I should explain Carla. She is seventy-nine, five feet tall, and she buried a husband and a son and has never let a sentence leave her mouth that she did not mean. She taught third grade for thirty-four years. Half this county can still recite their multiplication tables in her voice.
At seven o’clock I walked into her kitchen and found it full.
Stan was there, with a coffee cup the size of a bucket. Stan is seventy, a retired lineman for the electric co-op, who spent forty years sixty feet up poles and never admitted it was cold. Erle was there, seventy-four, a retired farmer with hands the shape of shovels. Arvel, sixty-seven, our retired postmaster, kept a schedule in his shirt pocket. Pastor Dave stood by the stove with a pie. And in the corner, with his hood up and his arms folded, sat a lanky seventeen-year-old I knew only as Carla’s grandson Orie.
On the table, next to the green recipe box, lay a yellow legal pad.
“Sit down, Wendell,” Carla said. “I have been on the telephone with God and half the county for two days, and I have noticed something.”
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I sat.
“Every night since Tuesday,” she said, “forty-one households have prayed that the Lord would send Garnet some help. And last night about eleven I was lying in bed, and it came to me. I have been running this chain for thirty-one years. I have the phone number of every able-bodied man in this congregation. And I have been asking God to send help as if I did not have the help sitting in a recipe box on my table.”
Nobody said anything. Stan’s coffee cup stopped halfway.
“The Lord,” Carla said, “has been known to answer a prayer by handing it to the people who prayed it.”
She pushed the legal pad toward me. At the top, in the clear teacher’s hand I remembered from my own spelling tests, she had written: Garnet’s jobs. Underneath were fourteen names and addresses, copied from the book at the hospital that morning.
“Carla,” Stan said slowly. “I can climb a pole. I have never nailed a shingle in my life.”
“Garnet has,” she said.
“Garnet’s flat on his back.”
“Garnet has a mouth, Stan. He is not flat on his mouth.”
That got a laugh, the first one. Erle wiped his eyes with the back of one large hand.
“Here is what I propose,” Carla said. “A Saturday crew. We start this Saturday at Edna’s. We do the jobs on his list, one at a time, in the order he wrote them, and we do them exactly the way Garnet would do them, because Garnet will be sitting right there telling us how. He cannot climb. But he can tell. And the people who hired Garnet will get Garnet’s roof, and nobody has to hear that Garnet is sorry.”
“And the boy?” I said, because I could not help it.
“The boy,” said Carla, “is going to carry shingles, because the vice principal says he needs a good use for his Saturdays, and I say he does not have a choice.” She did not look at him. “Milo from youth group is coming too. He is sixteen, he wrestles, and his mother says he cannot sit still.”
From the corner, in a voice that cracked a little, Orie said, “I said I’d come, Grandma.”
“I know you did,” she said. “I am saying it so everyone hears it.”
She turned back to the table and opened the green recipe box.
“Now. Here is how we do it. We use the chain.”