail? Names. Down at this end, by the top landing, where she’ll come out the door.”

He set his sandwich down on his knee. “What names?”

“Marla, Teresa, Kay and Charlene,” I said. “In that order. Oldest to youngest, except me at the end.”

He looked at me a long time. Odell knew about the deed. Everybody at church knew about the deed by then.