Chapter 8 - The Framing of the Ridge
The vocational building trades class of Henderson County High School arrived on Sycamore Lane at eight-thirty on Saturday morning in three yellow school vans and two county maintenance flatbeds loaded with staging planks, bundles of number-one cedar shakes, and four air compressors that thumped with a steady, rhythmic heartbeat against the December cold.
There were twenty-four of them.
Seventeen boys and seven girls, all between sixteen and eighteen years old, wearing heavy hooded sweatshirts under their tool belts, their safety glasses already fogging in the twenty-eight-degree air.
Travis was in the lead, carrying a twelve-foot aluminum ladder on his right shoulder like an iron lance, his heavy steel-toed boots crunching through the frozen crust of Beverly’s front lawn.
"All right, you knuckleheads!" Travis yelled, swinging the ladder down onto the grass beside the porch with a practiced, metallic clatter. "Miz Collins says we strip the east valley first! Anyone drops an old cedar shingle on Mrs. Collins's hydrangeas buys the coffee at the Texaco on Monday morning!"
The neighborhood came out onto its porches to watch.
Mrs. Hattie Gable stood behind her storm door, wrapped in a red wool blanket, her four-footed cane planted firmly on the sill, nodding with slow, rhythmic satisfaction as the first bundle of two-by-four staging was hoisted toward the gutters.
Inside the yellow ranch house, the lace curtains in the living room window remained drawn.
Beverly had refused to leave. When Nicole had driven down from Indianapolis on Friday night to pack her mother’s suitcases for the Carmel nursing suite, Beverly had locked the deadbolt on the front door, turned off the porch light, and slid a handwritten note under the weatherstripping:
I am not going to Indiana. The plumbing is too loud.
Nicole had left at midnight, her silver SUV spraying gravel across the lawn as she accelerated down Highway 60, leaving Aaron to deal with the commercial appraisal cancellation fees.
I stood on the ridge of the roof, thirty feet above the concrete drive, wearing my leather tool belt with my twenty-four-ounce framing hammer hanging from the steel loop on my right hip.
The view from that ridge was the same one my father had seen when he nailed the final cap shingles in October nineteen-sixty-eight.
To the north, the Ohio River lay like a vast, silver ribbon between the gray willows of Kentucky and the low, forested hills of Indiana. To the east, the chimney smoke from the aluminum smelter rose in straight, white columns into the freezing sky. And directly below my boots, through the bare branches of the sugar maple, hung the old oak porch swing.
Eli sat in the swing.
He was wearing his Carhartt coat, his wool hat pulled down so low only his red nose and his hazel eyes showed above his collar. Between his boots sat his toolbox—an old wooden ammunition crate Dad had converted into a carpenter’s tray with a piece of broom handle for a grip.
He had a pair of eight-inch slip-joint pliers in his hand, and he was carefully, methodically tightening the wire links on the miniature birdhouse swing, making sure the lead split-shot weights hung plumb above the tiny yellow floorboards.
"Eli!" Matt called from the ground, where he was staging the pneumatic hoses from the compressor. "Send up the chalk line!"
The boy didn't hesitate. He dropped his pliers into the wooden tray, picked up the blue plastic chalk reel, walked over to the base of the staging ladder, and hooked the brass eyelet onto the haul rope Travis had dropped from the gutter.
"Haul away, Travis!" Eli shouted, his voice clear and sharp in the cold morning. "Keep it off the shingles or the chalk gets wet!"
Travis grinned down from the eaves, hauling the rope hand-over-hand with the easy, muscular grace of a boy who had spent three summers working tobacco barns. "You got it, boss-man! Tell your dad we need another box of two-inch galvanized ring-shanks before the valley crew runs out!"
By noon, the east roof was stripped to the hemlock skip-sheathing.
The original boards—one-by-six white pine, rough-sawn, with the bark still showing on some of the edges—were dry and hard as bone. Dad had nailed them down with eight-penny common nails, two to every rafter, their heads rusted into the grain so tight you couldn't pull them with a flat bar; you had to drive them through with a drift punch or split the shingle around them.
I knelt on the valley flashing, my hammer tapping a steady, rhythmic cadence as I reset three loosened boards near the chimney.
A shadow fell across the pine sheathing.
I looked up, squinting against the winter sun.
Beverly was standing on the rear concrete patio, thirty feet below.
She was wearing her green wool coat, her head bare, her silver hair blowing wildly across her forehead in the north wind. She was leaning on Warren’s black umbrella, her small, swollen feet wrapped in a pair of old felt boots with zipper fronts that had belonged to my grandmother.
She didn't look at the high school apprentices who were laughing as they hauled the old cedar scrap to the county flatbed.
She looked at the sugar maple tree.
The birdhouse was hanging from the lowest lateral branch.
Matt had hung it there at eight o'clock, using twenty feet of five-sixteenths galvanized chain and two stainless-steel screw-eyes he’d pulled from the hospital maintenance shop. It hung six feet above the grass, perfectly level, the green shutters bright against the yellow pine siding, the miniature porch swing swaying three inches in the river breeze with that steady, balanced rhythm Eli had spent two months perfecting in my shop.
Beverly walked across the frozen turf.
Her boots made a dry, crushing sound in the winter grass—the same sound my father’s boots had made when he walked out to check the oil in his truck on January mornings.
She stopped two feet from the birdhouse.
She reached out with her gloved hand—her right hand, the one with the crooked index finger that had caught in the wringer washer when Nicole was a baby—and touched the tiny pine swing.
She pushed it with one finger.
The little swing moved forward, the lead weights holding the oak slats level, swung back through the center of its tiny arc, and settled into the stillness with a faint, metallic whisper of wire against wood.
Eli was standing ten feet behind her, his small hands buried in his Carhartt pockets, his wool hat pulled down to his brows.
He didn't say a word. He didn't run to her. He stood there on his grandfather's lawn, his boots planted wide, his chin level, watching his grandmother through the cold air like an apprentice watching an inspector check a plumb line.
Beverly didn't turn around.
She stood there for three minutes, her forehead nearly touching the cedar shingles of the little roof, her back curved beneath the green wool of her coat.
Then she reached into her pocket, pulled out a small, yellow plastic box—a box of lemon drops she had carried in her purse since nineteen-seventy-five—and set it carefully on the tiny yellow front porch of the birdhouse, right beside the whittled walnut chimney.
"Eli," she said.
Her voice was small. It didn't carry to the roof; it was barely louder than the dry leaves rattling in the privet hedge.
Eli took two steps forward. "Yes, Grandma?"
Beverly turned her head slowly, her watery eyes blinking against the glare of the noon sun reflecting off the new galvanized valley flashing above our heads.
"The swing doesn't squeak," she whispered.
"No, ma'am," Eli said, his small voice clear and steady as a pine rafter. "I oiled the wire with the sewing-machine oil from Dad’s tackle box. Grandpa told me that squeaking is just iron crying because nobody gave it any grease."
Beverly looked down at her felt boots for a long moment. Then she looked back at the little yellow house hanging in the maple branches, reached out, and pulled Eli’s wool hat up until she could see his cowlick.
May you like
"Your father’s chili is too hot, Eli," she said, her voice trembling slightly, though her jaw remained set in that hard Collins line. "Tell him to bring me a bowl with some sour cream in it before the roofers finish that valley."
She turned, her umbrella dragging through the frost, and walked slowly back toward the kitchen door, leaving the lemon drops sitting on the tiny pine porch like two yellow lanterns waiting for the birds to come home.
