Prewitt spoke last. He did not make excuses for himself. He said, in front of the whole congregation, that he had called an old woman’s grief just furniture and a dead man’s life’s work worth nothing because the man could not defend himself anymore, and that he had been wrong in a way that shamed him, not because of who his grandfather turned out to be, but because it should have shamed him even if his own family had never touched a single board. He said the pews were staying, full stop, no discussion needed on that point, and then he did something I did not expect. He withdrew the salvage bid himself that same night, on the phone, in front of everyone, and told the board he would personally cover whatever the sound system upgrade would have cost out of the money he had already budgeted for his own consulting fee on the renovation project, so that nobody could say the pews had cost the church its coffee bar.
We did not sell the pews. We refinished them instead, that whole next month, on three Saturdays that the church turned into what Harwood started calling pew Saturdays, with sawhorses set up in the fellowship hall and half the county coming through with sandpaper and rags and cans of oil, some of them grandchildren of the original 1979 crew who had never once been told their own grandfather’s hands were somewhere in that wood until Quill found the marks. Hensley’s daughter-in-law brought a cooler of iced tea every Saturday and would not let anybody pay her back for it. The VFW donated the use of their folding tables for the potluck lunch we set out at noon each of those three Saturdays, ham sandwiches and Harwood’s rhubarb pie again, forty-six years later, same recipe, same folding tables practically. Quill worked every one of those Saturdays for free and would not take a dime for his time, only for materials, and told anybody who asked that he had learned that particular kind of stubbornness from the same man who taught him how to hold a chisel.
Prewitt showed up all three Saturdays himself, in old clothes, sanding the ninth pew longer and more carefully than anybody else touched any board in that building, until the grain under his own grandfather’s initials came up gold. He did not say much while he worked. A few of the older farmers who had voted against the sale from the start were slow to warm to him, and I understood that, and did not push it. Trust in a small town is not handed back in one gesture, even a real one. But I noticed he came back the second Saturday and the third without being asked, and he was still the last man sanding when the light went gold through the fellowship hall windows each of those evenings, and by the third Saturday Wyndham was standing next to him at the sawhorse, the two of them talking low about nothing in particular, the way men talk when they have decided to trust each other again.