We dedicated the pews again on the second Sunday of June, forty-six years and six months after the first dedication, in the same building, and Pastor Fallon read the same verse Iverson had chosen for my pew, the one about a temple not made of stone, and said that a church is not the wood or the walls, it is the hands that built it and the hands that keep choosing, every generation, to keep it standing, and that this congregation had just proven it twice in one lifetime.
I sat in the third pew, right side, near the window, with my hand flat against the seat back the way I had every Sunday since 1979, and for the first time in six years I did not feel like I was sitting in the last place that remembered him. I felt like I was sitting in the one place in this whole town built so that he never really left it. Prewitt caught my eye from across the aisle before the service started and gave me a small nod, the kind two people give each other when there is nothing left that needs saying out loud, and I nodded back.
Quill mounted a small brass plate on the wall by the sanctuary door that week, at his own cost, with all the names from Iverson’s 1979 ledger engraved on it, Hensley and Prewitt and seventeen others, under two words at the top: Built By. Nothing about me, nothing about Iverson by name, because that is not what he would have wanted, a man who hid his own writing on the underside of the wood instead of the front of it. But I know where his letters are. I know exactly where to find them, third pew, right side, near the light, and some things a woman does not need engraved anywhere but in her own memory to carry for the rest of her life.
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I still bring supper for one out to that spare room some nights and sit on the edge of the bed near his unfinished bookshelf, the way I used to sit on the sawhorse in his shop, and I tell him how church went. I do not know if that is faith or just an old woman talking to an empty room. I have decided it does not matter which. Either way, I know now for certain that a man does not stop having a vote in the place he built with his own hands, not really, not ever, not as long as somebody is willing to turn the wood over and look.
This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.