The Roof My Shift Put On in a Day

“I’ve got a trailer and a compressor,” Arlo said. “And my brother-in-law’s got a roofing nailer he never uses. I’ll bring it.”

The next morning, before I went in, I drove to the lumberyard in town. The man behind the counter had been up to his eyes in storm orders for three weeks, and he didn’t even blink when I told him what I needed.

Cletus had figured the order on the back of a napkin. Twenty-three squares of gray architectural shingles. Synthetic underlayment.

Ice and water shield for the eaves and valleys, which code calls for in our part of the state. Drip edge. Starter strip. Ridge cap. Ridge vent. Coil nails. Six sheets of plywood for the soft spots.

It came to $5,300 with the dumpster rental. I paid it out of the insurance money and watched the number in our checking account drop like a stone down a well.

The lumberyard said they could drop it Friday afternoon. The dumpster company said the same.

I asked the county about a permit and the woman on the phone said for a re-roof outside town limits they did not need one, just do it right.

Tara called the wives. I didn’t ask her to. She just picked up the phone Wednesday night with the plant phone list in her hand and started dialing, and by Thursday she had a whole lunch planned that I knew nothing about.

“Sandwiches,” she said. “Potato salad. Two coolers of tea. Somebody’s bringing bars. You men just worry about the roof.”

On Friday the shingles came on a flatbed with a boom, and the driver set the pallets right up on the roof ridge where we’d need them, the way the good yards do.

The dumpster came at four and they set it right beside the house.

I didn’t sleep much Friday night. I lay there listening to every truck on the gravel road and wondering if anybody would really come.

They came.

At a quarter past five Saturday morning, with the sun just coming up red over the bean field across the road, the first pickup turned into our drive.

It was Cletus. He had a coffee in one hand and an extension ladder on his rack.

Then another truck came. Then another. Then they just kept coming, until there were nine more of them lined up along the edge of the yard, tailgates down, and eleven men standing in the wet grass in T-shirts and ball caps.

They had nail guns, framing hammers, compressors and hoses coiled over their shoulders. They had their own ladders.

They had pry bars and roofing shovels and a magnet sweeper on a pole. Three of them had worked a double on Friday and come straight from the plant.

Nobody made a speech. Cletus walked once around the house, looked up at each side, kicked the bottom of the downspout, and came back.

“Tear-off first,” he said. “Front side, then the back. Nobody up top without a harness on the front. I’ll set the anchors. Tarps on the flower beds so Tara doesn’t kill us.”

I had bought harnesses, because Cletus told me to. He set the roof anchors himself, the way he’d set them at the plant on the elevator head houses.