On the first Tuesday of April, Garnet was working alone on an old barn out on County Road 9. There was frost on the north slope. At six-forty in the morning it took his feet out from under him, and he went down the roof on his back and off the edge, twelve feet to the ground, landing with his right leg across the corner of a concrete water trough.
The farmer found him twenty minutes later, sitting up, gray as ash, holding his knee together with both hands and apologizing for the mess.
I heard about it the way I hear about everything, from Carla, at ten past six that evening. Her voice on the phone had its prayer-chain sound, steady and low, the voice she uses to hand you a name like a plate of something hot.
“Wendell, it’s Garnet. He fell off a barn this morning. They’re doing surgery Thursday on the knee. The doctor says the kneecap is in pieces and a couple of ligaments besides. Pray for the knee.”
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“I will.”
“Pray for the rest of it, too,” she said. “I know that man’s book.”
I did not know what she meant. I wrote Garnet’s name on the pad by the phone, called Stan, called Arvel, and said what I could in the garage. It was a good prayer. It was the kind I had said a hundred times. I went to bed feeling like I had done my part.
On Wednesday after work I drove to the hospital with a bag of peppermints, because I did not know what else a man brings another man.
Garnet was in a bed by the window with his right leg locked in a brace from hip to ankle and propped on three pillows. He is sixty-four years old, with a gray crew cut and forearms like fence posts and a voice that sounds like a truck on gravel, and I had never in my life seen him lying down. It was like seeing a barn on its side.
“Wendell.” He tried to push himself up and thought better of it. “Sit. You’re making the nurse nervous.”
I sat. He took a peppermint, looked at it, and set it on the tray table next to a spiral notebook and a pencil worn down to the width of a matchstick.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The book.”
It was a plain black book, the kind you buy at the feed store for a dollar and a half. Juna kept Garnet’s books for twenty-eight years, in a handwriting so neat people asked her to address wedding invitations. After she died, Garnet kept them himself in block capitals.
Fourteen jobs. Fourteen names and addresses, April through the end of October, each with a price and a date and, in the margin, a small penciled check mark.
“Those are the deposits,” Garnet said. “A third down on every one. Soon as they sign, I order the shingles. Soon as the shingles are ordered, that money’s out the door to Dean at the lumberyard. Some of it’s already on people’s lawns, stacked under tarps.”
“Okay,” I said, not understanding.
“So, if I don’t roof them, I owe them their money. And I don’t have their money. It’s on their lawns.”
I looked at the book. I looked at him. His hand was shaking a little on the sheet.
“The doctor says five months before I can climb,” Garnet said. “Five months if everything knits. And that’s April to September, Wendell. That’s my year. Eight months of roofing is what feeds twelve months of living, and I’ve lived on it so thin since Juna that…”
He stopped.