Rumble would hear endless renditions of how the husband didn’t go out and get the paper like he always did while his wife was fixing breakfast and school lunches and getting the kids up and ready for school and making sure they didn’t miss the bus before she fixed his eggs the way he liked them and asked what he might like for supper and what time he’d be home.
Ruby Sink had worn out Rumble’s patience. She had been planning her monument ever since her sister died eleven years ago, and it wasn’t uncommon for Miss Sink to wander in once a month just to see what sorts of things Rumble was working on. First she wanted an angel, then a tree, then a plain African granite headstone with raised lilies, then she got into marbles and went through them like a woman rifling through her closet trying to figure out what color dress to wear. She had to have Lake Superior Green, then Rainbow, then Wausau, then Carnelian, then Mountain Red, and so on.
Rumble’s business had been in the family for three generations. He had dealt with all sorts and was smart enough to quit placing orders for Miss Sink after the third time she had changed her mind.
‘Good afternoon, Floyd,’ Miss Sink walked right in talking loudly above the chop chop chop and rat-a-tats of machines and blasting of carbon sand and whirring of the exhaust fan and roaring of compressors.
‘I guess so,’ he said.
‘I don’t know how you stand all the dust in here.’ She always said that.
‘It’s good for you,’ he always replied. ‘Same thing they use in toothpaste. All day long your teeth get cleaned. You ever see a Rumble with bad teeth?’
In part, he went down this path to distract Miss Sink. Sometimes it worked. Today it didn’t.
‘I guess you heard.’ She moved close to confide in him.
The thirteen-hundred-pound monument hung perilously midair and Rumble thought about what a chore restoring it was going to be. All duplications of old work like that had to be chiseled by hand, and there was no way he was going to start on it while Miss Sink was within a mile of his shop. She’d decide she had finally found what she wanted. She’d know without a spark of doubt that she had to have soft white Vermont marble chiseled by hand.
He started looking through trays of stencil types, preparing to etch a Hebrew inscription on Sierra White marble while his crew lowered the damaged monument into a cart.
‘You heard what they did to Jefferson Davis,’ Miss Sink told him.
‘I heard something about it.’
Rumble started laying out stencil types. They had to be plastic so one could see through them, but they broke all the time.
‘As you know, Floyd, I’m on the board.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
The overwhelming matter that must be taken care of is how badly is the statue damaged, how do we go about restoring it and how much will it cost.’
Rumble hadn’t gone into the cemetery to look yet. Nor would he bother at all unless he was offered the job.
‘He paint any of the marble base or just the bronze?’ Rumble inquired.
‘Mostly the bronze.’ Just the thought of it made her sick. ‘But he did paint the top of the base to look like a basketball floor. So yes, some of the marble was involved.’
‘I see. So he’s standing on a basketball floor. What else?’
‘Well, the worst part. He painted a basketball uniform on him, tennis shoes and the whole bit, and changed his race.’
‘Sounds like we got two problems here,’ Rumble said as he tossed out another broken letter and the diamond saw in a corner started cutting through stone. ‘To fix the marble, I’m going to have to chisel it down and put on a new surface. As for the bronze, if we’re talking about oil-based paints…”
‘Oh we are,’ she said. ‘I could tell. Nothing spray-painted here. This was all done in thick coats with a brush.’
‘We’ll have to strip that down, maybe with turpentine, then refinish with a polyurethane coating so we don’t get oxidation.’