The Roofing Season the Chain Saved

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll do the ground.”

“Good,” said Garnet. “Now. Let’s tear off a roof.”

That Saturday I learned a great deal about roofs and, I think, more about the man in the lawn chair.

A tear-off is just what it sounds like. You work a flat spade under the old shingles and rip them up in sheets, and it sends a gray fog of old roof into the air. Stan and Arvel and the feed store brothers went up the ladders, clipped into ropes Stan had rigged to the chimney. I stood at the bottom with a wheelbarrow, and Milo and Orie hauled load after load of broken shingles to the dumpster.

Garnet could not see the roof well from the chair, but he could hear it.

“Stop,” he called, around ten o’clock. The whole yard went quiet. “Arvel. You’re prying against the grain. Go the other way. Let the nail come to you.”

“How could you possibly know that?” Arvel called down.

“I can hear it. It squeals like a pig.”

A man learns a roof by sound, I found out, the way I learn a gravel road by the feel in my feet. Garnet, with his leg on a cooler and a cinnamon roll in one hand, listened to a crew on a roof like a man listening to an orchestra, and every few minutes he lifted a finger, and somebody adjusted.

At eleven Edna brought out coffee and ham sandwiches. At noon the felt went down. At two o’clock, with the old roof stripped to bare plywood and the new paper snapped down in silver rows, dark clouds showed on the west horizon.

Garnet looked at the clouds for a long moment. “We’re not finishing the shingles today,” he said. “Everybody on that roof comes down. We’re drying her in.”

“Three more hours and we’d have her,” Stan said.

“Three hours of work in the rain is how a man ends up in a bed next to mine. She’s covered, Stan. That felt will hold. Edna’s bed is dry. That’s what ‘We Don’t Leave You Open’ means. It doesn’t mean we finish. It means nobody gets rained on.”

By three-thirty a hard gray rain drummed on that roof, and Edna’s bedroom was dry, and Edna stood at the window with her hands clasped under her chin. Garnet sat in his chair in the downpour under a plastic poncho Carla had found in her trunk, and would not go inside. He looked at the roof as though he were watching a child sleep.

I stood beside him, soaked to the skin and shivering. I had a blister rising on the heel of my right hand. It was the first real blister I had earned in about thirty years.

“Wendell,” Garnet said without turning his head.

“Yes.”

“How’s the hand?”

“I have a blister.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s how you know it’s prayer.”

I did not understand that. Not yet. I only knew I wanted to laugh and cry and could not decide which, so I stood there in the rain and let the water run down my face, and it did not matter which.

We finished Edna’s shingles the next Saturday, in a clean, windless morning. She stood in her yard and looked up at the new roof, a weathered gray with a ridge as straight as a ruler, and she cried for a while. Then she handed Garnet a check for the balance. He folded it into his shirt pocket and did not look at it.