The Bishop hires the carpenter to build a spiral staircase

The hiring of the carpenter turns the chapel’s stalled construction problem into a workable plan: rather than rebuild the choir loft or make schoolgirls climb a ladder, Bishop Lamy accepts the carpenter’s proposal for a spiral staircase. The agreement begins with Lizzy Enders noticing that a hungry stranger has a trade, and it unfolds in the same devotional setting as the nuns’ novena to Saint Joseph. Its practical solution is also shaped by a small but consequential act of respect: the carpenter will not begin until the novena is over.

The Chapel’s Unsolved Problem

The staircase is needed to reach the chapel’s choir loft, but the space left for it is inadequate. Bishop Lamy explains that the only conventional option available to a builder would be to tear down the choir loft and rebuild it, an undertaking he says would cost a great deal. The other possibility is a ladder. That might solve the access problem on paper, but he rejects it as unsuitable for the little girls who would have to climb it. The obstacle is therefore both architectural and practical: the chapel needs a route to the loft, but the obvious alternatives impose either a major expense or an unsafe arrangement for its students.

The problem has already drawn the nuns into repeated prayer. They have been conducting a novena to Saint Joseph, and the Bishop has been praying over the matter as well. He admits that people look to him to perform miracles, although he cannot do so. His comment sets the limits of his authority beside the limits of the building: prayer has not yet supplied a staircase, and his position as Bishop cannot make the missing space appear. He is still looking for a human answer when Lizzy brings him a possible worker.

Lizzy’s Proposal and the Carpenter’s Design

The carpenter arrives at the convent as a beggar without work. Lizzy says she brought him home the previous night and that Gregorio put him in the barn. She knows he is a carpenter and connects his need for work to the chapel’s need for a staircase. The suggestion is modest and direct: the Bishop can give a hungry man a job by asking him to examine the problem. It also makes Lizzy an intermediary between a vulnerable stranger and an institutional decision-maker. The carpenter has no established place at the convent until her proposal gives his skill a purpose there.

After Lizzy leaves the Bishop’s office, she hears him explaining the dilemma to the carpenter on their way to the chapel. From the hallway, then from the chapel doorway, she watches the consultation rather than taking part in it. The carpenter steps into the empty space where the staircase should be, extends his hands as though measuring, moves in a circle, and looks upward. His lips move silently as he considers the space. The action gives the design its own small scene of discovery: before offering a solution, he reads the dimensions and shape of the problem with his body.

He concludes that he can build the staircase, but specifies that it must be spiral. Bishop Lamy responds with pleasant surprise. Several carpenters have already been consulted, yet none suggested that form. The proposal does more than supply a new design: it avoids the two alternatives that had made the problem seem intractable. The Bishop asks whether the carpenter can carry it out, and the carpenter answers that he can. The plan is not presented as a miracle or as an abstract stroke of inspiration; it comes from a worker examining the available space and identifying a design suited to it.

The Agreement and the Novena

Bishop Lamy agrees to hire him. He offers to open an account for the carpenter at the lumberyard in town, so that the worker can order the materials he needs, and asks for an estimate of the cost that afternoon. The arrangement gives the carpenter access to supplies and establishes an immediate next step. The Bishop’s response is practical: the proposal has to become a buildable project, with materials and an estimate, not merely a promising idea.

The carpenter asks to wait until the following day before providing the estimate. His reason is that the nuns’ novena to Saint Joseph will conclude that night, and he does not want to begin before it is finished. When the Bishop asks how he knows about the novena, the carpenter explains that Lizzy told him. The Bishop accepts the request and agrees that they should wait out of respect for Saint Joseph. Thus the hiring is neither a rejection of the convent’s religious practice nor a claim that the carpenter himself can guarantee divine intervention. The work is authorized, but its starting point is arranged around the prayer already underway.

That pause matters because the novena had been part of the convent’s daily life before the carpenter was offered the job. Lizzy had grown accustomed to the incense, Latin, and responses to prayer; the evening service gave her a peaceful interval in which to think about her mother. The staircase problem is therefore not simply solved by replacing prayer with skilled labor. In the agreement, the human task and the religious observance occupy the same chronology: the carpenter is hired to build, and he waits until the final night of the novena has passed.

Consequences and the Staircase’s Meaning

The hiring also changes how the staircase is understood by those who have been waiting for it. Later that afternoon, Mrs. Lacey stops on the cemetery hill, clasps her hands, and celebrates that a carpenter has finally been found. She credits Lizzy with bringing about the possibility and connects the completed staircase to the peace she hopes her son Robert will find. Her response gives the construction a personal meaning beyond access to the choir loft: for her, the long-awaited work is bound up with grief and the hope that Robert can rest in peace.

The carpenter’s employment leads to the eventual construction of the spiral staircase, which is later revealed without a banister. Sister Roberta treats that absence as a demand for faith and demonstrates how she believes the descent can be managed: she turns and creeps down backward, step by step, on her hands and knees. The schoolgirls pray as she descends; their relief when she reaches the bottom accompanies her praise of the wood. The later scene does not erase the original engineering problem. Instead, it gives the staircase a continuing role in the story, where workmanship, physical risk, prayer, and trust remain closely joined.

As an event, the hiring is a meeting of need and capability. Lizzy recognizes that the beggar is a carpenter; the Bishop recognizes that his design can answer a problem that other builders have not solved; and the carpenter accepts work while honoring the convent’s novena. The resulting staircase begins with an ordinary act of employment, but its spiral form and its place in the community’s prayers make the decision resonate beyond the lumberyard account that set the work in motion.