“Lord, Send Someone to Fix This Roof Before Snow,” She Whispered... Not Knowing He Was Behind Her
Chapter 11
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She went slowly. At the fourth rung, she stopped and shut her eyes. He felt it through the rails, a shiver in the wood, and he held on and did not speak. At the eighth, she said very quietly, "Lord, I'm up here. Keep it." It was not elegant; it was the plainest thing he had ever heard a person say to God.She went on. Then she was on the scaffold, and then on the roof.The snow had made a light skin on the shakes, and she crept along the plank on her knees. She set the first shake of the last course against the one below it. She drew her father's hammer from her belt.The first blow rang flat. The second sent a bright pain up her arm. She switched the hammer to her left hand, and the third blow bounced; the fourth went in."Take your time," he called, and then bit his tongue because it was not his to say."I am taking it." She did not look down. "Don't talk."He did not. She drove nail after nail with a clumsy, furious patience, snow settling on her hat and her shoulders, her breath smoking. Once, her knee slid on the wet plank, and a long, terrible second went by in which her whole body froze, and he gripped so hard that the rail bit into his palms. She caught the ridgepole with her good hand. She held it. She breathed.Then she set the last nail. She laid the ridge cap over the peak and drove the final two nails through it, one on each side, and the hammer fell quiet.For a moment, she stayed where she was, on her knees on the new roof in the falling snow, with her forehead against the cold wood. When she lifted her head, her face was wet, and he could not tell whether it was snow."It's done," she said to nobody. "It's done.""Come hold it again," she said unsteadily. "I'm coming down."He had not moved; he was still holding it. She came down the rungs one at a time, with the hammer in her fist and her breath coming hard, and halfway, she slipped.It was a small thing—her boot skating on the wet rung—and her whole weight swung out and came back against the ladder with a crack. Ezra's arms took it. The ladder did not shift a hair. She hung there, her cheek against the rail, her eyes wide open."It held," said Willa Prior. "It held."She laughed—a startled, broken sound—and then she was on the ground with her back against the wall of the house and the hammer in her lap, and neither of them said a word.Behind the wall, in the dark house, the buckets stood where they had stood for a year. Nothing fell into any of them.She slept that night. He knew because the lamp in the cabin window went out at 8:00 and did not come on again. He lay in the barn with the mules breathing in the dark, and the snow came down all night, soft and steady and unhurried.