The Wall We Finished by Hand

We set the last course by eleven. Then it was the cap blocks, with the last of the drain rock going in behind them a few loads at a time, and topsoil to come next week so Eunice could seed grass in the spring.

Cap blocks are thinner and flat on top, and they get glued down with masonry adhesive.

You run two beads out of a caulk gun along the top of the last course, set the cap, tap it with the rubber mallet, and check it with the level. Eighty caps.

Dewey ran the caps. He had the steadiest hand of any of us, and he was the one who had been there the longest.

Gus ran the caulk gun ahead of him. The kid and I carried the caps down from the last pallet two at a time in the wheelbarrow.

I was on one of the last loads when I looked up the slope and saw Eunice sitting on her porch steps in her blue cardigan, her white hair bright in the sun, watching us with her hands folded on her knees. It was almost three o’clock.

The wall ran across her hill like it had always been there. A hundred and twelve feet of tan block, straight as a church pew, the cap line running dead level across the top with the turning oaks behind it.

I pushed that wheelbarrow of gravel down the plywood one last time, the last of the drain rock for the low end, and when I set it down and straightened up, Dewey was kneeling on top of the wall at the low end, holding the last cap block in his lap.

He had his carpenter’s pencil out, but he was not using the pencil.

He had a sixteen-penny nail from his pocket, and he was scratching something into the back of the cap block, the side that would face into the hill where nobody would ever see it.

I came up beside him. He did not hide it. Two letters, deep and careful in the face of the block. Q.K. And under it, smaller, the year.

“He should’ve set this one,” Dewey said. He did not look up at me. “Since he can’t, I figured he ought to at least be in it.”

I could not say anything. I nodded. Dewey ran two beads of adhesive along the last open spot, set the block with the letters facing the hill, and tapped it down three times with the rubber mallet. Then he laid the level across it.

The bubble sat dead center.

Up on the porch, Eunice had her hand pressed to her mouth.

Dewey’s tally was on the end of that last pallet. A hundred and seventy-one loads.

He tore the cardboard tag off the pallet and put it in his shirt pocket and did not say why.

We were loading the wheelbarrows back into the crew truck when Lyman’s dually came up the road.

He did not have the trailer on. He came slow, the way you drive past a wreck, and he pulled over to the curb in front of Eunice’s mailbox and stopped.

He did not turn the engine off. I could see him through the windshield with both hands on the wheel.

From the curb you could see the whole wall. The way the yard falls off, there is no angle on that road where you cannot see it.