The young man in the cap and gown stood beside the casket as if he had run there, his chest heaving, his black tassel swinging. The gown was rented, too long, and the cap sat a little crooked on his head. He was twenty two, lean and dark skinned, with a face still soft at the edges, and he held a single bent nail between finger and thumb. He set it gently on the lid, and he looked straight across the room at my uncle. “My name is Andre Whitfield,” he said. “I graduated from Clemson four hours ago. And I came here straight from the stage, because of this man.”
My uncle Ron sat in the front row, stiff in his gray suit. He is a big man of fifty five who runs the family construction company, and he had told us that morning that our grandfather Jim spent his life hammering nails into the houses of other people and never built anything of his own. He had insisted on a funeral of thirty minutes, without a eulogy. “I was nine,” said Andre. “Our house burned in November. My mother and I and my little sister slept in a car for two weeks. On the fifteenth day, a man in a pickup truck stopped on the street and looked at the ashes.”
“He did not ask for a name. He asked what we needed. My mother said, A roof. He said, All right. He came back the next morning with six men from his crew, on their own time, and a truck full of lumber that he had paid for himself. It took nineteen days. They built us a house. Not a patch, a house, with two bedrooms and a porch. And on the last day, he handed me a hammer and a nail. He said, Son, you drive the last one. And I bent it.” Andre almost laughed. “I bent it three times. He said, Good. Now you know how.”
A single bent nail was set on a casket by a young man in a rented cap and gown and gave one grandson the afternoon to bring his uncle back to the roof.
“He pulled the nail out himself and handed it to me. He said, Keep that. A bent nail is a teacher. It reminds you to be patient with yourself. I kept it in my pocket every day for thirteen years. In school, when I wanted to quit, I put my hand in my pocket. I got a scholarship. I studied structural engineering. I am the first person in my family to finish college.” His eyes were full. “Mr. Jim came to my high school graduation. He sat in the back, in a plaid shirt. He cried more than my mother.”
I was twenty nine years old, and I had to look down at my shoes. My grandfather had come to my graduation too. I remembered his big rough hand on my shoulder afterward, and the smell of sawdust and cigarette smoke. He had never once told me about a house on a burned lot. He had never mentioned Andre. Beside me, I heard a ragged exhale, and I saw that my uncle Ron was gripping the edge of the pew in front of him with both hands. His face had gone red. His shoulders were rising and falling.
“I have a gift for the family,” said Andre. He pulled a roll of blueprints tied with string from inside the gown. “I started this in my junior year. Every house he ever built for free, forty one of them, I found them all. The families are listed here. I have drawn a plan for a nonprofit that will build homes for families who lose everything, using volunteers and donated lumber, the same way he did. I have called it Bent Nail Builders.” He swallowed. “I was hoping his family might help me begin. It is only an idea. I have no money.”
My uncle Ron rose. The whole room watched him walk to the casket. He is not a man who shows emotion, and as he lifted the bent nail from the lid with two thick fingers, his hand was visibly trembling. “I told my father he never built anything,” he said, in a rough, low voice. “I run a company with a hundred and forty employees, and I have never built one house for a family on a burned lot.” He closed his hand around the nail. “Son, I would be proud to help you begin. Bent Nail will have my trucks and my crews, and I will pay you a salary, starting Monday.”
Andre stared at him. Then he laughed, a sudden bright boyish laugh, and began to cry at the same time. My uncle opened his arms, and the young man in the rented gown walked into them, and the two of them stood there, a big white haired builder and a skinny boy with a crooked cap, holding each other in the middle of a funeral home with three hundred people looking on. Someone began to clap. Then everyone clapped. The funeral director quietly put the lights up, and a woman at the back started a hymn.
The service ran three hours, and my uncle spoke for the last twenty minutes, without a note. He told the story of a day when he was eight, and his father took him up on a roof, and handed him a hammer, and said, Do not look at the ground. Look at the nail. I could see that he had not told it in forty years. When he finished, he turned to the casket and said, Daddy, I will build the next one with you. Everybody understood that he did not mean a house.
The first Bent Nail house was raised in Anderson in October, on a lot where a fire had taken everything from a young mother of three. Forty volunteers came on a Saturday. Andre ran the plans. My uncle Ron ran the saws. And when the last board was set, the mother was handed a hammer and a nail, and she drove it, and it bent, and everybody cheered. Andre pulled it out gently with the claw and held it up to the light. He said, Keep that. A bent nail is a teacher.
