The Driveway We Paved for Imogene

“That was his thermos,” she told me when I came over. “He carried it to the prep plant every day for thirty-one years. It still keeps coffee hot till supper.”

She poured me a cup before I could say no, and I did not say no.

Boyd walked the whole drive once, top to bottom, with his hands in his jacket pockets.

He kicked at the clay in a couple of places and squatted down once to look along the grade. Then he came back up and told us how it was going to go.

We would fill the ruts with Ronnie’s big rock, spread the dense grade over everything, grade it to shed water, and roll it hard.

Then we would pave from the top down, so the last truck could empty at the road and pull straight out.

Boyd ran the skid steer himself. He pushed Ronnie’s two piles down into the ruts first, a bucket at a time, packing the big rock into the soft places, and the young ones followed him with shovels and filled the low spots by hand.

Then he started on the dense grade. He would scoop a bucket out of the row and spread it with the bucket tipped down, back-dragging it smooth, working his way down the hill and crowning the middle so the rain would run off both edges.

Coy walked behind him with a string line and a level and a can of marking paint.

Every so often he would hold up a hand, and Boyd would stop, back up, and take an inch off or put an inch on without a word passing between them.

I ran the roller behind them on the base, vibration on, back and forth in slow overlapping passes.

Coy had the radio on in his truck with the doors open, a Saturday gospel hour out of Madisonville, and Imogene sang along from her lawn chair, quiet, a little behind the beat.

Every hour or so she got up out of that chair with the thermos and a sleeve of foam cups, one careful step at a time with her cane, and poured coffee for whichever man was closest. Not one of them told her no.

“You’re going to wear yourself out,” I told her the second time she came down the edge of the yard.

“I sat in a chair four hours on Wednesday getting my blood cleaned,” she said. “I can sit in a chair and pour coffee for men fixing my driveway.”

The base was rolled by half past nine. Boyd walked it again and stomped it in a few places with his boot heel.

It did not give anywhere, not one spot. He looked at me and nodded once, which from Boyd Tackett is about the same as a parade.

The plant opens at six on Saturdays in the fall, and the scale house line was already long with trucks running late jobs before the cold shut everybody down for the year. Our driver left for the first load a little after nine, so it would come hot just as the base was done.

Boyd had hired a second truck and driver out of his own pocket, so the paver would never sit and wait between loads.

At twenty to ten the first truck came up the road with a tarp over the bed and turned in at the culvert.

You can smell hot mix before you can see it, that smell of hot tar that gets into your clothes and your hair and stays there for good.