He was back the next Saturday at seven in the morning with a flatbed trailer, and Pam beside him with a pan of caramel rolls, and neither of them said a word about why.
That first Saturday he hauled. The old aluminum boat went to a boy in Fort Pierre who wanted a project and got it for nothing, trailer and all. The hay wagon went to the church, where it should have gone to begin with, and the trustees parked it behind the fellowship hall. He pulled the camper outside, got up on a ladder and resealed the whole roof seam, front to back, and then he backed it in along the west wall a good four feet clear of Len’s workbench. The good boat went in behind it, nose to tail.
When he was done, everything my brother owned in that shed took up a strip twelve feet wide along one wall. I could have parked three cars beside it.
The next three Saturdays he roofed the lean-to.
He would not let me see the ticket from the lumber yard. Pam told me later it was twenty-eight hundred and some for the steel and the screws and the new purlins, and that he paid it out of his fishing money without being asked. He pulled every sheet of that old barn tin himself and stacked it by the fence. He ran new two-by-fours across on two foot centers, snapped his lines, and laid ribbed steel in a color the yard calls barn red, each screw set down in the flat beside the rib with its rubber washer just snug, the way the sheet tells you to do it and almost nobody does.
The Schmidt brothers came the second Saturday without being asked, either. They were on their own time. Kurt ran the screw gun on the high side and Joel handed sheets up, and Vince, who has never in his life let another man work on his job without supervising, let them.
Kenzie counted screws into a nail apron and sent them up in a coffee can on a rope.
At noon on the last Saturday, Vince came down the ladder, washed up at the hydrant and went into the shed by himself. I found him at the workbench.
He had Len’s level in the vise with a rag around it. He had sanded the gray off the mahogany, a little at a time, and he was rubbing linseed oil into it with his thumb.
“I can’t do anything about the vial,” he said, without turning around. “It’ll read. It just won’t ever look right.”
“That’s all right.”
“It isn’t.” He worked the oil in. “But it’ll read.”
I stood beside him.
“I should have been the one who dried those tools off,” Vince said. “Not some kid from Onida.”
“He’s a good kid from Onida.”
“He is.” He almost smiled. “He told me my camper was a foot over the line, and called me sir while he did it.”
“I told him to leave it be.”
“I know you did. That’s what got me, Donna, when I had time to think. You had every right to drag all of it out in the yard, and you never laid a hand on it. You just let me look at it.”
I did not have an answer to that, so I did not give one.
He hung the level back on its two nails, where Len kept it, out of the wet.
That afternoon, when the last piece of ridge trim was on, he walked to the house, got my keys off the hook by the door without asking, and drove my car across the yard himself. He backed it in under the new steel, dead center, and shut it off, and sat there a second with both hands on the wheel.
Then he got out and handed me the keys.
“There,” he said. “Quit fussing.”
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