The Steeple I Painted Every Ten Years

In 2006, I was fifty-two years old and my knees were already talking to me on the way up. Pastor Hagan, a good man who had served our church eleven years, came to me in August and said the Boy Scouts and the fire department had both offered to help.

“I appreciate it,” I said. “But I’ve got it.”

“Harlan, nobody expects you to carry this alone.”

“It’s not carrying. It’s my turn.”

I had no idea what I meant by that. I just knew that I did not want to be helped. I had a picture in my head of the way it was supposed to look, one man on a ladder, and I was not going to let anybody put a second man in it.

I went up that fall alone. It took sixteen days.

In 2016, I was sixty-two, and I had been retired from the co-op two years. I thought I had more miles in me than I did. It took twenty-three days. I came down at the end of each one with my hands shaking from holding on, and I sat in the grass and ate two sandwiches Darlene had packed without tasting either.

The last night of it, I came down from the cross with white all over my face and my right shoulder screaming, and I found Darlene sitting on the church steps with a thermos.

She did not say anything about the work. She poured me coffee and handed it over.

“In ten years, you’ll be seventy-two,” she said.

“I’ll be fine.”

“That’s what you always say.” She looked at the steeple, white against a hard blue sky. “Forty years you’ve given this church the best of what you’ve got. And in all that time you never let one soul hold your ladder. You never let anybody give you one thing back.”

“It’s not about getting something back.”

“I know it isn’t,” she said. “That’s what worries me.”

I did not answer. I drank the coffee. I wrote H.P. 2016 under the others, and my handwriting was bigger than it had been, because my eyes had started to go.

I should say something here, so you do not take me for a saint. I was not humble about any of it. I was proud. I was proud in a way I did not recognize as pride, because it dressed itself up as service.

A man can hide a lot of vanity inside a good deed, if the deed is big enough and nobody sees what is in his heart while he is doing it.

Darlene saw. She saw it for forty years and loved me anyway, which is its own kind of patience.