The Ramp the Board Ordered Torn Down

At a quarter to ten, a golf cart had pulled up at the curb with an orange flag on the antenna.

Gordon did not get out right away. He sat with both hands on the wheel, looking at the saws and the sawhorses and the women with the coolers. I saw him look at Opaline, cutting a baluster with her straw hat pushed back, and I saw something move across his face.

He got out, with his clipboard, and stood at the edge of the lawn where the sidewalk stops, with the clipboard against his chest. Nobody said a word to him. A few of the men nodded and went back to work.

He was not a large man. In my memory he had been tall, but he was medium height, sixty or so, a little stooped, in pressed khakis, and standing at the edge of all that sweat and sawdust he looked extraordinarily alone.

I walked over with my pitcher of water. I did not decide to. “Gordon, would you like some?”

He looked at the pitcher as if I had offered him a live snake. “Mrs. Alcott, I’m here in an official capacity. I need to see the permit.”

“It’s on the front door. Forty-five dollars. I paid it myself.”

He read it from where he stood and wrote something on the clipboard. I set a cup of water on the hood of his golf cart and walked away without looking back.

At twelve minutes after twelve, Hal drove the last deck screw.

I was in the kitchen laying out sandwiches with the school secretary, and I only knew because the hammering stopped. After five hours of noise, the silence rang. I came out onto the porch wiping my hands and saw the ramp.

It was beautiful. It went out from the porch door in a long gentle line down the front of the house, across a five-foot landing, and turned back toward the walk in a second long line that ended flush with the sidewalk. The decking was pale gold in the noon sun, and the rails were smooth as church pews.

Every one of the ninety-one numbered boards was in it somewhere. Hal had put the old boards in the decking at the turn, where the chair would swing around. “They were built with love,” he said, “and I want them to carry the weight.”

Lyle stood at the foot of the ramp with a four-foot level in one hand and a tape in the other. He took off his cap and wiped his forehead on the back of his arm. Then he looked out over the crowd of tired, sunburned people and said, in a voice that carried to the street, “I need somebody to hold the dumb end of this tape.”

There was a pause.

Lyle was looking at the curb.

“Gordon. You’re about closest. Would you mind?”

I do not believe Lyle meant it unkindly. He said it the way he would have asked anyone. But everyone on that lawn stopped and turned to look at the sidewalk.

Gordon stood there with his clipboard. His face went through three or four things. He looked at Opaline, standing with her hat in her hand. He looked at the stacked lumber and the sawdust and the fifty faces.

Then he set the clipboard on the seat of his golf cart. He walked across the lawn. He took the end of the tape from Lyle’s hand, went down on one knee in the grass at the foot of the ramp, and held the metal tab against the bottom of the first post.