The Steeple I Painted Every Ten Years

Fifty-two feet

The basket is not a ladder. I want to say that, because I could hear Dr. Bergmann’s voice in my head, and because the doctor had said no ladders, and a bucket truck is a different animal. I have spent thirty-nine years in them. I know how they move.

Jesse clipped me in himself. He ran the lanyard through the D-ring on the basket, and tested it twice, and checked the one at my back, and he did not once say a word about how long it had been. Ray worked the controls from the ground. Eldon Teague watched from his chair with his hands folded on his blanket.

We rose slowly. The lot dropped away beneath me, and the faces went small, and every one of them was turned up, forty-four people and a ninety-one-year-old man

I could see Church Road run off into the trees. I could see the Hobbs barn, and the co-op yard, and my own porch, half a mile down, with the chair I sit in every evening. I could see the ridges going the way they go in October, red and yellow and rust, one folding into another all the way to the bluffs.

The steeple was beside me, close enough to touch. Every board was clean. I laid my good hand flat on the south face, and the paint was dry and cool and smooth as a plate.

Jesse eased the basket around to the north side, and the wind came up, and there it was.

A band of bare wood, two hands wide, right under the lip of the cap. The boards on either side of it were white. The wood in the middle was the gray of a fence rail, left alone, with pencil on it. O.P. 1946. O.P. 1956. O.P. 1966. And my own, under them: H.P. 1976. H.P. 1986. H.P. 1996. H.P. 2006. H.P. 2016.

Eight dates in a row, eighty years of Pruitts hanging from one building.

I sat there in the basket with my back to the whole county. I did not cry. My eyes did not do anything. I just looked at my father’s handwriting, square and plain, and I thought about a boy of twelve with his boots on a ladder rung, leaning in with everything he had.

Jesse waited without speaking. The wind moved the netting.

I took the pencil in my right hand. The fingers closed on it without any trouble at all, because a pencil weighs nothing, and I put the point to the wood under my last line.

My hand shook. It had not shaken like that in 1976. I held it steady against the board with my left, and I wrote what I came to write, and the six came out leaning like a man on a ladder in a wind.

2026.

It sat under Daddy’s three and my five, a little crooked, on the one board of that church the paint never reached.