“Lord, Send Someone to Fix This Roof Before Snow,” She Whispered... Not Knowing He Was Behind Her
Chapter 7
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"Go in the morning."He nodded. He rose and set his plate on hers and went down the steps. Behind him, he heard the screen door, and then the bar drop across the inside of the house.He did not sleep. He lay in the wagon bed, looking at the beams of the barn and listening to the mules shift. Once, near midnight, he thought he heard the sound of someone weeping very quietly behind the cabin wall, and then the scrape of a mallet on wood: she was splitting shakes in the dark.At first light, he harnessed the mules. He walked them out through the gate with the wagon rattling behind and halted in the road, a rod beyond the post where he sat with the reins slack in his hands. He did not drive on. He had said he would go; he had also been taught that you do not leave a job you have said you would do because the person who hired you is angry. But a man did not walk into a house that had barred its door.So he sat at the gate with his hat on his knee and waited to be told which one it was.The sun cleared the ridge; frost smoked off the orchard rows. After an hour, the cabin door opened. Willa came down the steps with her coat buttoned to the chin and her bad hand wrapped in fresh flannel. She walked the whole length of the yard and stopped at the gatepost where the dime in its twist of paper still hung."Are you going, Mr. Colton, or aren't you?""That's yours to say, ma'am.""I can't." Her voice shook. "I can't ask you. I asked Him, and I can't ask you." She drew breath. "Do you understand? It's the only way I know to stand."He looked down at her: the hard, thin face, the set chin, and the eyes red-rimmed and wide open."You asked Him," Ezra said gently. "I only heard it. It's not the same as being asked."For a moment, she did not move. Then she put one hand on the gatepost and shut her eyes, as if the whole yard were tilting."Stay," said Willa Prior. "Not because I asked God. Because I'm asking you."On Saturday morning, she held the ladder.She had decided it in the dark, she told him later, between one swing of the mallet and the next: if a stranger was going to climb onto her family's roof, she would stand at the foot and take the weight of it.She braced the rails with both boots and her good arm, and kept her eyes on the rungs as he went up with a pry bar and a nail apron. The old north slope came off in long gray strips, thin as paper and furred with moss. Under the patched place, the sheathing was soft, and he knelt with his knee on a sound rafter and cut out the rot with a handsaw until he found hard wood. He worked slowly, testing every inch before he trusted it with his weight.