The Steeple I Painted Every Ten Years
What they left
I stood there with the lot full of people, and Darlene holding on to my arm, and my face doing something I couldn’t control.
Jesse had come down. He rode the last bucket truck down to the ground and climbed out of the basket with his harness hanging on him and white paint to the elbows. He crossed the lot and stood in front of me with his cap in his hand, looking about twenty-one years old again.
“Mr. Pruitt, we didn’t want you to see it unfinished.”
“You didn’t have to do any of this.”
“No, sir.” He grinned. “I know.”
I tried to say something. It did not come out.
“I want to tell you one thing,” Jesse said, quieter, so only the nearest few of us heard. “Wednesday morning, one of the Hobbs boys was up scraping under the cap, on the north side. He called down. He said somebody had written on the wood in pencil.
Ray went up and looked at it, and came back down, and told every one of us to leave it alone. Not scrape it. Not prime it. Not paint over it.
We painted everything on that steeple but the width of two hands, right under the lip.”
My breath went out of me.
“We don’t know what it is,” Jesse said. “Ray said it wasn’t ours to know. He said it’s got to belong to the man who wrote it. But there’s a good place for a next line, Mr. Pruitt, and we figured it was yours to put in.”
I looked at the bucket truck. The basket stood there on the end of the folded boom with its door open and a harness hanging off the rail.
“My hand,” I said. “I can’t.”
“It’s a pencil, sir.” He held something out in his palm.
It was a flat carpenter’s pencil, an inch and a half long, sharpened with a pocketknife. The wood had gone the color of tea.
I knew it before I touched it. Darlene had found it in the bottom of my old toolbox, behind the hooks, where I had put it in 2016 and told nobody.
I turned to look at her.
She was crying, openly, with her hand pressed flat under her collarbone, the way she cried at weddings. She did not wipe her face.
“Go on,” she said. “I’ll hold the ladder.”