Dolores Pratt laid the photograph on the white tablecloth between the tomahawk bones and the birthday cake, and she squared it with one finger, the way you would set a picture on a mantel. It showed a little blue house with white shutters and a freshly shingled roof, a porch swing, and a dog on the steps. “That was our home for forty six years,” she said. “You will notice that the roof is new.” The private room at the steakhouse had gone so quiet I could hear the ice settling in the glasses. At the head of the table, my uncle Roy had stopped with his bourbon halfway to his mouth.
“On the night of the tornado, two Mays ago, we took cover in the bathtub with a mattress over us,” she said. “Harlan and me. The house across the road is gone. Our roof came off in one piece and landed in a neighbor field. In the morning we stood in the yard in our nightclothes, and there was nothing between our bed and the sky.” Her husband, a lean old man in a faded Wichita State cap, stared at the cap lying on the tablecloth in front of him. “The insurance company said we had missed a deadline. We live on a pension. We did not have the money.”
“I called Tina,” she said, “and she called Roy, and Roy said he would see what he could do. That was the last we heard.” She did not look at Roy. “Three weeks later a young man drove up our road in a pickup, with a trailer of shingles and two friends. He said a woman at the church had told him about us. He said he did not have much, but he had Saturdays. He put on that roof himself, with his friends, in the sun, over eleven weekends. He ate the sandwiches I made and he never took a dollar.”
A photograph of a little blue house laid beside a birthday cake showed a rich uncle what his nephew had done after the tornado.
At the end of the table my son Jesse sat very still with his iced tea. He is thirty two, with sunburned shoulders and long, patient hands, and he had gone red to his collar. Roy, with his steak half eaten and his glass of Wild Turkey in his hand, said nothing for a long, bad moment. Then he said, “Dolores, why did you not tell me? You never said a word.” “You never asked,” Harlan said quietly, in a low, patient voice. “We did not want to be a burden. And I will say, Roy, we thought you might say no.”
Roy looked at the photograph for a long time. He is seventy five years old, a barrel chested man with a white mustache, who made a fortune drilling holes in Kansas, and in all my life I have never seen him cry. I did not see it then, exactly. He took off his glasses and pressed his knuckles to his eyes, and his shoulders moved. “I thought that Jesse was a boy who could not hold a job,” he said. “I told myself that for years. I was the one who could not hold a thing.” He put the glasses back on. His voice was hoarse. “Jesse, I owe you more than an apology.”
He stood up, a little unsteadily, and the room fell silent. “Fourteen houses,” Roy said. “Dolores told me. Fourteen roofs on the houses of strangers, and not a word. The only thing you will ever own is a ladder, I said.” He shook his head. “Son, that is the finest thing a man can own. I am sorry that I said it. I am sorry I said it in front of your mother. I am sorry I have been saying it for thirty two years.” Jesse had risen too. He did not say it was all right. He said, “Thank you, Uncle Roy,” and Roy walked down the length of the table and wrapped his arms around him.
Then Roy turned to the room. “Everyone here has eaten my steak,” he said. “Now I am going to do something with my money that I should have done two years ago.” He pulled a checkbook from his jacket. “Jesse, you spent your down payment on shingles. I am going to replace it. Do not argue.” “Uncle Roy…” “Do not argue. And I want to set up a fund, for the roofs of every old person in Butler County who gets turned down. You will run it. You will hire your two friends and pay them real wages.” His wife Tina, who had said barely a word all evening, gave a small, wet laugh.
Jesse protested. He is proud, my son, and I raised him to be. But in the end, with all of us watching, he took the pen. “I will take the money for the fund,” he said. “And I will take the down payment, but as a loan. I will pay you back in Saturdays.” Roy burst out laughing, a big roaring cattle country laugh that rocked the whole private room. “Deal,” he said, wiping his eyes. “I will be there on the first one with a hammer.” Harlan Pratt put his faded cap back on his head, and I saw him smile for the first time all night.
Roy was there on the first Saturday, at seven in the morning, in white tennis shoes and a gimme cap, and he lasted exactly forty minutes on a roof in Cheney before Jesse sent him down. After that he held the ladder. He held it every Saturday for a year, in all weather, with a thermos of coffee, and he learned the names of the people whose houses they covered. A woman named Opal told me he sat with her on her porch swing and listened for an hour about her late husband.
Jesse closed on a small white house on Maple Street in September. The roof is new. On the day of the closing, Dolores and Harlan drove over with a pie and a framed photograph of the little blue house, and they hung it in the front hall. I stood in the doorway and watched my son, and my uncle, and two old people in the hallway of a brand new home, and I thought about the long ugly toast, and about how a bad word can be answered by a good roof.
