The Coffee Can That Fixed the Roof

Then the men started calling Ben. Bud Rader. Gene Albrecht. The hauler from Barry County, whose name I finally learned was Lyndon Danforth.

Bud was the one who made it real. He said the men from the sale barn would put the roof on for the price of the materials, if a few of them could be spared on Saturdays.

The lumber yard in Lamar offered the metal panels at cost, $11,800 for the whole thing, delivered. The math worked. $6,200 from the old fund. $3,100 from Glenda. $2,500 from the board. That was $11,800, to the dollar.

I counted three times myself, like my daughter, and I did not trust it until Pastor Leon read the sum aloud from the pulpit one Sunday in January and half the pews applauded.

Wayne did not come on that Sunday. He didn’t come to church until March, and when he did he sat in the back, in the pew nearest the door, and stood for the hymns with his hat in his hand.

Ben told him, in December, after the sale barn, that he was welcome at our table for Christmas dinner. The one condition was that he sat down next to Glenda and ate whatever she put on his plate.

Wayne said that was fair. He sat down next to her. She put a snickerdoodle on his plate before the ham, which the Tate family has never done in a hundred years of Christmases, and nobody said a word about it.

He was quiet at that meal. But when Glenda asked him to pass the rolls, he handed them over with both hands, like something he was glad to carry.

It was a wet spring. The first dry Saturday was the second week of April.

I came out to the church at seven with the cooler, because Glenda would not hear of letting the men go without cider. There were twelve pickups in the gravel lot already, and a trailer of metal panels the color of old silver.

Bud Rader was on the ground, supervising with a cane, because his hip would not allow the ladder. Gene Albrecht had a cordless drill hanging off his belt. Ben was already on the roof, his hat tipped back, laying out chalk lines.

And at the top of the ladder was Wayne.

He had been up there since six. He had pulled off the old shingles by himself before the others came, rotted and curling and green with moss, and tossed them down into a dumpster until the pile was higher than his head.

“Look at him go,” Bud said to me, quietly. “He hasn’t been that fast since Lorraine was alive.”

Glenda set up the stand at the foot of the ladder. She stood at the table in her teal coat, even though the morning had warmed up, with her braids over her shoulders. She poured a cup of cider.

“Uncle Wayne!” she called up. “You want some?”

He looked down from the roof. The sun was on his face. He looked ten years younger than he had in the muddy lot.

“What’s it cost?” he called.

“A dollar!”

“Well, I’m not coming down for a dollar.”

“Then you pay on the rope!”

She had thought of it, I swear, on the drive over. She tied the cup into the old church bucket, one of the three that had caught rain all those years, and Ben fed out a rope from the eaves.