One late winter when I was eleven, or maybe twelve, we had a series of storms which dumped freezing rain on top of older snow. This accumulation ended up caving in the roof of a shepherd’s cabin which my Uncle Danzig kept on a grassy slope further up in the hills from Enkel Kanindal. He used the cabin every spring when he would take his flock of sheep up there for a few weeks. The slope faced the sun and sprouted early frostgrass each year which was the best grazing available for that stretch. He had walked up there in advance of moving the flock, and had seen the fallen roof.

  He, my father, Uncle Slade, and my cousin Canute – Danzig’s loud son, who was just a year older than I was – planned a trip up to repair the cabin.

  Uncle Danzig was the oldest of the three brothers; Slade, the youngest; my father, the middle. Danzig was a no-nonsense man who always worked hard; my father, for his part, also worked long hours playing all the musical performances he could line up; while Slade, on the other hand, was more loose, doing just enough at his farm to stay afloat, frankly, and also disappearing for days or weeks at a time to travel out of our town, or out of the area entirely. In those days Danzig’s hair was largely gray, my father had a bit of gray in his, and Slade’s was still solid brown.

  As for Canute, he was gangly and big, looking considerably more than one year older than me. I couldn’t imagine that I would be his size in twelve months (and indeed I did not turn out to be; to this day he is bigger and meatier.) He also tended to . . . well, shout whatever was in his mind at any given moment without any sort of filtering. A lot of people called him Galoot, behind his back, and it wasn’t intended to be a friendly nickname.

  My dad, Slade, and Danzig gathered in our house to plan the cabin repair, and Canute and I were there. This was to be a men’s outing for whatever reason. They would need saws, axes, hammers, nails; some wood shingles, just in case any had broken in the collapse; plus food, and bedding. They would have to spend the night to get the work done, given how far of a walk the cabin was.

  When they talked about who would carry what, Canute was specifically included in the plan; I was not. My father and Uncle Danzig were clearly assuming I would not come along. They were apparently counting Canute as a young man who could be of some help, but me as a burdensome boy, still. This burned, for me, needless to say.

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  As they discussed how many shingles Canute could carry himself, and so on, Uncle Slade glanced at me a couple times. I was in a chair in the corner of the room, rather than seated at the table with them, but I was listening. My little sister Daphne was six or seven, then, but she was off with my mother somewhere.

  Toward the end of the chat they wrapped up the details, and set the time when they would meet again, the next day. I confirmed to myself, silently, that I was not included.

  But Uncle Slade interjected, at the last moment:

  “I’ll be giving some of my nails and my hammer and whatnot to Flicker. I’ll have enough to lug up there without all that.”

  My father and Uncle Danzig looked at him, and then at me.

  “Flicker?” Danzig said.

  “Well, someone has to climb up on the roof to nail down shingles, and I’m not messing with that,” Slade said. “He’s got the sure feet for that.”

  That settled it; I was going. Slade’s explanation was a fiction, of course. As far as my walking on the roof was concerned, Canute probably could have vaulted himself up there one-handed, and then pounded in nails with the side of his fist, or his forehead. And of course the roof would have to be built strong enough to hold any of them, not just me, because it was the inability of it to support all the snow and ice which had caused the failure in the first place.

  My father and Danzig spoke something like a quiet “all right, then,” and Slade looked at me one last time, quickly, and may have winked.

  Later that day, my father told my mother that I was going, and she was confused that I might not have in the first place.

  “Of course he’s going – ?” she told him. She was heading outside with a shovel to do something, but came up short at the news.

  “Yes, well. Initially it was just going to be the four of us. But he’ll come.”

  “The three of you, and Canute, it was going to be,” she said.

  “Well, yes.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Well, that’s good. Take plenty of food. And don’t fall off the roof.”

  *

  So I went along on the cabin repair outing. I helped skin bark off of some new logs they sawed for rafters, among other things. And it was Uncle Slade who had thought of me.

  Johann Jaritz, CC BY-SA 3.0 AT , via Wikimedia Commons

  Lake: Taken by my wife!