"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 flourishing 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 shirt 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-shirt, 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?"

Annie Sue stirred uneasily. "My dad won't let me either."

Cindy sat back, looking scornful. "And y'all are just gonna let them tell you what you can do every minute?"

"Easy for you," said Annie Sue. "Now that your dad's gone, you can talk your mother into anything."

That seemed like a callous remark to me, what with Ralph McGee not in his grave a month and Perry Byrd barely a week earlier, but only Paige seemed to notice.

"I could probably talk her into it later," she said quietly.

"Just not now. She thinks it wouldn't look right this soon after."

"Where are y'all wanting to go?" I asked.

"My cousin and her new husband have a condo down at Emerald Isle," said Cindy, "and he's got to go to Chicago on business so she's invited us to come stay with her next week. Just four females. It's not like Jet's going to have men over or anything and her new-married."

"Jet Johnson's your cousin?" I asked.

"Jet Ingram now," Cindy said. "Actually, second cousin. Our grandmothers are sisters. Anyhow, she's settled down a lot these last two years and I don't know why Mr. Herman won't trust her to chaperon."

Annie Sue just shrugged, but I could have told Cindy why my straitlaced brother objected. And for once I agreed with him. Jet Johnson's more my age than Cindy's. She grew up in our part of the woods over in Cotton Grove and she didn't get her nickname at the tender age of thirteen just because she had dark eyes and coal black hair. She broke the Colleton County sound barrier, and drugs and s.e.x were only the tip of her wildness. There'd been rumors of dealing and known acts of violence.

True, I'd heard nothing in the last year or so. And maybe I was turning into an old fogy right before my own eyes. All the same, I didn't like hearing that one of Annie Sue's best friends was that closely related, and I was glad old stick-in-the-mud Herman had put his foot down on any beach trip Jet Johnson might be a part of.

"I think he's just being mean," Cindy persisted. "Why don't-"

Paige abruptly nudged her foot and smiled over my shoulder. "Hey, Miss Nadine."

I turned and there was my sister-in-law bearing a box of homemade cookies.

"Ah, here you all are!" said Nadine. "Who wants a fudge delight?"

CHAPTER 7.

ROUGHING IN.

"Rough carpentry includes the layout, cutting, and erection of formwork members and of such wooden structural members as plates, joists, studs, girders, bridging, bracing, and rafters... sheathing and subflooring members are also included under rough carpentry."

The trusses to support the peaked roof were built of two-by-fours and looked like big wooden triangles with W-shaped stiff knees between rafter and joist. They spanned the full width of the house from one exterior wall to the other and they looked heavier than they were. Or maybe that was because many hands really do make light work. I was afraid we'd need sky hooks to hoist those c.u.mber-some things up to the women perched like acrobats on those flimsy-looking skeletal walls. Up they went, though, and once they were nailed in place, the whole structure suddenly became rigid and st.u.r.dy. A steady stream of half-inch plywood sheets followed; and as soon as the bottom courses were secured, several of us swarmed onto the roof to tack down black tar paper.

"Now let it rain!" we told one another.

As we knocked off in the late afternoon, BeeBee Powell stood under the waterproof roof with a blissed-out smile on her face.

"Starting to look like a real house, isn't it?" I said.

"Starting to look like home," she answered softly.

Her children were darting in and out between the open studs. "Which is my room, Mama?" they called. "Which is mine?"

Annie Sue approached with the wiring diagram in one hand and a carpenter's pencil in the other. "We don't have to put everything exactly where it is on this, BeeBee. Did you think about where you'd like counter sockets in the kitchen? And what'd you decide about that ceiling light in Kaneesha's room?"

As they went off together to mark off on wall studs and ceiling joists where each socket and light fixture should go, I grabbed a basket and started picking up sc.r.a.ps to carry out to the dumpster.

Most of the women had gone, scattered for the week with promises to come back or send friends in their places next weekend. Still there were Annie Sue's friends who were straightening lumber in the back and Lu Bingham and Betty Ann Edgerton, who sat on the edge of the small front porch and conferred about delivery schedules for next Sat.u.r.day's supplies. They were hoping to set the doors and windows and get the exterior sheathing on so that the whole house would be dried in, ready for insulation and Sheetrock.

I had emptied two basketfuls of trash when Betty Ann called, "Come and sit a minute."

"I'm afraid my muscles will seize up if I stop moving," I said, but I didn't need to be asked twice.

Out in the side yard, Cindy McGee and Paige Byrd had stepped into a water fight with the Powell kids. Squeals of laughter erupted every time the hose changed hands.

"Where do they get the energy?" Betty Ann groaned as she pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from her nail ap.r.o.n and lit up.

"Probably comes with being sixteen," I said.

"Were we ever sixteen?" Lu took out her own cigarettes and offered me one.

I shook my head.

"We were sixteen," Lu said. "Because that's when you and I both started smoking. I remember sneaking out of study hall with you to the girls' bathroom. When did you quit?"

"When I was eighteen," I reminded her. "When my mother was dying with cancer."

It was part of yet another secret bargain I had tried to strike with G.o.d that summer: Just let her live and I swear I'll never put another cigarette to my lips.

G.o.d wasn't bargaining that day either.

"Oh, Lordy, that's right," said Betty Ann as Lu's hand hesitated on her lighter. "Will it bother you if we smoke?"

"No," I said honestly.

In truth, I had always loved the smell of mellow tobacco and still missed cigarettes after all these years. Yet even if it did bother me, it would be hypocritical to say so, since part of my income is from the tobacco allotment I inherited from Mother. Besides, some of my sweetest memories had the smell of her cigarettes and Daddy's twining through them.

The sun headed down the western sky behind the tall pines but there was plenty of daylight left. I rested my tired back against a wall stud and waited for Annie Sue to finish up and carry me home. She and her two friends had talked about meeting some guys at a dance over at the Armory, but Aunt Zell and Uncle Ashe's Jacuzzi was the only entertainment I wanted tonight.

Marking on the studs as she talked, Annie Sue and BeeBee came down the newly defined hall into what would be the living room. "-and then over by the front door, we'll have a switch plate for the porch light and that lamp outlet, okay?"

BeeBee nodded. "Sounds fine to me." She grinned at the three of us flaked out on her new porch. "Y'all look plumb worn out."

Before we could retort, her son came around the corner of the house lugging the hose with such mischievous intent that she drew herself up sternly. "Boy, you better think again 'fore you point that thing at me."

Gurgling with laughter, he didn't hesitate and before we could dive for cover, all five of us were swept with a spray of cold water.