The Roofing Season the Chain Saved

Our prayer chain prayed for Garnet’s knee for two days, and then Carla phoned me on a Thursday night and told me to bring gloves.

That is the whole reason I spent twenty-six Saturdays of my fifty-eighth year on other people’s roofs, and I want to say right at the start that I am not a roofer. My name is Wendell Gilliam. For thirty-one years I have run a road grader for the county highway department here in Caldwell Grove, Illinois, with both feet flat on a steel floor. I do not like ladders. When my wife Joanne asked me to clean the gutters one fall, I paid a boy from church twenty dollars and told her I had a bad shoulder.

I am also, and this surprised everyone including me, a member of the Caldwell Grove prayer chain.

If you have never been on one, a prayer chain is a list of names and phone numbers kept in a recipe box. Ours is a green metal box that has lived on Carla’s kitchen table for thirty-one years. When somebody falls sick or buries a husband, Carla calls two people, and those two each call two more. By suppertime forty-one households are saying the same name to God, and nobody has had to make a speech.

I got on the list fourteen years ago, when Joanne had cancer.

For eleven months the chain prayed for her every night. I know because Carla called me every Sunday afternoon to say so, news or no news. There were casseroles too, and rides to Peoria, but mostly there was the knowledge that forty-one kitchens were holding my wife’s name up like a lantern. When her scans came back clean, I asked Carla the next Sunday how a man got his name on the list.

She looked at me over her glasses.

“You call two people when I call you,” she said. “That’s the whole job.”

I was a man with a debt and no way to pay it, so I took the job. For fourteen years I have been the person who calls Stan and Arvel when Carla calls me. A phone call. A name. A few quiet minutes in the cab of the grader with the engine off.

Now I have to tell you about Garnet.

Garnet’s Roofing has been in Caldwell Grove for thirty-one years, the same as Carla’s recipe box. If you own a house in this town, there is about a sixty percent chance Garnet put the roof on it. He drives a white truck with Garnet’s Roofing painted on the door in red, and under that, smaller, in the cursive his wife Juna chose: We Don’t Leave You Open. Once he tears the old shingles off your house, he does not go home until it is dried in, even if that means working under work lights at midnight.

After the hailstorm of 2019, Garnet put a new roof on my house. The insurance paid for the materials, and Garnet charged me nothing for his labor. When I came out to the driveway with an envelope on the last afternoon, he put both hands in his back pockets like a boy refusing a vegetable.

“Wendell,” he said, “put that away before I get embarrassed for both of us.”

I have thought about that envelope many times since. It is still in my desk drawer.