The Ramp the Board Ordered Torn Down

Miss Odessa is eighty-one, and she is the engine of this whole story. She has run the prayer chain at Copperline First Baptist since 1987. It is a telephone tree, and it can put a name in front of every kitchen table in town in under forty minutes. When Denton came home from the war, her chain prayed for him by name every Tuesday and Thursday for a year and a half.

I called her at eight thirty, crying, and told her all of it. She does not interrupt. When I finished she was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped.

Then she said, “Mara, honey, give me the names of the board.”

“The board of that association. Every one. Write the names down. I mean to pray for each of them out loud, starting at noon tomorrow. The president first.”

“Miss Odessa, he told my husband this is not a veterans hospital. I don’t want you to pray for him.”

“I know it, honey. That is exactly why we’re going to.”

“Because I have been praying for people for fifty years,” Odessa said, “and I have never once seen a man’s heart change because somebody wished a leaking roof on him. I have seen it change plenty when his name went up in front of folks who meant it. Write down the names.”

So I wrote them on the back of the electric bill, standing in my kitchen in my robe. Gordon was the president. Opaline was the treasurer, a retired schoolteacher I had always liked. Vern kept bees. Winnie ran the garden club. Kip was the youngest, a young father who I think had joined because nobody else would. Odessa repeated each name back slowly, like a teller counting bills.

Odessa had already called Hal, and Hal had called a man. The man was Lyle. He is the county building inspector, a deacon in our church, sixty-one years old, with a gray mustache and a shirt pocket permanently weighed down by a tape measure and three pens. He came to our house that evening after work, in his county truck, and sat down at my kitchen table without being asked.

“I’m here as a church member,” he said. “Not as the county.”

He turned my grocery list over and began to write. I still have that list in a kitchen drawer. It says, in his neat square hand:

Rise: 30 inches.

Slope: one inch of rise for every twelve inches of run.

Run: 30 feet.

Width: 36 inches clear between the rails.

Handrails: both sides, 34 to 38 inches high.

Landings: 5 feet by 5 feet at the top and at every turn.

Edge: 2 inch curb on the open sides.

“That’s the whole book on one page,” Lyle said. “Hal eyeballed the slope on yours, and it came out one in eight. He has been sick about it for a month. A person can do it right, if somebody sits down and shows him.”

“Thirty feet,” I said. “In one day?”

He looked at me over his glasses. “I have watched the men of this church put a roof on a widow’s house between breakfast and supper. Give me fifty hands and good lumber and a level.”

Then he said the hard part. “I’d advise you to comply. The Association, in this one particular, has the paper on its side. The ramp as it stands is a little dangerous, and you do not want a lien on your house the week of a wedding. Take it down. Saturday you build the right one, in the front yard, in daylight, in front of everybody, so nobody on this street can say they didn’t see. I’ll be here at noon with my level and my tape, on my own time, and whatever I find I’ll say out loud.”