“It is on that paper, Bishop, because I sold the company that owns that lift,” I said, and I stood in the aisle of the sanctuary with my hands at my sides. “Nine weeks ago, I sold Lockhart Steeple and Restoration for nine million, six hundred thousand dollars. Every lift, every crane, every employee.” The old bishop, in his purple shirt, turned to look at me with a face as calm as river water. “Unit three is on line three of the equipment list. It belongs to the buyer. My nephew is selling it for one hundred sixty five thousand dollars, along with a smaller lift and the gold leaf for the crosses.” Somebody in the choir loft gasped.
Thaddeus lowered his hand from the paper. He is a large man with a rich voice, accustomed to filling this room, and just then he looked as small as a boy sent to the office. “Jalen,” he said. “Son. Is it true?” Jalen stood at the front, in the new deacon robe that his father had ordered from the catalog, and his lip was trembling. “Daddy, I thought the company was running out of steeples,” he said. “Uncle Harvey told me the churches could not afford repairs. I thought if I took one lift, I could do a little good.” “You can do good without taking,” I said. “That is the whole sermon, nephew.”
Gloria walked up the center aisle in her cream suit and stood beside me. She is a retired nurse, and when she speaks, even the bishop leans in. “Thaddeus,” she said, “for forty years you have called my husband the steeplejack. At every Thanksgiving. At every church anniversary. At the memorial service of our father, you asked him to sit in the back pew. Harvey Lockhart fixed the cross on this very church when the storm broke it in 2004, and he did not send a bill.” She looked at her brother. “Say his name.” “Harvey,” said Thaddeus, with a catch in his voice. “I am sorry.”
A sheet of paper laid on an altar rail gave one nephew the weekend to bring his uncle back to the sanctuary in Charlotte.
I gave Jalen my terms at the altar rail, with the choir silent behind him. The lift, the smaller lift and the gold leaf would be back at my yard on Wilkinson Boulevard by noon on Monday. Simmons Sacred Restorations would be closed, and the white paint washed from the bucket. He would tell the lawyers of the buyer the whole truth. If he did all of it, I would not press charges, and I would ask the new owners to keep him on as a lift operator at the same pay, because he had fixed crosses a hundred feet in the air without a tremble.
On Monday morning, I stood at the gate of the yard with a thermos. The smaller lift came first, on a trailer behind a church truck. Then a plain wooden crate of gold leaf, wrapped in a blanket, which Jalen carried in his own arms. At ten, the orange Genie lift rolled through the gate with its bucket clean. Tyrone, my yard foreman, circled it with a clipboard and checked the controls. When he finished, he lifted his chin. “Mr. Harvey, number three,” he said. “Not a scratch. It even still smells like the work of the Lord.” I laid a hand on the warm orange base and exhaled.
Thaddeus came to my house on Tuesday evening, alone, without his collar. He sat in my kitchen with a cup of coffee going cold between his hands. “Harvey, I preached for thirty years about humility, and I could not hear it in my own mouth,” he said. “I treated you like the help in the house of my father.” He lifted his eyes. “I have been wondering what I would say to the Lord if He asked me how I treated the man who fixed His crosses.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “You will say you were corrected,” I said. “That is a fine thing to be.”
The following Sunday, the bishop returned to Mount Calvary and preached on the washing of feet. He called me to the front of the sanctuary before the whole congregation. A basin of warm water stood on the altar, and a white towel lay across the arm of the bishop. “Pastor Simmons,” he said, “will you kneel?” Thaddeus knelt. The bishop handed him the towel. And my brother in law, a man who had never knelt in public in his life, washed my feet before six hundred people. I wept openly. The choir hummed “Total Praise” so softly that it seemed to come from the beams.
The money consequences were fair. Jalen repaid the buyer fifteen thousand dollars for the hauling, the fuel and a damaged hydraulic line, and he ran his lift for a year without overtime. Thaddeus sold a lake lot and a second car to cover the legal fees. When he tried to hand me a check for my trouble, I walked him to the church office and asked him to give it to the roof fund. “Mount Calvary has been leaking since last spring,” I said. “Let us fix it with the money meant for pride.” He did. The new slate roof went on by Thanksgiving.
In the name of my father, Deacon Isaiah Lockhart, who passed twenty one years ago and who held the ladder for me on my first steeple in 1978, I started the Steeple Fund. It pays for repairs to crosses, bell towers, roofs and stained glass for small rural churches in the Carolinas that cannot afford a restoration. In the first year, we repaired forty one churches. At a white clapboard church in Gaston County, an old woman watched a new cross rise into the morning light, and she whispered to me, “I prayed under a leak for sixty years.”
The next spring, at the ordination of a new deacon at Mount Calvary, I sat in the front pew, between Gloria and Jalen. After the dinner, I walked to the fellowship hall expecting to find a vacuum cleaner. Instead, I found Thaddeus in shirtsleeves, with a bucket, a mop and a stack of chairs. He looked up and grinned. “Steeplejack,” he said, “I am cleaning up this time. You sit.” I sat. Through the window, the cross on the steeple caught the afternoon sun, and I thought of the long climb behind me, and of the people who had held the ladder.
