Southern Discomfort by Margaret Maron

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 shore 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 classmate 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 Saturday morning was shattered by the high-pitched whine of power saws and the pounding of hammers as we anchored 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 nobody 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,