Dad’s Martin Houses Go Back Up

The Carport

We went and got them that afternoon. I took the rest of Thursday off. My husband was on shift at the plant, so it was me and Dad and, about ten minutes after we pulled in, Ozzie, who had been sitting on his bench by the duck pond waiting to see what we would do.

“Need a hand?” Ozzie said.

“We could use a back,” Dad said. “Mine quit in 2009.”

The three of us loaded the four houses into the bed of Dad’s truck. They are not heavy, but they are awkward, and a cracked roof will cut your hand if you grab it wrong. Ozzie wrapped his in a rag.

While we were loading, the martins kept circling over us. One landed on the top of the first pole and sat there looking down. Dad stopped with a house in his arms and looked up at it.

“Hold on, buddy,” he said. “We’re coming back.”

That was the only time all day I thought he might cry. He did not. He set the house in the truck bed and went for the next one.

We spread them out in Dad’s carport on sawhorses. Dad looked them over the way he used to look over a storm-damaged line, slow and careful, touching every seam.

“Three are easy,” he said. “Dents are cosmetic. This one,” and he put his hand on the cracked roof, “needs a new roof panel. I’ve got sheet aluminum in the shed. But it’ll take a day to cut and rivet.”

Ozzie went home and came back with a rubber mallet and a block of two-by-four wrapped in carpet. You hold the carpet block inside the dent and tap the outside with the mallet, and the dent comes out slow and smooth. Ozzie learned that fixing grain spouts at the elevator.

I took the room doors off and scrubbed every room with a bucket of hot water and a little bleach, the way Dad has always done it in the fall. I pulled out the green leaves and the pine needles and I felt bad about it, but they had to be clean before the paint.

We worked until the shadows got long across the driveway, and then Dad said that was enough for one day, and Ozzie went home, and I made Dad a grilled cheese sandwich before I left.

Friday

On Friday I took a vacation day. I had eleven saved up and nothing I had been saving them for.

Dad was already in the carport when I got there at eight. He had the sheet aluminum laid out on a sawhorse and he was measuring the new roof panel with a tape measure and a carpenter’s square.

“Measure twice,” I said, because he used to say it to me.

“Measure four times,” he said. “I’m ninety. I don’t have aluminum to waste.”

He cut the panel with tin snips. His hands shook some, but the cut was straight. I held the panel while he drilled the rivet holes, and Ozzie, who came over at nine with a sack of sausage biscuits, ran the rivet gun because his grip is better than either of ours.

By noon the fourth house had a new roof. It was a little shinier than the old metal, but you could not see that from the ground.

After lunch we painted. Dad has always used plain exterior white, the bright kind. We did two coats on every house, inside the porches and out, with the doors off and laid in a row on newspaper in the driveway.

Somewhere in the second coat, my phone buzzed. It was Darlene.

“Hey, Rosie,” she said. She is the only person alive who calls me Rosie. “What are you doing today? I called the office and they said you were off.”

I looked at Dad. He was painting a porch rail with a tiny brush, very careful, and he did not look up.

“Helping Dad with a project,” I said.

“What kind of project?”

“Just some painting.”

There was a pause. My sister and I have been sisters fifty-two years. She can hear a pause in my voice the way a mother can hear a cough at night.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Tell him I love him.”

“I will.”

When I hung up, Dad said, still not looking up, “Thank you.”

I did not say anything. I went back to painting. But it sat heavy in me all afternoon, that I had kept something from my sister, even for a good reason.

By four the houses were done, gleaming white on the sawhorses. Dad stood back and looked at them with his hands on his hips.

“Your mother would say they look like a row of little churches,” he said.

She would have. She said it every time.