The Steeple I Painted Every Ten Years

What gave out

It started in March. A big limb came down off the oak in our yard in an ice storm, and I dragged it by myself because that is what I do, and something tore in my right shoulder that I felt all the way down to my wrist.

The surgeon in Rolla, a young man named Dr. Bergmann, fixed the tendon in April. He told me afterward that the nerve running down that arm had been pinched so long, it might wake up and it might not.

“Might not?” I said.

“Mr. Pruitt, it’s not predictable.” He wrote something down. “I would not plan on any ladder work.”

By June, I had the strength back in my shoulder and nothing in my hand. I could hold a pencil. I could hold a fork. But when I closed my fingers around anything heavier, they would hold and then, without any word of warning, they would simply quit.

I dropped a full coffee cup in front of the whole Sunday school class. I dropped a socket wrench in my own driveway and stood there looking at it on the gravel.

Over the summer I watched the steeple from my porch, half a mile off, every evening, with the sun hitting it. The paint kept coming off. Early August was hot, and the south face went from gray to gray with long raw stripes. In September we had two days of rain, and I saw one dark streak crawl down the wood from the louvers like water down a windowpane.

Wet wood in a steeple is a clock. If the boards stay wet through a winter, they begin to rot. You can fix the paint. You cannot fix the wood.

So on the second Saturday of September, I took the extension ladder out of the barn, the same one I had used for forty years, and I leaned it against the church, and I started up. I told myself I would only go as high as the porch roof and tie off a rope for later.

That is how I ended up in the grass.

The quote

On Sunday, after services, I took Pastor Glen Kessler aside in the fellowship hall by the coffee urn and told him I could not do the steeple.

Pastor Glen was thirty-four years old and had been with us three years. He was a big, quiet young man who had played tight end somewhere in Iowa, and he had never once told me what to do. I appreciated that more than I could say.

He looked at my wrapped hand and nodded.

“I figured,” he said.

“You figured?”

“Darlene told me about the shoulder in the spring. I just didn’t want to be the one to say it out loud.”

“I’ll find somebody with a lift,” I said. “Somebody.”

“Harlan, the church is already getting a quote.” He said it gently. “So we have a number to work from.”

That was the part that landed hard. The quote came back in a week, from a painting outfit in Rolla, a reputable one. Fourteen thousand two hundred dollars. Scaffolding, lift rental, lead abatement, two coats, labor.

Liberty Ridge Baptist has forty-one members on a good Sunday, and most of those are older than I am. The building fund held thirty-eight hundred and sixty dollars. They could not have paid it if every one of us had turned out our pockets.

I sat in my pickup in the church lot with the engine off and looked at the steeple for a long time. I was not angry at anybody. I just kept picturing a stranger from Rolla in a clean white jumpsuit with a spray rig, going up my father’s steeple in three days, and getting down again, and driving away.

Darlene found me in the kitchen that night, sitting at the table with the quote in front of me and a cup of coffee going cold.

“You can let them,” she said.

“Let them do what? Hire a stranger?”

“Let them do something.”

“There’s nothing to do. We don’t have the money.”

“Harlan.” She sat down across from me. “I did not say money.”

I did not understand what she meant, and I was too tired to ask.