The Steeple I Painted Every Ten Years

My right hand let go on the ninth rung. I did not tell it to. I was reaching for the tenth with my left, the way I have reached for a rung ten thousand times in my life, and the fingers on the other side just opened, like a man setting down a cup.

I hung there by one hand from a forty-foot extension ladder with my boots about nine feet off the grass. Then my left hand started to slide too. I let myself down the rails the way a boy comes down a barn pole, and the aluminum took the skin off my palm on the way.

I sat down in the grass at the foot of Liberty Ridge Baptist Church with my hand bleeding into my lap and looked up. The steeple is fifty-two feet from the roof ridge to the tip of the cross. It was the second Saturday in September, a high clean sky without a cloud in it, and the south face of that steeple was gray as an old barn.

The paint had been going for two summers. By then it was coming off in sheets, the bare wood showing through like the knee of a pair of work pants.

Darlene was standing at the corner of the church. She had been standing there ten minutes with her purse over her arm, saying nothing, because she had promised the doctor she would not grab my sleeve and she had promised me she would not nag.

She did not say a word now either. She came across the churchyard in her good slacks and sat down in the grass beside me. She took my hand and turned it over and looked at the palm.

“That is going to need a bandage,” she said.

“I know it.”

“Harlan.”

“I know it, Dar.”

We sat there a while. A pickup went by on Church Road and the driver lifted two fingers off the wheel, and I lifted two back, like a man who had every right to be sitting in the grass in the middle of a Saturday.

That was the day I knew. I had known since April, if I am honest, but there is a difference between knowing a thing and sitting in the grass bleeding over it.

My name is Harlan Pruitt. I am seventy-two years old. I live on Church Road in Cobb Springs, Missouri, half a mile from Liberty Ridge, fourteen miles south of Rolla, in the part of Phelps County where the roads are chert gravel and the hickory trees turn the color of a lit match every October.

Every ten years since 1976, I have climbed that steeple, scraped it, primed it, and painted it white. I never took a dime for it. In all that time I never once asked a soul to hold the ladder.