Behind that blind window, wrapped in quilts and wedged upright between the studs, was a panel of stained glass. About three feet tall. I lifted it out slow and held it up to the real window beside it.
The light came through, and the room went red and blue and gold.
It was a shepherd with a lamb over his shoulders, standing on a green hill. Below his feet, painted into the glass, were the words, In Loving Memory of the Miners of Salem, 1923.
The couple who hired me, Rob and Tina, came running from the kitchen when they saw the colors on the wall.
Tucked in the quilt was a letter. It said the Salem Community Church burned on Christmas Eve, 1962. Everything was lost except this one window, which the writer had pulled out of the frame with his bare hands while the roof was coming down. It said the church never had the money to rebuild the way it was. It said he could not bear to see the window stuck in a basement, so he built a place for it in his own house, in a wall facing east so it would catch the morning light, and one day when the church was ready, it should go home. Signed, Clyde Bennett, deacon.
A man had walked into a burning church to save one window, then kept it hidden in his own wall for sixty years, waiting for it to be wanted again.
Rob called the church the next morning. The church had been rebuilt in 1968, a small brick building with plain glass windows. The pastor, a young woman named Rev. Kim Hayes, drove over that afternoon. She stood in the room with the window held up to the light and did not say anything for a long time.
Then she said the congregation had a photograph of that window from 1955, framed in the fellowship hall. Everyone thought it had melted in the fire.
Clyde Bennett had passed in 1991. His grandson, a man named Roger, still lived in Salem and still went to that church every Sunday. He had never heard a word about it.
Rob and Tina donated the window that week. The church raised the money to set it properly in a matter of days. People who had not been to a service in years sent checks. A stained glass restorer from Clarksburg cleaned it and repaired two cracked panes for free.
I set the frame myself. Rev. Hayes asked me to. It went into the east wall behind the pulpit, where the morning sun hits it during the first hymn.
On the first Sunday, Roger sat in the front row. When the light came through, it fell right across the pew where he was sitting. He told me later his grandfather used to sit in that exact spot.
Rob and Tina have a regular window in that wall at home now. Clear glass. It lets in the morning light.
Twenty two years setting glass. That is the only window I ever set that I had to stop and look through.