The Legend of Forrest Langley
There were a bunch of people my parents knew from the neighborhood—mostly old folks. Church friends of my grandparents, neighbors, people who needed help. My parents were always doing odd jobs for them: hanging wallpaper, building things, taking older women grocery shopping to Alpha Beta or Lucky’s.
My sister and I were usually dragged along, which felt like a punishment. Sometimes we’d just sit in the car while my mom and our 300-year-old neighbor, Mrs. Hupp, shopped. We’d sit in the backseat of her olive green Chevy Nova for hours, windows rolled down, just looking around. We got very good at doing absolutely nothing. None of my kids seem to have inherited that skill.
One of these people was a man named Forrest Langley. I have no idea what he did before he retired. He was a nice enough guy—not as warm as Grandpa Tutty, who lived across from Dick and Mary Lou, but decent. He was quiet, soft-spoken, wore cardigans, didn’t smoke. That alone was enough for my dad to decide he didn’t quite fit the mold of every other man in his orbit.
At some point, Forrest decided to raise the roof of his garage. For help, he enlisted my dad—an unemployed man built like he could carry half the house on his back. The arrangement was simple: my dad did the work, and Forrest supervised.
They worked on that garage for about a month. Every day my dad came home complaining—not about the labor, but about the rules. Forrest wouldn’t let him drink beer while he worked. That, more than anything, seemed to bother him.
Forrest, meanwhile, took the role of foreman seriously. He liked having someone to direct, and he used the opportunity fully. Eventually, the constant oversight wore thin. There was an argument—no one remembers exactly what started it—but my dad walked away, declaring he wasn’t going to keep working under those conditions.
Even so, he had been thinking ahead. There was a ridge board running along the peak of the garage roof—the spine where all the rafters met. My dad had convinced Forrest to leave it long so that, someday, he could mount a hoist to it and use the garage to swap out car engines. We had a garage at home, but it was packed so full of junk that nothing useful ever happened in it.
Forrest, for reasons of his own, decided to cut that extra length off.
He set up a ladder, climbed up, and sat on the ridge board to trim it down.
This part of the story has never changed in 45 years. No embellishments, no shifting details. That’s the only reason I believe it’s true.
Apparently, Forrest was sitting on the wrong side of the cut.
He sawed through the board and fell about fifteen feet onto his asphalt driveway.
A neighbor heard him screaming in agony and called an ambulance. Forrest went to the hospital and stayed there for a few weeks before he died.
Everyone in this story is gone now.