“Lord, Send Someone to Fix This Roof Before Snow,” She Whispered... Not Knowing He Was Behind Her
Chapter 8
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Near the bottom of the dip, tucked into the gutter trough where the valley met the eaves, something caught the sun. He worked it loose with the pry bar and turned it over: it was a hammer, a plain claw hammer with a hickory handle worn dark and smooth, and a name burned into the wood by a hot nail, so old that the letters were almost soft: A. Prior. The head was flecked with rust and a long winter's worth of leaf mold. It had lain in that trough, he judged, for months.He stayed there with it for some time. Then he came down the ladder with the hammer in one hand, and when his boots touched the ground, he held it out to her with the handle toward her palm.Willa looked at it. She did not take it. She let go of the ladder, and her good hand came up to her mouth, and she made a small sound he had not heard from her before."It was in the gutter," Ezra said. "I'd guess it's been there since June." He waited."The 9th." Her voice was very quiet and quite level. "He was up there with a tin patch and a bucket of tar. He'd been at it since morning. I was in the orchard. I had a basket on my arm, and I was looking at a tree that wouldn't set fruit, and I heard the ladder go. It slid on the wet boards. It didn't make much sound."She was looking at the hammer, not at him."He was 61. He was not a careless man. He'd said for two years he would reroof it right, but the money went to the doctor when my mother was sick, and then to the note on the north pasture, and then there was never enough. So he patched. He said a patch was an honest thing if you said what it was.""Miss Prior—""I found him at the bottom. He was alive for a while." She breathed. "He asked if the ladder was all right. I said it was. I didn't know what else to say. I've been patching since," said Willa. "I've gone up that ladder and put tin where he put tin, because I couldn't bear to have a stranger on his roof, and I couldn't bear to have it leak. And I was so afraid of the ladder, Mr. Colton. So afraid that every time I went up, I was sure..."She stopped."That's the wrist. I slipped on the second rung in September. It wasn't a bad fall, but I lay in the yard and I thought, He asked if the ladder was all right." Her voice cracked then. "And I asked God for someone else to climb it. I thought He'd heard that. I thought it was the only honest thing I'd said to Him since June."Ezra closed his hand on the handle. He did not say that she was not to blame, or that grief had its own seasons. What he said was, "He'd have wanted the roof done properly."