I told him. Dunbar Prewitt. The hardware store owner who had given six Saturdays and every screw and can of varnish in 1979, and who, as it turned out, once I finally thought to ask around and check the county records at the courthouse the next morning, was the current board chairman’s own grandfather.
Prewitt did not know. That is the part I want to be fair about, because I have thought about it a great deal since, and I do not believe a man who knew his own grandfather’s hands were in that wood would have called it just furniture, even a man in as much of a hurry as Prewitt always seemed to be. He had grown up three states away, raised mostly by his mother after his parents split when he was young, and he had never once heard the story of Dunbar Prewitt and the pews, because nobody in his branch of the family had thought to tell it, and he had moved to Ivy Junction two years ago knowing almost nothing about the town except that the internet was fast and the taxes were low.
I called him myself, that Monday evening, which was harder for me to do than anything else in this whole account, because I still had his voice in my ear saying dead men do not get a vote. But I thought of Iverson, who never once in forty years let a hard truth go unspoken just because it was uncomfortable to say, and I made myself dial the number.
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I told him what Quill had found. I told him about Dunbar Prewitt’s initials under the ninth pew, six Saturdays of joinery, every screw and can of varnish donated in 1979. There was a long silence on the line, long enough that I asked if he was still there.
He said his grandfather had died when he was nine years old. He said he remembered almost nothing about him except a woodshop smell and a man who let him hold a hand plane once and told him to feel how it wanted to move with the grain, not against it. He had not thought about that memory in twenty years, he said, and his voice had gone thin in a way it had not been thin at the hardware store counter.
The board called an emergency meeting for that Thursday, open to the whole congregation this time, not just the twelve. I do not think I need to tell you it was full. Pastor Fallon stood up first and said he had voted wrong the first time, not because change was wrong, but because he had let a spreadsheet decide something that belonged to people’s memory instead, and he was sorry, and he asked the board to reverse the vote.