The scaffolding on the east gable of the Miller estate always made a particular, hollow rattle whenever the wind came off the river, a dry metallic clatter that got into your bones after ten hours of hauling bundles up a fifty-foot ladder. We were three weeks into that job on the ridge, putting thirty squares of heavy slate-blend shingles on a house big enough to hold four families, and by Friday afternoon my lower back felt like it had been run over by a tractor.
I was up there stripping the old felt paper off the overhang, wiping the sweat out of my eyes with the back of a calloused forearm, when I looked across the narrow country lane and saw the blue tarp snapping in the breeze. It wasn’t just a patch. It was wrapped around the ridge vent of a low-slung, white-painted brick bungalow that looked like it had been built right after the Eisenhower administration and hadn’t seen a paintbrush since theCarter years. An old man was up on an aluminum extension ladder that was wobbling three feet to the left, trying to anchor the corner of that ragged plastic with a rusted brick tied to a length of yellow nylon twine.
His hands were shaking so bad I could see them vibrating from fifty yards away, and every time the wind gusted off the valley, the ladder gave a sharp little kick that made my stomach turn over. I dropped my scraper into the gutter, leaned against the rake board, and just watched him fight that piece of plastic for ten solid minutes until he finally climbed down, coughing into a stained handkerchief, and sat hard on an overturned milk crate by his back porch.
I didn’t think much about it at first because you see people trying to patch their own leaks all the time when the economy gets tight and the supply houses start charging forty bucks a bundle for three-tab felt.
My daddy always said a man’s roof is his castle until the water starts coming through the plaster, and then it’s just a race against the rot. But Saturday evening rolled around, and I was sitting at my kitchen table with a cold bottle of amber beer and a plate of cold meatloaf, looking out the screen door at the yard, and that old man’s ladder kept sitting right there in the front of my head. My wife, Martha, had passed three years back, and the house has a way of getting awful quiet around six o’clock, leaving you plenty of room to think about things that aren’t any of your business.
I kept seeing his hands, those long, thin fingers with the knuckles swollen up thick from arthritis, trying to knot that yellow twine around a brick that weighed half as much as he did. I finished my beer, wiped my mouth with a paper napkin, and walked out to the garage to check the back of the Dodge. I had four full bundles of architectural charcoal-blend shingles left over from a pallet short-shipped on the Miller job, plus two rolls of ice-and-water shield and a box of galvanized coil nails that had been rattling around in my gang box since the middle of August. It wasn’t enough to do a whole house, but for a thirty-by-twenty section where the valley was clearly giving way, it would do the trick and then some.
By Sunday morning the church bells down in the valley were just starting to ring out their first round at five-fifteen when I turned the key off and let the old Dodge coast quietly into the gravel drive across the lane. I didn’t want to wake him up if he was sleeping inside, but when I stepped out of the cab into the damp morning grass, I saw the kitchen light was already on, casting a pale, yellow square across the weed-choked flower beds. The air had that sharp, iron smell it gets right before the autumn frost sets in for good, and the dew was heavy enough to soak through the canvas of my work boots before I even reached the tailgate.
I popped the latch, grabbed a bundle of shingles by the wrapper, and hoisted them onto my shoulder, feeling that familiar, dull ache settle right into my left shoulder blade where I’d separated it hauling timber back in ninety-four. The ladder was still leaning against the gutter, trembling slightly in the quiet air, so I jammed the feet two inches deeper into the packed dirt and tied the base off to my trailer hitch with a length of old tow strap just to make sure it wouldn’t slide out from under me while I was twenty feet up with a hundred pounds of material on my back.
Working alone on a Sunday when the rest of the world is sitting down to coffee and the funny papers is a strange kind of peace, but it’s hard on the knees if you don’t pace yourself. I climbed up with the first bundle, kicked my heavy framing hammer out of its holster, and started ripping into the old three-tab shingles around the chimney where the flashing was completely rusted through. The cedar decking underneath was soft as wet sponge, black with mold and smelling of thirty years of trapped attic moisture and dead leaves. I spent the first two hours just tearing out the rotted plywood and nailing down fresh half-inch OSB that I’d cut to size with my circular saw right there on the grass before hauling it up piece by piece.
By nine o’clock the sun had burned through the valley fog and was beating straight down on the back slope of that roof without a single tree to break the glare, and my flannel shirt was soaked dark across the back and under the arms. My hands were already black from the asphalt coating on the shingles, and every time I drove a nail home with my waffle-head framing hammer, the shock went right up my forearm to my elbow. I didn’t stop for coffee, and I didn’t stop to sit down, because once you get into the rhythm of stripping and laying, your body just goes on autopilot until the job starts looking like something you can be proud of.
Around eleven o’clock the kitchen window downstairs pushed open with a sharp, wooden squeak, and a raspy voice called out through the screen. “Hey! What in the name of God do you think you’re doing up there?” I stopped with a shingle half-nailed, my hammer resting against my thigh, and looked down over the edge of the rake. The old man was standing there in a faded blue bathrobe with a flannel lining, his white hair sticking up in tufts on one side like he’d just rolled out of a troubled sleep. His eyes were watery behind thick glasses with plastic tape holding the bridge together, and he was squinting up against the glare like he couldn’t quite decide whether to be mad or just confused. “Just fixing your valley, sir,” I shouted down, wiping my forehead with my sleeve. “Looks like you had a bit of a leak around that brick stack.” He gripped the windowsill with both hands, his knuckles as white as chalk, and his chest was heaving under the robe. “I didn’t hire nobody,” he said, his voice cracking right in the middle of the sentence. “I don’t have the purse for contractors, mister.
You got the wrong house.” I told him I wasn’t a contractor, just a fellow working the job up the road who had some spare material and a Sunday morning with nothing better to do. He stood there staring up at me for a long, heavy minute, the wind rattling the blue tarp I’d rolled up and tossed into the bushes, before he finally pulled his head back inside and shut the window without another word.
I went back to nailing, driving those galvanized coil nails home two at a time until the new charcoal shingles were locked down tight in neat, overlapping rows that looked like the scales on a bass. By one o’clock the new ridge cap was on, the flashing was sealed with high-grade polyurethane caulk, and the whole back slope was buttoned up so tight a hurricane couldn’t have pulled a single tab loose. I climbed down the ladder for the last time, my legs shaking from eight hours of standing on narrow rungs, and started rolling up my extension cords and gathering my stray tools off the gravel.
I was coiling my air hose when the back screen door groaned open again, and the old man stepped out onto the concrete stoop. He had changed into a pair of brown trousers held up with wide elastic suspenders and a clean khaki work shirt buttoned all the way to the top without a tie. In his right hand he was carrying a small, wide-mouth mason jar with a rusted zinc lid, the kind people use for putting up pickled peaches or tomato relish, and it was filled nearly to the top with a heavy mix of quarters, dimes, and folded five-dollar bills.
He walked across the gravel with a slow, stiff hitch in his left hip, his boot heels crunching loud in the quiet yard, until he stopped right beside my tailgate.
He didn’t look at the roof, and he didn’t look at my truck. He just looked down at the jar in his hand, gave it a little shake so the coins rattled against the glass like dry seed pods, and then looked up at me with his chin trembling. “How much do I owe you?” he asked, his voice so quiet I almost missed it over the idle of my truck. I dropped the end of the air hose into the back box, wiped my black hands on my dungarees, and looked down at that jar of change, knowing damn well it was probably every cent he had set aside for groceries or his monthly blood pressure pills down at the pharmacy.
I could see the little blue veterans lapel pin pinned crooked to the pocket of his khaki shirt, right over his heart, tarnished around the edges where the brass was starting to show through the paint. I walked over to the tailgate, rested my palms on the cold metal, and gently reached out to push his hand back down toward his chest with the jar still in it. “You spent years protecting our sleep, sir,” I said, and my own voice sounded rougher than I meant it to, like I’d swallowed a mouthful of dust from the old decking. “The least I can do is make sure yours stays dry.”
He opened his mouth like he was going to say something else, maybe argue about his pride or ask me my name, but the words just didn’t come out, and his chin kept shaking until he pressed his lips together hard. I didn’t wait for him to find his voice because some moments are heavy enough on their own without standing around waiting for speeches that neither one of us was built to give. I climbed into the cab of the Dodge, turned the ignition, and let the old eight-cylinder engine catch with a deep, familiar rumble that settled into the floorboards under my boots.
I put it in reverse, backed out of the narrow drive in a wide, slow arc that kicked up a little cloud of white dust, and shifted into first gear without looking back through the rear window. When I glanced in my side mirror as I straightened out for the lane, he was still standing right there by the edge of the gravel, holding that little glass jar against his stomach, looking up at the clean, dark shingles that didn’t have a single blue tarp in sight. I drove back down toward the river with the windows rolled down and the cool October air blowing the sweat off my neck, realizing I hadn’t made a dime all day, but for the first time in three years since Martha went, the house I was going back to didn’t feel quite so empty after all.
