The Roof My Shift Put On in a Day

Then he clipped me in personally and gave the strap a tug like he was checking a chain.

The tear-off went faster than I would have believed. Six men up top with roofing shovels, walking the old shingles down off the deck in long sheets and dropping them over the edge into the dumpster.

The noise was like a hailstorm all over again, only this time it was going the right direction.

The men on the ground raked the grass with magnets and picked up every nail they could find. My daughter was not allowed in the yard yet.

She sat on the porch steps in her pajamas with her rabbit and a bowl of cereal and watched.

By seven o’clock the old roof was in the dumpster. By seven-thirty Cletus had walked every inch of the bare deck and marked the soft boards with a carpenter’s crayon.

There were four of them, all over my daughter’s room, right where the tarp had failed.

He had two men cut them out with a circular saw and he and I fit the new plywood in, screwed it down, and he checked my work with the heel of his boot.

“That’ll hold a truck,” he said.

Then came the ice and water shield along the eaves and up the valleys, sticky side down, rolled out by two men who had clearly done it before. Then the drip edge. Then the underlayment, rolled out and nailed in rows.

By nine o’clock the whole roof was a smooth sheet of gray, and Cletus was up on the deck with a chalk line, snapping straight lines across it.

Arlo held the other end. The chalk puffed up blue in the sun every time he let the line go.

Then the nail guns started.

If you have never heard eleven men run nail guns on one roof at once, I don’t know how to describe it except to say it sounds like rain on a tin barn, only steady.

Pop, pop, pop, pop. Starter strip first along the edge, then the first course, then up and up.

Cletus ran the front. A tall fellow from the night shift who’d roofed in college ran the back. The rest of us carried bundles, cut in around the vents and chimney, and kept the hoses from tangling.

I was up top in a red T-shirt and an old tool belt Tara had bought me for our first anniversary, carrying bundles from the pallet to the men.

Each bundle of architectural shingles weighs about seventy pounds. By the tenth one I had stopped feeling my shoulder. By the twentieth I had stopped thinking at all.

The sun was full up by then, the sky that hard summer blue you only get after a week of storms.

It was going to be hot. By ten it was, and the men had their caps turned around and their shirts dark down the back.

Around ten-thirty the first car from the wives pulled in. Then two more.

Tara met them in the yard, and before I knew it there was a card table under the maple tree with a tablecloth and a crockpot and two big orange coolers of sweet tea.