I do not know what he thought. I only know something in my chest turned over, very slightly, like a key in a lock that has not been used in a long time. I did not feel kind. I felt tired. But I did not feel quite so sure of my leaking roof.
At four thirty that afternoon, Denton said, “It’s time.”
The men came at a quarter to five with a cordless drill and a pry bar. They looked at their feet, and then at Denton, sitting at the top of the ramp with his hands on his knees.
“Take it down careful,” Denton said. “It’s good lumber.”
They worked quietly. As each board came off, Hal numbered it with his carpenter’s pencil, one through ninety-one, and the boys stacked them in order on the grass.
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When the last board was off, Denton asked to be carried down. Two men lifted his chair down the five stone steps and set him in the grass in the shade of the oak. He looked at the bare strip of dirt and the numbered pile and said, “Well. That’s that.”
At five o’clock exactly, a pickup pulled to the curb and two men in Association windbreakers got out. They looked at the dirt. One wrote something on a clipboard. They got back in the truck and left.
That night around nine I found my husband alone on the back patio in the dark, and I sat down on the bench beside his chair.
“I’ve been in a chair thirty-five years,” Denton said, “and I have never been afraid. But tonight I sat on that lawn looking up at my own front porch, and I thought, I can’t get into my own house. And for about a minute, Mara, I was afraid.”
I leaned my head on his shoulder. We said the Lord’s Prayer, the two of us, in the dark. When we got to the part about forgiving those who trespass against us, he said it plainly, without a catch, and I stumbled, and he squeezed my hand and waited for me to catch up.
At six thirty on Saturday morning I stood in my kitchen with a pot of coffee and a pan of sausage biscuits and heard a sound out front like a thunderstorm coming in.
It was trucks.
They were parked up and down both sides of Larkspur Lane. Pickups with ladders in the beds. A flatbed from Copperline Farm and Feed stacked with new lumber. A horse trailer with a table saw in it. A church van, and two cars from out of town with sawhorses coming out of the trunks.
On the lawn under the oak, Hal sat at a card table with a receipt pad from the feed store. He was taking names.
I stepped out in my slippers. Hal looked up, and his weathered face broke into a smile. “Morning, Mara. Got a little crew for you.”
Dewey at the feed store had sold the lumber at his own cost, and the love offering Pastor Cal passed at Thursday night prayer meeting covered every board, two thousand one hundred and eighty dollars.
By seven o’clock there were so many people on my lawn that Hal climbed up on a sawhorse to be heard.
“All right. Lyle is going to give you the numbers, and I want every one of you to hear them, because we are not building this one by heart. We are building it by the book.”