The Coffee Can That Fixed the Roof

The roof is the trouble. It has leaked since before Glenda was born, and everyone knows it, the way everyone knows which pew has the squeaky board.

Pastor Leon keeps three buckets in the sanctuary. When it rains he sets them out before the service, one by the pulpit, one in the second pew on the left, one in the aisle.

You learn to hear the hymns over the plinking. Glenda says she can tell what kind of rain it is by the sound. Hard rain rings. Slow rain thuds.

Last Easter the drip got a church bulletin and the hymnal that belonged to Mrs. Alder’s late husband. Mrs. Alder held that wet book in her lap through the whole sermon and never said a word.

Glenda sat two seats down and watched her do it. I think that was the day it started, though she did not tell me so until later.

The quote for a metal roof had come in the winter before: $19,400, materials and labor, from a roofer in Carthage who gave the church a kind price and still could not make it smaller.

The building fund held $6,200. Six years of bake sales, a soup supper every February, and the change in the offering plate when somebody remembered.

Do the arithmetic and you can see why nobody had pushed the matter. It was not that they did not care. It was that $13,200 looks like a mountain to forty families who are mostly feeding cattle and hauling milk.

On Friday night Ben hauled his old plank-and-sawhorse table out of the shop and scrubbed it down. He found a plate for the cookies and a clear spot on the corner for the coffee can.

The can was Glenda’s idea. She had picked it out of the recycling that morning, washed it, and cut a slot in a plastic lid with her father’s razor knife while he stood over her and said nothing.

“It has to be a coffee can,” she told me. “Churches take offerings in plates. A can is different. A can means you saved up.”

I didn’t argue. At nine she was already right about a good many things I had needed thirty years to learn.

Gene Albrecht runs the sale barn on the edge of town. I called him on Thursday and asked if my daughter might set up a table by the gate on Saturdays, just till Christmas.

Gene was quiet a second. Then he said, “Kristine, I’ve had a hot dog stand and a man selling knives out there. A nine-year-old selling cider to cattlemen is the best idea I’ve heard all year. Tell her to come at seven.”

Saturday is sale day. The trailers start lining up on the churned mud before the sun clears the sale barn roof, and by ten the whole lot is thick with pickups, stock trailers, and men in feed caps and cowboy hats talking about the price of calves.

I got up at four to bake. I made snickerdoodles from Lorraine’s recipe card, which was the only thing I knew how to make that did not need a recipe lookup and a prayer.

Lorraine was Wayne’s wife. She gave me that card the Christmas before she died, written in her round teacher’s hand on the back of a seed packet envelope. Cream of tartar, two sticks of butter, a dash of nutmeg that she swore made the difference.