The Boy Who Emptied His Piggy Bank

My son has not said more than ten words a day to a stranger since his father died, so when Hollis stood up alone in the middle of the second hymn, walked past four rows of Sunday coats, and dumped his entire piggy bank into the offering plate in front of the whole congregation of Bethel Grove Community Church, I nearly dropped my hymnal on the floor.

Coins do not fall quietly. That is the first thing I want you to understand. Forty seven dollars and eighty five cents in nickels, dimes, and crumpled ones does not slide gently into a wooden plate already holding a stack of careful, folded checks. It clatters. It rings. It keeps going for longer than you would think a child’s piggy bank could hold, plink after plink after plink, while two hundred people who had been half listening to Wanda Pruitt’s alto suddenly were not listening to anything but that sound.

Hollis is eight years old. He is small for his age, with his father’s cowlick and his father’s habit of studying his own shoes when he talks, which is rare enough on its own. He had not asked me. He had not told his teacher, or Pastor Cole, or Cora McAllister, whose family the offering was for. He had planned the whole thing himself, in the quiet way he plans everything, and by the time I understood what was happening, my son was already walking back to our pew with an empty plastic pig under his arm and his ears burning red, while half of Bethel Grove sat there with their mouths open.

I need to back up, because you will not understand what that pig meant unless you know what it cost him.

My husband Ray farmed three hundred acres east of town and ran a small engine repair shop out of our barn on the side, fixing riding mowers and chainsaws for half the county because he could never bring himself to charge what the work was worth. He died two years ago this past March, on a Tuesday, of a heart that gave out while he was walking from the shop to the house for lunch. Hollis was six. He found him.