Carla stepped out from behind Arvel’s sedan. I had not seen her arrive. She had her purse over her arm and her good church coat on, and she walked up the lawn and stopped about four feet from him, so she had to tilt her head back to look at his face.
“I know you didn’t, Raymond,” she said. “That is why it is called grace. They don’t ask you first.”
Garnet looked at her. Then he looked at the ground. Then, and I will remember this when I am very old, he took one hand off a crutch and wiped his face with the heel of it, hard, once, like a man wiping off a windshield.
“Juna would have done this to me,” he said.
“Juna,” Carla said, “would have done it better.”
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That broke something. Garnet laughed, one short bark of a laugh that sounded like it hurt, and so did Erle, and so did Edna in the doorway, who said, “Garnet, you come in here and sit down before you fall,” and Garnet said, “Edna, I’m not coming in. I have a roof to supervise.”
“Then I’ll bring you a chair,” said Edna.
She brought him a lawn chair, green and white, with the old plastic webbing, and carried it out herself in her housecoat. Erle turned a cooler over and propped Garnet’s leg on it. Garnet lowered himself into the chair like a man lowering a piano, and looked up at the roof the way a bird looks at a fence post it knows.
“All right,” Garnet said. “Everybody who’s going on that roof, come stand in front of me.”
We stood.
“I’ve been roofing thirty-one years, and I have never had a man hurt on my job,” Garnet said, in a voice that carried across the whole yard. “I am not about to start with volunteers. So these are the rules, and I am going to say them one time.”
He held up one thick finger.
“Nobody goes on this roof without a harness. I have six in the truck. Stan has a lineman’s belt and knows how to use it, so Stan is in charge of the ropes. If I see a man on that roof without a line, he is off my job.”
Second finger.
“Nobody over seventy goes on a roof steeper than a six-in-twelve. That is a gentle roof. Edna’s is a four. Erle, you are seventy-four. If I tell you to stay on the ground, you stay on the ground.”
“I’ve been on roofs since before you were born,” Erle said.
“Then you know better than to argue.”
Third finger. He looked at the two boys.
“Nobody under seventeen goes up on a roof the first two Saturdays. Milo, Orie, you are on the ground with the wheelbarrow, and don’t give me that look. I have saved more men’s lives from the ground than from the roof.”
Orie stared at him. It was the first time I saw him look at a person directly.
“Yes, sir,” said Orie.
“And last.” Garnet looked at me. I felt it like a hand on my chest. “Wendell.”
“Yes.”
“You’re in charge of the ground.”
“Garnet, I am not a roofer.”
“I know it. That’s why. A man afraid of ladders makes the best ground man there is. You will see everything. You’ll tell me if anybody is doing something stupid, and you’ll pick every nail off the grass with a magnet, because a nail in a tire at four in the afternoon is a story nobody wants to tell Edna.”
I opened my mouth to protest. Carla’s third-grade teacher stare traveled across the lawn and found me.