The Saturday Thirty Men Brought Ladders

I found out Thursday night, when Dwight Strunk stood on my porch with his cap in both hands, like a boy come to take the girl to the prom.

“Mrs. Pickett, I’m sorry I told you March. Lowell called me. I called the men’s breakfast. We’re coming Saturday.”

“I can’t pay a crew.”

“Nobody’s asking you to.” He put the cap back on. “Lowell’s sending the shingles at what he paid, and you can settle up when you’ve got the strength. The rest of us are coming on our own time.”

“I am seventy years old,” I said, which I had not meant to say. “I do not need to be somebody’s good deed.”

Dwight Strunk is thirty-eight and has shoulders like a door. He studied my porch boards.

“Your husband carried my granddad’s casket,” he said. “When my dad’s barn burned in 2009, Dale was the first truck in the yard, and he did not ask what we needed. He just started loading. It’s not a good deed, Mrs. Pickett. It’s a bill that’s come due. You’re the last one to know it.”

I had no answer to that. I held the doorframe.

“Don’t cook,” he said. “I mean it. The women have got the food.”

Cedar Street

At ten after six on Saturday morning I counted nine trucks from my kitchen window. By seven there were twenty-two, parked nose to tail down both sides of Cedar Street with their tailgates down and their thermoses out. It was fifty-one degrees and not a cloud in the sky. Dwight had been watching the weather for three days.

Lowell’s flatbed backed into my yard stacked to the cab. Twenty-nine squares of shingles, which is eighty-seven bundles, plus underlayment, drip edge, ridge cap, a dozen sheets of plywood, and a box of nails the size of a cinder block.

He handed me the ticket before I could ask. Six thousand one hundred eighty-four dollars and forty cents, to the penny, at what he had paid.

“Mrs. Pickett,” Dwight said. He had a chalk line in one hand and a clipboard in the other. “I’m going to give you the rules, and then I want you to go sit down. Nobody under sixteen goes on the roof. Nobody over seventy. Harnesses on the steep side, no exceptions.” He turned his head. “That’s you, Merle.”

“I heard you,” said a voice from the sidewalk.

Merle Dunaway is seventy-nine. He roofed houses in this county for fifty-one years and has not climbed a ladder since his hip was replaced in the spring. He came up my driveway with a folding lawn chair, opened it in my flower bed on top of what was left of the mums, and sat down with his hands on his knees.

“I’ll supervise,” he said.

“You’ll holler,” said Dwight.

“I’ll holler, and you’ll listen.”

Thirty men came that day, by Dwight’s count, and one boy. Wendell Brauer brought his own ladder. The pastor came in overalls and a Cardinals cap, with brand new work gloves. There were two boys from the high school ag shop, a man who drove a milk truck, and the young fellow who runs the tire shop.

They went up my ladders in turns of fourteen, which was all Dwight allowed on the roof at once. The tear-off sounded like a hundred people dragging chairs across a gym floor. A boy of fourteen named Tyler carried bundles for eight hours straight and would not stop to rest.