They Built Houses

They built houses. These men who were friends and family in farmland flat and wide came together to build each other houses. They shared their time and their strength and their skills. They shared their tools. They shared their good humor and laughter and their sorrows and fears too probably. I bet they shared some smokes and some drinks out there, when we kids were not around. I know they shared jokes and some of those jokes were running themes to be mentioned at every future gathering. They built my uncle’s house, then they built our house. I remember when I was just three years old, walking next to my dad or sometimes following behind him, from the mobile home where we lived to the house site through tall tall grass, and hanging around the site while my dad and his friends worked. There was joy there, the men hollering requests to each other, handing tools and wood back and forth, lifting a thing together, holding a ladder for one another, discussing the best way to do something often worded as "a guy could . . . ". It didn’t seem like work there those days, and I must have gotten some of my work ethic from them in that time, for I have never worked a job that didn’t seem like play to me. I don’t know what kind of arrangements were involved but there were always people there, not always the same ones, but friends working together. Brothers and friends and brothers of friends and friends of brothers. Were they hired or paid in barter somehow? Were they paying back favors or buying favors ahead? Or were they there just for the joy of it? For the friendship and camaraderie? I will never know because those men are mostly gone, my dad in 1996, his brother a few years before, and one of them just this past month. I remember them sobbing at my dad’s funeral, hugging me tightly, and one said through his tears close into my ear so that no one knew why I laughed at my father’s funeral: “That g#####m b#####d still has my saw!”