When we stepped back out into the light, the world felt a degree kinder. We didn’t cure the ache in our backs or bring the wages up where they belong. We didn’t turn off the big screens at the yard or bring back shop class.
But the step didn’t wobble anymore, and sometimes that is enough to make the morning worth the trouble.
On Sunday, my daughter came for the shelf. She brought my granddaughter—a girl with scabby knees, a missing tooth, and curiosity like a lantern. The shelf sat on the bench, finished as anything gets in this life. I handed the girl my old wooden folding rule.
“What’s this?” she asked, unfolding it until it sprung back and pinched her fingers. She yelped, then laughed through the sting.
“It’s how we measured before the phone did,” I said. “You can tell a lot about a thing by taking its size with your own hands.”
We hung the shelf together. My daughter held the level. The little one steadied the screws, solemn as an altar boy.
I drilled pilot holes because studs don’t always sit where you want them, and I’m tired of finding them by luck. When it was up, the shelf looked like it belonged—oak over paint the color of early peaches.
My granddaughter climbed the chair and put a paperback on it, then a stone she’d painted like a ladybug. “For Uncle Dale,” I heard myself say, and the room went quiet as if a cloud had passed.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
“My brother,” I said. “He built things.”
“Like you?” she asked.
I had to swallow, then nod. “Yeah,” I said. “Like me.”
After they left, I drove back to Frank’s with a cooler and two catfish sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. We ate them on the tailgate like kings. Grease worked a dark spot on the box holding Dale’s apron.
A mockingbird flung its voice across the neighborhood—car alarm, frog, squeaky gate—work of a creature that knew how to listen and give it back.
“You see what they’re paying now?” Frank asked, eyes on the street, voice angry the way tired men get when the numbers don’t add up. “Ten dollars an hour to swing a hammer under a sun that’ll cook a man.
Twenty if you got your own truck. And folks still want to bid you down because some fella on the internet says he’ll do it for half.”
“I see it,” I said.
“We’re priced like we don’t matter. Like what we do is a YouTube video and a weekend. But when a hurricane walks through a city, nobody calls an influencer. They call a man who can read a wall.”
He balled the sandwich paper into a tight knot. His hands shook. Age is a thief with good manners. It takes small and steady until one day you find yourself counting how many steps are left between the truck and the porch.
“You heard from the church?” I asked, to move us away from the pit where talk turns sour.
He nodded. “They’re starting something Saturdays. Fix-It days. Folks bring what’s busted. Toasters, chairs, lamps, hearts if they can carry ‘em. The pastor asked if we’d mind taking a table in the fellowship hall.”
“Free?” I asked.
“Donations for the food pantry,” he said. “You know how to mend a chair rung?”
“I know how to listen to one.”
We showed up the next week with boxes of screws in repurposed coffee cans, glue thick as honey, clamps like iron hands. The fellowship hall smelled like old coffee and a thousand casseroles.
A boy in a hoodie rolled in a wobbly bicycle. A woman set down a lamp with a shade that had seen better decades. An old man brought a stool whose leg had split along the grain. We set to work.
I watched the boy’s face while Frank trued the wheel with a spoke wrench. The kid’s eyes sharpened. He leaned in. “Can I try?” he asked, scared of wanting to get it right.
Frank put the wrench in his hand, guided his fingers. The boy listened to the click, click, click of spokes finding their place. He straightened a tooth of metal and made a thing whole again. I swear the room got brighter.
At our table, I showed the woman how to replace a lamp’s brittle cord. When we plugged it in and the bulb came up warm, she put a hand over her mouth like light was a miracle. It is.
The pastor—gray hair, laugh like wind chimes—walked by with paper cups of coffee. “Y’all are preaching without words,” he said.
“Nah,” Frank said. “We’re just telling old stories.”
By noon the hall hummed like a beehive. Work makes a music no radio can touch. It’s the sound of folks believing in themselves again. The boy with the bike came back with a second wheel and a grin. “Can I come next week?” he asked.
“You better,” I said.
The months slipped by like boards fed through a planer—rough going in, smooth on the other side if your knives are sharp. We saw the same faces and new ones.
A young mother learned how to patch drywall. Her daughter, hair in beads, stood on tiptoe and stirred paint like it was cake batter. A retiree brought a busted rocking chair that had belonged to her father.
We glued it, clamped it, and watched the joint take. She sat slow, then rocked once, twice. It didn’t creak. Her eyes did.
Frank’s knees complained, my back held its opinions, and neither of us trusted a ladder anymore. But our hands knew things our minds had forgotten they knew. The work fed something no checkbook measures.
One Saturday, a kid in a red ball cap brought in a cracked iPad and a wooden cutting board that had split down the middle. He wanted the screen fixed. We couldn’t help him there. He looked disappointed.
“Let me see that board,” I said. He handed it over like he didn’t believe wood deserved the same attention as glass. I showed him the split. “See the way the grain runs?
Wood moves when it’s wet and dry, hot and cold. You gotta give it room, or it’ll break trying to be something it’s not.”
He frowned. “Like people?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Now we’ll cut a little spline and glue it in. It won’t be perfect. It’ll be stronger.”
He watched me cut the spline—a little tongue that would live inside the seam, holding two sides in conversation. We clamped it and waited. When we pulled the clamps, he ran his hand over the board like petting a quiet dog. He smiled slow. “It’s good,” he said.
“Strong,” I corrected.
He nodded. “Strong.”
That night, sitting on the back steps with a glass of sweet tea and the sound of crickets stitching the dark together, I thought about Katrina and the houses and the years.
My phone lit with a photo from my daughter. The shelf hung on the wall, a row of books leaning into each other like cousins at a reunion. The ladybug stone sat proud. Under the shelf, my granddaughter had taped a drawing—three stick men holding a long board between them.
Above their heads: WE BUILT HOUSES, NOT JUST WALLS.
I laughed, then I cried the way old men do when nobody’s watching—quiet, like the tears are sneaking out the door. I sent the picture to Frank. He didn’t text back. He called. We don’t say much on the phone, but it felt like standing side by side again, looking at the same thing from the same place.
“You think folks will remember us?” he asked after a minute.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said, and surprised myself by meaning it. “They’ll remember the houses. The nights they slept dry. The steps that didn’t wobble. The light that came on. That’s enough.”
He breathed. “Yeah.”
The next Fix-It day, I brought Dale’s apron and hung it over the back of a chair. A man in a suit came through with a camera, said he was from the paper. He asked us why we do it.
I wanted to tell him about pay scales and vanished shop classes and the way respect for hands-on work fell out of fashion like last year’s shoes. I wanted to talk about algorithms that set prices without ever getting splinters, and businesses that treat skilled labor like a hobby.
Instead, I told him this: “Storms take. People build. We’re the second part.”
He wrote that down. Maybe it’ll make the paper. Maybe it won’t. Doesn’t change the chair leg that held when the old man leaned his weight into it, or the smile on the boy with the bike, or the lamp that lit up after years of dark.
A few weeks later, Frank and I drove back by Mrs. Connelly’s place. The porch had a new coat of paint, white as Sunday. The step felt solid under our boots. A little girl drew chalk flowers beside the welcome mat. Her mama nodded hello. “Thank you for the step,” she called. We tipped our caps like men who remember how.
On the way home we took the long way down along the water where the marsh breathes. The sky was the color of fresh-sawn cedar. Pelicans sat on pilings like old judges. We didn’t say much. Some silences are thick with things said long ago.
Back in my shop, I started another shelf. Not because I had to. Because the world is still full of walls that need a place to hold what people love. I signed the underside the same way. Names no one will read. A small, stubborn act of faith.
I know what I regret now. Not the hours. Not the aches. Not even the storm. I regret that we can’t always keep being the men we were when the world needed us loud.
But I’ve learned something about work and time. You don’t get to hold on to who you were. You get to pass him along—board by board, lesson by lesson, hand by hand—until the shape of him lives in other people’s lives.
Wood rots. Roofs sag. Walls crumble. So do men. But if you build with love, the house you make will stand forever in someone’s heart.
And sometimes, on a hot Mississippi afternoon, when the light lands just right in the dust of a little shop, you can hear it—three hammers keeping time, and a laugh from a brother who never really left, steady as a nail driven home.
