I work rotating twelves. Some weeks I’m on days, some weeks I’m on nights, and you learn to sleep whenever the sun lets you. It’s honest work and it pays the bills, mostly.
Tara and I bought our place nine years ago.
It’s a small white farmhouse on four acres off a gravel road, with a porch on the front, a machine shed out back, and a garden Tara puts in every year whether the weather cooperates or not.
The house was built in 1948 and it has been patched by every owner since.
It’s about 2,000 square feet if you count the upstairs, which has a slant to the ceilings that makes me duck. We love it anyway. You love the house you can afford.
The hail came on a Tuesday in late May. It came in the middle of the afternoon, about four o’clock, out of a green sky that made the cattle across the road bunch up against the fence.
It lasted ten minutes. Some of the stones were the size of walnuts. I was at work, but Tara was home, and she said it sounded like somebody emptying gravel onto the house out of a truck.
When I got home that evening I set a ladder against the eave and went up. The shingles looked like somebody had gone over every square foot with a ball-peen hammer. Bruises everywhere. Granules washed down into the gutters like sand.
Half the county got hit. You could drive any road that week and see roofs pocked gray and white, siding dented, car windshields starred. The body shop in town had a waiting list a page long by Thursday.
Our insurance adjuster came out the next Monday. He was a young fellow, polite, with a chalk stick and a little measuring wheel. He walked the roof, marked his test squares, counted the hits, and climbed down shaking his head.
“That’s a full replacement,” he said. “No question about it. You’ll get a check for the actual cash value, less your deductible. The depreciation we hold back until the work is done and you send us the invoice.”
I’m a mechanic, not an insurance man, so I made him say it twice. The way it works, they don’t pay it all at once.
They pay you what the old roof was worth today, take your deductible out, and keep the rest until you prove the new one is on.
The first check came to $8,400. The rest, a little over $3,000, would come after. All in, it was a fair number for what we had. It was not a rich number.
Dewey came over the Saturday after the check came. He’s Tara’s dad. He’s sixty-four, retired after thirty years of framing and roofing houses all over that part of the state.
He has forearms like fence posts and he can still outwork most men half his age.
He sat at our kitchen table with a cup of coffee and read the adjuster’s paperwork line by line with his reading glasses down on his nose. He didn’t ask if he could. He just picked it up.
“My buddy will do it for fourteen thousand,” he said, and set the papers down. “Tear-off, new decking where you need it, the works. He’ll start whenever I tell him.”
Tara looked at me. I looked at the papers.
“Dewey,” I said, “the whole claim isn’t fourteen thousand. We’d be three thousand short at the end, and we’d be short the whole time we’re waiting on the second check.”
“You’d be getting a roof done right,” he said. “That’s worth three thousand.”
I knew the buddy. Everybody in Dewey’s world knew him. He and Dewey had roofed together back when they were young, and he was a decent man as far as I could tell. That wasn’t the trouble.
The trouble was the year Tara’s mother was dying. That was four years ago.
Dewey was still working then, and when she got sick he could not leave her, and his buddy finished three of Dewey’s jobs that fall and never sent him a bill.
Dewey never forgot that. I respected him for it. A man ought to remember who stood by him. But he had decided, somewhere along the line, that the way to pay that debt was with our roof and our money.
“We already have a bid,” Tara said quietly. “A fellow from the next county. He came out Tuesday. He’ll do it for what the insurance pays, and he doesn’t want a dime up front.”
Dewey took his glasses off and folded them very slowly. “Who is he?”
She told him. Dewey had never heard of him, which in Dewey’s mind was the same as saying the man did not exist.
“Young?”
“Forty, maybe,” I said.
“Young,” Dewey said. “Young men cut corners. They staple instead of nail. They skip the ice and water at the eaves because the homeowner can’t see it. You’ll be calling me in three winters with water in your walls.”
“Then we’ll call you,” I said, trying to make it light.
He didn’t take it light. He stood up and pushed his chair in, square to the table, the way he always does. “You want cheap,” he said, “you’ll get cheap.”
And that was the end of the visit. He didn’t slam the door. He never slams a door.
I’ll say this for my wife. She didn’t fight him that day and she didn’t fight me after. She just stood at the sink a long time with her hands in the water and said, “He’ll come around. He always does when it’s done.”
The check was ours. The roof was ours. The bills were ours. And Dewey simply would not be told any of that. I had been married into that family twelve years and I had never once seen anyone tell him anything.
So we signed with the roofer from the next county. He gave us a date, the last week of June, and he seemed like a fair man. I put the insurance check in the bank and we waited.
Two weeks later he called me at work. I was halfway down a bucket elevator pit with a flashlight in my teeth, and I had to climb out to take it.
“Brad, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve got a school district two counties over that needs four buildings done before classes start. I can’t turn it down. It’s a year of work. I can’t get to you until October.”
I don’t hold it against him, not really. He had a crew to keep paid and a family of his own. But October was months off, and we had a tarp on a roof and a whole summer of storms coming.
I spent my lunch break that day calling every roofer in three counties. Every one of them was booked. Some were booked until September. One fellow laughed, not mean, just tired. “Mister, I’ve got ninety houses ahead of you,” he said.
There were storm crews in from out of state by then, the kind that knock on your door with a clipboard and a truck with plates from four states away.
A man at the plant had paid one of them half up front the week before. They had not come back.
I wasn’t going to do that. Not with Tara’s name on the check.
So I tarped it. I bought the heaviest tarp the farm store had, two by fours to batten the edges, and a box of cap nails. I spent a whole Sunday up there doing it right, or as right as I knew how.
It held for eleven days. Then came the Sunday storm, and the phone call, and my daughter on the couch watching the water come through the light.
That night was the first of six she slept on the couch. We moved her mattress out to dry and Tara put a sheet over the cushions and tucked her in with her rabbit, and she said, “It’s like camping, Mom.” She said it every night after that.
She never once complained. That was what got to me. Kids are supposed to complain. When a kid stops complaining, it means she has figured out that the grown-ups are already carrying as much as they can.
The ceiling over her bed sagged in a soft brown belly. I cut it out with a utility knife on Monday morning before work, and wet insulation came down in clumps. Up in the rafters I could see daylight through the boards.
I went to work that Monday on four hours of sleep and sat down at the break table at nine with a cup of the plant coffee, which tastes like it was made in a grain dryer.
There were six or seven of us there. It’s a long table in a block room off the control room, with a microwave nobody cleans and a bulletin board nobody reads.
The men on my shift are farm kids and ex-Army and a couple of welders who came over from the railroad.
Somebody asked how the house was holding up, because they knew about the hail. Everybody’s place had taken some.
I meant to say fine. I didn’t. I told them the whole thing, flat, the way you’d tell a man how a gearbox failed.
The bid. The buddy. The roofer who backed out. The tarp. My daughter on the couch. What Dewey said on the phone.
I didn’t ask anybody for anything. I want that understood. It just came out of me, because I had been holding it for a week and there was nowhere else to put it.
Nobody said anything for a minute. A couple of the younger fellows looked at their phones.
Then Cletus set his coffee down.
Cletus has been a millwright at that plant for twenty-six years. He’s in his fifties, bald as a doorknob, with a gray mustache and hands that look like they were made out of the same steel he works on.
Before the plant, every summer from the time he was sixteen until he was thirty, he roofed.
“How big is the house?” he asked.
“About 2,000 square feet. One layer to tear off. Twelve pitch on the front, shallower on the back porch.”
“Decking?”
“Board decking. One-by-sixes. A couple of them are going to be soft over my daughter’s room.”
He nodded like I’d told him the size of a bearing. “Saturday,” he said. “We’re all off Saturday. Sunup. You get a dumpster and you get the shingles. We’ll bring the rest.”
I started to say he didn’t have to. He held up one hand.
“Brad,” he said, “I’ve got a granddaughter that age.”
That was all he said about it. Then he picked his coffee back up and asked somebody about the Cardinals.
By the end of that shift I had a list on the back of a work order. Nine names, then ten, then eleven.
Men I’d worked beside for years and men I barely knew. One of them was a welder named Arlo who’d been at the plant less than a year.
“I’ve got a trailer and a compressor,” Arlo said. “And my brother-in-law’s got a roofing nailer he never uses. I’ll bring it.”
The next morning, before I went in, I drove to the lumberyard in town. The man behind the counter had been up to his eyes in storm orders for three weeks, and he didn’t even blink when I told him what I needed.
Cletus had figured the order on the back of a napkin. Twenty-three squares of gray architectural shingles. Synthetic underlayment.
Ice and water shield for the eaves and valleys, which code calls for in our part of the state. Drip edge. Starter strip. Ridge cap. Ridge vent. Coil nails. Six sheets of plywood for the soft spots.
It came to $5,300 with the dumpster rental. I paid it out of the insurance money and watched the number in our checking account drop like a stone down a well.
The lumberyard said they could drop it Friday afternoon. The dumpster company said the same.
I asked the county about a permit and the woman on the phone said for a re-roof outside town limits they did not need one, just do it right.
Tara called the wives. I didn’t ask her to. She just picked up the phone Wednesday night with the plant phone list in her hand and started dialing, and by Thursday she had a whole lunch planned that I knew nothing about.
“Sandwiches,” she said. “Potato salad. Two coolers of tea. Somebody’s bringing bars. You men just worry about the roof.”
On Friday the shingles came on a flatbed with a boom, and the driver set the pallets right up on the roof ridge where we’d need them, the way the good yards do.
The dumpster came at four and they set it right beside the house.
I didn’t sleep much Friday night. I lay there listening to every truck on the gravel road and wondering if anybody would really come.
They came.
At a quarter past five Saturday morning, with the sun just coming up red over the bean field across the road, the first pickup turned into our drive.
It was Cletus. He had a coffee in one hand and an extension ladder on his rack.
Then another truck came. Then another. Then they just kept coming, until there were nine more of them lined up along the edge of the yard, tailgates down, and eleven men standing in the wet grass in T-shirts and ball caps.
They had nail guns, framing hammers, compressors and hoses coiled over their shoulders. They had their own ladders.
They had pry bars and roofing shovels and a magnet sweeper on a pole. Three of them had worked a double on Friday and come straight from the plant.
Nobody made a speech. Cletus walked once around the house, looked up at each side, kicked the bottom of the downspout, and came back.
“Tear-off first,” he said. “Front side, then the back. Nobody up top without a harness on the front. I’ll set the anchors. Tarps on the flower beds so Tara doesn’t kill us.”
I had bought harnesses, because Cletus told me to. He set the roof anchors himself, the way he’d set them at the plant on the elevator head houses.
Then he clipped me in personally and gave the strap a tug like he was checking a chain.
The tear-off went faster than I would have believed. Six men up top with roofing shovels, walking the old shingles down off the deck in long sheets and dropping them over the edge into the dumpster.
The noise was like a hailstorm all over again, only this time it was going the right direction.
The men on the ground raked the grass with magnets and picked up every nail they could find. My daughter was not allowed in the yard yet.
She sat on the porch steps in her pajamas with her rabbit and a bowl of cereal and watched.
By seven o’clock the old roof was in the dumpster. By seven-thirty Cletus had walked every inch of the bare deck and marked the soft boards with a carpenter’s crayon.
There were four of them, all over my daughter’s room, right where the tarp had failed.
He had two men cut them out with a circular saw and he and I fit the new plywood in, screwed it down, and he checked my work with the heel of his boot.
“That’ll hold a truck,” he said.
Then came the ice and water shield along the eaves and up the valleys, sticky side down, rolled out by two men who had clearly done it before. Then the drip edge. Then the underlayment, rolled out and nailed in rows.
By nine o’clock the whole roof was a smooth sheet of gray, and Cletus was up on the deck with a chalk line, snapping straight lines across it.
Arlo held the other end. The chalk puffed up blue in the sun every time he let the line go.
Then the nail guns started.
If you have never heard eleven men run nail guns on one roof at once, I don’t know how to describe it except to say it sounds like rain on a tin barn, only steady.
Pop, pop, pop, pop. Starter strip first along the edge, then the first course, then up and up.
Cletus ran the front. A tall fellow from the night shift who’d roofed in college ran the back. The rest of us carried bundles, cut in around the vents and chimney, and kept the hoses from tangling.
I was up top in a red T-shirt and an old tool belt Tara had bought me for our first anniversary, carrying bundles from the pallet to the men.
Each bundle of architectural shingles weighs about seventy pounds. By the tenth one I had stopped feeling my shoulder. By the twentieth I had stopped thinking at all.
The sun was full up by then, the sky that hard summer blue you only get after a week of storms.
It was going to be hot. By ten it was, and the men had their caps turned around and their shirts dark down the back.
Around ten-thirty the first car from the wives pulled in. Then two more.
Tara met them in the yard, and before I knew it there was a card table under the maple tree with a tablecloth and a crockpot and two big orange coolers of sweet tea.
My daughter had gotten dressed by then. She came to the bottom of the ladder in her tennis shoes and a T-shirt that said something about her softball team, and she looked up at me.
“Dad,” she said. “Can I help?”
I was going to say no. I was going to say it was too dangerous, go help your mom. But Arlo was halfway up the ladder with a few loose shingles under his arm for the ridge, and he stopped.
“She can hand me these,” he said. “I’ll stay right here.”
So he stood on the ladder about six feet up, and she stood on the bottom rung with one hand on the rail, and Tara handed her shingles one at a time off the stack, and she handed them up to Arlo, one at a time.
And every single time, Arlo said, “Thank you, ma’am.”
Every time. Twenty, thirty, forty times. “Thank you, ma’am.” And she said “You’re welcome” every time, very serious, like she was running the whole job.
I had to stop and look the other way for a while. I had a bundle on my shoulder and I just stood there at the ridge looking out over the bean field until it passed.
That was my girl who had slept on a couch for six nights and called it camping.
And here was a welder I barely knew, who had driven forty minutes on his day off, thanking her like she was the one doing him a favor.
At noon Tara rang the old dinner bell on the porch post. It hadn’t been rung in years. Every man on that roof stopped and laughed and started climbing down.
We ate under the maple. Ham sandwiches and turkey sandwiches and potato salad and somebody’s pickles and three pans of bars.
Before anybody ate, one of the older men took his cap off and said a short grace, just a sentence, and every man took his cap off with him.
It was right about then, with my mouth full, that I heard a truck slow down out on the road.
I knew the sound of it before I looked. Dewey drives a work truck older than our marriage, and the muffler has a little tick in it that I could pick out of a parade.
He slowed almost to a stop at the end of our drive. Then he turned in.
He pulled up behind the last pickup in the line and shut it off. And then he just sat there, with both hands on the wheel, looking up at the roof.
I had gone back up by then to grab my water jug. I was standing on the ridge, so I could see him plain through his windshield.
Nobody at the card table said a word. Nobody waved. The wives went on putting the lids back on the bowls.
A couple of the men glanced over and then glanced away, the way you do when somebody else’s family business shows up in the yard.
Cletus wiped his hands on a rag and climbed back up the ladder. He picked up his nail gun. After a minute, the rest of them did the same.
Eleven men went back to nailing while Dewey sat in his truck.
He sat there a long time. Long enough that I thought he might back out and go. Long enough that Tara stopped wiping the card table and stood with the rag in her hand.
Then his door opened. He got out, slow, the way he does now with his knees, and he walked across the yard to the foot of the ladder.
He looked up at me.
I set down the bundle I was carrying, and I came down.
I’ll be honest. I didn’t know what he was going to say. Part of me was ready for him to tell me that every one of those men was doing it wrong. I had my jaw set for it.
He didn’t say anything at first. He stood at the bottom of the ladder with his hands in his back pockets and looked up at the eave.
“Who put your drip edge on?” he said.
“Cletus,” I said. “And me.”
“Ice and water under it at the eaves, or over?”
“Drip edge over the ice and water at the eaves,” I said, because Cletus had made me repeat it twice that morning. “Under the underlayment on the rakes.”
Dewey grunted. He walked along the side of the house to where the shingles came down closest to the ground, at the low corner by the porch, and he reached up and lifted the edge of one with his thumb.
He looked at the nails. He counted them, I think. Six per shingle, all set right on the line, none of them cocked.
He let it down. He did the same thing three feet over. Then again by the downspout.
Cletus had come to the edge of the roof above him. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there with his nail gun hanging from his hand, looking down at Dewey the way one tradesman looks at another.
“Six nails,” Dewey said, up to him.
“High wind country,” Cletus said. “Manufacturer says four. I put six.”
Dewey nodded. He looked at the chalk lines. He looked at the valley over the kitchen, where the shingles came together clean in a closed cut. He looked a long time at that valley.
“That’s right,” he said finally. It wasn’t loud. “That’s done right.”
Then he walked back to his truck and dropped the tailgate and sat down on it.
He didn’t leave. He didn’t say anything else. He just sat there on his tailgate in the sun and watched eleven men put a roof on his daughter’s house the way he would have put it on himself.
I went back up. I didn’t know what else to do. The afternoon was getting away from us and the back side wasn’t half done.
From up on the ridge I could see him. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his cap pushed back.
Every now and then a man would come down the ladder for a bundle and walk right past him. One or two nodded. Most didn’t. Nobody was rude. Nobody had to be.
I have thought a lot since then about what that hour must have been like for him.
A man who roofed for thirty years, sitting on his own tailgate in the yard of his only daughter, watching strangers do the job he’d refused, and do it the way he’d taught himself to do it.
That was his consequence. Nobody had to say a thing to him. He had to sit there and see it.
Around one o’clock, my daughter came across the yard to him with a paper plate. It had a ham sandwich on it and two pickles and a lemon bar. Tara had sent her. Or maybe she sent herself. I never did ask.
I couldn’t hear them from the roof. I could only see.
She held out the plate, and he took it, and she climbed up on the tailgate next to him the way she used to when she was small, and she started talking with her hands.
She talked a long time. He didn’t eat. He just held the plate.
Later, Tara told me what she’d said, because Dewey told Tara that night on the phone and he had to stop twice telling it.
She told him she had slept on the couch for six nights because her ceiling fell down. She told him it was like camping. She told him the water came right through her light.
And then she told him it was all right now, because Daddy’s work friends came, and Mr. Arlo let her help, and she had handed up forty-one shingles, she’d counted.
“So you don’t have to worry, Grandpa,” she said. “It’s fixed.”
That was what did it. He set the plate down on the tailgate and put his big hand on the top of her head, and he sat there with his eyes shut.
I watched his shoulders from the ridge and I looked away, the same as I’d done that morning.
A little after two, he got down off the tailgate and went and found Tara at the card table.
I came down for that. I didn’t want to, but I thought I should be there.
Cletus called a water break, which I think was on purpose, so the men were all standing in the shade and none of them were watching, which was its own kindness.
Dewey stood in front of Tara with his cap in his hands. He was a big man and he looked small just then.
“I was wrong,” he said. “I was wrong about the money and I was wrong about you two and I was wrong on the phone. I should have been up there a week ago. I let that little girl sleep on a couch over my pride.”
Tara didn’t say anything. Her chin was shaking.
“I told myself I owed him,” Dewey said. “And I do. But that’s my debt. I tried to make you pay it. That wasn’t right.”
“Dad,” Tara said.
“Your mother would have skinned me,” he said.
And Tara laughed, and cried, both at once, and he put his arms around her right there under the maple in front of eleven men and their wives. Nobody watched. Everybody saw.
Then he turned to me. He held out his hand. I took it. He has a grip like a bench vise.
“Brad,” he said. “I’m sorry, son.”
He had never called me son. Twelve years. Not once.
“Okay,” I said, because there wasn’t anything else that would come out.
Then he did something I didn’t expect. He walked over to the men in the shade, one at a time, and shook every hand. Eleven of them.
He asked each man his name and where he worked at the plant, and he said thank you to every single one of them, just like Arlo had said thank you to my girl.
When he got to Cletus, the two of them stood there a minute.
“Where’d you learn to cut a valley like that?” Dewey asked.
“Roofed fourteen summers,” Cletus said. “Old man I worked for wouldn’t let you off the roof till it was straight.”
“That’s the only way,” Dewey said.
“That’s the only way,” Cletus agreed. And that was the end of that.
The afternoon went fast after that. The back side went on.
The tall fellow from nights ran the courses up to the ridge, and two of the younger men cut in around the stack vents, and the ridge vent went on along the top.
By three-thirty the only thing left was the ridge cap on the front, a row of thick shingles that runs along the very peak and covers the seam.
Cletus and I and two others ran it from the far end, working back toward the ladder.
It was right about then, with four or five pieces left, that Cletus stopped and looked down at the yard.
Dewey was still standing by the card table. He hadn’t gone home. He had a glass of tea in his hand.
Cletus didn’t say anything to me. He just set his nail gun down on the ridge, and pointed with his chin, and waited.
I understood. I don’t know how. I set mine down too.
I called down. “Dewey,” I said. “We saved you the last few.”
He looked up. For a second I thought he would wave me off. He was sixty-four and his knees were bad and it was ninety degrees.
Then he set the glass of tea down on the card table. He walked to his truck, and he reached behind the seat, and he came out with his old roofing hammer.
The one with the hatchet blade and the worn leather grip. The one Tara’s mother had his initials burned into the handle of, thirty-some years ago, so the other men on his crews would stop borrowing it.
He held it a second in both hands, like a man holding something he hasn’t held in a while.
Then he walked back across the yard, past the card table, past the wives and the men in the shade and my daughter on the porch step with her rabbit, and he put one boot on the bottom rung.
The whole yard went quiet. Even the compressors had stopped.
My daughter stood up on the porch and said, “Go, Grandpa.”
The roof was done by four o’clock, eleven men and one old roofer, and that night my girl slept in her own bed under her own ceiling, and Dewey came back the next Saturday and helped me hang the new drywall without being asked.
But that’s not how I remember it. I remember it the way it looked from the top of the ridge, in the sun, with the new gray shingles hot under my hands.
I remember Dewey Haase climbing the ladder with his own hammer.
The End
