The Roofing Season the Chain Saved

Juna died two years ago this March, after eighteen months of the kind of sickness that makes an insurance company send a lot of polite letters. What I had not known, because Garnet was not a man who told you such things, was that he had borrowed against the house to cover what the policy would not. He had fallen behind on the note over the slow winter and meant to catch up by June.

“Here’s what I figure,” he said, quietly, to the window. “I call all fourteen tomorrow and tell them to find somebody else. Thirty-one years nobody ever had to wait for Garnet. And I go out of business on my back in a hospital bed, owing money to people I put roofs on.”

“Garnet,” I said. “The chain’s praying for you. All of it. The whole list.”

“I know it.” He turned his head and looked at me, and his eyes were not angry. They were tired. “Carla already came by with a casserole and a lecture. I thank you. I do. But I’ll tell you what I told her. I don’t know how to ask for things. Juna did the asking. And prayer is a fine thing, but it doesn’t put shingles on Edna’s roof, and that’s the first one on my list, and she’s eighty-one years old and she’s got a bucket on her bed.”

I did not know what to say, so I said the thing that came out.

“I’ll keep praying.”

“I know you will,” Garnet said. “That’s what worries me.”

He did not mean it unkindly. But I drove home in the dark with those words sitting next to me on the seat like a passenger, and halfway across the Kickapoo Creek bridge I understood them so suddenly that I pulled onto the shoulder and stopped.

He meant that I would pray, and go home, and that would be the end of it.

That was exactly what I had planned to do.

I sat on the shoulder of that road with the hazard lights ticking and tried to pray the way I always did, and I could not find the words.

I want to be honest about what I felt, because it was not holy. It was closer to embarrassment. For fourteen years I had believed that praying for a person was what you did when you could not do anything else. I had never once considered that it might be a thing you do while you are getting up.

So I did the only honest thing I knew. I said it plainly, out loud, in a pickup truck on the shoulder of a county road in the dark.

“Lord, I’m praying for Garnet. But I’m sitting here with two hands. If there is something You want me to do with them, I would appreciate it if You would be clear. I am not a subtle man.”

Then I drove home. I did not hear a voice. I did not feel a chill. I want that on the record. What I felt, going up my own driveway, was a small, stubborn, unglamorous sense that I was not done.

The surgery went well Thursday. The surgeon put in what Garnet later called “enough hardware to open a store.” At six o’clock that evening, Carla phoned me.

“Wendell, it’s Carla.”

“How is he?”

“He’s sore and he’s stubborn, so he’s fine. Wendell, I need you at my kitchen table at seven tonight. Bring your work gloves.”

“My gloves.”

“The leather ones. Bring them.” And she hung up.