Cliff came up the church lawn at a quick, heavy trot, in his work boots and his orange vest, and he stopped in front of the stage where Dennis Hoover was holding the microphone. Cliff is sixty one, a big, scarred man who has hung from steeples for forty years without once looking down. “Lester,” he said, loudly enough for the first six rows, “Brad has the JLG lift on a flatbed at the corner of Elm. He is telling the police it belongs to Hoover Restoration. The police want to know whose name is on the title.” Four hundred folding chairs, which I had set up that morning for thirty dollars, creaked all at once as four hundred people turned around.
Dennis lowered the microphone. He is sixty eight, a short, round, red faced man with a mustache and a laugh like a car starting, and for thirty years he has called me steeple monkey at every family gathering, and I have let him. “Lester, what is this?” he asked. “Brad said you let him have the lift. Said you had retired and it was just sitting.” “Dennis,” I said, “I did not retire. I sold. Pugh Steeplejacks, nine million, six hundred thousand dollars, to a restoration firm out of Columbus in May. The lift belongs to them. So does the truck. So did the sign on the door.”
Carol, my wife, stood up from the front row. She is sixty four, a small, composed woman in a navy dress and pearls, and she did not raise her voice. “Dennis, I want to say something before this goes any further. I asked Lester to keep the sale quiet until the church anniversary. I wanted to see how everybody would treat him if they thought he was only a man in coveralls setting up chairs.” She looked at the four hundred places that were suddenly full. “And I want it understood that I watched my own brother in law hand my husband a thirty dollar bill.”
A folding chair stood in the grass at an anniversary picnic and gave one steeplejack the Sunday afternoon to bring his son in law back to the ground.
Brad had arrived by then, at a run, in a Hoover Restoration polo, his cheeks blotched with heat. He is thirty seven, married to my youngest daughter, a good looking man with the forward lean of a salesman, and he was already talking. “Lester, I can explain. I had a bid on the bell tower at First Presbyterian. A big one. We needed the lift, and you were not using it. I figured I could make the first payment and then work out the paper.” “Brad,” I said, “you stood in my yard and told Cliff the lift was a gift. You put a sign on it.”
“Brad,” I said, “what is the first thing I teach every new climber?” He swallowed. “Check your harness.” “Check your harness. Twice. Because the person under you is trusting your knots.” I stepped closer. “I sold that lift to a firm that employs forty families. You took it off a flatbed in the night. If it had gone over on Elm Street, with a church bell hanging off the side of it, somebody would not have come home.” He stopped. For the first time all day Brad had nothing to say.
Dennis Hoover set the microphone on its stand and came down the three steps, heavily, one hand on the railing. He crossed the grass to stand in front of me. “Lester, I owe you more than an apology,” he said. “I called you steeple monkey for thirty years. I thought it was funny. I did not know you were the best man in this family.” His chin trembled under the mustache. “Everybody here is looking at me. They should be. Say whatever you need.”
I did not say it at once. I looked at the church, the old white steeple of Trinity Lutheran that my father had helped to patch in 1962, with the weather vane crooked as always. Then I turned to the crowd. “I do not want to say anything harsh,” I said. “I climbed my first steeple at nineteen, and I have been called a monkey a good deal since. But a monkey is a creature that can climb anything. I never minded. I only minded that you said it as if climbing were a lesser thing.”
A murmur ran through the crowd, and then someone at the back began to clap. It was an old woman in a straw hat, clapping slowly. The clapping spread. It rolled up through the chairs like a wave, until four hundred people were on their feet, and Dennis stood in the middle of it with his hands hanging at his sides and tears running down into his mustache. Carol took my arm. She was crying too. “Lester Pugh,” she said, “you are going to get a thirty dollar bill framed.”
The lift went back to the firm that night, with Cliff driving. Brad signed the statement the next morning, at my kitchen table, in his good shirt. The firm declined to press charges, and offered him an apprenticeship as a groundman, at groundman wages, with a harness he had to check twice. He took it. He went up his first steeple in September, white faced, with Cliff on the rope beneath him, and he came down grinning, and I knew then that he would be a real climber.
Dennis hung the thirty dollar bill in a frame on the wall of his garage, with a card that reads, The Price of a Fool. He calls me Lester now. On the fourth of July, he came to our house and brought a sixpack and a folding chair, and he set the chair up himself, in the yard, and sat down in it. “Four hundred of these,” he said, “in one morning. How did you do it?” I told him that you start at one end. You do not look at how many. You only look at the next one. He nodded, slowly, as if I had said something about steeples.
