The Roofing Season the Chain Saved

On the ride home Stan told me what Garnet said when he thought nobody was listening.

He had stood by his truck, looking at that roof, and he had said, very quietly, “Juna, I think you’ve had a word.”

By May nobody had to be told twice. The chain phoned two, the two phoned two, and on Saturdays at seven there were pickups outside whatever house Garnet’s book named next, and a lawn chair on the grass.

On the sixth Saturday Garnet sent me up a ladder. It was a garage with a four-in-twelve pitch, hardly a roof at all, and I climbed it like a man climbing the gallows, with Stan clipping my line.

“Wendell,” Garnet called from below, “you hold that hammer like you’re apologizing to it.”

I hit a nail. It went in crooked.

“Four nails per shingle. High and straight, a nickel’s width below the seal. Do it like you mean it.”

By noon I was nailing straight. By the end of the day I had a feeling I had not had since I was a young man, the plain satisfaction of making a thing that would stand in the weather. I stayed up there ten minutes past quitting time. Stan saw me. He just grinned.

The boys changed too. Milo learned to read a chalk line, and by June he was the fastest on the crew. Orie said almost nothing for six weeks. Then one Saturday, hauling shingles up the ladder, he said without looking at anyone, “My dad did this. Before he left.” Garnet did not turn his head from the chair. “Then you’ve got it in your hands somewhere,” he said. “Let’s find it.” Orie took his hood off that day and never put it back on.

When the heat came, Garnet moved us to six in the morning and sent every man over sixty-five down by eleven. Before the felt went down on every roof, he had one of us write the homeowner’s name and our own on the bare plywood in carpenter’s pencil. “So the house knows who it’s for,” he said. And at noon, every Saturday, he brought lunch. He had not cooked since the funeral, and he came with a roaster of sloppy joes, and would not say whose recipe it was, and would not let a single man pay for it.

I stayed behind one evening in late July, the last night at a job on Maple, to run the magnet over the yard. Everybody else had gone. Garnet was still in the lawn chair, with the sun going down red over the corn.

“She used to bring my lunch up the ladder,” he said. “Juna. On a rope, in a bucket. Thirty years. I’d pull it up and there’d be a note in the napkin.” He did not look at me. “I’ve got a tarp on my own roof, over her sewing room. Since the May storm. I haven’t touched it. I haven’t touched that room.”

“Garnet.”

“She bought the shingles herself,” he said. “The winter she was sick. Forty-two bundles, stacked in the garage under a sheet. She said, Do the house, Garnet, I don’t want it dripping on my sewing machine. And I couldn’t. I roof everybody’s house in this county but mine.”

I did not say anything. I have learned that when a man says the thing, you let it lie where he put it.

A few weeks later I drove out to Carla’s after church.

“Carla, how long has Garnet been on the chain?”