The Roof My Shift Put On in a Day

Then he did something I didn’t expect. He walked over to the men in the shade, one at a time, and shook every hand. Eleven of them.

He asked each man his name and where he worked at the plant, and he said thank you to every single one of them, just like Arlo had said thank you to my girl.

When he got to Cletus, the two of them stood there a minute.

“Where’d you learn to cut a valley like that?” Dewey asked.

“Roofed fourteen summers,” Cletus said. “Old man I worked for wouldn’t let you off the roof till it was straight.”

“That’s the only way,” Dewey said.

“That’s the only way,” Cletus agreed. And that was the end of that.

The afternoon went fast after that. The back side went on.

The tall fellow from nights ran the courses up to the ridge, and two of the younger men cut in around the stack vents, and the ridge vent went on along the top.

By three-thirty the only thing left was the ridge cap on the front, a row of thick shingles that runs along the very peak and covers the seam.

Cletus and I and two others ran it from the far end, working back toward the ladder.

It was right about then, with four or five pieces left, that Cletus stopped and looked down at the yard.

Dewey was still standing by the card table. He hadn’t gone home. He had a glass of tea in his hand.

Cletus didn’t say anything to me. He just set his nail gun down on the ridge, and pointed with his chin, and waited.

I understood. I don’t know how. I set mine down too.

I called down. “Dewey,” I said. “We saved you the last few.”

He looked up. For a second I thought he would wave me off. He was sixty-four and his knees were bad and it was ninety degrees.

Then he set the glass of tea down on the card table. He walked to his truck, and he reached behind the seat, and he came out with his old roofing hammer.

The one with the hatchet blade and the worn leather grip. The one Tara’s mother had his initials burned into the handle of, thirty-some years ago, so the other men on his crews would stop borrowing it.

He held it a second in both hands, like a man holding something he hasn’t held in a while.

Then he walked back across the yard, past the card table, past the wives and the men in the shade and my daughter on the porch step with her rabbit, and he put one boot on the bottom rung.

The whole yard went quiet. Even the compressors had stopped.

My daughter stood up on the porch and said, “Go, Grandpa.”

The roof was done by four o’clock, eleven men and one old roofer, and that night my girl slept in her own bed under her own ceiling, and Dewey came back the next Saturday and helped me hang the new drywall without being asked.

But that’s not how I remember it. I remember it the way it looked from the top of the ridge, in the sun, with the new gray shingles hot under my hands.

I remember Dewey Haase climbing the ladder with his own hammer.