Ramp Landing

The Habit

Chapter 36: Ramp Landing

Mt. Olive called on a Thursday.

Not God. Bishop Ellis, which in Noel's experience was often less negotiable.

"You free this afternoon?" he asked.

"Depends."

"Church ramp feels wrong under the ladies from Dorcas Circle, and when church ladies begin noticing structural truth, men should move quickly."

Noel drove over at four-thirty.

The ramp on the fellowship hall side entrance had been built in 1998 by volunteers, improved twice, and painted often enough that no one could remember what the original wood looked like. It served funerals, potlucks, committee meetings, choir rehearsals, blood drives, and every person who had ever grown older in public.

Bishop Ellis bounced once near the landing and the boards answered with a soft, delayed flex.

"There," he said. "You hear that?"

Noel knelt, pressed his palm to the deck, and followed the slope with his eye to the downspout splashing too near the corner.

"Water's been landing in the wrong place," he said.

"That sounds familiar to me lately."

Noel looked up.

Bishop Ellis smiled without apology.

"I listen when people talk about porches at prayer request pace," he said.

They opened enough of the edge trim to see what mattered. The outer joist at the landing had softened near the bolts, and the post base below it was carrying more damp than trust.

"Can it hold Easter breakfast?" Bishop Ellis asked.

"Yes."

"Can it keep holding everything after Easter breakfast."

"Not if you want old women to go on believing in surfaces."

Bishop Ellis nodded as if that answer had fit the sermon outline in his head.

"Property committee meets Tuesday. You're coming."

"I don't go to property committee."

"You do now."

The meeting was in a classroom that still had flannel-board hooks on the wall and a map of Paul's journeys curling at one corner from age and humidity. Noel took a chair near the back, assuming this would preserve him from membership. It did not.

Darren was there because he had been on the property committee since 2014 and considered it an acceptable venue for legal complaining. Edna was there because no meaningful church function had occurred in her absence since the Carter administration. Leon was there because Bishop Ellis had asked him to come look at the drainage and Leon respected water more than doctrine.

Noel laid out the problem plainly.

Landing joist soft. Post base suspect. Downspout too close. Repairable if opened soon. Dangerous only in the way all delayed repairs are dangerous: incrementally, then publicly.

"Can we do it ourselves?" Brother Ellis asked.

"Mostly," Darren said before Noel could answer.

"Mostly means?" Edna asked.

"Means the labor is free and the materials aren't," Darren said. "Also means if somebody quotes Scripture at the circular saw, I go home."

The work day was set for the Saturday after Easter.

Noel found himself volunteered as de facto foreman by the simple mechanism of being the person least willing to romanticize rot.

When the meeting ended, Edna walked out with him to the parking lot under a sky the color of unpolished pewter.

"You know what this is, don't you," she said.

"A committee mistake."

"Practice," Edna said. "Repairing a place people use while they are still using it."

The sentence stayed with him all the way home.

His house had taught him hidden damage. The porch had taught him visible incompletion. Now the church was asking whether he could bear repair in a place that did not belong to him alone.

He stood on his own front porch after dark and looked at the corner post, the new wood still raw against the old paint.

The house was no longer his only text.

That night he wrote:

Noon would have been easier than evening, but Bishop Ellis called and by suppertime I was under the fellowship hall ramp at Mt. Olive looking at another landing where water has been arriving in the same wrong place for years. The property committee decided on a work day after Easter, which apparently means I am now part of the property committee whether I meant to be or not.