Part 7 (1/2)
”I'd act surprised,” I said, ”except that I met his boss last night.”
Lu made a face. ”Rufus Dayley. Did he tell you how he was having to pay an inspector overtime? You'd think it was money out of his own pocket.”
Nitpicking or not though, the inspector had finally pa.s.sed the footing and the plumbing rough-ins as well. They had poured the slab on schedule last Monday.
”Feel how smooth,” said Lu, running her gloved hand across the dark gray surface. In truth, the finish was like marble.
The mason's wife tried to look modest and launched into a monologue about mechanical screeds, rough smoothings, and troweling machines. ”Then, 'fore we left, we sprayed the surface with a curing compound so it wouldn't dry out too fast and check on us.”
I didn't understand half what she said except to realize this was an artisan who took pride in her abilities. And with good cause, according to Lu.
”Once the carpet goes down, you'll think this is a hardwood floor,” she told me. ”Smooth, no b.u.mps or dips, and a hundred percent termite proof.”
I should hope so. My mother used to drive tobacco sticks into the ground for flower stakes and a month later, the sticks would be riddled with tunnels. Termites do love Colleton County's sandy soil.
”Bet they didn't find any faults with this slab,” I said.
The women exchanged glances and Lu Bingham shrugged her ample shoulders. ”Some men would fault G.o.d if they thought she was a woman.”
”Who's this inspector, anyhow?” I asked. ”Anybody I know?”
”Bannister?” hazarded the mason's wife. ”My husband keeps up with them, but I forgot to ask him.”
We walked over to the fluorescent orange building permit that was nailed to the utility post. Five categories were listed under the bold heading INSPECTIONS REQUIRED: Building, Energy, Electrical, Plumbing, and Mechanical. On the footings and foundation/slab lines, the same signature appeared: C. Bannerman.
For some reason that name touched a chord with me, but I couldn't think in what context. ”He from Cotton Grove?”
Neither knew and we quit wondering about him the minute our crew leader arrived.
Betty Ann Edgerton had been three years ahead of me at West Colleton High. She was the oldest daughter of a sharecropper on one of my daddy's farms; and after one frustrating semester spent struggling with office machines and typing, she had single-handedly changed Industrial Arts into a coed department.
”I ain't going to college,” she argued before the local school board (of which my mother was a member), ”and I sh.o.r.e don't want to spend my life cooped up in no office typing all day, so how come I can't learn how to build a house? Women buy houses, too, don't they?”
She eventually married a cla.s.smate who aced Business Skills and these days they own a flouris.h.i.+ng little contracting business, work three or four crews, and are building houses all over the county.
”This here's like a holiday,” she told me, happily revving up her Skilsaw. ”I stay so busy these days estimating bids and then checking in behind our crews, I don't hardly ever get to use a saw no more.”
Hers wasn't the only saw that got a workout that day. Annie Sue hooked up some outlets to the utility box so that bright orange extension cords could power the tools; and by eight o'clock, the quiet Sat.u.r.day morning was shattered by the high-pitched whine of power saws and the pounding of hammers as we anch.o.r.ed a heavy wooden floor plate to the slab. Using a carpenter's rule and some arcane formulae, Betty Ann and another woman who spoke the language quickly marked off where all the outer doors and windows were to go.
We divided into teams and were soon laying out two-by-sixes on each side of the house. Each exterior wall was nailed together flat on the ground, then hoisted into place, up on the plate, with door and window openings already roughed in.
Betty Anne was everywhere, explaining and directing. Annie Sue couldn't begin wiring until the walls and ceiling rafters were in place, so she fell in with a crew on the other side of the house where her friend Cindy McGee was hammering away.
The work was grueling, yet at the same time, enormously gratifying. By midmorning though, I was glad I'd been sensible the night before and started the day rested. It'd been years since I'd lifted and hauled under a broiling July sun, but at least I knew enough to wear a loose long-sleeved cotton s.h.i.+rt over my tank top and a baseball cap that shaded my face. Some of the town-bred women came in shorts, tube tops and sweatbands, and by ten o'clock they were turning pink on their shoulders and noses. One worker was the manager of a chain drugstore and she'd thought to bring along a case of sunscreen. Every time any of us took a breather, we'd go slather ourselves. The smell made me feel I should be pounding through surf at the beach instead of pounding a hammer. There were over thirty of us; yet even so, I was surprised at how fast the work was going. Despite our self-deprecating chatter, we gradually shaped ourselves into a raggedly efficient work force. In fact, we were setting the exterior wall framing in place when photographers from the Raleigh News and Observer and the Dobbs Ledger showed up. Without being obvious about it, I made sure I was in several of the pictures and that they got my name spelled right. (Modesty has its place, but n.o.body ever said you have to hide your altruism under a peach basket; and let's face it: name recognition's half the game in the voting booth.) By lunchtime, all the exterior and most of the interior walls were set in place.
”At this rate, we'll have the rafters up by quitting time,” Betty Ann encouraged us when we broke for lunch.
For the last fifteen minutes, women from two of the local churches had been spreading food on a table constructed of saw benches and planks. Every whiff of fried chicken and hot cornbread made my mouth water.
A clerk from the quick-stop down the street came up to invite us to use their facilities if the two portable toilets weren't enough, but most of us just lined up at the hose pipe to wash off the morning's grime and sweat, then headed for the food.
Lu stood at the head of the table. Beside her were BeeBee Powell and her two children, who'd been working hard all morning, too. On the other side was a sweaty white girl in green cotton running shorts, a pink T-s.h.i.+rt, and an even pinker nose. She didn't look a day older than Annie Sue and her friends.
”For those who haven't met her yet,” said Lu, ”I'd like to introduce the Reverend Veronica Norton. Ronnie?”
The young woman wiped her hands on the seat of her shorts, then opened a Bible, and with an impish grin, read the last three verses of the book of Proverbs. It's from the pa.s.sage that begins ”Who can find a virtuous woman?”-the one most preachers will read at an elderly matron's funeral when he doesn't really know the least little thing about her except that she'd been somebody's wife and mother. This was the first time I'd heard it read with a spin.
”Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all. Favor is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.” In the Reverend Norton's voice, the final words sounded down-right subversive: ”Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her own works praise her in the gates.”
I wasn't the only woman who turned and looked proudfully at the house rising behind us, strong and clean, soon to shelter the young mother who stood among us with her two children.
Lu next called on an elderly black deaconess who gave thanks for the food, both spiritually and temporally, and we fell to. My paper plate was soon loaded with chicken, b.u.t.terbeans, two thick meaty slices of vine-ripened tomatoes, and a dollop of zucchini ca.s.serole, and I carried it over to a stack of plywood shaded from the midday sun by a huge elm tree that was actually growing in the next yard over. Somebody's black-and-white hound was lying in the cool dirt beside the lumber. He looked up at me with a hopeful air and I gave him a bit of crisp chicken skin. Annie Sue, Cindy and a third girl soon joined us, sitting cross-legged on the broad sheets of plywood like day campers on a boat pier.
”Y'all know my Aunt Deb'rah, don't you?” Annie Sue asked.
Cindy McGee I had already recognized. The other, a strawberry blonde who'd been with her Thursday night, looked familiar but I couldn't put a name to her and said so.
”That's because you couldn't come to our spring concert,” said Annie Sue. ”She and Cindy and me made up a trio, but you had a fund-raiser or something that night.”
”I'm Paige Byrd,” the girl said shyly. ”I think we probably met at my father's funeral.”
”Oh. Right,” I said, feeling like a clod. ”Sorry.”
I vaguely knew that Annie Sue and Cindy had begun running around with Judge Byrd's daughter when they made the senior high school chorus last fall. And I must have seen her at his wake-even though I disliked Perry Byrd personally, I'd still gone to pay my respects to the family-but she had never fully registered.
”That's because she was a total mess,” Annie Sue told me later. ”Fat and frumpy. She's lost at least ten pounds since the funeral and Cindy and me, we made her cut her hair and get a rinse and start wearing bright colors. Can you believe it? Everything in her closet practically was beige. She just flat-out disappeared into the woodwork before.”
Now that I knew who she was, I could see the likeness to her father. Perry Byrd had been a redhead with broad flat cheekbones and wide brow, and his daughter had inherited both his bone structure and his coloring. She seemed to have escaped his prejudices though, if helping to build a house for a needy single black woman meant anything.
She wiped her fingers on her napkins and held out her hand like a well-mannered old lady. ”I'm pleased to meet you again, Judge Knott,” she said awkwardly. ”I've been wanting to ever since Annie Sue told me you were going to be appointed.”
”Why, thank you, Paige. I guess it must be hard for you and your family to see someone else in his place, but-”
”No,” she said firmly, as if this were something she and Annie Sue had already discussed. ”I was really glad when I heard it was you going to get his seat. I think there ought to be more women on the bench.”
”Hear, Hear!” said Cindy, tapping her hammer on plywood to underline her enthusiasm.
Paige turned beet red and there was a moment of self-conscious silence before Cindy, who was the prettiest of the three and who seemed to be the leader, leaned over and bossily took a b.u.t.tered biscuit out of Paige's hand.
”You want to put back every pound?” she said sternly, handing the biscuit to the hound, who didn't really need it either, but was willing to oblige. ”If you're going to get in that new bathing suit-”
”Doesn't matter whether I can or can't,” said Paige. ”My mother doesn't want me to go with y'all.”
”What?”