Return to Oakpin(30)
Craig opened the large front door. The vintage diamond-shaped, beveled-glass courtesy window in the center was chipped, but the thick oak classic closed precisely and latched with a sound Mason remembered from his boyhood. “You’re fine above the ceiling,” Craig said. “The rafters are all solid, and there is no water damage, though you can see the sky in a couple places. You want to start with the roof?”
“You?”
“We want to beat the weather.” Craig was happy to be starting this. “Let’s get the roof,” he said. That afternoon a truck delivered a huge blue dumpster bin, setting it alongside the house in the driveway, and they began.
• • •
Two weeks later Mason and Craig sat on the exposed planking of the roof of the old house in the benevolent October sun. The old boards were deep brown as if burned by their age. The men sat on the angled surface with their knees up. They’d torn off all the old shingles and tar paper along with two or three of the one-by-eight planks. The rusted rain gutter had fallen off voluntarily. Mason had gouged his left palm on a broken nail, and so he’d been to the clinic and now wore a padded bandage on that hand under his work gloves.
On the roof, his hand ached in a way that was all right. He’d hurt it; it would get better. The two high school boys Larry and Wade had joined Mason in cleaning the house, and they had emptied most of the debris from the interior and had shoveled trash and swept. Below the men now, the dumpster seemed a marker of some kind of accomplishment, almost full.
Craig had a thermos of coffee, and he poured two cups. They had their gear—lunches and jackets and extra tools—stored on a plank they’d tacked level near the roof peak. It had been better work than Mason had imagined, the teardown, removing the old shingles shelf by shelf, brittle things that had been facing the steady plains weather forty years, and they came off easily, almost neatly, nails and all, as if ready to quit. Mason was surprised not to be in worse shape. He regretted the hand because there were nails everywhere, and he’d been methodical, he thought, but he hadn’t seen the stub protruding from the planking. He immediately lifted the torn palm as the blood welled up, and as it did and he looked for a place to wipe it, finally settling on his trouser leg, he realized he hadn’t bled since he was here last, not even a good paper cut. There was something perverse in the way he watched it bleed as he thought: I’m going to get some good out of these hands yet.
He made a fist on a wadding of paper towel and drove over to Oakpine Clinic. The young medic had him sit on the papered examination table, and he scrubbed out the gouged flesh so they could decide on stitches or not, and suddenly Mason found his hand in the hands of a woman, her red hair curling in wisps at the corners of her forehead, and he almost started to see his old friend Kathleen Gunderson, and his second take was without question a flush of embarrassment as he waited while she examined his naked lawyer’s hand.
“It’s true,” she said. “Here you are. What’d you do to yourself?”
“I became a lawyer,” he said. “Can you do anything for me?” He was going to go on, say something about it, some small joke at the expense of his soft city hands, but she freed his hand then and folded her arms and smiled and said, “It’s your call, Mason. We can put two little stitches in there, or tape will do if you’re careful.”
“Hello, Kathleen. I think I’m in a careful phase right now, despite my old house. Let’s go with the tape.”
She scrubbed his hand again, which glowed now, and pressed the gauze and tape into place. She gave him several packets of gauze and half a roll of the tape.
“Over on Berry Street?”
“Right,” he said. They walked out into the nurses’ station and spoke over the counter while she checked down an instruction sheet for him. “Craig Ralston is over helping me prepare to sell it.”