CHURCH PAINTING

I was a young man in Clearwater, MN in the late 1970’s. Dad was a welding instructor nine months a year and did well drilling, steel construction, and odd jobs over the summers to augment his income. A teacher’s salary was hardly sufficient for a family with five kids – one in college and four adolescents. We lived pretty much hand-to-mouth most of the time, as did many of our neighbors. Competition was pretty strong for those odd jobs. It was August, and we needed school supplies and clothes and the house payment was due, so I know Dad was stressed.

The local church was in disrepair, and its building was in pretty rough shape as well. That is to say, the congregation was not so large as it once had been, and the remaining faithful had more faith than gold. They did agree finally to spend some trust fund money on a face-lift for the church building. It had been built in the 1920s and painted once since, the last time in the 1950s. The whitewash was wearing mighty thin.

The preacher got the go-ahead from the board and received a very tight budget for the project. Considering that the remaining congregation consisted mostly of octogenarians, using parishioner labor was out of the question, so he let out a request for bids. Unfortunately, they wanted to pay wages similar to what they’d paid the last time this was done. Dad won the contract by banking on my being able to work for little of nothing, and figuring materials very carefully.

We hauled in our gear in Dad’s old dilapidated Dodge pickup, laid ground cloths over the shrubbery and taped off the beautiful stained glass windows with old newspapers. I mixed the white paint carefully so as not to waste a drop. Dad confided in me that we would use thicker paint around the ground to get a good coverage, and we could thin it as we got up high on the peaks and more as we went up the steeple.

I didn’t care for the scheme, but he was my dad, and had a pretty good sense about finishing a job with quality to ensure we would get called back or referred to more work elsewhere, so I trusted him.

The weather called for sunshine all week, so we began painting on the structure, starting at the peaks with a somewhat thin whitewash and mixing it stronger as we reached the ground. We were saving the steeple for the end of the job, and would finish it about Saturday noon, leaving the rest of the day to clean up for church on Sunday.

Friday we set scaffolding around the steeple, fully 70 feet in the sky over the Mississippi River Valley. We felt good about our progress so far and breathed easily for being on track. It was a beautiful evening, but as I began mixing the paint for the next day’s work on the steeple, a cloud came as if out of nowhere. I decided to make all preparations for morning so we could get right to painting and have a chance to get it dried in case that cloud meant a storm.

I realized we were shorter on paint than we’d planned, and told Dad I’d give up my wages to pay for another bucket of paint. He said it was too late on a Friday to get to town for another bucket that evening, and if we went in the morning we’d lose too much of the day to finish the job. He said we’d make it on the paint we had, thinning progressively as we went up the steeple where it would be very hard to see the lack of coverage from the ground.

I protested. Was this not God’s house, after all? And here he was, up high, talking about getting one over on God! I think he was feeling some pressure, because Dad was abnormally curt with me, telling me to mix three pails of paint in graduated thickness. “Now!”

The resounding thunder clap that punctuated the end of his last statement convinced us that we’d best hurry and finish the job before a rain shower came and really messed us up.

At dawn, that cloud was overhead with a menacing dark color that led to a brilliant silver lining as the sun climbed behind it. The painting went well through the first bucket, but coverage was sparse and we had to double- and triple-coat some areas to avoid see-through paint where it was low enough to be noticed. I didn’t say much, but tried to make it as good as possible with the materials I was given.

I had (ingeniously, I though) tied each of the three buckets off to pull up in order. As I raised the second bucket, lightening flashed and thunder pealed loudly overhead. Maybe it was a wind gust, or maybe I flinched, I don’t know, but the bucket caught on a scaffold plank, tipped, and banged on a pole; and half of the paint spilled out. To make matters worse, a big blob of the paint landed smack in the center of the bare metal spot where the pickup’s paint had given up years ago, leaving a large circle of white surrounded by the dark rusted ring on the top of the cab.

Mortified, I clambered down. As I cleaned up the spill on the sidewalk, Dad showed up beside me. I told him he had to let me buy more paint now, but he poured water in the bucket and said we couldn’t waste the time or money, so we’d have to make it work before that cloud thinned all of our work.

As we mixed the bucket-and-a-half we had left into something the consistency of milk, I brooded. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, but I felt like I was between a rock and a hard place, and I told Dad I didn’t think God would take this well.
Grudgingly, I re-mounted the scaffold and began rolling on the watery whitewash. It took too many coats to get any coverage at all, and we were going through it just too fast.

We had finished about 20 feet of the wide base of the steeple, with the skinny 20 feet to go, and we were about to run out of paint. I felt ready to come to blows with Dad as he told me to take what was left back down for yet another dose of water. I protested that this was not a proper way to treat a church. Dad told me he was calling the shots, and this was the way it was going to be. As he told me to “Get down there,” he teasingly cuffed me on the back of the head and knocked my beat up old black beret into the breeze.

That cloud roiled behind me and wind stiffened blowing past, and I knew I had to comply with my father’s wishes. Dejected, I climbed down, noticing my hat flopping downward on the air, landing upside-down in the center of the paint spot on top of the pickup. The black spot in the center of the circle of white surrounded by the darker pickup roof looked like a WWI Allied Forces airplane fuselage badge. It was a good day for hitting that pickup.

I reached the ground and stared at that bucket of whitewash, feeling for all the world that mixing it down again would be a very, very bad thing. I decided to go recover my hat and try again in a moment. I had almost reached the truck when Dad reached me. He grabbed me by the arm, spun me around, and sent me reeling toward the paint, saying to get the water and get the job done. He was speaking to me, so as I stumbled, I looked back to watch him as he took one step toward me and barked he didn’t care what God thought.

The lightening flash was blinding, leaving an impression on my corneas of Dad’s silhouette with his hair on end and the beam of light from the cloud focused on the cab of the pickup behind him. My hat flipped through the air one direction and the hood of the truck the other way like Tiddley Winks. The deafening crack of thunder and the simultaneous popping of the four truck tires were followed by the crash of the truck’s hood and then a resounding silence.

A very clear, distinct, and deep booming voice came from the cloud, saying, “Repaint, and thin no more!”