The House That Rodney and His Friends Built

Mack Hall

"That in this moment there is life and food
For future years."

-- Wordsworth

When Rodney died he left behind an unfinished garage and unfinished grandchildren, so on the Saturday morning following his funeral his friends mustered to work on the one and to inspire the others.

Rodney had his garage framed, a lacey assemblage exhibiting all the geometric constructs Miz Bonnie Carter taught us (well, taught Rodney, at least; the minds of some of us were rather resistant to pie are square) in the long ago, all open to an impossibly perfect autumn sky.

And that was the problem, of course; perfect autumn skies soon deteriorate into imperfect winter ones, and Rodney’s last project needed drying-in.

And so men and boys and a dog gathered, for what is a communal building project without some boys and a dog? Manly men with pickups and trailers sagging with lumber and air-powered tools and ladders and leather tool belts and camouflage ball caps and all the other impedimenta of the independent American yeomanry swarmed the joists and rafters noisily and happily, trailing pneumatic and electric lines and emitting clouds of sawdust and calling out numbers: "I need a four by eleven-and-a-half over here!"

All was much like a house-raising scene in a John Ford film, except that The Old West didn’t suffer from cell ‘phones.

One hopes that some government agency or some The People’s Progressive Committee Activist Front doesn’t send a committee of comrades or lawyers to investigate, but while the menfolk labored on the garages (three parking spaces, pump room, workshop, deck, upstairs apartment), the womenfolk (accept the John Ford-ism, okay?) set out lunch under the shade of an oak tree. Mr. Folk, Rodney’s ag teacher, led the assembly in prayer, a happy duty that until a week before would have fallen to Rodney.

The little boys and the little girls and the dog occasionally ran through the project to be fussed at, and then out to the field to play an all-day game of football whose curious and inexplicable (to adults) rules were invented for and limited to that one occasion. They ate too much and got sunburned and laughed and shrieked and scraped some knees and celebrated their childhood world out under the high blue sky and in the fields and woods of a perfect October day.

They will forever remember this week, when Papa died and was mourned, and then how on a marvelous day they burst forth from the sadness for a while to run wild in Papa’s field, which is exactly what he wanted for them. And they will remember how Papa’s friends joined in prayer and in fun and in work to push forward, in a small way, his life for them.

The children – they are the house being built. And they will remember.

I expect the hammering and sawing and noisy good fellowship were heard all the way from Magnolia Springs Cemetery.
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