The Steeple I Painted Every Ten Years

The first time up

I went up in October of 1976 with a lineman’s belt around my waist, because I did not trust anything else, and I tied off to the louvers of the belfry every six feet like I was working a pole in an ice storm.

It took me eleven days of evenings and Saturdays. I scraped the old paint with a hook scraper and a wire brush until my forearm cramped, and I primed every board, and I put on two coats of white that the church had bought and carried out to the lawn in buckets.

When I got to the cross I could see the whole county. I could see my father’s hay barn, and the co-op yard in Cobb Springs, and the Gasconade bluffs going blue in the haze, and the road we’d all drive down for the rest of our lives. I stood there with my chest against the cap and my legs shaking, and I had never been so happy.

Under the lip of the cap, on the north side, there were three dates in pencil, in my father’s square print. O.P. 1946. O.P. 1956. O.P. 1966.

I wrote H.P. 1976 under them. My handwriting looked like a boy’s. I put the pencil in my pocket and came down, and my father was sitting on the church steps with a glass of tea in his hand, and he did not say a thing.

He did not have to.

Every ten years

You will think the rest of it was easy, because it happened the same way each time. It was not.

In 1986, my daughter Tammy was three years old and sat on a quilt in the churchyard with a cup of apple juice, watching her father paint a cross. About the third afternoon, a storm blew up out of the southwest faster than the radio said it would. I was at the belfry, forty feet up, tied off, with wet paint on every rail.

I knew better than to be there with the lightning coming. But I could not leave the white half-dry, and I thought I had time. I did not.

I stayed on that ledge for forty minutes with my knees locked and the bucket hanging on my hook, listening to the thunder go through the wood like somebody dragging furniture across a floor above me. I said a prayer that was not pretty and was entirely honest.

Darlene told me later she had Tammy under the church porch with a quilt over both their heads, and neither one of them said a word.

In 1996, I found out the belfry had a hornet’s nest the size of a basketball hanging from the underside of the rafters, and I found out the way you find out. I was stung eleven times. I came down the ladder faster than I had ever come down any ladder, and the Hobbs boys stood in the churchyard laughing so hard one of them had to sit.

I went to the emergency room in Rolla with my arm swelled up like a ham and a smile on my face, because I had gotten the south side done and the rest could wait for a cold morning.