The Roofing Season the Chain Saved

She held out the card. He took it in a hand that was not steady, and read it, and read it again. Then he stood for a long moment with his chin on his chest, and every one of us found something to look at on the ground.

“I’ll sit in the chair,” Garnet said at last, thickly. “For the tear-off. I’ll tell you how.”

We tore off the old roof in two hours. Over the sewing room the plywood was gray and soft where the tarp had trapped the damp, and Garnet told Stan exactly which sheets to cut and which to save. Then, with the bare deck open to the sky, he did a thing he had not done at any house all year. He got up out of the chair, put on a harness, and said, “This part is mine.”

He climbed the ladder with Stan holding the line. Slowly, an inch at a time, he made his way across the deck to the corner over the sewing room. He knelt on his good knee. From his shirt pocket he took Juna’s card, set it on the plywood, and drove four nails through the corners, high and straight, a nickel’s width in. Then he took a carpenter’s pencil and wrote beside it, in careful block letters, Juna’s name, and under her name the words he had said on every roof that year. So the house knows who it’s for.

Then he called us up, one at a time, every one who had come, and had each of us sign. Stan. Erle. Arvel. Milo and Orie. Pastor Dave, in a stiff Sunday hand. Carla, last of all, who needed help up the ladder and would not hear of it, and wrote Carla, who kept the list.

I signed beside Garnet. My name looked small and crooked next to his. But it was there.

By four o’clock the felt was down and by dusk the shingles were on. Garnet would not let anyone else lay the ridge cap at the peak. He did it himself, sitting astride the roof like a boy on a fence. When the final nail went in, he sat there with the hammer across his knee and looked down at the thirty-some people in his yard, and I believe he said something to someone who was not there.

The next Tuesday, Carla handed him two cards.

“A chain is only as good as what’s passed along it,” she said. “Garnet, you call two people when I call you. That’s the whole job.”

On the first Tuesday in December, a freezing rain split a limb off an oak and took the roof off a young couple’s back porch out on the north road. At six o’clock the phone rang at my house.

“Wendell,” said Garnet. “It’s Garnet. Pray for Josie and Pete, and their porch.” He cleared his throat. “Then Saturday, seven o’clock. Bring gloves.”

The sign on his truck still says We Don’t Leave You Open. Under it now, in small letters Orie painted, it says Saturday crew welcome. Milo and Orie work for Garnet after school, at a real wage. Garnet runs the jobs from a stool.

I used to think prayer was what you did while you waited for God to do the work. I know better. Sometimes it is how He gets forty-one households out of their chairs. I keep my gloves in the truck. The blister is a callus now, and I would not trade it for anything.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.