Eight five-gallon pails of barn red. A hundred and seventy-seven dollars each.
Two gallons of white for the trim. Rollers with thick one-inch nap for rough wood. Extension poles. Brushes. Paint trays. A box of rags. A case of canvas drop cloths.
It came to a little over seventeen hundred dollars.
I paid it out of our household account. The one Arlo and I have kept at the same little bank in Tracy since 1989.
The boy who loaded those pails into the back of Arlo’s pickup was maybe seventeen.
“Painting a barn, ma’am?”
“Painting it back,” I said.
He didn’t ask what I meant. And I didn’t explain.
I sat in the pickup in the Runnings parking lot, and I called Nate.
Nate Ellison is the youth pastor at our Methodist church in Tracy. He’s twenty-nine. He has a beard he’s still growing into. And he drives a minivan with a big dent in the sliding door that the youth group kids are not allowed to mention.
He’d driven to Sioux Falls twice to pray with Arlo.
The second time, Arlo grabbed Nate’s hand with his good left hand and wouldn’t let go for twenty minutes.
“Nate,” I said. “How many kids could you get on a Saturday? All day? If I fed them?”
He didn’t even ask what for.
He’d driven past the barn on Wednesday. Everybody had.
“Let me make some calls, Carol,” he said. “I’ll ring you back.”
He called back in one hour.
“Twenty-two kids,” he said. “And four dads with extension ladders. And Carol? I need to tell you exactly how we’re going to do this. So nobody’s mom calls me on Sunday.”
I liked him a great deal right then.
Nate had rules. He read them to me over the phone like a man who’d already thought about this a lot.
Every kid would have the church activity form signed by a parent. No exceptions.
Nobody under sixteen would go up a ladder. Period. The younger kids would roll the bottom eight feet from the ground, with rollers on poles. And there was plenty of bottom eight feet to go around.
The older kids could work ladders. But only up to the first floor. And only with Nate running the ladders and watching every single one the whole time it had a kid on it.
No kid would ever be on a ladder alone.
“And the peaks?” I asked. “Those gambrel ends go up thirty-six feet, Nate.”
“Nobody’s going up there on a ladder,” Nate said. “Not a kid. Not me. Not anybody. You need a lift.”
So I called Merle.
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