About thirty-five hundred square feet of ribbed steel, used and rust-spotted, a little bent at the edges but sound. I had paid thirty-one hundred and fifty dollars for the lot, and I did not tell Russ the number until it was in the yard.
“Good steel,” he said, running a hand along the edge. “Better than what they make now.” “It’s seventy years old.” “That’s what I said.”
By ten, nineteen neighbors were in my yard.
I counted them, because that is a thing I do. Stuart Hasselbring and his wife, Wilma, with a roaster of beef and noodles. Delbert, who had come on foot because he said the tractor needed a rest.
Eddie Ruhl with a screw gun the size of a rifle. The pastor, in work gloves. A boy of about eight who carried screws in a coffee can and was as proud as a man.
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We started at the south end and worked north. One person set the sheet and lined it up with the chalk. Another ran the first screw. The next one drove the rest. By noon the east wall was done.
By two the west wall was done. By three the roof was two thirds covered, a rippling silver deck with the sun on it, and I stood in the yard and watched it and could not speak.
Russ was beside me in the lawn chair. He had walked to it himself that morning, with the walker, twelve steps, the farthest he had gone since surgery.
“Alvin would have loved this,” he said. “He’d have hated that we used old tin.” “He’d have hated that we used old tin,” Russ agreed. “Then he would have asked who had the extra screw gun.”
I laughed. I felt it all the way down.
The last sheet was mine. We had agreed on it without ever saying so. It went on the north eave, the final piece of the roof, a ten-foot length of dairy barn tin the color of a dime.
I carried it up the ladder myself, with Tanner holding the bottom rung and Jake feeding me the screws one at a time, and I laid it down and set the edge and lined up the first hole.
Up on the stepladder at the north eave.
Then I heard a truck slow on the county road. I looked toward the sound. It was Garth’s pickup. And behind it, bright and white on its trailer, was the boat.
He was taking it to a storage lot at the lake before the weather turned, I found out later, because he did not have a shed to keep it in.
His own shop was full of other people’s jobs, and I think he had not thought about where a boat would live.
He saw the yard. He saw the cars and the people and the sheets of tin shining in the sun. He saw the frame of a shed standing on the old black ground where his father’s shed had been, and he saw it was almost finished.
He stopped square in front of our drive. The window rolled down. “Glenda,” he called. His voice cracked on the second syllable. “Glenda, come down a minute. I can explain.”